New Sapphire HD6970 2GB crappy performance.

U

Uncle Meat

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Apr 29, 2008
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So I just put my new system together last night and have only got Win 7 Pro loaded and a few bench marking apps. Once all the drivers were updated I've been going through and testing the different subsystems to ensure the performance is where it should be. Everything was looking good without a hitch, or so I thought until I ran 3DMark11 to see what this new video card could do. Ran the 3DMark11 basic edition Performance test (1280X720) and only scored 5221! :confused: FPS never exceeded 33! I know this card should perform better than that! So I thought maybe the drivers Sapphire provided with the card on CD might be better than the latest version downloaded from AMD. Removed latest drivers and installed Sapphire drivers. Realized the Sapphire provided driver disc contained the same software as the AMD driver download site, only a few versions older. Ran test with older drivers and got the same results.

Would the PCIe slot the card is mounted in have any impact on performance? Out of the three slots available on my ASUS P8Z68-V Pro I took the middle one because it allowed more room between the CPU cooler and the video card.

Ideas? I did a web search and found a few other instances of poor results like mine, but never any resolutions...

U.M.
 
Usually the top slot is the main x16 slot, but with pcie2.0 even a 4x slot should give decent performance.

That said, I'm not sure that score is too far off for a stock 6970...Is that the combined score or just the graphics part?
 
My 6950 does 5686 combined in the top 16x (P8P67 Pro) slot. It has the 6970 shaders and is overclocked. 5221 doesn't seem that bad, try the 16x slot and retest.
 
What evidence do you have that a 6970 should get higher than 5221? 3DMark11 is designed to bring all cards to their knees. Crossfire or Trifire would be a different story..

If it's operating in 4x (use GPU-Z to figure it out) then you'll see performance degradation. But at 8x or 16x it won't be the bottleneck.
 
I just ran and got P6200 on 1st rig listed in sig with gtx 570 at 825/4000.
 
Your score is about right. I got just under 5K in that test on my old system with a 6970.

The resolution is kinda low, so it won't utilize your videocard as much as your processor.
 
If you're not overclocked on the CPU and GPU, your score is right around where it should be. My 4Ghz PII X6 and 6970(940/1440) scored only 5520.
 
Okay... so I guess I wasn't expecting 3DMark11 to stress the card as much as it did at such a low resolution. While watching the test I kept thinking to myself, "Why does the picture look so bad"? The old 3DMark tests used to look beautiful...

So I downloaded my free copy of Dirt3 and installed it. Cranked every video option up as high as it possibly could go and then ran the included demo to check FPS. Avg was 51FPS@1920X1200 and it never dipped below 42 during the test.

I feel much better after messing around with a real game and getting some numbers versus what 3DMark11 was showing and telling me. I swear those submarine scenes look like absolute crap on my system while Dirt3 was total visual candy!

U.M.

Now all I have to do is figure out how to fix this other self-induced screw up! I THOUGHT I was removing all the ATI stuff prior to updating drivers each time while troubleshooting this issue. Now my ATI tool in the task tray looks like this! I'm pretty sure there shouldn't be 4 entries... :rolleyes:

ati.jpg
 
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one for each display it can support 2 dvi or 1 dvi and 1 hdmi and 2 mini display ports = 4 displays , so nothing wrong with that same on my 6950.
 
Thanks! Here I thought I hadn't been properly removing all the driver files with each different install.

U.M.
 
You can run 3Dmark11 Xtreme at your native resolution and it will look really good. Don't know if you need the paid version to do it, I can't remember exactly (I uninstalled all benchmark tools when I sold my 6950). I do have the paid version.
 
Yeah you need the full version to run the Extreme tests. The trial version only allows the Pro test.

U.M.
 
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