WHAT?! Upgrade to GTX 280 = WORSE performance?!

[KentaroKaos]

So I upgraded from my 8800 GTS (G80 revision, the one with 640 MB VRAM) to the new GTX 280 video card.

Running Vista x64, I get absolutely NO performance improvement and even WORSE performance in certain areas of maps (I'm looking at you, DM-Deck--sludge area) ! Granted, I get decent framerates.. 40-60 on average, but even so, I was expecting a smooth 60 FPS throughout! 40-60 was what I had on the 8800. And now it sometimes even dips to the 30s!

This was such a big disappointment to me, and I'm just wondering if anyone else is experiencing the same thing. If anyone out there recently upgraded to a GTX280, let me know how things are running and which OS you're using! Perhaps this is only a Vista thing.

Oh, and I'm talking about MAX settings, of course.

[HideInLight]

Could be a Vista problem, might wanna try latest non beta drivers. Have you tried disabling "DirectX10?" (It's known to cause probs with UT3 and)

check in your UTEngine.ini
search for AllowD3D10=True and change the value to false.
Also make sure VSync is off, although it's off by default.

Since you running a really fast card try to push for the stable constant 90fps mark

Also in your UTEngine.ini
[Engine.GameEngine]
bSmoothFrameRate=TRUE
MinSmoothedFrameRate=22
MaxSmoothedFrameRate=62
bClearAnimSetLinkupCachesOnLoadMap=

Change MaxSmoothedFramerate to 90, not to sure about the minimum try 60 or something. Or if you wanna check how many fps you can get turn it off.

To check your performance ingame press F10 and type in stat fps.

[Bunnykinx]

there are quite a few reasons this could be happening.

the 8800GTX has a higer ammount of RAM (even though its only ddr3) this means it does cope a tiny bit better from my expenriance with HIGH resalutions.

if you dont have a new power supply this could also be the problem.

one thing i also know from experiance is that alot of poeple end up with a big fat bottle neck when upgrading to a great part.

I feel like its a bottle neck on your CPU.

one last thing. I dont know what 280 comes with. but maybe its todo with hardware physics.

[KentaroKaos]

Could be a Vista problem, might wanna try latest non beta drivers. Have you tried disabling "DirectX10?" (It's known to cause probs with UT3 and)

check in your UTEngine.ini
search for AllowD3D10=True and change the value to false.
Also make sure VSync is off, although it's off by default.

Since you running a really fast card try to push for the stable constant 90fps mark

Also in your UTEngine.ini
[Engine.GameEngine]
bSmoothFrameRate=TRUE
MinSmoothedFrameRate=22
MaxSmoothedFrameRate=62
bClearAnimSetLinkupCachesOnLoadMap=

Change MaxSmoothedFramerate to 90, not to sure about the minimum try 60 or something. Or if you wanna check how many fps you can get turn it off.

To check your performance ingame press F10 and type in stat fps.

Tried your suggestions, still dips to mid 30s at certain points. This is truly absurd. I'm going to test it out on my XP partition in a moment.

[KentaroKaos]

there are quite a few reasons this could be happening.

the 8800GTX has a higer ammount of RAM (even though its only ddr3) this means it does cope a tiny bit better from my expenriance with HIGH resalutions.

if you dont have a new power supply this could also be the problem.

one thing i also know from experiance is that alot of poeple end up with a big fat bottle neck when upgrading to a great part.

I feel like its a bottle neck on your CPU.

one last thing. I dont know what 280 comes with. but maybe its todo with hardware physics.

Thanks for the reply. I'd like to say that I highly doubt that the E6600 is a bottleneck when it comes to gaming. Running the E6600 at stock and overclocked speeds (3.6 GHz) shows no change in FPS for UT3. What DID show and FPS change was when I overclocked my 8800GTS--I gained 10-15 FPS on average with that card overclocked. With the GTX280, it's low framerates all around, no matter what clock/memory speed.

Also I got a new PSU just for the GTX280, so it definitely has enough amperage and wattage to power it (I made extra sure of this).

[oldkawman1]

Chances are, say 99.9%, that the nvidia driver just plain sucks. I bet if you go to the nvidia forums, you will find others with the same complaints.

[Jungle+=]

Just got my GTX 280 OCX in the mail today.
Using 178.24 drivers ( they are the latest stable drivers )
I have a quad extreme qx9650 and 4 GB of ddr2 ram
Running Vista x64
To give you a rough comparison, My 9800 GTX gave me 100 fps and generally not dipping below 70 with 3/3 settings ( DM-Rising Sun )
The GTX 280 is giving me 160 ish with dips as low as 80 on the same map.

