6800nu CPU footprint high ?

[uotymab]

1st post in this Nvidia graphics forum & it's a puzzling one, so bare with me please

I have recently upgraded from a GF4 TI-4200 64MB (MSI) to a GF6 6800nu 128 MB (LeadTek A400 TDH), both are AGP.

On performing various benchmarks & game fps tests before & after, the improvement was about as I expected. Typically the 6800 is 2-3 times faster than the Ti4200 (8 x faster in 3dmark03). The improvement would no doubt be more if I had run the tests at the resoulutions & AA/AF settings that the 6800 is capable of, rather than those I was using for the 4200. The 6800 seems to be running as expected: 3300 3dmark05, 8700 3dmark03 & 17800 3dmark01 (XP2500M CPU @ 217x11, 512 MB PC3200 RAM, Nforce2 board, see the My SYstem button for more details).

Now the problem. The main game I play is Grand Prix Legends (GPL) a racing sim from 1998, based on F1 from 1965 & 1967. This is very much a CPU limited game. It's dx7 game & was originally written for Rendition & Voodoo cards (the d3d rasterizer was a later addon), so the CPU rather than the GPU does almost all of the work. It also has a max fps of 36, which clearly won't hit graphics cards very hard ! Whilst this is a game from 1998, it has been continually updated to the extent that it needs a modern high spec rig to run flat out (the modders keep making the game better, but harder on CPU's).

Playing the GPL sim on the 6800, the frame rates are actually worse than they were on the 4200 It is much worse at the start of the race (as the flag drops) & this is typical GPL behaviour when your CPU is maxed out, which it will be at the start of the race (all those calculations as the cars start moving).

This leads me on to three questions:

1) Is the 6800 using up more of my valuable CPU cycles than the 4200 was (there has been some talk of faster GPU's wasting CPU cycles by telling the CPU they are ready for more work) ?

2) Is the 6800 particularly bad in terms of using up CPU cycles (CPU footprint ?) compared to other modern GPU's & would I therefore be better off with something like a 6600GT or X800PRO ?

3) I can't pretend to understand GPU internals, but given that GPL doesn't use the graphics card to lighten the load on the CPU much, would I be better off with a GPU that has higher clock & memory speeds (like a 600GT), rather than a slower clocked card with more pipelines (like the 6800) ?

[Tonton]

Must I bare myself? Can't I just bear with your questions?

Sorry. Couldn't resist..,

Can you specify which driver you are using for your card?

[uotymab]

Thanks gor your reply Detonator wise, I have tried the 61.77's, 66.32's, 6766's, 66.93's & 71.90's (a couple from LeadTek, the rest from Nvidia), running Drive Cleaner in safe mode each time. It's an Nforce2 mobo & I have the latest Nvidia unified 5.10 drivers including the GART.

[uotymab]

To answer my own question, no the 6800nu doesn't have a high CPU footprint, but the recent detonators do ! Tested in game performance on the old Ti4200 using both recent & older detonators and it performed way better on the old detonators. Tested the 6800 & the 4200 on new detonators & the 6800 was slightly faster than the 4200 (it's a CPU limited game).

6800 (67.02 dets) FPS: 13 OGL 18 D3D
4200 (67.02 dets) FPS: 15 OGL 17 D3D
4200 (45.23 dets) FPS: 23 OGL 23 D3D

Still don't know whether modern ATI's would be better for older CPU limited games though

[MaverickmanTP]

Playing older games with modern graphics cards is problematic. You know that the 1998 games were designed for the cards that were available at the time like the Nvidia TNT or Voodoo 2. A 6800 is definitely overkill.