Catalyst 12.6

[Noir]

Anyone having huge slow downs with the latest catalyst drivers? Like going to 30fps instead of 60 for no reason?

I found that the best drivers for my 6870 are the 11.12, even if the shadows don't look so good with this driver

[Noir]

well this should be in hardware & software probably, sorry

[gyrene81]

i think 12.8 fixed all of the issues people found with 12.4 and 12.6. just make sure aa is turned off for ah.

[Noir]

i think 12.8 fixed all of the issues people found with 12.4 and 12.6. just make sure aa is turned off for ah.

well all what the 12.X series of drivers brought me was problems and performance decrease. I'm sticking to 11.12 for a while, reconfiguring Eyefinity each time is annoying.

[zack1234]

I use 12.1 other's were not very good.

What do you gain from loading current drivers for a 6970?

I have AA on, why would you disable a major part of a graphics card feature?

[Noir]

I use 12.1 other's were not very good.

What do you gain from loading current drivers for a 6970?

I have AA on, why would you disable a major part of a graphics card feature?

You gain some frames per second in some recent games, it fixes issues with crossfire etc etc.

AA is alright but very expensive in resources for what it offers IMO, SInce I went triple screen I had to turn it off in all games and I don't miss it much.

[gyrene81]

I use 12.1 other's were not very good.

What do you gain from loading current drivers for a 6970?

I have AA on, why would you disable a major part of a graphics card feature?

do a search in the tech support section key words anti aliasing posted by skuzzy. i've experimented with it offline, on my 6950 2gb and my old 4870 1gb. frame rates took a hit regardless of which driver version, even at the lowest aa settings available. to be frank about it, i didn't notice much difference with the hi-res pack installed. a big 4gb video card could probably handle 2-8x aa without supersampling.

1.  Do all testing offline, using the ndisles terrain.  Online introduces too many variables.  It can take minutes for the game to stabilize online, whereas offline it is almost immediate.

2.  Your video card is easily going to be overwhelmed if you have any anti-aliasing set, along with bump mapping.

3.  You really should disable "ground clutter".

4.  You probably should not be running "bump mapping" at all, but if you do, disable anti-aliasing.

5.  You probably should disable other plane skins.

6.  You will never see all of the video RAM used as the NVidia drivers will start using system RAM when it gets too close to being full.  NVida and ATI both need a percentage of video RAM for scratch pad work.  Stability issues will follow once system RAM starts being used. (my computer gets all manner of graphical anomalies with its NVidia card once it reaches about 80% full).

By the way, I was pondering how a 2GB video card could run out of RAM.  It suddenly dawned on me that 2GB of video RAM is being mapped into our 32 bit address space, which then reduces the maximum amount of application memory we can address to 2GB.

In effect, the 2GB video card cannot map its entire address space into our space due to the lack of memory in the 4GB address space, which causes us to get the "out of video ram" error from the video card.

In this case, you need to disable anti-aliasing, or set the "detail range" to something less than what you have it at now.

Sounds to me like the memory of the video card is filling up.  Easy to fill up 2GB (or more) of video RAM with Aces High, depending on the settings.  Get enough objects in view with enough anti-aliasing and large shadow texture size and that will do it.

Just drop the shadow texture size and see if that helps.  Or drop the anti-aliasing a notch.  Or both.

[zack1234]

Just checked again my AA is set to "application settings"

while 12.1 are working I will leave the update alone.

[Krusty]

do a search in the tech support section key words anti aliasing posted by skuzzy. i've experimented with it offline, on my 6950 2gb and my old 4870 1gb. frame rates took a hit regardless of which driver version, even at the lowest aa settings available. to be frank about it, i didn't notice much difference with the hi-res pack installed. a big 4gb video card could probably handle 2-8x aa without supersampling.

Gyrene, the first one he's talking specifically about a guy running a GeForce 8800, the second one he's considering only 32-bit systems, and the third was Challenge's system which was pretty much maxed out on every detail he could find.

Regarding AA: FSAA doesn't hurt that much. You use just 1 or 2 notches and most systems can handle that just fine. Just enough to get rid of the "jaggies" so to speak. Running 8x, or more, you can't physically see the difference anymore. It's just bragging rights.