Under testing...the GTX 280 is bottlenecked by ANY CPU that is less than a 3.6 GHz quad core.The new i7 intels will be the first cpu's that won't bottleneck a gtx 280 at stock speeds.
The fps you are getting with your E6600 and a GTX 280 seems inpossibly low.

How many combined amps can your psu give? a GTX 280 needs 42 Amps.
and either 1x6 pin and 1x8 pin pcie connectors or 3x6 pin connectors.

Another possibilty that occured to me, is the wdm video memory management that Vista uses. when I was previously switching cards....i ran into it face first. Virtual memory was alloted to the card i had in the pc at the time of vista install.When I switched to 2 cards...it had retained the memory allotment for only one card. Nothing a reformat didn't steam roll over I don't know if the WDM virtual memory issue was ironed out properly with SP1,,,,but this might be a consideration for you.

[KentaroKaos]

Just got my GTX 280 OCX in the mail today.
Using 178.24 drivers ( they are the latest stable drivers )
I have a quad extreme qx9650 and 4 GB of ddr2 ram
Running Vista x64
To give you a rough comparison, My 9800 GTX gave me 100 fps and generally not dipping below 70 with 3/3 settings ( DM-Rising Sun )
The GTX 280 is giving me 160 ish with dips as low as 80 on the same map.

Under testing...the GTX 280 is bottlenecked by ANY CPU that is less than a 3.6 GHz quad core.The new i7 intels will be the first cpu's that won't bottleneck a gtx 280 at stock speeds.
The fps you are getting with your E6600 and a GTX 280 seems inpossibly low.

How many combined amps can your psu give? a GTX 280 needs 42 Amps.
and either 1x6 pin and 1x8 pin pcie connectors or 3x6 pin connectors.

Another possibilty that occured to me, is the wdm video memory management that Vista uses. when I was previously switching cards....i ran into it face first. Virtual memory was alloted to the card i had in the pc at the time of vista install.When I switched to 2 cards...it had retained the memory allotment for only one card. Nothing a reformat didn't steam roll over I don't know if the WDM virtual memory issue was ironed out properly with SP1,,,,but this might be a consideration for you.

My PSU gives combined amperage of 57A over the 12V rails, and has an 8 and a 6 pin PCI-E connector. So the card gets the power it needs.

Can you do me a favor, please? I know you're running a much faster CPU than I am, but can you see what framerate you're getting in DM-Deck, around the very bottom area with all the green sludge and teleporter? Just walk around in front of the teleporter looking towards the pipes that have the shield belt. See what framerate you're getting at MAX settings (5/5).

I've tried this same exact spot on XP and i almost always get a smooth 60 FPS (V-sync with an LCD monitor, so 60 is all I need), so yeah, there's something off with Vista. It's DirectX 9 performance is slow (it's emulating it as far as I know).

[Bunnykinx]

sorry...

just throwing a simple thing in the mix.
in the vista proformance stuff... you can select the power usage.. and it has min and max options. I had a SLIGHTLY lower fps on games when it was on balanced (default.) and gained a good 10 fps on everything when i turned to high power.

as you have overclocked your cpu im guessing your mobo has good overclocking features. just make sure that it does not have the "fast" "turbo" "standard" options in the bios..

overclocking and still leaving them on things like turbo and standard can cause problems.
also turn off OpenAL just for a test.

[KentaroKaos]

sorry...

just throwing a simple thing in the mix.
in the vista proformance stuff... you can select the power usage.. and it has min and max options. I had a SLIGHTLY lower fps on games when it was on balanced (default.) and gained a good 10 fps on everything when i turned to high power.

as you have overclocked your cpu im guessing your mobo has good overclocking features. just make sure that it does not have the "fast" "turbo" "standard" options in the bios..

overclocking and still leaving them on things like turbo and standard can cause problems.
also turn off OpenAL just for a test.

Hey thanks for the reply. I already had power settings on max performance and I made sure my BIOS was correctly set up for overclocking. OpenAL had no effect on performance (on or off).

[Enforcer-5]

I may be of a little help but this question might be somewhat obvious, or asked
already but I missed it anyways, have you tried any other games yet to see
if you get low FPS dips as well that don't seem reasonable?

[.51.Lestat]

So I upgraded from my 8800 GTS (G80 revision, the one with 640 MB VRAM) to the new GTX 280 video card.

