ATI RS780 benchmarks

Is this a primary / secondary display issue? When I had two displays attached one was fast the other was dog slow (sorry, I'd forgotten about that until you mentioned this!). I think it's not uncommon that only the primary display is accelerated.
Nope it seems that the second LCD is fast too. It's only if I am running one output that things get slow.
 
What do you have your Video/Monitor Detection routine set to inside Catalyst Control Center?
 
What do you have your Video/Monitor Detection routine set to inside Catalyst Control Center?
Everything is set to default. "Detect when CCC is opened." I tried manual too just now but it didn't seem to affect the speed issue.
 
I installed Vista on the machine last night, because sleep is just so been-there-done-that. :) I'm not having any slowness problems in Vista. I wonder if there's a XP bug, or if something was wrong with my install of XP. Maybe I'll go back one day and give it a whirl again.

BTW, don't buy Gigabyte boards for their end-user support. I have tried numerous times to get support out of that company for my 3 Gigabyte boards and they take days to respond and usually haven't read what I wrote. They actually gave up entirely on one question I asked (can't boot 4GB USB sticks on P35 or 965P, BIOS no recognize), and just stopped responding to my responses. I still haven't gotten a response about this video issue. 48 hours now.
 
Ah I should have asked before if you were on Vista or XP. Prior to the move to Vista, I used to have all kinds of quirky behavior in XP with regards to 2D and 3D video acceleration. Especially when combined with Video playback.

Vista has been such a welcome relief from having to deal with each niggling problem I had in XP.

Let me know how your experience is if you try XP again. I'm keeping my dad's machine on XP for the moment so he doesn't have to complain about learning something "new." :) And was thinking of getting an RS780 based board for an upgrade for him.

Regards,
SB
 
I've been pondering AMD's IGP/CPU relationship lately, while playing around with this 780G board. It strikes me that their CPU memory controller + hypertransport bus setup is a major impediment to IGP performance. An Athlon 64 with its 1000 MHz 16-bit HT bus only has 2 GB/s bandwidth to the IGP. That's less bandwidth than a NVIDIA TNT2 had available to it. With Phenom, you get HT3 which seems to be just more clockspeed on the bus. At 1800MHz we're still only talking 3.6GB/s (this is more than a typical HD 2400 Pro's 3.2 GB/s though).

Compare this to an Intel IGP which has direct access to 128-bit dual channel RAM. An Intel IGP can have upwards of 16GB/s bandwidth available to it. AMD would need to move to a full 32-bit HT bus and higher bus clock to get close to this.

I don't really see how they can make an IGP that performs much better than 690G/740G and 780G with their current socket.
 
I've been pondering AMD's IGP/CPU relationship lately, while playing around with this 780G board. It strikes me that their CPU memory controller + hypertransport bus setup is a major impediment to IGP performance. An Athlon 64 with its 1000 MHz 16-bit HT bus only has 2 GB/s bandwidth to the IGP. That's less bandwidth than a NVIDIA TNT2 had available to it. With Phenom, you get HT3 which seems to be just more clockspeed on the bus. At 1800MHz we're still only talking 3.6GB/s (this is more than a typical HD 2400 Pro's 3.2 GB/s though).
Your numbers are a bit wrong. HT is using double data rate signaling. Also, it has dedicated up / downstream links (2x16bit). So aggregate bandwidth for HT2.0 is 8GB/s (4GB/s each direction). Now, I don't know what the typical read to write ratio is for 780G, but you're right it is less than the total (typical) main memory bandwidth (12.8GB/s for dual-channel DDR2-800). And yes, if you only look at read bandwidth, this is less than what a typical HD2400Pro has (which has 6.4GB/s with 64-bit 400Mhz ram - I think you got confused with the ram frequencies vs. data rate...).
And apparently HT3.0 really helps those IGPs if you look at benchmarks, so they are indeed definitely a bit bandwidth limited. Though a HT3.0 link at 1800Mhz puts them above the memory bandwidth of a HD2400Pro or HD3450 (7.2GB/s vs. 6.4GB/s) even if you look at only read bandwidth - aggregate they'd have twice the memory bandwidth (ok not considering the cpu needs to use some but you get the idea).
The HD3200 IGP has likely FAR better bandwidth saving schemes (z buffer compression etc.) than the gen4 intel igps (they don't have any I'm aware of at all), and they could make up for less bandwidth with larger caches too (though I've no idea if that's the case).
 
