compatibility notes - ATI cards [Archive]

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screetch

18-03-2005, 10:32

ATI cards have a problem with AntiAliasing, if you enable antialiasing the game screen flickers in the missions ;

to disable it :
* open the ATI control center, go to the 3D settings, antialiasing, check "let the application decide".

It's been reported that downgrading the catalyst drivers from 5.3 to 5.2 solve graphical problems.

phoenixstar

18-03-2005, 20:53

I love the game so much I had been planning on getting an ATI X850PE just to make it look as good as possible, but from what you're saying does having the highest anti-aliasing possible not make the game look better?

I would think so, but I ask because if it doesn't why did you guys pick ATI as the card to recommend when anti-aliasing doesn't cause any graphical improvement to the game?

Kiev_Axe

19-03-2005, 00:49

Nvidia dominates so hard in Anti aliasing it aint funny.
Let me give u an exaple.
When i got my 6800 i did some far cry bencmarking.

I turned off antialising and ran at max details + 1024 by 768 res. I got about 50 Fps on a certian benchmark.
I then ran the same test with 4 AA, and i got about 45 fps.
It dropped about 5 fps.

Now when i did the same thing on my older 9600 PRO, the frame rate drop was more then half.
This just goes to show that the Nvidia cards handle full screen antialiasing very solidly.

phoenixstar

19-03-2005, 02:00

taliosfalcon

19-03-2005, 10:17

well, i'm not sure about the anti-aliasing, but i do know that i have 2 desktops, one with a 6800 ultra, and one with an x800 pro, and with all the same settings the x800 pro gives a much crisper picture, and just looks better overall, now the fps are a bit lower on the x800, but only a bit and i believe thats mostly due to the fact that the x800 pro isnt ati's equivalent to the 6800 ultra, its actually a step down, comparing the fps drop in anti-aliasing between a 9600 ati and a 6800 nvidia also isnt showing anything at all due to the fact that they're 2 completely different generations, a 9600 has very little in common with an x800, the architecture is different. now if you were comparing the 9600 to a geforce 5900 or something the results might mean a bit more.
i've also never had any problems with my x800's anti-aliasing in other games so i'm assuming this is more of a case of act of war as a specific game not liking atis drivers, the same thing happens to some games with nvidia.

larchy

19-03-2005, 10:56

Originally posted by Kiev_Axe
Nvidia dominates so hard in Anti aliasing it aint funny.
Let me give u an exaple.
When i got my 6800 i did some far cry bencmarking.

I turned off antialising and ran at max details + 1024 by 768 res. I got about 50 Fps on a certian benchmark.
I then ran the same test with 4 AA, and i got about 45 fps.
It dropped about 5 fps.

Now when i did the same thing on my older 9600 PRO, the frame rate drop was more then half.
This just goes to show that the Nvidia cards handle full screen antialiasing very solidly.

The 6800 is an NV40 12pipeline card with 5 vertex processors supporting SM3.0 - most of them use GDDR3 on a 256bit memory bus. This is of course assuming you aren't referring to a 6800GT or ultra which is 16pipes/6 vertex.

The 9600Pro is an RV350 4 pipe design running plain DDR on a 128bit memory interface with 2 vertex pipes.

Firstly you're comparing a mid-high-end card from nvidia with a low-mid-range card from Ati that is about 2 years older than the nvidia design. You may as well be comparing a 9800Pro to a GeForce2.

Secondly the 6800 has between three and four times the raw brute power roughly speaking.

Thirdly the 6800 with its faster GDDR3 and 256bit bus has far, far more bandiwidth available than the poor old 9600pro.

Memory bandwidth is a large determining factor when it comes to peformance with FSAA enabled, which is why the 9600Pro loses out so badly.

if you decide to go out and buy a Geforce6600Gt rather than a 9800pro the 9800pro will cream nvidia's latest design with FSAA enabled because it is running on a 256bit bus wheras nvidia only run a 128bit bus on a 6600GT.

Basically if you try to run any form of high-level IQ stuff then you need a card with a lot of brute-force and loads of memory bandwidth.

Ati's AA algorithms have been about 2years ahead of nVidia since the release of that wonderful bit of hardware the 9700. It was only with the release of the NV40 last April that nVidia finally had a GPU that support Rotational Grid MultiSampling, something Ati has been doing for years and pioneered by the Rampage engineers of course. They also caught up to Ati in terms of Anisotropic algorithms, switching from their Euclidean distance calculation used in the NV3x series to a weighted Manhattan model (although there is debate about performance/quality tradeoffs in going this route).

