AMD K-7 Athlon

[MANDOBLE]

It seems that to increase frame rate in AH, the most important thing is just the CPU power, not the 3D accelerator, this is common for almost all the PC flight sims. As far as I know, the Athlon is the fastest processor in the market with substantial FPU power advantage over the corresponding PIII. Any of you have tried AH with K7? How it was performing? Any compatibility issue?

Thanks and best regards.

[Lance]

No problems at all with my Athlon 600mhz.  Frame rate is around 40 at 1200x1024.  That's with 128 meg ram and a Diamond Viper v770 (not ultra).

Gordo

[MANDOBLE]

Wich motherboard and power suplly do you use?

[DHM]

We have a couple of Athlons, all with MSI-6167. No probs at all. One is a Cybermax 700 - very nice and stable machines. The other is a KryoTech 800   - fast but expensive. I've been running TNT2 Ultras and Geforce DDRs. Not much of a difference in frame rate here.

[Lance]

I use the microstar MS-6167 motherboard as well.  Power supply I am not so sure of.  When I built the machine, I bought a generic ATX case with a 300W power supply already installed.  If you visit the Athlon web site, they have a list of compatable cases (and other components) that you  might want to look at.

btw, I put three fans in (One in in the front, two out in the back) in addition to the fan that was already installed on the power supply and have had no cooling problems whatsoever.  Hope that helps.

Gordo

[BBGunn]

 www.amdzone.com/  has a utility download for nVidia AGP Detonator reference driver 3.72.   Athlon users might want to check it out.

[Tern]

  I can tell you on any K6 or K7 you're screwed unless you have a Diamond or Herculese video card.  HT says "the K6-K7's are CPU bound for graphics and that those will always have poor FR".  I asked why, that was and got ignored.  Then I said.."Number one selling CPU on the frigging market and HTC won't support it,  Go figure."  
To which HT says, "By by Terne" and booted me.  
Am I angry? Yes, that he refused to answer an honest question, then kicks me off the system.
Am I disappointed?  Extremely so.  

You try flying with 18 FR after having pressed Shft-F2 then ask me if I have a right to be miffed...

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O.E. 'Tern' Dillon
"Live to Fly!  Fly to Fight!  Fight to Live!"

[Pongo]

I am sure that HT said or meant the k6. the K6 has a very marginal floating point unit in it. The K7(athelon) is the exact oppisite. This is a 3d game. 3d calculations are very floating point intesive.  To make the game playable on a k6 it would be wasting the capabilities of the K7 or even a celeron. The reason the k6 is so popular is that it is cheap. It is cheap partialy because it has a cheaper FPU.  Most of us want more eye candy like contrails, ack puffs more detailed damage effects etc. These would all be imposisble if the K6-3 was targeted.


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Pongo
The Wrecking Crew

[Tern]

 

Originally posted by Pongo:
I am sure that HT said or meant the k6. the K6 has a very marginal floating point unit in it. ...These would all be imposisble if the K6-3 was targeted.

A. I beg to differ on the floating point, since I can run Janes, European Air War, Heavy Gear II, Rogue Spear, MiG Alley and Swat3 all at highest res with no frame chop or game lag on my K6-2-450.

B.  If HT "meant" not the K6-7 CPU's then he should have said that in the first damn place, instead of booting me after I asked why.

C.   Yeah, the Athlon is much faster FP etc.  Look at its bus size and ask it to slow down sometime.  Damned things like the Santa Monica freeway at 2AM, (ZOOOOOM!).  
    Sadly, I cannot afford to go out and replace this one year old system like so many others in the game.  In fact, I may have to cancel due to unplayability issues with the FR, (much to HT's and many others glee I am sure).  And lastly, the specs should reflect the facts!    If the game, (or developer in this case) has issues with a certain make of CPU's or system configuration, he should say so upfront and in bold friggin letters.
I'm just glad I never sent in the review on AH.  Given how I was treated by HT himself giving me the boot for asking why he don't support brandX, while he lets another player off with a tap on the wrist, for a major lang violation.  Yeah there's sure some equal and fair treatment in AH.  (



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O.E. 'Tern' Dillon
"Live to Fly!  Fly to Fight!  Fight to Live!"

[hitech]

Tern: You started the hole conversation by asking me if I was going to support the AMD.

I said no.

You than didn't ask what I was going to do but started a campain online arguing that I should support it because you were having slow frame rates. You even asked if I would be upset with you (not eact qutoe) Continued to push the issue. I replied yes I would.

The rest of your chat on line contined to complain that I wasn't going to support it.

Thats when I booted you, not for question but for complaining, while im doing a q&a seasion online I have a lot of people im talking to. You ask respect from me online, please give me the same.

And I don't even know the differance between a K-6 and K-7 so how should I have said so?

HiTech

[Swager]

HiTech!  You can just boot people??

