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Why is my Radeon 9800 so slow?

TheReef

TheReef

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Sep 30, 2007
1,888
167
NSW, Australia.
Hi all,
I've been playing Colin Mcrae Rally: Mac, it's been going ok…but has a horrible lag moment about every second which I've until now learnt to put up with.
I just pulled out CMR 2 on the old PC with integrated graphics and marvel at how smooth it runs (yes I know it's an old game).


This periodic stutter can be visible in the menu graphics too of CMR: Mac.

This happens with settings on high, resolution at 1680 x 1050.

Thing is, when I drop settings to bare minimum, at 640 x 800 there is no gain in performance!

I have ATI displays installed, but have no idea if the "updated default Leopard drivers" (if such exist) are in effect.


So I went to Xbench, and as it turns out a dual 2Ghz G5 more than doubles my single 1.8 Ghz G5 (3 Gig of RAM) OpenGL score of 80 at a whopping 191. Also a dual 1Ghz MMD PowerMac achieves a score of 110, what's up with that???

Would a second processor really give that much of an increase?
I asked Feral Interactive, they said dual processors would see a small increase.

I'm kind of annoyed considering that CMRs graphics are new for 2005. :(


Anything I can do to check to see if I have the correct drivers, or if anything is causing a bottleneck somewhere? It is the 256MB Special Edition and I'm running 10.5.5.


Thanks.
 
Couple things here...


The test is flawed, because it counts the cache time as part of the render. So on my girlfriends g4 eMac with onboard video, it gets 20 but after running it a few times it goes up to 45.

My 2.0 G5 gets 81. Caching isn't an issue because of the speed of the drives and such on this machine so it consistently gets 81. So the CPU isn't making the difference here, the card is since your 2.0 bench is at 191.
 
What puzzles me is the fact that changing the resolution from max 1680x1050 down to the minimum 640x480 gives no boost in performance.
 
TheReef said:
Yes, just moved a 25 gig iPhoto library to my external drive, no difference at all.
Click to expand...

ok then that is pretty darn annoying. i couldnt tell you what the problem is.

http://www.insidemacgames.com/reviews/view.php?ID=403&Page=1

that site is a review of a number of graphic cards around your GPU's range, they are getting frame rates of 70-80 when playing Unreal Tournament.... those games are from the same era so i dont see what is the problem.

are you sure that there is nothing running in the background?

have you restarted lately??

have you run disk utility to reset file permissions?

i donno just things like that can make a difference.
 
DoFoT9 said:
ok then that is pretty darn annoying. i couldnt tell you what the problem is.

http://www.insidemacgames.com/reviews/view.php?ID=403&Page=1

that site is a review of a number of graphic cards around your GPU's range, they are getting frame rates of 70-80 when playing Unreal Tournament.... those games are from the same era so i dont see what is the problem.

are you sure that there is nothing running in the background?

have you restarted lately??

have you run disk utility to reset file permissions?

i donno just things like that can make a difference.
Click to expand...

Yeah I have pretty much tried everything :(
I know for sure that this card should be performing better.
Might just be a driver issue.

Not very happy with Apple lately I need to take a walk outside…

But thanks for your help guys :)
 
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