Catalyst 8.2 out

Waiting for the 8.3's, as they're rumored to have a bunch of multi-GPU support updates. I'm quite happy with the performance I have right now on the WHQL 8.1's with my CF'd pair of 3870's.

 

Well, then you have a select bunch of games. And you propably don't own/play Gothic 3, Two Worlds, Kayne&Lynch, Hitman BM

Also UT3 has low min fps with CF.

 

Any news on wether AAA in World of Warcraft has been fixed?

 

Just a note for us AGP users, this 8.2 apparently does not have the AGP fix, so stick with the 8.1 hotfix for the time being if you need it.

 

yea
anyone knows where i have to look on ati/amd site if they release a hotfix for 8.2?
Getting crazy with the troubleshhoting area there

 

Ouch. You'd figure something like that would have made its way into the codebase by now...

 

The code base is probably running a few months in advance of ratified driver releases. The hotfix is actually only a little older than the 8.2s, so that was already pulled out of a recent codebase anyway.

We waited six months for the AGP fix, another couple to get it into the full release drivers isn't surprising.

 

I don't play Gothic, Two Worlds, or Kayne and Lynch. I just purchased Hitman and it seems to be doing just fine?? And UT3 works great too; I don't have any issues with minimum framerates on a 4.3Ghz E8400 and 4Gb of ram.

 

Kane&Lynch is being worked on. Gothic 3 runs quite nicely here on a pair of 3870X2s with the 080123 drivers(which BTW are the latest drivers one can get freely, they're newer an better than the 8.2s in a number of ways, not the least of them being that they enable AA with UE3 engined games running DX9, something which the 8.2s lack). Two Worlds I no longer have( maybe I could scour the DVD(s), though), Hitman BM I never had(sadly).

About UT3, I think that the low min fps happens only upon initial texture loading(the Driverheaven article on the X2 details it quite well). This has been around ever since CFs debut in a number of titles, and I doubt it'll be fixed anytime soon, if ever, without working out a different way of handling multi-GPU rendering.

 

I wonder if my dedicated pair of 16-lane PCIE 2.0 connections that the 3870's are plugged into make the difference on texture load performance issues? I mean, that's essentially the only bottleneck when loading textures from main system memory to video memory.

I could see people using a PCIE 1.1 16x / 4x setup having performance issues as that second card will have to wait 4x as long (hypothetically) to get the textures loaded. But ye ol' X38 chipset gives me a best-case of 2x that transfer speed, or a worst-case of 8x that transfer speed. All on paper of course, but I bet it makes a significant difference between a 50ms-per-frame render rate and a 12ms-per-frame render rate.

 

It looks like some sort of memory leak in UT3. When I play the Sanity Warfare map, the framerate goes downhill (35 fps)after a few seconds. Also in Trident, a CTF map, some very low framerates are popping up (38 fps 1600x1200 max IQ HD3870 CF Q6600@3ghz) during heavy fire fights. And there're more places not direcly related to increased rendering objects IMHO.
When I rename the exe to FEAR, the drop in Sanity stay's away.

I still have 35-40 fps in Gothic3 at the start and see:
http://www.computerbase.de/artikel/..._ati_radeon_hd_3870_x2/12/#abschnitt_gothic_3

Also GOW en Hellgate dx10 have major drops, to 18 fps, when playing in DX10 (same res).
Crysys is also not to great and dx9 just got broken with the latest (23st januari drivers, it was ok before)

There is still some work to do at the CF front, I hope they will succeed because CF can work so great (65% of my games have very good scaling), but its time now to fix some things which are left.

 

I can't say that I have those same issues in UT3, but I'll go play a bit more this week and see if I can make it happen. I'm using max settings in-game, but I'm not forcing anything from the control panel. I wonder if it makes a difference?

Crysis was an ~85% gain for me with crossfire enabled on both DX9 and DX10. DX10 is still painfully slow in places, but I think that's more the onus of the codepath versus the video hardware / drivers. I can play in the "Very high DX9" mode at full rez with VERY reasonable framerate. It's not 60+ by any stretch of the imagination, but it's quite playable for me.

But there's always room for more improvement.

 

I also play with AA and AF set to appl. pref. in UT3, AA is not usable right now, it runs at 35 fps.
It also crashes quite a lot btw just before entering a map btw. I wonder if it is my soundcard capping my fps in some spots. I was runing out of pci slots and use my onboard FX supreme 2 audio instead of the X-Fi

 

GOW is kindof bugged through the DX10 path ATM. If it's bugged on Epic's side or on ATi's I'm not yet sure. Fact of the matter is that switching to DX9 got me from unplayable teens to constantly hitting the 60 FPS framerate cap on an X2, and since the latest betas enable FSAA through the CP in the DX9 path there's no reason to use DX10 in this title ATM(bear in mind, I like DX10 personally, I'm not one of the save XP save DX9 zealots ).

 

I'm definitely using onboard audio; I've yet to find a solid benchmark in the last 24 months showing me any performance benefit from "offboard" audio solutions.

That being entirely beside the point, I'll tinker with UT3 at my next opportunity and see what I can make happen.

 

AA in GOW dx9 is also way to slow for my tast for now. (30-40 fps in 1600x1200 max IQ) but otherwise it performs great in this path. (still some mipmap lines though!)

 

Tried messing with the ini and setting the anisotropy level there?Either that or forcing AF through the CP.

 

I tried CCC and ingame AF. Not messed with the ini yet, but I think there won't be an option for trilinear AF in the ini?

 

Actually, there is. In the WarEngineUserSettings file, found in your My Documents\My Games\Gears of War for Windows directory. Under the SystemSettings tab, you have a Trilinear toggle and a MaxAnisotroy switch. Hope this solves your issues. Cheers.