Cool!  Listen!  I need your help!

Next time someone is on my 6 and I can't shake em.  I will let you know, and you boot them for me.  

Just Kidding!!  

Getting shot down builds character!  And brother have I got character!  

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JG2 "Richthofen"

"My Brother-In-Law used to work for the
telephone company"

Pilot Office Christopher Hart III
Hornet Squadron, France, May 1940
From Novel "A Piece Of Cake"

[AKDejaVu]

 

Then I said.."Number one selling CPU on the frigging market and HTC won't support it, Go figure."

I'd be interested in where you get this data.  Last I heard, AMD made 800,000 Athlons last quarter and did not face a shortage.  Intel made over 5,000,000 Coppermine processors and did face a shortage.  I'll let you do the math there...

AKDejaVu

[Sorrow[S=A]]

OK, HT, he may not have asked you but _I_ will.

What ARE you planning to do?
Like I mentioned before AMD is always been very happy to assist programmers in putting AMD 3DNOW technology into their games. While I am sure you will be adding SSE and know you must have used MMX we are pretty much out on a limb about your plans for AMD. Please, you have made an extra effort to have the game playable by low end users on Pentium 233's can we get a little tidbit of what your plans are for AMD?

BTW DejaVu K6II is the top selling CPU for several months now. Only one that comes close to it in volume is Celeron series. Athlon and PIII are very far behind those two in sales this quarter.

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If your in range, so is the enemy.

[Lephturn]

Sorrow,

There is no lack of support for AMD, AH runs just great on an AMD chip.  3DNow instructions are included in DX7, so some of them would be made use of.  What else should HT do to support it?  Note that Athlon owners have no problem with framerates, and I haven't heard any complaints from K6-3 owners either.  The only real issue here is that the older K6's have really bad FPU's, and most flight sims including AH make heavy use of the FPU.

It may be that HTC could use some specific 3Dnow instructions to slightly improve framerates for those with old K6's.  If this is even possible, i can't believe it would be worth the time.  The number of customers that it would benefit is very small, and the amount of improvement would be small as well.  I don't know how much extra work this would be, but I'm sure it would not be trivial.  For the majority of the customer base this would just be a waste of HTC's valuable time that could be spent getting great new features and planes into the game.

HTC supports AMD just as well as they do Intel.  If you have a CPU with a weak Floating Point Unit you will get low framerates, period.  This has nothing to do with HTC "supporting" AMD specifically or not.  They don't write an app for a processor, they write it for Windows and DirectX.  If you have a toejamty processor, it runs slower.  It really is that simple.

Now please, will you folks stop wasting HT's time debating a non-issue?

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Lephturn - Chief Trainer
A member of The Flying Pigs
Visit Lephturn's Aerodrome for AH news, resources, and training data.
 http://users.andara.com/~sconrad/

"MY P-47 is a pretty good ship
And she took a round coming 'cross the Channel last trip
I was thinking 'bout my baby and lettin' her rip
Always got me through so far
Well they can ship me all over this great big world
But I'll never find nothing like my North End girl
I'm taking her home with me one day, sir
Soon as we win this war"
 - Steve Earl

[Sorrow[S=A]]

Lephturn,

The instructions included on DX7 really make little or no difference to the AMD K6 II in the game, what we need is support for it in the actual graphics code.

Yes the K6II has a poor fpu, that is not an issue here, the problem here is that HT relies little or not at all on software he did not write for the Graphics engine in AH. This means that since he did not include any support in for the 3dNOW extensions everything has to be processed the long way by the processor when running the 3D Engine.
this means that the Celeron with it's faster FPU performs much better than the K6II or III will because both rely heavily on 3DNOW to shorten the load on the CPU to do those calculations. the fact that AH is a flight sim is irrelevant, the effect would be the same with any graphics engine not using them.

Is this a non-issue? NO NO NO.
It is NOT.
Why?
Because with support for 3DNOW any AMD CPU (whether it can run it fine now or not) gets a VERY noticable performance boost. Whether it's a low FPU K6 or a high FPU Athlon matters little, it improves the way it runs.
And with more and more Compaq and IBM or HP off the shelf systems having K6II's in them you will be seeing more new users coming in with this handicap. Not to mention that these systems typically have poor OEM video cards they end up seeing AH perform very poorly and just leave.

  Note also that this does NOT affect all of HTC Leph, the person it affects really is just HiTech, since he does the majority of the Graphics engine coding. If he chooses to include AMD support in the engine I sincerely doubt it would affect the development of the game an enormous amount. after he learned how to implement it he could slowly backdate the existing code and all new additions would have it allready there. and finally, ALL I was asking was whether or not HT had looked into it yet, and whether he had any plans formed. I have been a fly in his ear for awhile now in Q&A about it, I am not trying to be a pest, just persistent.

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If your in range, so is the enemy.