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Stardate
20020831.2335 (Captain's log): OK, I think I need some help from the Clueless Brain Trust here. There is something deeply wrong with the new computer's graphics.
I replaced the Radeon 7000 (which shipped with it) with an ATI All-in-Wonder 8500DV which I bought a couple of months ago and which has been sitting around all this time waiting. Then I downloaded some of the standard 3D benchmarks, in hopes of being wowed, especially 3DMark 2001. I was eager to see some of the benchmarks which my old Matrox G450 card couldn't support. And they are indeed spectacular visually, or at least I can see where they might be.
Unfortunately, the result was more than a little bit underwhelming. Not to put too fine a point on it, performance stinks. It's much worse than when I used to run these programs on a PIII-933 with a GeForce 2.
Like one frame per second with Vulpine GLMark in 640*480*16 mode with benign settings during the first part of the first scene, which is an approach to the island over water. It was too painful to watch; I killed the program, so I don't have an overall score.
Or 25 frames per second max (and as low as 10) on the first test of 3DMark 2001 SE. According to The Tech Report, this thing should be running about five times as fast as I'm seeing. Read it and weep:
| Game 1 low |
17.7 fps |
| Game 1 high |
10.9 fps |
| Dragothic low |
35.4 fps |
| Dragothic high |
13.5 fps |
| Nature |
11.3 fps |
| Fill single |
560.2 MT/s |
| Fill multi |
1618.3 MT/s |
| High poly, 1 light |
1.9 MT/s |
| High Poly, 8 lights |
1.7 MT/s |
| Environmental bump mapping |
31.2 fps |
| DOT3 bump mapping |
26.5 fps |
| Vertex shader |
17.0 fps |
| Pixel shader |
13.0 fps |
| Advanced pixel shader |
30.6 fps |
| Point sprite |
18.9 MS/s |
| Overall score |
1894 |
Stinking. Absolutely stinking. Tech Report says that the score should be in the low 8000's. (They were using a slower CPU than I am, and a single, and their display card had twice the RAM mine has. I don't believe that these tests are running out of 64MB of ram and overflowing into main memory, and in any case when that happens it still doesn't clobber performance like this.)
It reports that I'm using AGP 4X. (There isn't any control over the AGP speed in the BIOS, so I'm glad to know it's using the highest speed.) The driver for the 8500 is 5.13.01.3286, which is what shipped with the board, and happens to also be what TR used in their benchmark. 3DMark ran with all settings default. (FSAA was disabled. Textures compressed. Z buffer depth 24 bits. Double buffering. "D3D Pure Hardware T&L. The board has 64MB of memory. VSync was enabled, but that wouldn't explain this. Display mode was 1024*768*32 @ 85 Hz.)
After thinking about it for a while, I began to wonder what chipset drivers I was running and whether the AGP port was crippled. So I looked into it, and it looks to me as if it's using the default driver shipped with Win2K, but I'm not really sure whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. (But the fact that the AGP port's driver file is named "AGP440.SYS" is extremely scary.) For the device "Intel 82850/82860 Processor to AGP Controller", the driver is listed as:
Provider: Intel
Driver date: 8/1/2000 (two years ago)
Driver Version: 2.50.1.0
Digital Signer: Microsoft Windows Hardware Compatibility Publisher
HP's download site provided a package of drivers for the chipset, and on Intel's site I found an even newer one. Problem is, they don't seem to make any difference whatever. I even tried uninstalling all the drivers for the graphics boards and then running the Intel program, and then reinstalling all the drivers, for all the good it did. The fucking thing is a monolithic program which claims that it will install appropriate INF files in the Windows directory, but nothing happens that I've been able to see, and though it's supposed to be possible to get it to unpack itself so I can see what it's installing, I can't make that work.
Meanwhile, the documentation for the one HP provided lists the 850 chipset but not the 860, which is what I have. Intel had a chipset identification program, which says the following:
Detected chipset: Intel 860 chipset
Memory controller hub: 82860
I/O controller hub 82801BA (ICH2)
In any case, the file from HP has no more effect on the system than the Intel one. HP's driver is dated 5/1/2001 and claims to be version 2.80.008. The one I downloaded from Intel is dated 6/7/2002 and is version 4.00.1013. Both of them include installation programs; both run; neither complains; neither does anything useful.
If either of them had actually had any effect, I wouldn't expect the device's driver to say it was version 2.50.1.0, which I'm pretty sure is the Win2K default.
In any case, I've found another page at Intel where it says that I need to use something called the "Intel Chipset Software Installation Utility" or else it won't be configured p
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