I must be missing something here... I thought I'd see how well my system ran, so installed 3dMark06 yesterday.
I've got an Inspiron 9100 (A06 BIOS), 3Ghz, 9800/256Mb ATI card, 1Gb Ram, and 60Gb/7200RPM HDD... so nicely specced out.
I've been using the Dell-supplied ATI drivers (v8.162), with A01 BIOS upgrade for a long while, and when on the "Balanced" driver settings, managed a 3dMark06 score of "784" (SM2 = 381, CPU = 702). Tweaking these to all "high performance" increased it to 809 (394 / 708).
After reading these forums, I installed the latest Omega drivers (v 3.8.291), and again, tweaked everything to "high performance" and no VBI waiting... the scores went up to 867 (424 / 714).
I notice that in the 3dmark competition scores, the 9800 was getting scores well above 3000 with no overclocking... and yet I struggle to hit 900.
What am I missing?
Dan