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

glide smoothness..

glide smoothness..

Any game that runs in glide will run more smoothly (generally) than it will in D3D on another card, although I have to admit that I don't seem to have run into this problem with my original Radeon or 8500.

I came from a Voodoo4 to the Radeon and didn't really see any difference in smoothness, other than the fact that in UT the V4 would not drop as low in FPS as the Radeon (running in direct3d). The only game I don't like running on the Radeon/8500 so far is Morrowind, which is either poorly coded or needs a 3GHz processor to get decent framerates out of it.

I generally run with vsync off though, and never get any tearing or visual glitches to speak of.
 
I've had a Radeon 32DDR and now a 7500, previously I had 3dfx, TNT, TNT2 Ultra, etc...and I would have to agree that ATI seems to have a chronic issue with stuttering/lack of smooth, consistent framerates. Primarily under Direct3D, I would say, and sometimes with conditions that shouldn't especially tax the card or CPU. I did have a few problems with stuttering in OpenGL when I had the original Radeon, specifically with blood in Quake3 and Q3-engined games like RTCW. That issue either disappeared when I upgraded to a 1.4GHz Athlon/Radeon 7500 or as a result of driver updates, I can't be sure, but I'm about 90% sure it was the upgrade.

Still, I play a number of older games that my system should be able to run like a champ but they stutter inexplicably. I think a system that wasn't even conceived at the release of Shogo or X-Wing Alliance should be able to handle those games. :hmm:

Anyway, I'm upgrading (again). It seems like I'm on a 6 month refresh cycle even if the manufacturers can't quite stick to it. So, the question is, should I stick with ATI and get the 8500 or seek smoothness from a more proven source?

So, any 8500 or GF3/4 owners out there wanna comment on smoothness? And please, I don't need an ATI vs. nvidia flame war...I have no real biases...I know both companys are ultimately just after my $$$ and all I want is a decent gaming experience in return. ;)

EDIT: By the way, waiting for R300 is not an option, since I won't be able to afford it anyway. I usually stay one product cycle behind the leading edge to keep the upgrade costs minimal. RV250, maybe. But so far I'm not convinced it will be all that much faster than the 8500...certainly not an R100 -> RV200 difference.
 
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Don't know if this has been mentioned, but if your friend was playing an Unreal engine game the voodoo will run it flawlessly because of glide. The 8500 does not support glide and will run in d3d which doesn't work nearly as well..
 
Uriel said:


Less colorfull = seems faster?

I don't get it :)
Click to expand...

The theory could go something like this:

Our eyes are more sensitive to changes in contrast than they are to changes in certain color ranges. Alternating images that have that "pastel" or washed out look don't trigger our perception like alternating high-contrast images. If we assume that the contrast (thus color clarity) is higher for radeon cards than it is for nVidia cards, then our eyes should be more sensitive to inconsistencies in animation on radeon platforms.

The theory sounds highly anecdotal, but there is significant room for sound testing of the hypothesis. By someone with the proper scientific equipment and control procedures. Not likely on rage3d forums.
 
kbleft said:


The theory could go something like this:

Our eyes are more sensitive to changes in contrast than they are to changes in certain color ranges. Alternating images that have that "pastel" or washed out look don't trigger our perception like alternating high-contrast images. If we assume that the contrast (thus color clarity) is higher for radeon cards than it is for nVidia cards, then our eyes should be more sensitive to inconsistencies in animation on radeon platforms.

The theory sounds highly anecdotal, but there is significant room for sound testing of the hypothesis. By someone with the proper scientific equipment and control procedures. Not likely on rage3d forums.
Click to expand...

Yeah, what he said. ;)


I'm going to go look for some studies on that, but I doubt anybody has conducted anything related to that.
 
I agree.
My voodoo 3 - 1000 is still the most *consistent* card I have ever used. Once Wicked GL came out, I was able to play counter-strike @ a steady 70 fps in high resolution. Now I have a Radeon 8500DV and even though I can run it in higher resolutions, it has only been after a serious overclock that I can actually play at a reasonably smooth level... I'm considering purchasing a voodoo 5 pci card just for playing the fun (read: old) games and leaving my 8500DV to the new (read: uses all of the features)& everything else.
 
kbleft said:


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.
Click to expand...

It would be better to say that it is kind of a 2.5D game. It does use DirectX to implement certain 3D functions. If you have a REALLY old card (the game was designed 2 years ago) it can function without it, but doesn't look even half as good. As it says from their web site:

What are the benefits of using a 3D card in Diablo II?


