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I decided to benchmark my videocard recently and see how it's holding up. Previously I was capable of scoring around 5,xxx points on 05 with my Athlon 64 and I was curious to see what I could get with some overclocks now.
As soon as I start the test I realize something it up, only 10-20 seconds in the framerate drops to about 2fps. The benchmark seems to be skipping, rendering a frame then freezing, then rendering another 3 or 4 seconds later and freezing again. There are brief moments when the benchmark does run at a clean 18-24fps, but it's only on the last GPU test, and very rarely.
On my first test, I took this screenshot. Specs were:
Socket 754 3700+ (2.4ghz)
eVGA 6800 NU (Unlocked) on 77.72
Next test, I updated drivers, checked temps and overclocked some more:
Socket 754 3700+ (2.6ghz)
eVGA 6800 NU (Unlocked) on 77.77
Finally I decided to loose the unlocked shader and pipelines, even though they've worked fine as long as I've owned the card, but I disabled them anyways:
Socket 754 3700+ (2.6ghz)
eVGA 6800 NU (Locked) on 77.77
Temps seem fine, no artifacting in any games after any amount of time. It seems to be this benchmark exclusively. 3Dmark03 suffers from the same symptoms.
On my Athlon XP 2800+ I've run these benchmarks a few months ago on the exact same card without any issues at all and managed decently high scores, I even broke 11,000+ in 3Dmark03 and 4,000+ in 3Dmark05:
My Athlon 64 is obviously faster than my Athlon XP, I wish I had screenshots from my previous 5,000+ 3Dmark05 runs with this CPU when I first upgraded from the AXP, but why would it make such a huge difference in these benchmarks now? All my real games run faster though, so I guess it's not a huge deal, but what happened to my CPU, can drivers make that big of a difference?
As soon as I start the test I realize something it up, only 10-20 seconds in the framerate drops to about 2fps. The benchmark seems to be skipping, rendering a frame then freezing, then rendering another 3 or 4 seconds later and freezing again. There are brief moments when the benchmark does run at a clean 18-24fps, but it's only on the last GPU test, and very rarely.
On my first test, I took this screenshot. Specs were:
Socket 754 3700+ (2.4ghz)
eVGA 6800 NU (Unlocked) on 77.72
Next test, I updated drivers, checked temps and overclocked some more:
Socket 754 3700+ (2.6ghz)
eVGA 6800 NU (Unlocked) on 77.77
Finally I decided to loose the unlocked shader and pipelines, even though they've worked fine as long as I've owned the card, but I disabled them anyways:
Socket 754 3700+ (2.6ghz)
eVGA 6800 NU (Locked) on 77.77
Temps seem fine, no artifacting in any games after any amount of time. It seems to be this benchmark exclusively. 3Dmark03 suffers from the same symptoms.
On my Athlon XP 2800+ I've run these benchmarks a few months ago on the exact same card without any issues at all and managed decently high scores, I even broke 11,000+ in 3Dmark03 and 4,000+ in 3Dmark05:
My Athlon 64 is obviously faster than my Athlon XP, I wish I had screenshots from my previous 5,000+ 3Dmark05 runs with this CPU when I first upgraded from the AXP, but why would it make such a huge difference in these benchmarks now? All my real games run faster though, so I guess it's not a huge deal, but what happened to my CPU, can drivers make that big of a difference?