6800gt Not impressing me

C

Chakachim

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jul 25, 2001
Messages
297
I recently upgraded from an ATI 9800XT 128mb to the eVGA 6800gt, and so far Im not very impressed by it. My EQ2 runs worse than it did on my 9800, My Farcry has serious shadowing issues. And in Aquamark and 3dmark my benchmarks are just slightly higher, only slightly. What should I check to see whats causing the poor performance.

my specs are:
Amd 2800
Asus a7n8x-e deluxe
1gig Corsair cl2 dual channel pc3200
120 gig samsung sata drive
71-1.84 drivers
 
Try different drivers or update Far Cry. Should fix that. As for the performance....that's your rig to blame. A 2800+ XP is very ho hum for today's standards. Even a 3200+ is a good deal of a bottleneck. Your rig seems very average in speed and timings.

You could try reformatting and make sure vsync is diabled and all aa/af is disabled if need be.
 
I hope you have formatted since you have added your 6800gt. That would help alot
 
Something is not right, you should be getting at least 2,000 more points in 3DMark05.

Did you use driver cleaner?
 
I did run driver cleaner twice. Ive tried numerous drivers, reinstalled. what kind of scores should I expect on aquamark ? and other appz
 
On Aquamark with a 6800GT you "should" get around 58,000 - 63,000. You may be a little under that with your older CPU (not sure)

My best is 62,656 at the moment, that's with the card overclocked (425/1145)
 
People need to get off of this reformatting kick. The Windows 98 days are over people. Monthly reformat's aren't needed. Especially not for something as routine as a video card upgrade.

Poor performance is not soley based on your CPU. Although it's not a rocket, what settings are you using in your games?

For example if you only run 1280x1024 for your games with no AA and no AF you will not see any huge jump in performance.

Otherwise I'd say its likely a chipset driver or some other software problem. I don't know how much a 6800GT would impress you if you had a 9800XT prior to that. But generally speaking it's a massive improvement.
 
Chakachim said:
I recently upgraded from an ATI 9800XT 128mb to the eVGA 6800gt, and so far Im not very impressed by it. My EQ2 runs worse than it did on my 9800, My Farcry has serious shadowing issues. And in Aquamark and 3dmark my benchmarks are just slightly higher, only slightly. What should I check to see whats causing the poor performance.

my specs are:
Amd 2800
Asus a7n8x-e deluxe
1gig Corsair cl2 dual channel pc3200
120 gig samsung sata drive
71-1.84 drivers
Click to expand...

Um, I went from a 9800Pro to a 6800 GT and saw colossal performance improvements in Far Cry and Aquamark 3. Something is wrong with your system, either a screwed up driver install, out-of-date motherboard chipset drivers, or something like that. It could be a defective 6800 GT, too, but that is pretty darn unlikely... if it was bad, it would simply not work 99% of the time.
 
i get 73k and im super impressed with this card upgraded from 5900xt that overclocked like a deamon 500/975! ;)
 
You should post your scores, so we can see how bad they are. We probably won't make fun of you. Well, not much anyway. My NF7S-2 2800+ gets 5037 3Dmark, 56,054 Aquamark today. I have a mild OC on everything, 2.4 CPU, 375/1.0 GPU. I can score a good bit better, no problem.
 
I wasn't impressed by it either. Not because of it's performance but rather because of the following:

a) it was loud.

b) it was too hot (not too hot as in burning my rig up but rather so hot that my cooling fans in my computer were running full speed all the time, leading to point a) )

c) i hated fiddling with 10 different drivers, one for each game

d) it was inconsistent in it's performance. Max FPS was great, min FPS was not always top notch.

Yeah, this was on a fresh install with a 3.25GHZ and 1GB of mem. All the above kind of pushed me back to the ATI line of cards.

Not that i think it's a bad card overall. Quite the opposite. For it's price its a great card. Just not what i had hoped for when i upgraded from a 9800pro.
 
a) it was loud.

So are most modern video cards, unfortunately. Some of them are pretty quiet though (e.g. Leadtek's version with the huge copper cooler).

b) it was too hot (not too hot as in burning my rig up but rather so hot that my cooling fans in my computer were running full speed all the time, leading to point a) )

So are most modern video cards, unfortunately, unless you get one with a big cooler. Some of the ATI cards run cooler, but some of them are kind of heat pigs too (look at the 2-slot coolers ATI had to put on the x850 series...)

c) i hated fiddling with 10 different drivers, one for each game

That isn't necessary, and anybody who says otherwise is jerking off.

d) it was inconsistent in it's performance. Max FPS was great, min FPS was not always top notch.

I've found min FPS is usually dictated by your CPU, not your graphics card, with a 6800 GT or similar card. Anything short of a FX-55 is going to be CPU-limited to some degree at most settings.

Yeah, this was on a fresh install with a 3.25GHZ and 1GB of mem. All the above kind of pushed me back to the ATI line of cards.

... Where you'd find mostly the same thing. See the complaints about various Catalyst verisons for details.
 
I went from a 9800XT to a 6800GT and its been better in every way.