Realistic perspective mode
Improved transparency effects
Improved lighting/shadowing effects, such as colored lighting, and smoother transitions between light and dark areas
Atmospheric effects
Possibly faster frame-rate
 
Re: Ati should work on the "smoothness" of their drivers (8500)

Rancidm said:
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)
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Well your V5 friend first off is probably running WickedGL drivers...which were NOT the default 3dfx drivers...

can't blame em though lol....I recall seeing the difference between WickedGL Voodoo3 and non-WickedGL voodoo3...about a 100% gain!

And on my own V2-SLI it gave the same 100% or so boost...friggin insane...

Too bad V2's looked like crap compared to my G400 and the smoothness on the V2-SLI was crap since the drivers were VERY optimized so when it actually needed musclepower from the cards they would choke lol...

But those WickedGL drivers were the BEST damn driver set boosts I'd ever seen...still wish Wicked3D would somehow decide to release ATI drivers...(heh maybe we should convince them to make 8500 boards...they'd DEFINITELY make their own drivers lol)
 
I must say i've experienced stuttering mainly when running a D3D game such as unreal tournament, it seems smoother in OpenGL.

I think it could be something to do with the way the drivers are written for each cards. Someone said something about the 3DFX cards being smooth, yes thats i have Voodoo2 sat somewhere in my room and i have to say that it is incredably smooth, but u must also realise that 3DFX cards used a "special driver" (OpenGL Glide) i reckon this is the key to its smoothness in games.

someone else said less colour seems faster! hmmm i've noticed on my Radeon8500 the 16bit gfx are slower this is esspecially apparent in 3Dmark 2001SE

Ah well maybe ATi/Nvidia will work on the smoothness, i personally blaim too little bandwidth on motherboards possibly causing a bottleneck, bring on the age of the RISC machine :)
 
My 21" Compaq monitor has a sync display: whenever the sync changes the monitor displays it. I have never seen this happen in any game. The only stuttering I ever experience is when MOHAA auto saves a game.

I still have a V3 3000 and a 2000 and while they were great in their day, I agree with another here that they look washed out in 3D compared to the ATI, though the V's 2d is as good as anything I've ever had including the ATI.
 
Ok is it just me that is noob?

or

There is more than one definition of stuttering?

1- Hard disk loading textures, making the game pause.

2- Ati's radeon high contrast level, making the animations blurry when there are alot of camera movements, all of this while holding the framerate at a decent level.

I always thought stuttering was number 2.

can somebody confirm?


And I must say that I always have seen 25 fps on the radeon, waayyy smoother than 25 fps on a gf2; at a point that i did not believe the numbers that 3dmark was reporting my card performed.

Is it just me?
 
Forgot one thing. For those running 2K\XP you may want ot turn off the Index Service. My daughters pc would stutter in games until I disabled this. In fact turn off all services not needed for maximum gaming.
 
The excuse some of you are making is "Well, the Radeon's colors look so much better, it just looks like it's stuttering." Lame...
 
Predatorsfan said:
The excuse some of you are making is "Well, the Radeon's colors look so much better, it just looks like it's stuttering." Lame...
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Yes, it is lame. But this is typical behavior of about half the people on this board, who are trying to rationalize the poor performance of their ATI cards (in the interests of disclosure, I have a Radeon GF2 GTS and a Radeon 8500 64 MB). I'm not interested in video card dogman or fanboyism. I want something that's fast in everything with good drivers. For the moment, nvidia still looks like the only option. *sigh*.

Goto Dengo
 
After reading this thread I signed up just so I could comment!

I was setting up a few of my friends for lan-party action, back when the Radeon LE was such an awesome deal. I had been personally using a Geforce2 for a while, and just upgraded to a Geforce3. We were playing mainly RA3 (Quake3 mod) and Unreal Tournament.

I had been playing mucho RA3 around that time, and although after overclocking and tweaking the Radeon's there was just something about them that annoyed me in Quake3 engine games.

I will say that with the default settings the game looked somewhat better than it did on nVidia. I do think it's possibly to even them out by adjusting gamma, filtering, and game settings though. These things affect performance.

Mainly I'm talking about when the cards are tweaked for speed. Even though the Radeon benchmarked well, in-game smoothness was annoying to me after being used to the Geforce2. With the Geforce3, It was even a bigger gap.

I tried about every "profile" on the radeon tweaker that I had, and the problem persisted.

I know that this is old news now that the R200 is out, but I'll be honest, that kinda put me off on ATI products. It just seemed like I had more control over my nVidia card, being able to turn everything off and have uber-smooth gameplay or turning everything on and having good visuals with a understanable performance hit.

Originally, my friends (non-tweakers) thought I was being anal and were very happy with the Radeon upgrades (from TnT2 cards). Since then, they actually "saw the light" and the Radeon's were replaced with Geforce3's.

With 8500's at like $99 these days I want to go back and mess around again but... R300 is soon, I guess I'll wait.
 
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