Yea, the different aspects of the RAM sometimes messes me up. I was thinking that the HD 2400 Pro's 400MHz RAM actually referred to 2x200 MHz as in DDR1. Ooops. The aggregate bandwidth of HT is interesting too, but I'm unclear on whether dedicated up and down is better than a faster, unidirectional bus (for video).
 
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Yea, the different aspects of the RAM sometimes messes me up. I was thinking that the HD 2400 Pro's 400MHz RAM actually referred to 2x200 MHz as in DDR1. Ooops. The aggregate bandwidth of HT is interesting too, but I'm unclear on whether dedicated up and down is better than a faster, unidirectional bus (for video).
Having twice the speed in a bidirectional bus (this is what you meant instead of unidirectional) is always faster, but it's more expensive and harder to implement, AFAIK. 3D is probably more heavily biased towards writing when BW limited, but I don't think you'd gain much overall speed by going bidirectional for the same silicon budget.
 
:\

Not entirely pleased to here about these 2D issues with XP... I wonder if it's just some weird bug that popped up for multiple monitors... has anyone tried playing any 2D heavy games with the IGP? I was hoping 780 would be enough for my 2D gaming, but now I'm not so sure...
 
I haven't bothered to go back to XP yet, but it was definitely not performing right for me. Vista is fine; it feels just about as quick as my 3850. It is a given though that it will not be quite as fast because it just doesn't have the fast access to RAM that the discrete cards have. I really doubt though that it would have problems with any 2D games.
 
Ok, so I reinstalled XP on my Gigabyte MA78GM-S2H mobo and the slow 2D scrolling issue is still there. So it wasn't some weird XP install corruption. And again, it speeds up to normal as long as I run dual monitors. No problems under Vista, but problems with XP.

And I've discovered a new, equally annoying problem. Cool'n'Quiet seems to stop working after viewing a video. The CPU becomes stuck at full speed + voltage. Maybe other applications do it too, not sure yet. It is possible to get CnQ going again just by entering the power management panel. This occurs in both Vista and XP. It causes at 10+ Watt increase in power consumption. Not cool for my supposed-to-be-minimal-power-use sys. :(

Oh, and I'm not alone in having problems so it's not some some incredible personal incompetence that I was unaware of:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=992503&page=91
 
Wonderful

At this point, I think I'm just going to wait for the 790 and hope ATi fixes some of these issues. The temperature issue doesn't worry me though, Brisbane is known to have problems with temp readings, but that's the least of the problems... grrr.
 
Longterm observations and experiences with my Gigabyte 780G-S2H matx mobo. Originally used a 90nm Athlon 64 X2 3800+, then moved to current 65nm Athlon 64 X2 4200+ when I needed a CPU for a HTPC. These experiences are with use of Catalyst 8.5-8.7.

- The IGP will do 930 MHz completely stable. I set it to 940 MHz in BIOS and the clock multipliers align that to ~930 MHz. I strongly recommend a fan addition if overclocking it.
- An Athlon 64 X2's wimpy 1.0GHz HT bus is a serious bottleneck for 3D.
- Maybe buy DDR2-1066 RAM so you can jack the RAM clock and FSB as high as possible if you want extra 3D speed.
- In XP, with a single display enabled, 2D performance will be noticeably lower than if running dual displays. Vista eliminates this issue.
- It performs somewhere in between a Radeon 9600 and 9800. Even when overclocked to 930 MHz. 3DMark2001SE Nature test score was fascinating because of how low it was.
- In Vista, CnQ causes performance problems with 3D acceleration. Framerate was unsteady even standing still in a game. Disabled CnQ and went with a undervolted (1.0v) continuous clock. Doesn't happen in XP. May be caused by my CPU choice (vs. Phenom)? RMClock is an option to circumvent this, but it seemed to cause me instability (BSODs)
- In both XP and Vista, playing a video will cause CnQ to stop functioning. CnQ can be re-enabled by simply entering the power management panel in screen saver setup. Fixed by disabling ATI Hotkey Manager service in XP and ATI Event Manager service in Vista.
- 45W power consumption with 80Plus PSU when idle
- PCIe x16 slot can block one of the SATA ports when using a somewhat long vid card (3850 in my case)
- Not sure if the I/O deficiencies (USB/SATA) shown in various reviews are actually noticeable in real use. I don't use AHCI anymore, but Vista did install fine with it enabled when I tried it a while back. No drivers needed on install. Don't like extra boot time caused by redundant BIOS drive detection.
-S3 Standby works great.


