I just installed the 16.2.1 which seemed to be the latest for HD6970 (actually for the entire HD6000 series). This time I also installed the new settings app, IIRC that wasn't supported in the 16.1 I previously had.
Didn't you tell about some setting that improved performance in AH3 not too long ago? I might like to give it a try now that I have the Radeon Settings installed.
Hi Bizman,
So far Radeon Settings using the MS QT Framework UI is proving to be a vast improvement vs Catalyst CCC w\ MS .Net Framework 4.5 UI where resources are concerned along w\ performance\ease of use.
The thing to keep in mind here w\ AMD is that due to the way they implemented graphics features\performance features throughout their product line over time, w\ any of the new AMD Crimson drivers you will need to know what features the particular vid card (GPU type\generation) you have has designed in its hardware then read up on the release notes of the particular Crimson driver version to determine if there are tangible benefits to take advantage of. Unfortunately for most Radeon users of vid cards older than the 7000 series you're going to be on the scarce side of performance improvements since your cards most likely don't have such features as Power Tune, Power Tune 2.0, Zero Core, ULPS, Free Synch, FRTC, Shader Cache, Tesselation, etc in addition to any specific GPU architecture design improvements that the driver stack can take advantage of.
So my read for users of pre-7000 series Radeons you will be using mostly the standard driver stack settings that AMD has had since the ATI days (this is still the base coding in the new Crimson driver stack) and so it stands to reason that you won't realize any meaningful graphics performance gains until AMD starts to really dig into this part of the driver stack to look for any areas where they can improve driver efficiency w\ the older GPU line. It is here where in earlier posts I said that I hoped that Raja would get w\ John Maturi the creator of Radeon Pro utility (who is still working for AMD in the group that came up w\ AMD Raptr now Gaming Evolved) and license John's source code for his utility program then port all of it into QT Framework so it can be used in Radeon Settings. Then owners of older Radeon vid cards will have something to use to take advantage of as Radeon Pro was THE best utility out there to squeeze ALL the performance out of Radeon GPU's that was available.
I have the current flagship AMD R9 series vid card w\ its feature set and GPU architecture in which the Crimson drivers are being fully optimized for so when you read my posts concerning these drivers please keep this in mind.
As far as any specific setting for AHIII, the only 1 that I can remember is the recommendation to not use the Surface Format Optimization setting as this was a graphics "hack" back in the ATI days to add the appearance of trilinear texture filtering to graphics scenes w\o actually enabling full trilinear texture filtering at the GPU level (the trick of using FP11 to resemble FP16)....IOW a GPU performance enhancement. But as I also said, this is what I was seeing due to using this w\ my
R9 Fury X Fiji GPU as it is powerful enough to apply full trilinear texture filtering and not drop FPS so when I used this setting this caused my card to slow down due to less GPU load in which then Power Tune 2.0 would cut some power to GPU as it calculated that the GPU didn't need the extra juice as Power Tune 2.0 (Nvidia GPU Boost 2.0 is similar in operation) looks at the GPU driver graphics settings calls being used to help interpret potential GPU load. Since you have a 6000 series Radeon I would not recommend that you turn this setting off for your card as I believe your GPU's performance will be helped by using this driver setting in AHIII due to the game using the Shader 3.x Modeling code.
This is 1 of the areas where I believe the Crimson 16.3's are helping my GPU as the new power efficiency toggle in the Global settings section is active and I think that when I start up a 3D game this toggles some of the power control capability in the GPU to allow a higher power threshold meaning to not be so aggressive in throttling power back regardless of actual GPU load in game very much like in Radeon Pro as there was a checkbox that when checked it would tell the GPU to run at full GPU clocks regardless of actual GPU load in game when you started your 3D game thru the Radeon Pro game profile that you would create.
Come to think of it this may help your GPU as well, how much I don't know. Since you've now actually got the UI loaded on your box I would encourage you to run tests w\ these setting choices & find which ones give you what you want. If you use the Global settings in Radeon Settings as when you 1st loaded this you will be using essentially the same default driver settings that you've been using all along Biz (main reason why you're not noticing any change in GPU performance) w\ exception of the shader cache, FRTC and now the power efficiency optimization setting. I would highly recommend that you build a profile for each game you play to make any game specific setting changes as this way you keep the global settings in their default settings so you don't have to remember what they were (desktop uses the global settings). As for running AHII and AHIII use the AMD Global settings (default) as you've already set up both game versions to use the in game settings anyway as you didn't use the UI, just the drivers only before. If your vid card has enough extra mem then shader cache may help a little, power optimization may help you some as well but you will have to load the Crimson 16.3 drivers to get this. Crimson 16.3's also have the VulkanRt low level API coding now so you never know if this is actually working in conjunction w\ Directx or not. I'll have to do some snooping on this to find out. If it is then YEAH BABY!
Hope this helps you out.