I run just a notch or two on my AMD 6970 2GB, I have shadows set to moderate resolution, I have textures maxed, I have all the goodies enabled [Edit: All the AH goodies, my card settings are balanced between performance and looks], and I'm running 3 monitors at 3840x1024. It's all about moderation. If you try to super-max-out every single last card setting, you're just eating memory at a geometric rate and gaining a small % of improved quality. It's about setting the card right.

And, for higher memory limits it's a must to have a 64-bit OS installed. Or otherwise, as Skuzzy mentioned, you probably aren't using all of it.



P.S. I'm still on 12.3 drivers. Never saw much need to update. No bugs, glitches, etc. It might improve some performance but I just didn't want to be bothered to test it and see.

[gyrene81]

just quoting for illustration purposes Krusty. depending on the video card and system aa can either bite you or make things look pretty.

And, for higher memory limits it's a must to have a 64-bit OS installed. Or otherwise, as Skuzzy mentioned, you probably aren't using all of it.

i have to wonder how the os memory limits affect the memory usage of a video game that runs in a 32bit space.

[Skuzzy]

just quoting for illustration purposes Krusty. depending on the video card and system aa can either bite you or make things look pretty.
i have to wonder how the os memory limits affect the memory usage of a video game that runs in a 32bit space.

All 64 bit OS's map non-system RAM starting at the 4GB limit then downward.  Simply put, a 32 bit application is stuck with the same memory as before.  The only possible gain could come if the OS moved 64 bit apps above the 4GB address space to free up RAM for the 32 bit app.  A 64 bit OS also takes up more memory, so you have even less system RAM available to 32 bit applications.

So when you put a 2GB video card into a system, the game will still be fighting for memory even if your system has 4000GB of system RAM.

So the next question will be, "why or when are we going to do a 64 bit version of the game?"

Meaning we have to support two different games with two different memory models.  It is not so simple as just recompiling the game and every update would take much longer to get done as it is rare to be able to write code for 32 bit then simply compile it for 64 bit due to various base variable declarations changing between the 32 bit compiler and the 64 bit compiler.

[Bino]

...
Meaning we have to support two different games with two different memory models.  It is not so simple as just recompiling the game and every update would take much longer to get done as it is rare to be able to write code for 32 bit then simply compile it for 64 bit due to various base variable declarations changing between the 32 bit compiler and the 64 bit compiler.

Amen!  Years ago I ran all the nightly builds for a commercial product when we made the transition from 32-bit to 64-bit.  The change exposed a number of "gotchas" in our code.

[gyrene81]

All 64 bit OS's map non-system RAM starting at the 4GB limit then downward.  Simply put, a 32 bit application is stuck with the same memory as before.  The only possible gain could come if the OS moved 64 bit apps above the 4GB address space to free up RAM for the 32 bit app.  A 64 bit OS also takes up more memory, so you have even less system RAM available to 32 bit applications.

So when you put a 2GB video card into a system, the game will still be fighting for memory even if your system has 4000GB of system RAM.

So the next question will be, "why or when are we going to do a 64 bit version of the game?"

Meaning we have to support two different games with two different memory models.  It is not so simple as just recompiling the game and every update would take much longer to get done as it is rare to be able to write code for 32 bit then simply compile it for 64 bit due to various base variable declarations changing between the 32 bit compiler and the 64 bit compiler.

without having to go to 64bit wouldn't at least going to directx 10 allow for better graphical memory addressing over directx 9?

[Skuzzy]

without having to go to 64bit wouldn't at least going to directx 10 allow for better graphical memory addressing over directx 9?

No.

The only way to gain any memory space is if the video drivers make use of the PAE extensions to get a 37 bit address for 32 bit applications.  This would allow the video driver to remap some, but not all, of the video RAM above the 4GB address mark.

DX10's pipeline is slightly different than DX9, which would require us to do two ports of Aces High.  Again, it creates a support nightmare.  DX10 does not gain us anything that cannot be done in DX9.  DX10 is actually a bit more bloated than DX9.