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I have two new (compared to my Win95) boxes (OK, they're both over 3 years old but whatever). One runs WinXP SP3 and the other one has WinVista SP2.

The XP box has an onboard VIA/S3G UniChrome IGP (64 MB) graphics card, 2GB of RAM and a AMD Athlon XP (2.08GhZ) processor.

The Vista has a Radeon X300/X550 Series (128 MB) graphics card(sorry, I don't know the exact model number; I bought it used to replace a fried GeForce 7300), 2GB of RAM and an Intel Core 2 Duo (1.8GhZ) processor.

The interesting thing is, on the XP; the 3D Text screensaver runs very slowly and the iTunes visualizer can only get to 10FPS max, but Empty Clip runs at 50-60 FPS.

On the Vista, the screensavers run fast, the iTunes visualizer gets 20-25FPS, but Empty Clip only gets 5FPS max!

Does anybody know why one box can get great FPS but the other one doesn't and vice versa?
Both cards support DX9.

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Nate Koppenhaver
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  • What's the mystery? One has much better graphics hardware than the other. Empty Clip is 2D, so isn't harmed too much by the lack of a real GPU. – David Schwartz Oct 31 '11 at 00:00
  • but then why would it run so slowly on one with a (comparatively) good GPU? – Nate Koppenhaver Oct 31 '11 at 02:19
  • Hard to say without knowing what CPU that machine has. Is it an E6300? If so, for single-threaded programs, the performance of the Athlon XP 1.8GHz is comparable. – David Schwartz Oct 31 '11 at 02:32
  • yes it is an E6300 - but wouldn't the graphics rendering run on the GPU anyways? – Nate Koppenhaver Oct 31 '11 at 18:03
  • Not 2D graphics, like Empty Clip uses. – David Schwartz Oct 31 '11 at 20:01
  • It says it uses '3D Hardware accelerated graphics' though -- wouldn't that mean the GPU? – Nate Koppenhaver Oct 31 '11 at 20:28
  • Your guess is as good as mine. It uses 2D graphics but claims 3D acceleration. What it likely does mean is that its performance profile is going to be different from pretty much everything else. – David Schwartz Oct 31 '11 at 20:40
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    Maybe the game is not using the same set of features (like resolution, textures quality, anti-aliasing etc) on both cards. Maybe your settings on the VIA card are less-demanding than your settings on the ATI card. I ran the game out of curiosity and I could not find a way to change the settings, so the game is probably deciding for you and is not doing a good job at it. – yms Nov 01 '11 at 00:41

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