Poor Performance from 4870? GTX 260?

[NoTraction]

Hello,

My brother and I recently built identical computers with one exception, the video card. He went with Nvidia GTX 260, but I wanted to try out ATI this time around, so I got the 1GB GDDR5, 256-bit, 4870 from GIGABYTE.

My processor is an AMD X3 Phenom II 720 BE and I'm using OCZ DDR3 PC12800 RAM 6GB. I'm running Windows Vista 64bit.

We both ran 3Dmark Vantage, but his kicked my butt! I was upset, because the two cards cost the same amount of money.
My score was P7338 3DMarks and his was 11000-something. I feel mine is low and something is not configured properly. With the same hardware, how could his score so much higher? There can't be that much of a difference between the GTX 260 and the 4870 is there? Is this a low score for my card? Does anyone know what would limit its performance?

One thing I find odd is that CPUZ shows my processor having an L3 cache of 6MB, but the system info from 3D Vantage says 512kB. Does anyone know why this is? Could this be why my scores are low?

I just want to know if my computer is underperforming and if so, how can I fix it.

 

[Snowbum]

Do you get similar fps gaming?

 

[orangegator]

Vantage uses Physx, which is supported by nVidia cards, but not ATI. This will raise the cpu score, thus raising the overall score. You should compare just the gpu scores for the systems. That, or just compare fps in non-physx games.

 

[meodowla]

One thing I find odd is that CPUZ shows my processor having an L3 cache of 6MB, but the system info from 3D Vantage says 512kB. Does anyone know why this is? Could this be why my scores are low?

Your Processor has L3 cache of 6MB... thats shown in CPUZ.. But 3D Mark Vantage is not aware of the L3... It knows only L2 from a single core.. (From the idea that: In Intel processors, L2 and L3 are shared between cores... whereas in AMD, L2 is per core and L3 is shared...)

 

[jennyh]

Still something not quite right because P7338 is too low for a 4870.

 

[NoTraction]

Do you get similar fps gaming?

How do I measure in game fps? We have half-life two installed on both computers. Thanks for your reply.

 

[NoTraction]

Vantage uses Physx, which is supported by nVidia cards, but not ATI. This will raise the cpu score, thus raising the overall score. You should compare just the gpu scores for the systems. That, or just compare fps in non-physx games.

Thanks for the suggestion. Looking at just the GPU scores, his is about 9500 and mine is about 7000. Some new evidence has come to light. My brother was apparently able to unlock the fourth core of his X3. This nifty trick allowed him to score a whopping 31000 on the CPU score of 3D Vantage. I was blown away and jealous, because my X3 does not unlock and only scores a 7000.

Could the CPU bottleneck the GPU and thus lead to similar scores of 7000?

I also tried overclocking the 4870 using Catalyst Overdrive. I can run games stable at its increased settings, but the 3dvantage GPU score only increased by 400 to 7400.

One last question how can you tell if a game uses Physx or not?

Thanks for your reply

 

[NoTraction]

Still something not quite right because P7338 is too low for a 4870.

Thanks for your reply. This is what I am trying to figure out. If my card is performing in a limited capacity I'd like to know how to fix it. Does anyone know what my card should be scoring or how to maximize its potential?