Radeon question

[nesop 0]

I seem to remember that P1 and my beloved P2 had a reputation for a quirky AMD/ Radeon relationship

 

I wanted too ask quick question for those of you lucky enough to be flying in the OFF skies.

 

Is anyone running AMD based hardware happily?

 

in particular the XFX Radeon HD 4890 XT Video Card 1gb

 

can you offer any comments?

[BirdDogICT 3]

Apparently both of them cause a problem, as an AMD with a Nvidia cause no problem. And a Intel with a Radeon, feature tweeks.

 

But an AMD with a Radeon . . . . . . . GOOD LUCK

 

Au contraire, Uncleal. I'm running a dual core AMD processor (Opteron 185 overclocked to 3.0 GHz) with a 512 Mb Radeon 4870 (stock settings) and am getting avg fps of 27 (min 12, max 47) in 10 plane furrballs over the airfield with sliders at 53455 and 4XAA (Edge Detect, 12X samples) and 8XAF through ATI Catalyst. With the latest Catalyst 9.7 drivers, I don't have to apply ANY tweaks (doesn't seem to make a difference now, although it did with Catalyst 8.6 through 9.3). I also use the AMD Fusion for Gaming utility to free up extra memory resources for the game.

 

I'm not an ATI fanboi, having used both nVidia and ATI cards in my numerous PC builds over the years, and have seldom had problems with either brand. I usually buy AMD processors that are easily overclocked and cheap. Now that AMD owns ATI, I find that their components and utilities (like AMD Overdrive) work together very well.

 

According to the developers and users on this board, nVidia cards supply a higher FPS in BHaH, but my average of 27 is very playable...no artefacts or stuttering at all. According to Winder and others on this forum, the latest nVidia drivers are problematic.

 

Hope this clarifies...

[Parky 8]

Well there you go - guys, someone who has built numerous computers over the years, says there's No problems with his Hot-Rod AMD running a Radeon

 

So run right out there, and lay your bucks down for a stock AMD with a Radeon

 

If you encounter any problems . . See Bird Dog ICT

 

 

Al,

 

I've paid close attention to most of Birddog's tech related posts. It's pretty obvious he knows more about hardware AND software than the vast majority of us here.

 

No need for such an abrasive response to his post, particularly when your's was utter rubbish.

 

 

 

Cheers,

 

Parky

[Mr. Lucky 0]

I'm running a Radeon HD3850 which was a dog and I was cursing it daily. But since the 9.6 drivers came out, performance has increased dramatically and now OFF is playable for me albeit not at the highest setting : 4,3,2,4,5 . I can push my scenery up to 3 but around big towns such as Arras it drops frames too much. Mind you, acceptable me is FPS in the high teens to low 20's. Before I was lucky to get double digits. I wouldn't get any AMD product for OFF in the future, but overall I've always gotten good performance from AMD products except for their mid-range video cards. The way they had the 3850 handling graphics made me so frustrated, it left a bad taste in my mouth for AMD. I do reiterate, however, that performance improved greatly with the latest drivers. For m, I'll switch to Nvidia next time.

[sitting_duck 3]

hi nesop,,hope your enjoying all this!

 

but,,fyi,,researched that 4890, cause my 4870 went south,,,,

 

Gotta admit it got my attention,,nice specs and all, but i did come across some posts that said the 4890 is just a 4870 that has been factory overclocked. Considering the 50 buck price difference,,,and the fact that with just a dual core @ 3.2 ghz my processor will probably not be able to keep up with a 4870, I decided to just get another 4870.

 

and the 4890 2gb card looks really nice too,,but same thing,,,cpu isnt fast enough to take advantage of the video card...

[BirdDogICT 3]

I'm running a Radeon HD3850 which was a dog and I was cursing it daily. But since the 9.6 drivers came out, performance has increased dramatically and now OFF is playable for me albeit not at the highest setting : 4,3,2,4,5 . I can push my scenery up to 3 but around big towns such as Arras it drops frames too much. Mind you, acceptable me is FPS in the high teens to low 20's. Before I was lucky to get double digits. I wouldn't get any AMD product for OFF in the future, but overall I've always gotten good performance from AMD products except for their mid-range video cards. The way they had the 3850 handling graphics made me so frustrated, it left a bad taste in my mouth for AMD. I do reiterate, however, that performance improved greatly with the latest drivers. For m, I'll switch to Nvidia next time.

Mr. Lucky,

 

I remember a post several months by Winder that mentions that the cloud slider doesn't effect FPS, so I've been running on 5 ever since. Can't tell that it's hurt my performance.

 

The 3850 WAS a little bit of a dog...rushed to market to compete with the nVidia 8800. I considered buying it to upgrade my X1950XTX but couldn't see sending the money for a small performance boost. The 4870 essentially doubled my performance, though, and the new drivers are great. Buying graphics cards takes a lot of patience, especially when sorting through the industry "specmanship" game. There are a number of ATI users on this board (i.e., Sitting Duck, LeBlaque, Redwolf, Olham among others) who are happy to answer questions.

