Ideas faster on slow pc?

[mbroker]

I don't get it I use ideas on a very low end Pentium 4 1.6 pc (which most Pentium 3 1gig beat it) with 128 video ram and it plays it at 20-30 frames a second. It goes at 100% processing power.

On a high end Pentium D 3gig ati 256 video ram it goes 2-5 frames a second. This goes 60-80% processing power.

Can someone explain this odd things?

[SCHUMI-4-EVA]

First of all it's Ghz, not Gig.

Seconly just telling us what sort of ram the card has is useless. It depends on what the card actually is, ie. ATI Radeon X600 or so, it could be that a 128MB card outperforms a 256MB card. It also depends on your actual RAM you have in the PC, Operating System, background tasks (in other words Pagefile size) whether either of the cards is onboard and has shared memory and a ton of other things aswell.

[mbroker]

p4 has an official ATI 128 9000 pro pci card
sdram 512

PD has a Official INTEL motherboard with an official on board ATI integrated 256 xpress 200
ddr2 1gig
Even with with the shared memory it still has far more memory and better memory ddr2 which is better than sdram.

In any other application, game, and tests the Pentium d outperforms the low end Pentium 4, except for ideas.

[SCHUMI-4-EVA]

Hmm is it Pentium D as in the series which just for some wierd reason is called D, or is it the Dual Core Pentiums?
If it's a Dual Core it could be that iDeaS just cant handle the two cores? some older games also experience slow-down on dual-core's.

[StriderVM]

SCHUMI-4-EVA : Yep, you're correct, the Pentium D are dual core Pentium 4's.... And Ideas doesn't really support dual cores, thereby wasting one core, and showing only about 50-60% CPU usage.

Although sometimes, those performance are also caused by Windows itself, you might need to update your Windows thru Windows Update if you need to download stuff, however, I remember some direct links to dual core fixes for Windows somewhere in the forums....

[mbroker]

Ok I did Windows Update and it goes close to 10fps but it still is not as fast as the low end computer that goes over 20 frames.
hmmmmmm

[techniqu]

it might just be that the ati integrated graphics chip is terrible.


not sure though because I don't follow integrated graphics...but usually PCI/PCI-e > integrated by A LOT.

[SCHUMI-4-EVA]

I woulda have been inclined to say the same thing but, PCI is old...very old...so I am not sure how it would compare to what I thought was one of the better onboards a Xpress200. AGP and PCI-E (PCI Express x16) own any onboards though.

[runawayprisoner]

The integrated ATI chip IS terrible. I can confirm that because I also have a mainboard with the same ATI integrated chip (Intel D102GGC2) and most games would crawl at around 5-8fps in IdeaS. When I went with my 7600GT, most games would break the 45fps limit.
Conclusion: don't trust integrated graphics.

And by the way, no P3 1Ghz can beat the P4 1.6Ghz... you're thinking about Celeron.

[mbroker]

I tried a p3 1 gig and a amd 1 gig that beat the P4 1.6.
The thing is that the P4 Willamette 1.6 has less catche like 1/2. In many tests the P4 lost.

[runawayprisoner]

Really? I think you have a serious computer problem there. P4 processors never had "less" cache to begin with... Are you sure you are not talking about a Celeron?

[mbroker]

THE P4 Willamette are not as good as the Prescott's.
L1 Trace cache 12K
L1 Data cache 8K
L2 cache 256k

While another p3 1gig has 2 times more like around 16,16,512

So cpu ghz is not the only factor.

[StriderVM]

Yes, I also know about that (Since the Core2Duo processors are slightly based around the Pentium 3 processors. Also the Athlon - Pentium 4 wars as well.) but the performance difference shouldn't be THAT HUGE.

Something's bottlenecking that system.

[mbroker]

What could be bottlenecking that system?

I also tried a Pentium m 1.7 laptop 152ram and radeon 9600 128mb graphics and that went 37 fps. Also that the graphics card is integrated.

[SCHUMI-4-EVA]

I guess it's the Express200...considering that propper graphics cards work well...the 9600 used to be a very good card.

Could also be operating system though if the newer PC has Windows XP and the other two have Windows 98 or 2000.

Or just some background tasks running on the newer computer.

[mbroker]

Well the emulators went back to 2fps than 10fps even though it should be over 30fps.
I uninstalled the ATI driver and put other versions and they do the same. I even got the latest version that came out yesterday and nothing. The odd thing I noticed is that when I uninstall the ATI driver it goes 11fps :|

I email ATI about it and they don't know. They thought it was improper driver instillation but that isn't the case. I guess ideas is not good to handle it, while other programs work faster and better.

[runawayprisoner]

Well... maybe you could try installing an external graphics card onto that system and see if it doesn't produce better results than the X200?