Re: ATI problems (split)

(tokamak) #21

Some former critics of Direct3D acknowledge that now Direct3D is as good if not better than OpenGL in terms of abilities and ease of use. In January 2007, John Carmack said that “…DX9 is really quite a good API level. Even with the Direct3D side of things, where I know I have a long history of people thinking I’m antagonistic against it. Microsoft has done a very, very good job of sensibly evolving it at each step—they’re not worried about breaking backwards compatibility—and it’s a pretty clean API. I especially like the work I’m doing on the 360, and it’s probably the best graphics API as far as a sensibly designed thing that I’ve worked with.”

Either way, it’s too easy to blame ATI if there’s problems with certain cards. ATI users aren’t a negligible part of the gaming community and all of these issues should be known beforehand.

(zenstar) #22

Yeah… DirectX has been getting better with each itteration (thankfully, I remember the originals), but OpenGL has always been the fastest as it didn’t have someone else’s API layer between you and the graphics card. Either way: idTech4 is OpenGL so the game is OpenGL.

The problem with the ATI OpenGL argument is that ATI never used to have problems with OpenGL. There was a time when ATI rocked and they rocked hard. Then AMD bought them.

SD have always used idTech engines and have a healthy relationship with id. It’d be crazy for them to throw that away just to move to a directX engine now. Remember that Brink started development years ago and engine choice would have been made right at the begining.

I do blame ATI for having bad OpenGL drivers. It really sucks for the people who have ATI cards and have issues (not all models are affected) but they’ve had plenty of time to fix their stuff and they haven’t. They need to either drop OpenGL support for their cards (then they may as well sign over all customers to Nvidia and close the doors) or they have to man up and hire some OpenGL driver experts and sort their stuff out. Their patchy support now is hurting gamers, developers and the platform and they quitly sit behind everything because most people blame the first or second line (the store or the publisher/developer) and hardly ever track back to ATI themselves.

They make good hardware. Their video capture cards were the best in the biz when I was involved with hardware (years ago) and their graphics cards always outperformed the competition. But is they can’t back it up with well written drivers then it’s all wasted.

I really hope ATI sort their drivers out though. Seriously. I feel for the people that have ATI related problems. But they need to complain to the right people otherwise ATI will never feel the pressure and won’t change.

I’ll forever be an Nvidia man simply because I can rely on them (until they screw up big time… but then who do I turn to?). OK OK… there was that short fling with the S3 virge but I was young and needed the money :smiley:

(kilL_888) #23

[QUOTE=zenstar;360888]
I do blame ATI for having bad OpenGL drivers. [/QUOTE]

yea, well. then plz explain to me why doom3 runs smooth. why does quake4 run smooth? why does prey run smooth. and, last not least, why does etqw run smooth.

and why does brink not run smooth at all?

it makes no sense to me only blaming ati. i personally have no problem with any game, is it open gl or direct x. its just brink.

btw. if you didnt have a chance reading my conslusion on the performance issues of brink… take a look. i posted the link here somewhere.

(Jimmy James) #24

[QUOTE=kilL_888;360892]yea, well. then plz explain to me why doom3 runs smooth. why does quake4 run smooth? why does prey run smooth. and, last not least, why does etqw run smooth.

and why does brink not run smooth at all?[/QUOTE]
I am hoping I don’t get another infraction (which will lead to a temp ban) but I’ll venture a guess that the ATI cards run older games smoother than newer games.

Please don’t ban me for posting that SD! I really don’t mean anything negative, just trying to be helpful.

-JJ

(Lu-Tze) #25

[QUOTE=kilL_888;360892]yea, well. then plz explain to me why doom3 runs smooth. why does quake4 run smooth? why does prey run smooth. and, last not least, why does etqw run smooth.

and why does brink not run smooth at all?

it makes no sense to me only blaming ati. i personally have no problem with any game, is it open gl or direct x. its just brink.

btw. if you didnt have a chance reading my conslusion on the performance issues of brink… take a look. i posted the link here somewhere.[/QUOTE]

Because every game you name is about 4 years old, which means they use at most OpenGL 2.1.
The ATI Driver seem to have bad implementations of some newer Functions of OpenGL, which is now up to version 4.1.