Sound, performance... everything is awesome.

Maybe you got a crap card... I've never been impressed with EVGA cards.
 
ScYcS said:
I wasn't impressed by it either. Not because of it's performance but rather because of the following:

a) it was loud.

b) it was too hot (not too hot as in burning my rig up but rather so hot that my cooling fans in my computer were running full speed all the time, leading to point a) )




I have a Leadtek and its quite and the copper cooler is awsome, :D
Click to expand...
 
I switched from a 9800XT to a 6800GT last summer and was completely impressed by the performance increase. My overall experience was that the most demanding games became playable at 1600x1200 with FPS in the 30-60 range (e.g. HL-2, Doom3, FarCry) Also, less demanding games such as BF:V and UT2004 frequently hit above 100PFS at the same resolution, even with a little AA now and then.
 
yup me too :) I went from a 9800XT to a 6800ultra...the 9800xt can barely get 1280x1024 2xAA and 4xAF in counter strike source...while my ultra does 1600x1200 4xAA and 16x AF flawlessly......
 
keep in mind aquamark 3 is more cpu than graphics bound it's his proccessor holdin him back atm I have a 6600gt and a athlon 64 @ 2.475 9x275 and I'm getting 55,000 in aquamark just food for thought
 
I went from an XT PE to an Ultra (long story), and I am not impressed. Drivers are half ass, min FPS does suck, but I found both cards to run equally hot (especially those ram chips, ouch!).

Back to the driver issue, the 71.84's do seem ok but how long did it take them to come out with a decent performing driver?? Nvidia was supposed to have the best reputation for quality driver releases.
 
and why the heck did u upgrade from a x800xtpe...?

and how do u know minimum fps sucks?

AND what do u mean teh drivers are HALF ASS?
 
Sounds to me that you are cpu bottlenecked. You should see a marked improvement otherwise. Sounds like it's time to upgrade to an Athlon 64 motherboard/cpu combo. ;)
I have the opposite problem. I just upgraded from a Athlon XP system to the rig in my sig and now my video card is holding me back.
 
Roberty said:
Sounds to me that you are cpu bottlenecked. You should see a marked improvement otherwise. Sounds like it's time to upgrade to an Athlon 64 motherboard/cpu combo. ;)
I have the opposite problem. I just upgraded from a Athlon XP system to the rig in my sig and now my video card is holding me back.
Click to expand...
oh the irony :D
 
I made the switch from a 9700 Pro to a 6800 then to a 6800 GT. Saw improvemnts to the GT the most. I pretty much dont pay attention to the benchmark scores any longer or keep track of them. I focus on how my game plays and at what settings I can reach. So far the 6800 GT has performed very well in everything I play.
 
aZn_plyR said:
and why the heck did u upgrade from a x800xtpe...?

and how do u know minimum fps sucks?

AND what do u mean teh drivers are HALF ASS?
Click to expand...


I consider it a downgrade. I sold the PE to help pay for my blown up transmission on my firebird ( I just bought it and my tranny went south, it was an expense I would not have made had I know my tranny was going out). I had a 9700 Pro and it was still acceptable while gaming so I wasn't too worried about it. My wife felt bad so she went to Fry's and asked for the best video card they had. The salesman sold her a BFG 6800 Ultra. So thats how I ended up with that (she insisted I keep it and not worry about the expense).

How can you NOT know the min FPS suck? When playing something as simple as CS:S I get a noticable choppiness at times (which would indicate to me that my min FPS is falling below an acceptable playing level). Its not the only game it happens in, but its not something that happens constantly. Just noticable at times, and you expect more from these cards. I must add that I play at 1600x1050 and I do realize its demanding. I keep AA at 2x and AF at 8x. This unfortunately isn't low enough for some games. Usually turning off the AA will help smooth things out.

The drivers are half ass. I can rattle off a number of problems with the driver set. Yes ATI has its problems but they do shell out QUALITY updates very often. I wouldnt have a problem with beta drivers if they were worth a poop. How long did it take to fix the BSOD problem with DEP on (Unreal base game engines)? The yellow water in HL2 went on for months! I mean its HL2, not some old game that few people play. I can name a couple other problems with HL2 in general when it comes to Nvidia drivers but why bother. BUT the latest driver actually seems great....FINALLY.

I'm not stating these things to start a flame war with the fan boys. I just think that most of the time people aren't aware of these things when buying a 6800 card. Having had both cards (ATI and Nvidia's latest), I can say that for ME the ATI card was much smoother and crisper in games (AA on Nvidia cards isn't as nice as on ATI cards). When my wife gave the 6800 I was overjoyed. Unfortunately that happiness didn't last long. I just think people should look at all the pros and cons when making a decision. Something that isn't always stated on the forums with honesty. I'm not bashing the card just stating my experience.

My rig for those who might try to blame it for the performance issues:
A64 3200+ @ 2.4GHZ
1024 MB of ram
6800 Ultra @ 450/1.15
Epox MB EP-8KDA3J
Power Supply Antec True Power 430W
The other stuff in the system is moot....
 
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