meljor wrote:@Phil No LE card, i'ts a normal clocked 128mb version, like the one kanecvr used.
@kanecvr Nothing wrong with my setup or the driver. We talked about this before, it is really hard to completely fairly compare these cards without first checking out which is absolutely the best driver for each card. Will take forever. Because of this we can never compare each others scores OR CALL THEM WRONG without the same setup and drivers....
Let me start by apologizing - I've upset you, witch was not my intent. Please let me explain - not an native english speaker, and I probably didn't manage to convey what I meant to say correctly. What I mean by "wrong" is that the system is not performing as well as it could. I am genuinely interested in how much the card would have scored with such a fast setup.
We have talked about driver setup before, and we did agree on the fact that it's very very hard to come up with a driver setup that will provide good performance on all cards - but I would have expected over 7500 with the core 2 duo @ 3GHZ and the 9800 PRO - especially since 3dmark tests are very very CPU bound.
The screenshots I posted are not a means to boast. In fact they are very mediocre scores. In my attempt to try and convince OP that the 5800 is not worth the investment, and that it's such a rare card it should be saved for benchmarking and displaying, I may cave come off as a bit of an asshole, and if I did I apologize... 🙁 I did not mean this as any sort of personal attack, and I'm not doubting your skills in any way. Old tech is "finicky" and things like this happen. It would be a shame if you'd discount the 9800 as a poor performer based on that.
meljor wrote:I stated i took a driver that supported geforce4 to geforce7, so there will always be cards that would be faster with a more ''period correct driver'' and maybe the latest cards are best with the latest driver, who knows.
kane, you're talking about ''wrong'' and are trying to show me ''right'' but all you come up with are really small differences. Yes, the 9800pro is faster (like i stated before).
I came up with a score of around 6000, you counter with 6200......really??? Who says radeons scale to the moon? Me using a core2duo doesn't make a big difference apparantly. Someone above me came with nearly the same result and he had a 4ghz core2duo! Against my 3ghz setup. He had 60points more.....
All video cards scale very very well in 3dmark with very fast processor, because the tests also measure CPU performance, and because a faster platform will be able to feed more data to the card then a slower one - but you already know this. I personally managed to score a bit over 7k in 3dmark03 with a similar setup, using a C2D 6600 and a crappy AGP / PCI-E combo board (witch died while ago). Again, I'm not disputing the result, I'm just saying it can go higher.
meljor wrote:I didn't ''pick'' a driver for the 9800pro. I simply tested my Nvidia's (from geforce4 and up) and finished with the hd3850 just for extra fun. I then bought the 9800pro card and wanted to know if it was working, the setup was still complete so plugged it in and tested (with the 3850 driver).
So no, my results aren't wrong as i was mostly playing and wanted to know if my cards still worked and wanted to compare some (got some FX quadro scores and gf4 scores too).
And no, my 7800gs results are not low, the card is NOT faster as a 6800ultra as was stated in many reviews. Both are 16P cards and the ultra has the higher core clockspeed, the 7800gs has the higher memory speed. 7900GS has both and more pixel pipes and was the fastest Nvidia. Seems right and works for me.
I didn't know the 7800GS and 6800 ultra were on par with each other. I frankly expected the 7800GS to be faster, despite the similar core configuration. Guess you learn something everyday 😀
Using the 3850 driver explains why the 9800 under-performed. It's most likely using a basic form of it's driver w/o any GPU-specific optimizations, in witch case your bench score is actually pretty high, considering that's the cards "raw" performance.
meljor wrote:Your x800xt scores beeing so high i don't know, maybe 3dmark loves cpu clockspeed? 3,7ghz is no slow p4. Maybe it is because your card does not support sm3.0 and that way the scores get higher as the card has it easier in some tests compared to the 6800/7800/7900?
The P4 is much much slower then a 3GHz core 2 duo, and like I said before, 3dmark is quite CPU bound. Not only clockspeed but architecture as well. The fact that the x800 lacks SM3.0 support has nothing to do with it's performance. In fact it should slow it down. What you are seeing is "brute force". The benchmarks are genuine, and if you doubt them I can reproduce them anytime, film the benchmarks and post them to youtube 😀 The X800XT is faster then the 6800 in some games and benches, and that's a known fact. Until the 8800 series nvidia and ATi were extremely competitive with each other, after witch nvidia took a clear lead.
meljor wrote:It's a shame that it's always ''your score is too high!'' or ''your scores are bad'' or ''your scores are too low!'' I can come up with release reviews of cards that did massively different with different reviewers, but they didn't have the same systems/games/drivers so there is no comparison.
