Catalyst 11.2 is out

Yeah, it's quite interesting to use the manual setting on Heaven. Set the tessellation factor to 6 or 8 in CCC, and Heaven to extreme tessellation, and you can see very little difference. There's a massive amount of over-tessellation in Heaven, and only when you drop to 2 in CCC can you see much difference, but it's still pretty minor, and still has much more tessellation than heaven's low settings.

 

Heaven was always an extreme tesselation benchmark. Back when it first released I noted in these forums how simple objects which didn't need much tesselation (doors and door frames for example) received far more redundant triangles than the the cobblestones or roof shingles which actually showed the benefits of tesselation.

But that's not a big deal as the benchmark was just tossing as many triangles at the screen as possible via tesselation in order to see how hardware would respond. It only becomes an issue when people assume that level of tesselation is representative of what a well tesselated game will need.

Intelligent use of tesselation in the scenes used in the benchmark could easily have preserved and improved upon the overall look with far less tesselation on the over tesselated objects (doors and doorframes) with a boost in some under tesselated objects (cobblestone road is too "pointy"), and at the same time run significantly faster.

Regards,
SB

 

Pretty nasty flash bug in 11.2, gets stuck in a restart loop, affects all versions of flash (ie, firefox, and chrome), no idea what causes it.

 

No profiles mean that all games run at their default settings in the default drivers positions. The slider allows end user control, so the slider works then you activate and change it.

 

Thanks for the explanation. I haven't tried it out yet.

 

So what was the reasoning behind some of the changes like the tessellation slider? Are you guys working on setting the default configuration as 'give the most consistant performance possible with respect to maintaining image quality at a level where the average user is more than happy' and letting the people who know what they are doing change to more performant settings?

 

there is no ati version of nhancer is there ?

edit: found one Radeon Pro anyone used it ?
http://www.radeonpro.info/en-US/

 

This is the kind of information im interested in, thanks for sharing So how much the score was affected by decreasing the tess factor and did you tried in other applications or games?

 

The truth is I didn't run any benchmarks, I was just noodling around trying the difference tessellation levels in CCC and flipping backwards and forwards between the low and extreme tessellation levels in Heaven.

I don't know of any games that use these kind of levels of tessellation (not inclined to spend time researching it), and I don't think Heaven is a good example because it's not designed to take advantage of tessellation in a game, but to cram in as much tessellation as possible.

You can look at the wireframe of (say) the dragon in Heaven, and it's completely white. You can use the tessellation limits in CCC and easily keep the shape of the dragon as per extreme settings without having a totally solid mesh.

It seems to me it will help ATI users by driver-limiting over-tessellation that reduces performance but doesn't gain you any IQ, especially if it's true that Nvidia are pushing/paying devs to go overkill on tessellation in order to make AMD cards look bad.

 

Yes, I use Radeon Pro quite a bit and it's excellent.

 

sold...

edit tried it and its quite good allows you to set up different profiles for games, just a shame there is no limit extension string option
some way to make heretic 2 run full screen would be nice as well

 

When will we get the fabled..DX11 threaded performance patch?

Next Catalyst should pump up HD69xx more than just...benchmarks scores....need to get Cayman Pros above Cypress XT for all games....imho. Disheartening to see a 2GB 6950 losing to 1GB 5870..in quite a few games....

 

I'm not sure if you're saying you want a widescreen fix by way of the CCC or just one in general or something else.

In case you're looking for a wide screen fix you can try looking at this: http://www.widescreengamingforum.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=31&t=19713

 

just like to run heretic 2 fullscreen dont care if the res is still 1024x768 (well i do, but first things first)

ps: i get a ctd with that quake2.dll

 

http://forums.raven-games.com/showthread.php?t=33931

One fellow says use the 10.6 drivers, another fellow has some settings to try as well as advising the use of Windows 2000 Compatibility mode and using a utility to launch older games forcing CPU afinity to single.

In another thread I read confirmation that it's important to apply the 1.06 patch.

http://quakeone.com/forums/quake-talk/other-games/6216-heretic-ii-2.html

 

I have only the tessellation slider, but no MLAA. 5730 mobile.

 

I'm not sure I remember seeing even the tessellation slide. Will look again later.

Hey, has anyone had problems with presets applying? I tried setting up dual and single monitor presets (my 6950), so I can easily switch between the modes with hotkeys, but sometimes when I hit the hotkeys nothing happens. If I reboot, it works again. I don't know if standby is messing things up or what. At one point I had CCC crashing on command lol.

 

ARghhh....
Keep having drivers reboot with Win7x64SP1 and those drivers with BFBC2, it's veryyy annoying.
Going back to previous version to see whether this helps in any way.

 

I have both.

I don't know if it's these drivers, my xb360 controller/receiver (on W7-64 it warns that the driver isn't right) or just the game, but Just Cause 2 has frozen (with screeching audio) twice in about 5 hours of play. I just started playing it so perhaps JC2 is just buggy?

 

This may have beenposted before..but I just noticed I can't force AA through CCC anymore with the 11.2! WTH is that?