2D marks WAY down after driver upgrade?

[steelman]

Hi, let me start by saying how much I enjoy Passmark Performance Test. Actually a little too much. It has become an obsession to me to squeeze every ounce of performance out of my first completely home built system. Belwo you can see my progression as I've tweaked and tweaked to improve my score. However this latest issue has me stumped. As you can see I have an ATI x850 card. I was running the drivers from the box originally and just updated them with the latest from ATI. While this bumped my 3D score it devestated my 2D score, especially rectangles. Rectangles! I'm torn now about going back to the original drivers or suffering slow rectangles forever!
Any suggestions from the experts out there will be appreciated and swiftly put into action!
Thanks!

PS I wasn going to opst a graphic of the comparative results but dont see I can attach a graphic or image?

[David (PassMark)]

To attach a graphic you need to upload it elsewhere an link to the image. We didn't want to host images in the forum as it would get too big.

Can you post the actual before and after numbers. Not that is is likely we can do much if it is a driver issue. It wouldn't surprise me if ATI aren't testing 2D performance very often, so they might have broken something. Almost all the 'big' sites only care about 3D.

[steelman]

Results over time

I did submit a case to ATI to get their take.
Here are the sequential results.

Benchmark ResultsBenchmark Results
Test Name amd4200 amd4200noav AMD 4200w/driver
CPU - Integer Math 133.62 138.04 154.88
CPU - Floating Point Math 749.72 774.83 867.52
CPU - Find Prime Numbers 232.76 239.13 263.01
CPU - SSE/3DNow! 2858.84 2942.46 3302.45
CPU - Compression 3796.56 3916.10 4394.37
CPU - Encryption 26.79 27.63 31.06
CPU - Image Rotation 611.95 634.09 712.70
CPU - String Sorting 2059.71 2113.25 2408.95
Graphics 2D - Lines 160.50 181.24 197.70
Graphics 2D - Rectangles 323.76 323.46 98.47
Graphics 2D - Shapes 44.76 46.72 52.17
Graphics 2D - Fonts and Text 213.98 220.75 248.26
Graphics 2D - GUI 225.54 233.66 255.52
Graphics 3D - Simple 2216.19 2359.35 2415.26
Graphics 3D - Medium 300.35 316.71 328.39
Graphics 3D - Complex 28.96 30.49 37.19
Memory - Allocate Small Block 1726.45 1910.52 2156.24
Memory - Read Cached 1036.91 1076.46 1199.88
Memory - Read Uncached 926.39 964.78 1083.56
Memory - Write 994.92 1041.99 1166.13
Memory - Large RAM 466.79 501.55 549.45
Disk - Sequential Read 46.49 43.30 44.87
Disk - Sequential Write 55.31 54.88 51.48
Disk - Random Seek + RW 2.97 2.89 2.86
CD - Read 7.60 8.08 8.16
CPU Mark 858.76 884.90 993.88
2D Graphics Mark 774.18 805.05 612.83
Memory Mark 380.85 406.27 455.06
Disk Mark 378.94 365.50 358.77
CD Mark 929.93 989.41 998.64
3D Graphics Mark 814.63 866.17 889.95
PassMark Rating 666.04 690.84 704.48
System information - AMD 4200
CPU Manufacturer:AuthenticAMD
Number of CPU: 1 (2 Core(s)/CPU, 1 Logical(s)/Core)
CPU Type: AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4200+
CPU Speed: 2209.5 MHz
Cache size: 512KB
O/S: Windows XP
Total RAM:2146938880 Bytes
Available RAM:1556439040 Bytes
Video settings: 1024x768x32
Video driver
DESCRIPTION:
RADEON X850 Series
MANUFACTURER:
RADEON X850 Series
BIOS:
113-A47413-101
DATE:
11/17/04
Drive Letter: C
Total Disk Space: 175.8 GBytes
Cluster Size: 4 KBytes
File system:NTFS
Comments:
2D SUCKS!
PassMark(TM) PerformanceTest 6.0 (http://www.passmark.com)
Results generated on: Monday, October 23, 2006

[dukeofdoom]

I have run into the exact same problem. I have a x800 and I recently upgraded the drivers and my 2D results have tanked. Mainly rectangles.