Ati should work on the "smoothness" of their drivers (8500)

R

Rancidm

New member
I was at a lan party recently, and I was checking out a friend's machine with a voodoo 5 in it. He was playing a bunch of games and I was blown away by how smooth it was. I mean, the framerates were obviously lower than my 8500, but it ran like glass. With my card, games run pretty good, but there's always a hint of hiccups and slowdowns...it's quite noticeable. Even older games that shouldn't be any problem for the 8500 have nasty pauses in them... One example that comes to mind is Need for speed: porshe unleashed. It's certainly not a very demanding game, yet I still can't run it without the occasional hiccup.

Don't get me wrong...this isn't an really serious issue like some people have..such as constant stuttering. It's more like a general annoyance in almost every 3d game. It seems to happen most often when the camera is panning or turning. I never notice any problem with the character is moving straight forward.

There are very few 3d games I can think of that run truly flawlessly on my 8500; quake 3, quake 2, cs, wc3 (that doesn't really count). (and jk2 i guess since it's a quake 3 engine game). Almost every other 3d game exhibits smoothness problems.

For example, I was trying out an old game today, Theme Park World. It's a 3d simcity type game where you build a theme park. This game was built years ago with voodoo's and tnt's in mind, and still I could not scroll around the map smoothly. choppiness...

Now, i wonder why that is. Either the Quake 3 and quake 2 engines are built amazingly, and every other game engine is flawed. Or Ati's driver team concentrated a lot on popular engines (there's nothing wrong with that), and they still have a lot of work to do otherwise...

So...let's get some feedback. Has anyone else noticed this? (or should I be posting in the tech support forum). Have you tried other cards like voodoos or nvidia cards? How does the smoothness of those cards compare with the 8500? How's the original radeon for this?


(oh..and before you ask... No, I don't have tons of crap running in the background. Yes, I have enough ram. Yes, my page file is an acceptable size. Yes, I have all the latest drivers installed and XP patched up. My agp apeture size is at 128. I'm running the 6071's...and now the 6093s. My computer is more than fast enough to handle Theme Park World. Vsync on/off with ati refreshfix)
 
I noticed your running a ALi chipset motheroard. Have you installed the ALi AGP drivers?
Or more specifically the AGP Utility to enable 4x Turbo AGP?

I have a ALi board as well & can play anything without stutters.


Hope you can fix your problems.
 
One thing that 3dfx always had was very good texture managment in both there software and hardware i think that that is one of the things that really helped them get smooth gameplay even at lower frame rates.....

your not the first person to bring up this topic most ppl who do are ex 3dfx'ers and as soon as they mention it they get flamed to dead(ive not seen this here but i have seen it many times before of other message boards)

i have to say myself after using 3dfx for years(since the first orchid 4 mb addin cards)i have notice the same dips and bumps that you mention since swaping out my V5 for an 8500(which ive had for over 8 months now)although the 8500 is far more powerful i feel its just not as smooth for gameplay as any of my 3dfx cards where

even dropping into the region of 45/30 fps gaming on a voodoo still felt smooth but i notice as soon as my 8500 drops below the 50 fps mark gameplay seems to lose its flow/smoothness

now dont get me wrong i love my 8500 and as long as the fps are high its smooth gameplay for 90% of the time but after Have 99% smoothness with the voodoo's i find that the missing 9% can stick out like a sore thumb
 
Cyberstoner: yup, I installed both of them.

Gizmo: Thank you for your reply. I'm glad I'm not the only one who noticed this :).

As you said, don't get me wrong..I like my Radeon 8500 also. This isn't a horrendous problem or anything, but it's definitely noticeable. Especially if you're looking for it. ...or you've just gotten a new videocard and are scrutinizing the graphics instead of playing the game :).

Hopefully ati will start concentrating on the smoothness of programs also....instead of just the usual framerate and IQ.
 
Take a look at your HD !

Take a look at your HD !