Something that SD/Bethesda could have done would be to run a beta, though i doubt that in the case of the ati drivers, that would have helped much.

P.S.: I’m running a HD5870 and getting less fps than I would like, but the game is layable for me.

@J.J. Afraid of the allmighty banhammer?:cool:

(xTriXxy) #26

[QUOTE=Lu-Tze;360940]Because every game you name is about 4 years old, which means they use at most OpenGL 2.1.
The ATI Driver seem to have bad implementations of some newer Functions of OpenGL, which is now up to version 4.1.

Something that SD/Bethesda could have done would be to run a beta, though i doubt that in the case of the ati drivers, that would have helped much.

@J.J. Afraid of the allmighty banhammer?:cool:[/QUOTE]

Public beta would delay brink for another couple of weeks if not months. And i dont think that was counted in bethesdas income plan.

(Lu-Tze) #27

Yeah, but I am a bit spoiled. I played and loved the etqw betas and while preordering Brink i was disappointed i could not test it before it got released.

(zenstar) #28

[QUOTE=kilL_888;360892]yea, well. then plz explain to me why doom3 runs smooth. why does quake4 run smooth? why does prey run smooth. and, last not least, why does etqw run smooth.

and why does brink not run smooth at all?

it makes no sense to me only blaming ati. i personally have no problem with any game, is it open gl or direct x. its just brink.

btw. if you didnt have a chance reading my conslusion on the performance issues of brink… take a look. i posted the link here somewhere.[/QUOTE]

As some have already pointed out (and as I said before) it’s the newest versions of the drivers that are buggy. This most likely means the newer features are bug riddled, and not all models are affected. (I assume some cards have the hardware to deal with it or maybe they’re using some software emulation to do something on certain cards?)

There are some things in Brink that slow down everyone, but it takes an ATI card to make it truly unplayable and produce the grid bug (that was what it was called right?).

When the game was first released there were a host of ATI players that simply could not play with framerates of about 3-5. Some tweaking here and there and a new round of ATI drivers got some of those people into playable framerates. Nvidia owners never had that bad an issue.

I don’t deny that there are some possible optimization points, but there’s a big difference between playable and unplayable and a bunch of ATI cards were definitely in the “unplayable” section.

That’s why I blame ATI. Sure SD can tune the engine more and that’d be great for everyone, but people who are sitting with framerates of 3-5 with ATI are still not going to be able to play with a framerate of 6-10 (100% increase!).

Now this is all my opinion based on what I have read around the web on a few different games. By all means, do your own research and come to your own conclusions. I am completely willing to admit that it is possible I’m missing something and I could be wrong, but as of yet I think my theory still holds water.

(kilL_888) #29

actually i did my research. in my conclusion i wrote it down…

i actually exchanged my radeon hd 4870 with a gtx 560ti. it runs better, sure, but the 560 is a new card, the 4870 is over 2 years old…

there are still drops in the framerate and that is the main issue. the framerate in brink is not stable, independend from what card you are using.

even with the gtx560 ti the frames drop below 40 in large open spaces with more than 8 people fighting. and i didnt even have ambient occlusion enabled which would have reduced the framerate by an additional 50%.

the game demands a ****load of hardware. i5 to play with constant framerate. and as i stated in my conclision, the graphics brink provides dont justify the hardware requirenments.

all im saying is that ati is not (the only one) to blame. i think ati is in fact not to blame when i look at the launch of brink. gridding issue was not atis fault, it was splash damage’s fault actually. they did not test sufficiently or introduced a bug in the final build. the bug was fixed shortly after release by splash damage, not by ati. so, who is it to blame?