Please don't take this personally. I look at these things objectively, as my only interest is to judge actual performance today. Scores in period correct reviews are worthless since we have at our disposal newer hardware and a wide selection of drivers for these cards, witch reviewers did not. I never said ''your scores are bad' - I said "it scored too low" - witch should imply that the card can do much better, and nothing else. It was by no means a personal attack.
meljor wrote:BTW, do you really believe you OWN scores? An unlocked 6800 16p card is only about 15% faster as a 8p card? Sure that came out at 1280x1024. Try again at 1600x1200 or with AA and the 16p card is twice as fast as the 8p card. Your benches do not show that. It's hard to do it right.....
Yes, they are 100% genuine, taken as an average between 3-4 runs with the same card, and literally took MONTHS to compile. Before that I spent a 3 weeks looking for a suitable platform on witch the cards will scale well, and before that it took me 7 weeks to find the right driver to use for all cards - witch was Catalyst 6.2 for ATi cards, and Forceware 66.93 for nvidia cards. These two provided an increase in performance when moving up to newer cards, they ran all games and benchmarks on all cards were other versions would crash or black screen, and provided the least result anomalies.
like I said, if you or anyone else doubts the scores, I'm not above posting recordings of the cards running them on youtube to prove they are genuine. I know some of them are hard to fathom, like how the 8500 performs so well in unreal, or how in the same game lower clocked cards score better - I don't understand this myself really, I actually took a clip of the 8500 running unreal after I noticed it was so much faster then much newer cards. Still have it on my phoone.
As for the 6800LE - at 1280x1024 you can see it take a major lead over the 8p version - lead witch increases to 38% at 1600x1200. The reason I did not run q3 at 1600x1200 is because the slow cards ran it as a slideshow... so I saw no point. I did bench the faster of the cards at that resolution, and the X800XT is on top because of faster vram (the 6800LE has 700MHz DDR, witch I overclocked to 800MHz for the 16p tests - but it can't handle more then that. A 6800GT would have 1000MHz GDDR and would have come on top of the X800XT in quake 3 @ 1600x1200 as well). At lower resolutions like 640x480 the small difference between the 8p and 16p version comes down to a CPU bottleneck, witch I explained in the review. Just look at your Q3 tests - you score 400+ FPS because of the much much faster 3GHz core 2 duo. I would presume the maximum framerate a 6800GT card can achive at 640x480 w/o a CPU bottleneck is around 450-500 fps, and same for the x800xt.
PhilsComputerLab wrote:
People telling me "there's something wrong with your system", man, they aren't worth the effort. They come in so hard and opinionated, there is no ground to even enter a dialogue, not worth bothering, just ignore them.
I completely disagree with you phil. When benchmarking, taking the time to find the best platform and drivers is part of the job. I believe that as a reviewer it's your duty to bring out the best possible result for the cards you are testing, and driver / platform tests are MANDATORY, not optional. It makes sense to me to find the fastest driver (for both video card and chipset) and a platform that will run both competing cards as fast as possible with no hardware incompatibility issues. Please forgive me, but I see your approach to this as superficial.
Your videos are great tough. I can only imagine the sheer amount of time it takes to put one together - setting things up, taking cuts, adding commentary and so on. Personally I couldn't do it. My only complaint really is that I believe you could have been a bit more thorough in some of them, because of the huge amount of work it took you not only to do the benchmarks but also film and edit them in a pleasant and presentable way. Your videos are extremely relaxing to watch, and your voice somehow invokes a calming atmosphere reminiscent of the "good old days". I love coming home from work and sitting down to one of your videos with a cup of coffee, relaxing and reminiscing about the good old days. Sometimes I have one of your or LGR's or Plaul's videos running in the background while doing my own tests. It creates a great atmosphere. Great channel!
When I did my round of testing I went as far as to use two identical drives with separate windows installs as to not have old driver leftovers affect benchmark results. I tested several motherboards for performance and compatibility with all the video cards in the test - that's 28 video cards tested... 28 cards tested with 7-9 video drivers (hell for nvidia cards since there are so many drivers) and 28 cards tested with 4-5 chipset drivers... I managed to fill a notebook with tables and general scribbles. Actually ruined the AGP connector on one of my mainboards doing this - not to mention the sheer amount of time and research this entails - so please forgive me when I get a little "over excited" when I see someone has overlooked things witch I see as obvious, witch give some of the cards an edge. It is clear that I have to chance the way I "speak", as to avoid offending others, witch is what I apparently did here 🙁
As for "opinionated" - there's a lot of that going on on this forum and in IT in general. I try to avoid that, and since I love all brands (Intel, AMD, nvidia, ATi, 3dfx, you name it) I try to be impartial. If you look at my IT history you will see that over the years I've owned all brands, and found something I loved about all of them - and I reminisce fondly about all.
There is no such thing as the "fastest card" or "best card" in most cases. Today it all comes down to price / availability and compatibility with your current hardware and the games you want to play.