 

The big challenge in building budget PCs is picking components that you can afford that won't bottleneck your performance. I usually buy components that were introduced to market in the previous year, so that the price has dropped and most of the BIOS and driver problems have been resolved. My current rig is several years old now, based on a 939 socket processor. Adding a 4870 was the best and cheapest upgrade I could make, but the CPU and DDR memory bottleneck my performance a little. I'd love to build a new PC, but no telling when I'll be able to...I was cut to half-time in January, so am making do with what I have. At least I have plenty of time to play BHaH.

 

No is disputing the fact that nVidia products work better with BhaH. I'll definitely consider switching to nVidia when I upgrade again.

Edited August 7, 2009 by BirdDogICT

[sitting_duck 3]

just curious....anyone focused in on why nvidia is better in this game than ati?

 

ie,,is it a fact,,,or an assumption?

[Parky 8]

I don't think it's a matter of "better" or not. Pretty sure one of the factors was Nvidia cards were capable of renderering cockpit glass reflections whereas the ATI offerings wouldn't. Not sure if that's still a limitation with the ATI cards.....haven't owned one for a couple of years now. In terms of raw performance (FPS) I would imagine Nvidia and ATI are probably quite similar. Basically it comes down to IQ preferences, and at this point I would imagine image quality differences between ATI and Nvidia would be subtle in most circumstances. This is of course, assuming that the cards being compared are from a similar tier of products.

 

 

Sort of like Nissan vs Toyota....

 

 

Cheers,

 

 

Parky

Edited August 7, 2009 by Parky

[BirdDogICT 3]

Sort of like Nissan vs Toyota....

True enough...I like them both.

 

To quote the developers "CFS3 has traditionally not ran [sic] as well on ATI cards."

 

My guess is that the differences between ATI and nVidia is due to CFS3 being written for DirectX 8 (patching it to v3.1 makes it DirectX 8.2, I think). Since the biggest ATI tweaks for BHaH influence the use of vertex and index buffers and force single pass rendering, my guess is that ATI performance is due to CFS3's particular implementation of DirectX and how ATI cards implement the resulting vertex textures. ATI made some major strides in their DirectX 9 cards, and anyone who's interested in optimizing ATI cards for older DirectX 9 applications could read http://ati.amd.com/developer/dx9/ATI-DX9_Optimization.pdf

 

But I'm only guessing here...I haven't noticed appreciable differences between nVidia and ATI cards on most of my games. There are a few instances, though, where the differences are very noticeable (e.g., Half Life 2 code was written to favor ATI in rendering reflections using DirectX9). Since my ATI card works fine with BHaH, I haven't lost any sleep over not having a nVidia card.

[Dutch_P47M 9]

CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 6400+ OC 3.5Ghz

GPU: HD4890 1Gb VaporX no OC

 

No problems here.

 

BTW September will be the release of the new DirectX11 cards this means the DirectX10 cards like the HD4890 will be dropped in price!!!!

 

 

 

Sitting Duck your CPU will run fine on a HD4890 that for sure!!!!!

Edited August 7, 2009 by Dutch_P47M

[Mr. Lucky 0]

Mr. Lucky,

 

I remember a post several months by Winder that mentions that the cloud slider doesn't effect FPS, so I've been running on 5 ever since. Can't tell that it's hurt my performance.

 

The 3850 WAS a little bit of a dog...rushed to market to compete with the nVidia 8800. I considered buying it to upgrade my X1950XTX but couldn't see sending the money for a small performance boost. The 4870 essentially doubled my performance, though, and the new drivers are great. Buying graphics cards takes a lot of patience, especially when sorting through the industry "specmanship" game. There are a number of ATI users on this board (i.e., Sitting Duck, LeBlaque, Redwolf, Olham among others) who are happy to answer questions.

 

The big challenge in building budget PCs is picking components that you can afford that won't bottleneck your performance. I usually buy components that were introduced to market in the previous year, so that the price has dropped and most of the BIOS and driver problems have been resolved. My current rig is several years old now, based on a 939 socket processor. Adding a 4870 was the best and cheapest upgrade I could make, but the CPU and DDR memory bottleneck my performance a little. I'd love to build a new PC, but no telling when I'll be able to...I was cut to half-time in January, so am making do with what I have. At least I have plenty of time to play BHaH.

 

No is disputing the fact that nVidia products work better with BhaH. I'll definitely consider switching to nVidia when I upgrade again.

 

The way they handled graphics processing in the early drivers turned me off the brand for a while. Like I said, the new drivers are great so I'm not in such a rush to upgrade for now, barring equipment failure.

 

As for the clouds, Pol mentioned in a post a few days ago that if the clouds are set to 5, then the AI can't see through them either, so I set them on 5 ever since.

[BirdDogICT 3]

The way they handled graphics processing in the early drivers turned me off the brand for a while. Like I said, the new drivers are great so I'm not in such a rush to upgrade for now, barring equipment failure.

 

As for the clouds, Pol mentioned in a post a few days ago that if the clouds are set to 5, then the AI can't see through them either, so I set them on 5 ever since.

Mr Lucky,

 

Yeah, I agree...ATI was WAY behind the curve for a while (like during DirectX 7 & DirectX 8) but have been making some great products the last couple of years. As always, you have to shop carefully to get the most bang for the buck.

 

Thanks for the tip...I'll look for Pol's thread.

 

Cheers