(zenstar) #30

[QUOTE=kilL_888;361033]actually i did my research. in my conclusion i wrote it down…

i actually exchanged my radeon hd 4870 with a gtx 560ti. it runs better, sure, but the 560 is a new card, the 4870 is over 2 years old…

there are still drops in the framerate and that is the main issue. the framerate in brink is not stable, independend from what card you are using.

even with the gtx560 ti the frames drop below 40 in large open spaces with more than 8 people fighting. and i didnt even have ambient occlusion enabled which would have reduced the framerate by an additional 50%.

the game demands a ****load of hardware. i5 to play with constant framerate. and as i stated in my conclision, the graphics brink provides dont justify the hardware requirenments.

all im saying is that ati is not (the only one) to blame. i think ati is in fact not to blame when i look at the launch of brink. gridding issue was not atis fault, it was splash damage’s fault actually. they did not test sufficiently or introduced a bug in the final build. the bug was fixed shortly after release by splash damage, not by ati. so, who is it to blame?[/QUOTE]

I read your conclusions. You stated that the framerate increased when ATI released updated drivers. You also stated that the best you could squeeze out of your ATI was 30 fps but that with your Nvidia “in some areas the fps drop below 60. in large open spaces with a lot of fighting it goes even down to 40.”

Now this is what I am talking about: Some ATI players get less than 20 fps and still do. Completely unplayable and ATI has known bugs with it’s OpenGL drivers. I am not saying that ATI has caused all the issues in Brink. I’m saying that the specific issues which I am talking about are caused by ATI.

I’m not interested in your graphical fidelity arguments or your hardware requiremnt arguments which is why I never commented in your other thread. You’ve gone a bit offtopic as this was originally about the issues that ilyama999 had with his ATI card.

Looking at the tech support forum I see a similar trend that I’ve seen in other game forums: new ATI drivers (11.5 i believe) made a huge difference to fps. More so than game patches prior to the driver release. This points at ATI’s buggy drivers getting much needed patching.

Again: I’m not talking about getting FPSs dropping to 40 when everyone is in your view while fighting outside while turning your graphics to max while having a cpu lower than an i3 and only having 4Gbs of memory. I’m talking about a normal setup not being able to maintain 20-30 fps with an affected ATI card.

I neither agree nor disagree with what you’re talking about. It’s not on my original topic. If you’d like me to comment on your other thread just say so and I’ll go put my 2c in there (and point out how someone with a very similar graphics card to you with a better rig pulls out a far better framerate).

(kilL_888) #31

[QUOTE=zenstar;361035]You stated that the framerate increased when ATI released updated drivers. You also stated that the best you could squeeze out of your ATI was 30 fps …
[/QUOTE]

you seem to misinterpreted some of my statements. heres my quote:

in its current state and with 11.6 catalyst drivers i was able to run brink at a decent framerate most of the time. shadows and all the eye candy was disabled though. my minimum fps was around 30 at specific maps (security tower, resort)

30 is my minimum framerate, not my maximum framerate. my max framerate, even with the 4870 is a little over 100 in some places. the max framerate with both cards is basicly the same ingame.

the minimum framerate with the gtx560 ti was around 35-40. not that big difference for a new card compared to the over 2 year old ati… most of the maps run pretty decent though. but sec tower and resort are really ugly in most areas. sec tower is the worst.

i also stated that the updated driver, to be spcific the 11.6, improved my performance, but not much. the real big push came with one of the bigger game patches. i think it was patch 5 or 6 where some of the lightning rendering methods got changed.

i also observed that the framedrop behavior for both ati and nvidia is basicly the same. it depends on your position in the maps if your frames drop or not. this strenghtens my assumtion that bad engine and/or map optimization is in fact the cause of the bad performance.

(BiigDaddyDellta) #32

Whew… smells like PC in here. Don’t mind me console guy just passing through, my framerate’s fine by the way. Man tokomak, kill888, Zen, did you guys make someone wet his pants or something? Or is that just the smell of superior knowledge?

(kilL_888) #33

yea, it runs at a constant 30 frames per second. :smiley: i saw framedrops for the xbox360, too, though.