I just bought a GF4 Ti4400 this past week because I'd always had issues of stuttering, pausing, skipping, freezing to varying degrees in just about any game I played. What surprised me was the fact that I otherwise got great framerates. After upping my CPU, and RAM I was convinced it was all ATi's fault (I myself having a Radeon 8500 275/275 with the latest 6071 drivers).

I got the GF4 home and was excited as I installed it and proceeded to format my system just for good measure. The first game I loaded up was Tribes 2 (one of the worst offending games as far as stuttering goes). I had all but given up on playing T2 because the stuttering was so bad that I couldn't play. I thought that stuttering was going to be over with my GF4. I got into a game and the first thing I noticed was the familiar pausing/freezing/stuttering I'd always had. I was very dejected at this point until someone told me he had had the same exact problem with his games and had found that it was his hard drive causing the problems.

I went out and bought a Western Digital 40GB /7200rpm / 8 ms seek /tranfer rate 100mb HD and proceded to install everything...again. I loaded up T2 and WHAM! No more stuttering, freezing, pausing. My old drive was a Maxtor 40GB /5400rpm /13 ms seek time drive. This whole time it was my HD that was holding me back! I highly suggest you take a look into your HD and if you have a 5400 rpm dive, RUN DON'T WALK to your nearest store and get a new HD. You won't be disappointed. I suggest you go with an IBM or WD HD as even the 7200rpm Maxtors have slow seek times of 11-12 ms.

The 8500 is a damn good card (but so is my Ti4400) and I think ATi's drivers have matured very well since the 8500 came out last October.

I hope this helps you as much as it helped me.
 
I've also noted this.
I remeber seeing Black and White on a Voodoo 3 and it was almost silky smooth where my Radeon 7200 would get bad hiccups.

The 6071 drivers (especially with the updated Open GL driver) does seem very "smooth", ie in some games I only have 30-40 fps but it still seems VERY smooth.

One thing that I really dislike about ATI's drivers is their Vsync, it just doesn't seem to work right. The fps will get "unlocked" every now and then. Really strange... (And whenever the fps is "unlocked" it will stutter like crazy thus rendering Vsync 100% useless.)

For an example:
I enable Vsync and fire up CS. It will run smooth at 85 fps (ie Vsync working perfectly) but then all of a sudden it will jump to 99 and the instant it unlocks itself from 85 I will get a hiccup. And when there's too much stuff going on it will jump down to 42.5 just like it should. But sometimes it will just go crazy and and just skip syncing at all when there's too much preassure.

Open GL/Direct 3D all the same, doesn't matter wich OS I run or wich driver I use. I tried tweaking all four Vsync-realted settings but none of them helped. It's the same with my 7200 as with the 8500 so I can only assume that this is something of ATI's doing (hardware or software I dunno).

As someone said: ATI has problems with texture managment/uploads, well maybe not problem but it's too inefficient. Extreme loadtimes, hiccups in game when textures are "streamed", and it somehow seems like the viceocard isn't "releasing" the textures from the VRAM even when they're not used (ie the longer you play the worse performance gets).
 
I only notice this in games like NFS and Unreal engine games. Most games were made specifically for Voodoos to run optimally until a couple of years ago and just now are games starting to lose the hinderance of running an engine made for glide with a D3D or OGL renderer.
 
Uriel said:
I remeber seeing Black and White on a Voodoo 3 and it was almost silky smooth where my Radeon 7200 would get bad hiccups.
Click to expand...


Black and White hates Radeons :(

The last time I saw a comparative benchmark with this game of all the top video cards, the Radeon came below even the Kyro and GF2 MX.
 
most if not all the games u mention are DX7 games and dx7 games are alot more cpu dependant than dx8 is that could be one of the factors :S
 
Re: Take a look at your HD !

Re: Take a look at your HD !

CornCake:

Thank you for the suggestion. Unfortunately, I already have a maxtor 60 gig ata/133 drive...so it's probably not that.

Uriel:

That's a good point. I've noticed that the 8500's vsync is pretty poor as well (which probably doesn't help the appearance of smoothness very much). I don't think ati's vsync option really does too much. For example, take quake 3 engine based games. If you turn on vsync in ati's control panel, the tearing is reduced a bit, but in order to fully get rid of it..you still have to turn vsync on in the game itself. It runs 100% great then. The problem is a lot of games don't give you the option to turn vsync on ingame, and then you get into trouble with an ati card.

