Is this a decent graphic card?

Post by **Xest** » Sun Dec 10, 2006 4:54 pm

The BIOS is a closed system other than the parts it exposes to the OS, as it's something not all BIOS' expose Windows likely wouldn't therefore display it as standard. You maybe able to get some software that shows you in any BIOS' that exposes it to the OS, that's if any even do.

Post by **Xest** » Sun Dec 10, 2006 10:35 pm

BTW which review site suggested 20% to 100% improvement in framerate with the ATI card?

Stumbled across this:

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1 ... 831,00.asp

It suggests that the ATI card is nowhere near that much faster and at higher resolutions is in fact slower. This is also something I forgot to mention previously actually, I've noticed in the past that the nVidia cards are often better performing at higher resolutions althought I'm not entirely sure why, I'd have thought performance differences would be fairly linear at differing resolutions.

The reason the nVidia card performs better in Quake 4 and Prey is again as before, ATI doesn't properly support OpenGL and hence suffers there in terms of frame rate. That said, with Call of Duty 2 and FEAR the ATI demonstrates it's strength in a DirectX enviroment, this seems like a pretty reasonable set of results taking those facts into account, as I say the only one that's extremely weird is the Oblivion result which truly does stink of falsified, biased or poorly setup tests.

OohhoO · Post by **OohhoO** » Mon Dec 11, 2006 6:15 am

Xest wrote:the only one that's extremely weird is the Oblivion result which truly does stink of falsified, biased or poorly setup tests.

Yeah that was my impression too.
From 20% in mountain regions
to 100% in grassy regions
I'll try & find it again when I get home tonight.
I googled 1950PRO test or something similar so don't have it offhand.

Ovi · Post by **Ovi** » Mon Dec 11, 2006 9:23 am

OohhoO wrote:but if the BIOS can tell surely windows must be able to too?
I mean I can see virtually everything else about my hardware in windows including tons & tons of stuff which nobody would ever want to know even if they lived to be 1'000'000 years old ...

Third party apps like Sandra can tell you, so not sure why Windows can't. I have looked afew times and never found it.

With Sandra the information you are looking for is actually under "Mainboard information", or it used to be a few versions ago when I last used it.

Post by **Xest** » Mon Dec 11, 2006 12:24 pm

Ovi wrote:Third party apps like Sandra can tell you, so not sure why Windows can't. I have looked afew times and never found it.

With Sandra the information you are looking for is actually under "Mainboard information", or it used to be a few versions ago when I last used it.

Any idea how Sandra finds the information? If it can reliably pull it from the BIOS it does seem odd that Windows can't, if however it's making a best guess based on a quick benchmark of the speed of your RAM then it's understandable that Windows doesn't use this method.

You have to remember it's not so long ago that Windows didn't even show the speed of your processor!

OohhoO · Post by **OohhoO** » Mon Dec 11, 2006 12:36 pm

Xest wrote:You have to remember it's not so long ago that Windows didn't even show the speed of your processor!

I thought they introduced that in Win95...
or wait ... wasn't it even in Win3.11!?
& in pre-Windows days I seem to recall Norton Utilities showing that kind of thing, altho I might be wrong

Post by **Xest** » Mon Dec 11, 2006 1:50 pm

OohhoO wrote:I thought they introduced that in Win95...
or wait ... wasn't it even in Win3.11!?
& in pre-Windows days I seem to recall Norton Utilities showing that kind of thing, altho I might be wrong

Was only 2000 iirc, and even then only with SP2 or so I think. Previous versions would just show the cpu ID string such as "GenuineIntel" or "AuthenticAMD".

Ovi · Post by **Ovi** » Mon Dec 11, 2006 2:05 pm

Sandra wrote: SiSoftware Sandra

...

System Memory Controller
Location : Mainboard
Error Correction Capability : None
Number of Memory Slots : 2
Maximum Installable Memory : 4GB
Bank 1 - DIMM_A : CE00000000000000 F11A37AA DIMM Synchronous DDR-SDRAM 1GB/64 @ 533Mt/s
Bank 2 - DIMM_B : Empty

...

Exert from my Sandra report. It's from a version around 2005

It could be guessing, I have no idea whether it is right for this machine, the quantity is

Post by **Xest** » Mon Dec 11, 2006 3:06 pm

I'd guess it's doing it based on testing but of course it's hard to tell. I think MS tends to avoid these methods (hence why they only recently started giving full info about the CPU since CPUs started exposing this information to the OS reliably). I can understand this in some respects as should something be wrong with the system their maybe slower throughput than the RAM actually supports and hence the RAM could potentially be wrongly reported.

OohhoO · Post by **OohhoO** » Mon Dec 11, 2006 4:44 pm

Here's one:-

http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/evg ... page11.asp

The 7950GT is in there

& here's the 1950PRO
http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/ati ... page11.asp