video cards

[Matt Keys]

ok, well heres something that has been puzzling me. I have a 64MB Geforce 2 card, while my friend has a 16MB Voodoo3 3000 card. And for some reason his card totally outperforms mine, it leaves my card in the dust. We did a benchmark using quake 3, I got an average of 30-40FPS after a restart, and doing the same test on his computer he was recieving 60-70FPS. Can anyone explain this?

[Moose or Chuck]

What are the speeds of the different computers? How long has it been since you last formatted? Have you or he made any optimisations? Are you sure his config file is identical to yours? What motherboard/chipset are you/he on?

[randall]

That's a mystery. I have the exact same Voodoo card, but never thought much about how it performs.<br><br>The only thing I can think of, is sometimes games will say they are 3DFX ready.

[Chris Edwards]

maybe your using software rendering ...

[Moose or Chuck]

I already resolved this in an IM with Matt:<br><br>The bandwidth of Matt's Pentium3 600MHz system can only reach a maximum throughput of 1.03GB\s, whereas his friends AMD 800MHz system can reach 2.3GB\s.<br>His P3 motherboard doesn't have AGP 4x or ATA100 like the AMD system.<br><br>Matt's half framerate is due to the half amount of bandwidth in his system.

[randall]

okay, that's cool. I thought the geGorce2 was better than that, especially on a high end system.<br><br>Matt, your board doesn't have AGP?

[Moose or Chuck]

You don't understand anything I just said randall.<br><br>The OVERALL SYSTEM'S BANDWIDTH of a P3 board can only max out at 1.03 GB\s<br>The geforce 2 cards produce 7.36 GB of data per second. His computer can't pump out that much data through the pipe. Not even the AMD systems can process that much.<br>The OVERALL SYSTEM'S BANDWIDTH of an AMD board can max out at 2.3 GB\s.<br><br>And his motherboard only has AGP 2x, not 4x which means that the graphics interface has only half the bandwidth of the AMD's board.

[Chris Edwards]

He would probably have AGP 2x

[Chris Edwards]

oops.. that was a bit laggy... i didn't hit respond for like 20 minutes... and i guess moose already posted...

[Moose or Chuck]

Even though the Voodoo3 card can only produce half as much data a second, all of that data can be pumped through the system in near real time.<br><br>A Pentium4's bandwidth is 4.2GB\sec, but this doesn't mean that it's better for gaming. That one spec alone doesn't tell the whole story. The system's RDRAM latency is incredible high, especially when in conjunction with the dynamic system of a graphics card. So the AMD's 2.3GB\s is still more efficient, as this speed doesnt' slow down much lower than that for a prolonged period of time. The P4 cannot sustain that speed for very long at all.

[Chris Edwards]

yeah, and the P4 has a "feature" that slows down the clock speed when it starts getting above 50watts or something.. whereas AMD's run at like 74watts all the time .. it gets hot in there, but that's what fans are for.

[Moose or Chuck]

I hate my fan, I wish there was a way to cool it down without ANY sound at all. I wonder what a computer would be like without any noise coming from it.

[Chris Edwards]

get a sound resistant case. and get super-quiet fans... then it will be quiet.....

[Moose or Chuck]

Super quiet fans don't rotate fast enough to move enough cubic feet of air per minute. <br>And what kind of sound resistant case?

[Chris Edwards]

i dunno.. i heard about it once... .. but it would be cool.