Temperature on vid card.

yup, fully

if something goes wrong just re-open riva tuner and mask the pipes/vertex units back up

My results running AquaMark so far show only 3% speed increase but with 4xAA 8xAF on. Enabling the VP actually slows down the benchmark and I think it has hit a memory bottleneck.


12x1, 5vp
FPS: 37.6

12x1, 6vp
FPS:37.8

16x1, 5vp
FPS:39.3

16x1, 6vp
FPS:39.0

...I guess I need to do more testing. So far I guess the real bottleneck must be the amount of on board memory. IMO enabling the vp as well just eats up too much of the 128MB memory when running at high AA and AF and is not recorded by your benchmark test that take an average of everything. Even though AquaMark is one engine it does all tests at DX9 with forced AA and AF.

Nucleo can you confirm my findings running your card through DX9 and reasonably stressed 5vp/6vp @ 16pipes? I am looking for another benchmark test too.

well, i benched using 3dmark03
get it at http://www.futuremark.com

thats the best bet, get a hold of 3dmark05 as well, that is the most recent and im gonna bench with it l8er

I do have it and it maybe the standard but its useless...

3dmark is no good because it also benches non-stressed modes that you will never use which masks the final score as being positive where under stress tests the score maybe negative during that test. Under stress is why you have a 6800… so what if your framerate is 60 or 100, what really matters is if your framerate is 20 or 30 under stress like with AA and AF on all the time.

Thats why I see 16x1 6vp as slower than 16x1 5vp because I am stressing the memory out like you would under an intense game with loads of explotions and objects.

With AquaMark you can force it to do how you play games... but the downside to AquaMark is that its only one engine. I am going to look to download Half Life 2 source beta test.

EDIT: just had a look at 3DMark®05 and this may stress the system enough to prove or disprove my point after all... I will install it sometime this week.

3dmark03 does stress your card... but it puts the card under different tests.
some game tests, then some other tests... like vertex shader tests, and pixel shader tests.

so it tells you whether the pixel shaders or vertex units are active.

check the screens i posted, and check the change in fps where i activated to pixel pipelines and vertex unit

We will have to agree to disagree on this. Enabling the Pixel shader does have a positive on average but when playing games you will then get the lowest FPS during intense explosions or other heavy loads. Possibly because too much memory is used.