New Radeon 9250 PCI card making 2D much worse ;-(

[plumeria]

I have a 3 year old Dell 2.66GHZ P4 systen (Dimension 2400) with 768MB of RAM. I recemtly bought a 9250 PCI graphics card, but it seems to have offered no improvement over the default that you get with the onboard motherboard. I have installed the latest drivers from Radeon (6.2)

9250 vs. motherboard

2D - Lines
84.2 vs. 73.7

2D - Rectangles
2.9 vs. 33.2 !!!! (ran twice to confirm)

2D - Shapes
18.7 vs. 26.1

2D - Fonts and Text
43.5 vs. 68.2

2D - GUI
136.5 vs. 87.5

I thought a graphics card was supposed to make things better, not worse

How can one single measurement like Rectangles be so out of whack with the other bad numbers in that it is just so bad. Any ideas what is going on?

thanks

Peter

[David (PassMark)]

The 2D - Rectangles result is abnormally low. I would have expected a result between 70 and 110 with this card. Maybe hardware acceleration is turned off in Windows. Or maybe the card is not providing hardware acceleration for some other reaons. We have seen this happen some times if you run dual monitors. Or it could just be bugs in the current device drivers.

[plumeria]

The 2D - Rectangles result is abnormally low. I would have expected a result between 70 and 110 with this card. Maybe hardware acceleration is turned off in Windows. Or maybe the card is not providing hardware acceleration for some other reaons. We have seen this happen some times if you run dual monitors. Or it could just be bugs in the current device drivers.

Thanks for the prompt reply. I cleaned up all old drivers using Driver Cleaner and installed the latest recommended drivers from ATI (AMD) - 6.11.

I Then turned off hardware accelation totally (it was set to max) and this results were very strange.

Max vs. Zero H/W acceleration (set in Display menu)

2D - Lines
84.2 vs. 0.88

2D - Rectangles
2.9 vs. 29.5 !!!

2D - Shapes
18.7 vs. 1.35

2D - Fonts and Text
43.5 vs. 70.7

2D - GUI
136.5 vs. 91.6

This is all pretty new to me, but something with this seems very odd. Why would things improve with zero hardware accelaration.... other things get worse.

peter
p.s. how would a user notice a poor "Reactangles" reading when using a computer?

[David (PassMark)]

The 2D Rectangles test make very heavy use of the Windows API call BitBlt. The BitBlt function is used everywhere in Windows and more generally in computer graphics. Just about every square of color on your desktop (e.g. the white background of your windows) would have appeared there are a result of a BitBlt call. So for example, re-sizing and moving of windows may not appear as smooth as they should be if BitBlt is slow.

BitBlt should get a BIG boost from hardware acceleration. But you saw the opposite of what is to be expected and I don't have a good explanation as to why this is the case with your system.

[plumeria]

Thanks a lot for the clarification.. it is really awesome the level of support you single-handedly provide and makes me really inclined to buy the software once my trial period expires.

What is going on makes no sense to me, and the rectangles issue would explain why my machine seems sluggish. I had been looking for a PCI graphics card with s-video output, for watching video outpout on my TV - not for playing games The Radeon 9250 was highly recommended but I have read horror stories about ATI driver issues ;-(

I am going to try a different route now with a lower performance (but hopefully fully working) Nvidia-based eVGA GeForce™ FX 5200 128MB PCI Video Card. I'll let you know what happens.

regards

Peter