3DMARK2001SE
-2300 MHz A64X2 (1.0v), 330 MHz FSB (1650 MHz HT), 920 MHz DDR2, 930 MHz IGP.
-All voltages at stock other than undervolted CPU.
-Compared to a Athlon XP 2300 MHz with Radeon 9700 Pro.
Green = HD 3200
Red = 9700 Pro
image4px6.jpg

3DMark05
http://service.futuremark.com/results/showSingleResult.action?resultId=4404558&resultType=12
3DMark2001SE
http://service.futuremark.com/results/showSingleResult.action?resultId=9401601&resultType=6

Somewhat amazing geometry throughput there. Not something you really want to game on. ;) Older games and simpler games (online RPGs) are ok on it though.
 
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Somewhat amazing geometry throughput there. Not something you really want to game on. ;) Older games and simpler games (online RPGs) are ok on it though.
Well, remember that it is a unified processor.

Relatively high geometry throughput on a low end card is good because it lets you play newer games at low resolution at the same FPS as high end cards running high resolution. If everything was scaled down, this wouldn't be true.
 
Swaaye, I have I ever told you that I love you? 'Cause that would be creepy, BUT I will say that I REEEEEAAAAALLY appreciate all that info. Thank you so much. It's actually pretty hard to find info that frames the 780g's performance in a way that's actually useful for me, hearing that it gets 11 fps in crysis on low doesn't really help me, so again, thank you.

OH, also, did you get 930MHz on the stock passive heatsink or did you change to some 3rd party heatsink? Eitherway, that's pretty darn amazing.
 
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- In Vista, CnQ causes performance problems with 3D acceleration. Framerate was unsteady even standing still in a game. Disabled CnQ and went with a undervolted (1.0v) continuous clock. Doesn't happen in XP. May be caused by my CPU choice (vs. Phenom)?
- In both XP and Vista, playing a video will cause CnQ to stop functioning. CnQ can be re-enabled by simply entering the power management panel in screen saver setup. Fixed by disabling ATI Hotkey Manager service in XP and ATI Event Manager service in Vista.
Had you tried to use rightmark's CPU power manager? cpu.rightmark.org
 
In Vista, CnQ causes performance problems with 3D acceleration. Framerate was unsteady even standing still in a game. Disabled CnQ and went with a undervolted (1.0v) continuous clock. Doesn't happen in XP. May be caused by my CPU choice (vs. Phenom)?

A feature was just implemented in the drivers (not sure when this driver will be released to the public) that fixes this issue. The CPU freq. gets locked @ maximum when running any fullscreen OGL or D3D app. This issue only applies to the K8 family though. Phenom and it's derivatives (griffin aka turion X2 ultra) don't suffer from this problem.

In both XP and Vista, playing a video will cause CnQ to stop functioning. CnQ can be re-enabled by simply entering the power management panel in screen saver setup. Fixed by disabling ATI Hotkey Manager service in XP and ATI Event Manager service in Vista.

This was implemented to work around another issue with K8 cpus that caused some frame drops when the CPU lowered it's pstate during video playback. I noticed during my testing that the workaround is broken though... it locks the cpu minimum state @ 100% and doesn't revert it back. Again this is K8 only, if you had phenom all of these problems would go away. Buy a phenom! lol
 
OH, also, did you get 930MHz on the stock passive heatsink or did you change to some 3rd party heatsink? Eitherway, that's pretty darn amazing.
I added a ~3-volted (5-volts + a resistor) 60mm fan (it's a speedy little thing normally) to the heatsink with some hot glue. You definitely would not want to run it passive at 930 MHz.

I'm not sure if this is indicative of very many 780Gs, but 900+ MHz seems to be out of the range of the 3450's I've read about so it is amazing. If only it wasn't so bandwidth limited.
 
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Had you tried to use rightmark's CPU power manager? cpu.rightmark.org
I did try it but it was causing me blue screens that I just couldn't figure out. I seemed to be unstable even at the same FIDs/VIDs the BIOS worked with. No clue what was going on there. But yes, otherwise, it does solve the problem of CnQ stopping. I've used RMClock on several A64 systems before so I'm not new to it. It just didn't seem to be quite compatible with 780G.

On another hand, using a PCIe vid card solves the problem of CnQ stopping too.
 
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