(Someone correct me if i'm wrong. Out of curiousity, do Nvidia cards have vsync issues as well? I wouldn't know, I went straight from a voodoo 3 to an 8500)

In the example of stuttering in my first post, I cited Need for speed: porsche unleashed. That game is horrible for tearing on my 8500, with or without vsync turned on. Same thing goes for Morrowind.

Thinking back to the voodoo days, I don't remember ANY vsync issues with my voodoo 3. (If there's on thing I miss about 3dfx, it was it's ease of use.) Vsync/tearing is one of my biggest pet peeves with the 8500.

So, the lack of smoothness in ati cards is probably a combination of the texture uploads (or whatever's causing the hiccups) and vsync issues?
 
Predatorsfan said:
I only notice this in games like NFS and Unreal engine games. Most games were made specifically for Voodoos to run optimally until a couple of years ago and just now are games starting to lose the hinderance of running an engine made for glide with a D3D or OGL renderer.
Click to expand...

Diablo II does this, too. But, that IS a program that WAS written for Glide and adapted to directx later.
 
I think it's got to do with the colors and it tricking your mind. ATi colors are ALOT more vibrant that nVidia. nVidia looks pastelish, kinda colored penciledish, the same with 3dFX, it's just tricking you into thinking it. That's my theory, that's why ATi cards feel sluggish.
 
Re: Re: Take a look at your HD !

Re: Re: Take a look at your HD !

Rancidm said:
(Someone correct me if i'm wrong. Out of curiousity, do Nvidia cards have vsync issues as well? I wouldn't know, I went straight from a voodoo 3 to an 8500)
Click to expand...

Nope, no problems.
I play a lot of CS at my local internet cafe where they have 10 Voodoo 3's and 20 GeFOrce 3's, never saw a single problem with Vsync. On the GF3's it simply stays at a VERY steady 85 fps all the time. (Not like my Radeons where it's "jumping" between 84/85 at an insane rate when it actually manages to "sync".)

From what I've noted in game settings for Vsync will work fine in Open GL but not in Direct3D.
 
ATI LoVeR 8500 said:
I think it's got to do with the colors and it tricking your mind. ATi colors are ALOT more vibrant that nVidia. nVidia looks pastelish, kinda colored penciledish, the same with 3dFX, it's just tricking you into thinking it. That's my theory, that's why ATi cards feel sluggish.
Click to expand...

I don't see how the final output could ever effect performance.
The nvidia cards "still" does proper 16/32 bit color even though it might not look 100% as good as Radeons. (Gamma and saturation etc. settings won't effect performance.)
 
For opengl vsync try putting a dword 'enableTearFreeSwap' set to 1 under driver>0000>opengl>private in the registry.
 
Bambers said:
For opengl vsync try putting a dword 'enableTearFreeSwap' set to 1 under driver>0000>opengl>private in the registry.
Click to expand...

In (well at least my) 6071 the "normal" Vsync setings does nothing and enableTearFreeSwap just provides the same dysfunctional Vsync as the old Vsync setting did.
 
Uriel said:


I don't see how the final output could ever effect performance.
The nvidia cards "still" does proper 16/32 bit color even though it might not look 100% as good as Radeons. (Gamma and saturation etc. settings won't effect performance.)
Click to expand...
]


I'm not talking about FPS, I'm talking about the illusion it gives you(making you think it feels fast).
 
BillGtheIV said:


Diablo II does this, too. But, that IS a program that WAS written for Glide and adapted to directx later.
Click to expand...

I thought Diablo II was a 2D game. Yes/no? I played it, but it was similar to Baldur's Gate in that 2D images were animated against a fixed backdrop.
 
ATI LoVeR 8500 said:
]


I'm not talking about FPS, I'm talking about the illusion it gives you(making you think it feels fast).
Click to expand...

Less colorfull = seems faster?

I don't get it :)
 
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