9700Pro, X800Pro and Racing Sims

[BRH]

A friend of mine from my online racing league did an upgrade to his
system that I've been considering as well. He replaced his Radeon 9700
Pro with an ATI X800 Pro 256M Videocard. According to him, the results
were less than impressive.

His system is as follows: P4 2.66 w/ 1024 M memory. ATA Western Digital
Hard Drives, with an ATI 9700Pro card on an ASUS P4PE Motherboard.

In a nutshell, all settings remaining unchanged, his frame rates in
racing sims (GTR, NR2003 and EA's Nascar Racing Demo) DECREASED by 15-20
fps after installing the X800 Pro. However, his benchmark numbers in
3DMark 2003 INCREASED by about 60%.

These results came after properly uninstalling existing video drivers
and re-installing them after the X800 Pro was installed. He even tried
a clean install of XP Pro and these results were repeated. He used Cat
versions 4.12 and 5.1. Both versions resulted in similar numbers (ie -
significant drop in frame rate).

Can anyone explain why frame rate would drop in racing sims, but show a
marked increase in the benchmark? (I'm not sure if he tested the frame
rate in games other than racing sims.) He thinks that it may be due to
his motherboard being limited to 4X AGP. Any thoughts on that?

As I said, I was considering the very same upgrade on my AMD XP2600 I
Gig Ram system. But, if this is typical for racing sims (my motherboard
is also limited to 4X AGP), I'll skip it.

He ended up returning the card for a refund.

Thanks!

 

[JK]

It sounds like the ATI video drivers are not yet tweaked properly for the
X800 and the specific sims that you guys are running. That would explain
the good results in benchmarks, but the poor results in the sims. If you
look at the release notes for new driver issues ATI is constantly correcting
problems in certain apps caused by driver/video card combinations. You're
just going to have to wait until ATI gets around to fixing the problems with
your sims. Until then, stick with your 9700 pro.

JK