3dmark & driver woes

with the release of the v180 series of drivers, i felt it was time to upgrade from v179.13 i had been using. so, i decided to go for Dox' customized 180.43. after installing them, i ran 3dmark, and achieved:

180.43 => 9825

nice score there. but when 180.48 (apparently, uber-performing gaming driver) was released, i updated again. to my shock, 3dmark now gave me:

180.48 => 9109

wth? down by over 800 points? wowza. so i figured the driver was just bad at 3dmark, since gaming performance was decent. but then i ran 3dmark again.

180.48 #2 => 8326

ok, not good. score down by a mere 1500 points!! at this point, i re-installed the old 180.43 driver. now, my 3dmark score was:

180.43 #2 => 8331

naturally, this worried me quite a bit. in desperation, i went all the way back to 179.13. interestingly, my GPU was labeled 8700m-gt by the driver. at any rate, 3dmark now gives me:

179.13 #2 => 9706

so all's well that ends well. still, i'd like to know: has anybody else been getting abnormally low 3dmark scores with the 180 series drivers?

 

Yes I am getting the same results with the lower 3d mark scores. I am doing a throe test of them right now.

 

phew, so it's not me. i'm looking forward to your comparisons, dwend.

 

Here are my results. It seems that the 179.13 has much better shader performance. The lightmark 08 test for the 179.13 is not a lie, Retested 3 times with ~4 fps difference. It was reaching up 500-600fps, in some places. The shadow test in lightmark did very well, the others were reaching 40-60FPS in the Penumbra test were as the 179.13 was around 90fps.

 

i got 10444 3dmark06 when i first got my unit. driver & windows (vista Home Premium x32) are from AW .
i don't actually know what driver was .
after upgrading to vista x64 ultimate no matter what driver i install i got no more than 9700.

 

I just re-tested my system using 3DMark06.

With my T9300 and 8700M GT, I ended up with a 5217 score... which is great for my video card... the average for my card is around 4700ish.

Driver version: 179.14

 

The guy from Roswell Crew, Kevin, told me that for the m8800GTX, 9500 is the average score. If you manage to get more than that then you have a pretty nice setup already.

 

According to this, the average score is in the 9100 range.

 

3dmark is too dependent on the CPU to be able to generalize like that.

 

Well, I have the 2.4Ghz Processor, so then it must mean that you should be getting more than that then.

 

hmmm. That's what Kevin meant when he told me "9500 is actually a pretty good score" Nowadays when run 3dMark at 1280x720, I usually, get about 9600-9700's. But, again, this is all dependent on how optimized your system is.

 

RIGHT!!! I have to remember that the normal resolution for 3D Mark is 1280x1024, and since most owners have the 1440x900 screen, they can't quite do the "typical resolution" lol.

yeah... m15x averages would be higher due to that fact.

 

Phew, and here I thought I was getting a lower score than everybody else!



Glad to see I'm a little bit past the average. =)

 

yeah Oceanus, your score is perfectly normal. I get the same scores as you do.