[QUOTE=BiigDaddyDellta;361060]
Man tokomak, kill888, Zen, did you guys make someone wet his pants or something? Or is that just the smell of superior knowledge?[/QUOTE]

should i be able to understand this? plz help me pass the linguistic barrier…

(BiigDaddyDellta) #34

It’s a joke about you guys being smart and the other guy should feel he learned something, lol. Just friendly banter.

(zenstar) #35

[QUOTE=kilL_888;361059]you seem to misinterpreted some of my statements. heres my quote:
…
this strenghtens my assumtion that bad engine and/or map optimization is in fact the cause of the bad performance.[/QUOTE]

I think we should just agree to disagree. I get the feeling we’re not talking about exactly the same things and, to be honest, it’s a battle of opinions.

I agree that the engine could use performance optimization but also still think that ATI has bad drivers that do not help the situation.

Haha. and this is why, sometimes, console is just better. You buy a game and it runs on your hardware the same as it runs on everyone’s hardware and the developer only needs to test on a few harddrive configurations. If only Xbox supported mouse + keyboard. Come on! PC supports Xbox controllers.

(kilL_888) #36

[QUOTE=zenstar;361070]I think we should just agree to disagree. I get the feeling we’re not talking about exactly the same things and, to be honest, it’s a battle of opinions.
[/QUOTE]

we are talking about the performance issues about brink i think. i dont know if its all about opinions. you may disagree with me. but i did some actual testing using different hardware. its not my opinion, its actually my experience.

the actual cause of the performance issue was just an assumption by me, though.

i wish i would have a 2 year old nvidia card to test the game on my machine, so we would really know whats going on.

maybe you could try it out via amazon. they dont have shipping costs. i personally did enough exchanging and cancelling the last couple of days. :slight_smile: bought a gtx560ti, gonna send it back tomorrow. and ordered a gtx470 shortly after i realized the 560 is not worth ne money, but already cancelled that order…

i will wait for rage or battlefield 3 to upgrade my hardware. bf3 looks more and more promising. sound is more than awsome and some other little things really impress me, too.

(murka) #37

Even with some ATI cards not having issues(mine) they still have some bugs. In etqw there were quite a handful from incorrectly rendered megatexture, “wallhack”(don’t know what exactly happened, but was able to reproduce walls becoming black and having them show red arrow through them) to transparent effects displaying flipped when rendered off-screen. I actually used my laptops 9300m GS to render etqw videos and it took forever, but no bugs.
The blame is clearly ATI here. When SD fixes demo recording, all those etqw issues will still remain.

The problem with performance issues now instead of just bugs is that SD used many new features for Brink like virtual textures. You can’t compare this game to any other currently and the only one you could, will be Rage.

(zenstar) #38

[QUOTE=kilL_888;361083]we are talking about the performance issues about brink i think. i dont know if its all about opinions. you may disagree with me. but i did some actual testing using different hardware. its not my opinion, its actually my experience.

the actual cause of the performance issue was just an assumption by me, though.

i wish i would have a 2 year old nvidia card to test the game on my machine, so we would really know whats going on.

maybe you could try it out via amazon. they dont have shipping costs. i personally did enough exchanging and cancelling the last couple of days. :slight_smile: bought a gtx560ti, gonna send it back tomorrow. and ordered a gtx470 shortly after i realized the 560 is not worth ne money, but already cancelled that order…

i will wait for rage or battlefield 3 to upgrade my hardware. bf3 looks more and more promising. sound is more than awsome and some other little things really impress me, too.[/QUOTE]

I’m talking about the ATI cards that couldn’t play the game and still get unplayable framerates. You’re talking about reasonable framerates and engine performances.

Engine performance: I agree with you. There could be some optimization but nothing that really bugs me much.

The ATI cards that couldn’t muster more than 20 FPS (MAX): completely different discussion. I blame ATI drivers for these problems when their cards can run directX games just fine.

Either way. I think we’ve covered everything pretty exhaustively :stuck_out_tongue: