ATi RADEON - The Empire strikes back (12/15) Overclocking Unfortunately, ATi doen’t include an overclocking tool in its current incarnation of drivers. As with most current videocards, the RADEON’s main bottleneck is the "slow" memory which can’t keep up with the chip’s data demands. This is the reason why we see lower performance at higher resolutions and color depth. Powerstrip, a very popular overclocking tool, offers a solution to this problem: it lets you increase memory and core speed. The current release only allows for synchronous increases, though, meaning both memory and core speed are increased, but cannot be changed independently of one another.. The as yet unreleased Powerstrip v3.0 will change this. Since I only had a very limited amount of time with this card, none of these results can be guaranteed to be stable over longer periods of time. Nonetheless, the 205/205 MHz combination worked rock solid for me and gave a nice boost over the standard 183/183 settings:
We witness an interesting phenomenon here: Even the 800x600-16 setting, which shouldn’t be bandwidth limited, gets an appreciable boost from the higher clockspeed – another indication of bad 16bit performance or a badly optimized driver. Normally, only the higher 32bit resolutions should profit from the higher speeds, but mainly because of the higher memory clockspeed and the associated increase in memory bandwidth, not the faster core speed. At lower resolutions, it is the CPU that is limiting the cards performance, since it can’t get the data to the videocard fast enough – the card never even reaches its limit. For example, the Hercules 3D Prophet II 64 only profits from its higher clockspeed at 1280x1024 and higher (See our review here). Unfortunately, overclocking with the current beta of Powerstrip v3.0 was not possible, since it had problems with ATi’s drivers. This should, however, be cleared up in the final release. |
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| Copyright: 07.08.2000 -
RIVA
Station 2000 - Lars Weinand Translation by Benjamin Kraft URL of this Article: www.rivastation.com/radeon64_e.htm - If you want to link to it, please use this URL! :-) |
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