How is the amd radeon r4 graphics card?

[salt101]

I found my rig has a amd radeon r4 graphics card. Its a laptop so I cant upgrade, is this one insignificant for alpha?

[FLS]

I believe you'll need 1 GB of dedicated video memory. Your R4 only uses shared memory.

[Skuzzy]

Try it and see what happens.  We would like to know as well.

Do not be surprised if you have to turn down all the graphics features and reduce the texture size.

[salt101]

I have tried, so far I am only getting frame rates of 17-20 with the alpha demo. The funny thing is I am getting pretty much the same frame rates when graphics are turned up all the way. I was told by one player that the game is deliberately running hard so that bugs will show up easier (not really sure what that means, im rather illiterate about this stuff) and that the final product may be faster. Not sure if that is true, just what I was told. I get about 40-60fps on AH 2 with max graphics.

[Skuzzy]

AH3 is far more demanding on the graphics card than Aces High 2 is.  Make sure to set "environment mapping" to "None".

No, there is no "deliberate" action being taken, in the Alpha, to arbitrarily load up the video card.  It is just Alpha.

The Radeon R4 is about twice as slow, in performance, over the NVidia 9800 GTX video card we are using for the baseline performance video card.

[Chilli]

17- 20 FPS with default settings.  I would say that you are in the ball park of what is playable in AH3.   A Dxdiag would help to determine how much dedicated memory.........    I don't know if there is such a thing as total shared memory, (meaning I am thinking the onboard chip does have at least some dedicated memory for Graphics use exclusively).

[salt101]

I followed your suggestion Skuzzy, it helped quite a bit. I was averaging about 17fps, occasionally jumping to a max of 37. I am seriously computer illiterate but I will research to see if there is anyway to improve the speed, maybe closing programs in the background or something.
I am a little concerned though because about half the guys I fly with cannot even run AH2 at max graphics, I fear many AHer's will simply be shut out of AH3 because of the system requirements, my computer was bought less than a year ago so it is not quite a dinosaur.

[Skuzzy]

I followed your suggestion Skuzzy, it helped quite a bit. I was averaging about 17fps, occasionally jumping to a max of 37. I am seriously computer illiterate but I will research to see if there is anyway to improve the speed, maybe closing programs in the background or something.
I am a little concerned though because about half the guys I fly with cannot even run AH2 at max graphics, I fear many AHer's will simply be shut out of AH3 because of the system requirements, my computer was bought less than a year ago so it is not quite a dinosaur.

The video card we are using for a baseline performance card was released in April 2008.  Yes, you can buy hardware today, which is slower than that seven year old video card.

Did you check all the "Disable" options in Options->Graphic Detail?

[Bizman]

I followed your suggestion Skuzzy, it helped quite a bit. I was averaging about 17fps, occasionally jumping to a max of 37. I am seriously computer illiterate but I will research to see if there is anyway to improve the speed, maybe closing programs in the background or something.
I am a little concerned though because about half the guys I fly with cannot even run AH2 at max graphics, I fear many AHer's will simply be shut out of AH3 because of the system requirements, my computer was bought less than a year ago so it is not quite a dinosaur.

Cutting down background processes can at least stabilize your game, highly recommended. As of dinosaurs, it's not about the age, it's about the construction. Mine is over seven years old and I still get 60 FPS most of the time on both versions of AH. And it's almost impossible to run AH2 at max graphics: The environment map slider is a killer, only the highest end dedicated gaming computers can get good frame rates with it maxxed.

[salt101]

I guess I need to consider investing in a new machine, but first taking a little time to learn about them.

[FLS]

Generally the longer you wait the more performance you get for your money. Wait until AH3 is released to get the new PC. Consider a desktop instead of a laptop.

[715]

I have an ancient system: E8400 CPU (introduced over 7 years ago) with an HD7870 GPU  (3 years ago) and it runs AH3 just fine with everything except environment mapping on full.

If you look at benchmarks, top of the line system performance, especially single or dual threaded performance, has not really made vast improvements in the last 7 years.  Same for graphics cards.  It's maybe about a factor of two faster; so instead of 60 fps you get an eminently usable 30 fps.  Of course, if you start with a low performance system to begin with, then you're going to have problems whether it's old or new.

[icepac]

HD7870 is a beast of a card......still holds up well vs a new R9-270.......actually probably a whole lot faster using the older benchmarks for earlier versions of direct X.

This brings me to a question..........

Will some older cards like the hd7870 which smoke the newer cards through the benchmark "3DMark06" actually run the game better than the newer cards that perform better on "3DMark11"?

I'd hate to buy newer when an older card will work better.

[Chilli]

Icepac,

I found this while looking around for Puck's card.... http://www.futuremark.com/hardware/gpu/AMD+Radeon+HD+7870/review

Rated just above Nvidia GTX880 M and just below AMD Radeon R9 270X

[icepac]

A comparison that includes the "3dmark06" shows the older card crushing.

My question is whether the new alpha is made with code that caters to the older card's strengths.......which are the newer card's weakness.