Running Vista x64, I get absolutely NO performance improvement and even WORSE performance in certain areas of maps (I'm looking at you, DM-Deck--sludge area) ! Granted, I get decent framerates.. 40-60 on average, but even so, I was expecting a smooth 60 FPS throughout! 40-60 was what I had on the 8800. And now it sometimes even dips to the 30s!

This was such a big disappointment to me, and I'm just wondering if anyone else is experiencing the same thing. If anyone out there recently upgraded to a GTX280, let me know how things are running and which OS you're using! Perhaps this is only a Vista thing.

Oh, and I'm talking about MAX settings, of course.

Same problem here, but another vidcard...

Two weeks ago I had a nice 8800gts 320mb running UT3 in XP all max, 1680X1050, it was smooth, I couldnt complain at all. but you know... if its not broken...its time to upgrade and break a few things...

So I got an ATI HD4850, and cuz I have too much free time, I installed Vista x64 sp1. Everything went just fine, I must say installing Vista was a trouble free xperience, zero problems. Time to try my fav FPS, I was expecting to purple combo some noobs at 4850 fps, lol, dumb me, my personal benchmark consist in loading dm-deck, to my surprise I get lower fps with my new card, as you said around 30-40 around the teleporter....it feels like a downgrade. It was a surprise cuz many reviewers never mention this problem in UT3. I tried COD4 and FarCry2, nice FPS, no problems.
I have two options, 1st go back to XP, 2nd forget UT3...

So far I dont like neither of them..

My box:

msi p7n platinum (750i sli)
core2duo 8400 @ 3.75mhz
2x 2gb ddr2 kingston
2x 320gb seagate barracuda sata drives
x-fi xtreme music sound card
msi HD4850 512mb @ 690core, 1120 mem
Vista Ultimate x64 sp1
thermaltake power express 250w sli
coolermaster 430w psu
22" samsung lcd 1680x1050

[Sincreator]

Same problem here, but another vidcard...

Two weeks ago I had a nice 8800gts 320mb running UT3 in XP all max, 1680X1050, it was smooth, I couldnt complain at all. but you know... if its not broken...its time to upgrade and break a few things...

So I got an ATI HD4850, and cuz I have too much free time, I installed Vista x64 sp1. Everything went just fine, I must say installing Vista was a trouble free xperience, zero problems. Time to try my fav FPS, I was expecting to purple combo some noobs at 4850 fps, lol, dumb me, my personal benchmark consist in loading dm-deck, to my surprise I get lower fps with my new card, as you said around 30-40 around the teleporter....it feels like a downgrade. It was a surprise cuz many reviewers never mention this problem in UT3. I tried COD4 and FarCry2, nice FPS, no problems.
I have two options, 1st go back to XP, 2nd forget UT3...

So far I dont like neither of them..

My box:

msi p7n platinum (750i sli)
core2duo 8400 @ 3.75mhz
2x 2gb ddr2 kingston
2x 320gb seagate barracuda sata drives
x-fi xtreme music sound card
msi HD4850 512mb @ 690core, 1120 mem
Vista Ultimate x64 sp1
thermaltake power express 250w sli
coolermaster 430w psu
22" samsung lcd 1680x1050

What driver are you using? Another thing to point out is that most review sites use qx9650 cpu's at crazy ghz, so maybe because ut3 uses all 4 cores, two is slowing you down. Ive seen alot of these types of threads pooping up recently, and there is usually a common problem/statement made by each person. "Every other game runs fine, except ut3" is the comment I keep hearing. Now I'm not saying that this is the problem for sure, just that it could be.

[.51.Lestat]

Im using latest 8.10, I've tried a few options in CCC, it improves a little, but nothing near to my XP performance. I've tried a few tweaks in utgame and utengine, same results.

**** I like Vista, it looks good, it feels good, it uses my 4 gb's of ram, everything performs fast.. argghhh!!!

[KentaroKaos]

What driver are you using? Another thing to point out is that most review sites use qx9650 cpu's at crazy ghz, so maybe because ut3 uses all 4 cores, two is slowing you down. Ive seen alot of these types of threads pooping up recently, and there is usually a common problem/statement made by each person. "Every other game runs fine, except ut3" is the comment I keep hearing. Now I'm not saying that this is the problem for sure, just that it could be.

Looks like that is just the case. I've just come out of testing out some other games within Vista x64, and they run pretty well with the GTX280... better than my 8800 as I had hoped.

So what's up? Is UT3 really that processor-intensive? If so, why doesn't it show such strain when running in XP? Why is it only Vista?