Ati are still ahead when it comes to IQ both in terms of performance and quality - and a look through any comprehensive comparisons done by professionals on site such as tomshardware, anandtech, xbitlabs etc will demonstrate that if you compare like-for-like cards Ati wins out when aniso&FSAA come into play. The Geffers only win in terms of pure speed, depending on the game of course.

pownes

21-03-2005, 17:55

totally agree on larchy

above his arguments, farcry is made for nvidia, just like half life 2 has been made for ATI. Sae goes for Doom 3, it rus a lot better on a system with an NVIDIA card.

A game being created for a brand of videocards makes a lot of difference. I have recently seen benchmark tests between an ATI X850 (dont know the type, but it was the highest in his class) and 2 NVIDIA 6800 videocards in SLI mode. that means you got a lot of graphical power difference. But take one guess.....the ATI card outran the 2 nvidia cards.

To make a long story a lot shorter. There is no F#*%ing way you can use a game to benchmark.

Yours truly,

screetch

24-03-2005, 12:00

With latest ATI drivers screen flickers when you select a unit and the cursor is the move cursor. Set the cursor setting to small cursors in the option solves this problem. Only happened recently to me with the latest ATI drivers, it seems it has a problem with large (64x64) cursors.

KingsRevenge

24-03-2005, 19:55

The new omega5.1's fixed my texture issues so now the textures look GOOD.

Peoples-Agent

27-03-2005, 15:15

Originally posted by pownes
totally agree on larchy

above his arguments, farcry is made for nvidia, just like half life 2 has been made for ATI. Sae goes for Doom 3, it rus a lot better on a system with an NVIDIA card.

A game being created for a brand of videocards makes a lot of difference. I have recently seen benchmark tests between an ATI X850 (dont know the type, but it was the highest in his class) and 2 NVIDIA 6800 videocards in SLI mode. that means you got a lot of graphical power difference. But take one guess.....the ATI card outran the 2 nvidia cards.

To make a long story a lot shorter. There is no F#*%ing way you can use a game to benchmark.

Yours truly,

Sorry to say, Far Cry performs better with high end ATI cards, anything Direct 3D based tends to kick more using an X800 or such. And i'm a 6800 owner saying this, but it's the truth.... doesn't mean we don't have more tweaking options tho which more than make for up it , so much more versatile than ATI cards its a joke.

larchy

27-03-2005, 15:20

Originally posted by Peoples-Agent
doesn't mean we don't have more tweaking options tho which more than make for up it , so much more versatile than ATI cards its a joke.

Just out of interest, to what tweaking options do you refer? I honestly can't think of anything you can 'tweak' on an nvidia card that you cannot on an Ati card. In fact nVidia were berated soon after NV3x's release for overriding user options in the driver control panel to hide poor performance.

In anycase something like rivatuner exposes pretty much anything you could wish to alter, on cardsof either make.

Peoples-Agent

27-03-2005, 15:39

I'm talking about tweaking at the driver's .inf level.
Never has worked too well with ATI cards, that will soon change... but as things stand...its a no go!

EDIT: I am by no means an nVidiot ....nVidia fanboy!!

I actually skipped the entire NV30 series as I really didnt like em!

larchy

27-03-2005, 15:48

ooh crikey, I'd rather stick to something with a GUI than delve into the .infs unless absolutely necessary :)

Peoples-Agent

27-03-2005, 18:04

hehe lol

That's the thing, nVidia drivers all over the place you can get with it already done for ya!!

Not enough for ATI atm because the effects differ so much from PC to PC, its a big shame tho ...if that wasnt the case id have bought an ATI card, I love my tweaked drivers. Makes so much difference.

Echo66

31-03-2005, 20:17

Hi,

Am trying to run AOW on a toshiba A60 laptop with an ATI Mobility Radeon 7000 IGP display adapter. Patch 1 is installed & the game will no longer run at all but prior to this it would give me an error message regarding pixelising etc whilst loading the menus......it would then crash to desktop when i'd clicked the Launch icon.

I've downloaded the latest ATI update from Toshiba.

The issue with patch 1 aside, what can i do to get AOW to run with this adapter? Am i dead in the water & do i have to take it back to the shop?

Thanks

Regards
Ed

batteries

03-04-2005, 15:37

will these cards work?

ATI Radeon 9250 256MB 128bit DDR AGP
Radeon 9550 256MB DDR AGP8x

????????????

sdack

06-04-2005, 23:01

totally agree on larchy ...
I disagree. The original poster wrote "This just goes to show". He did not write that it shows it.

And yes, the difference between a 128bit and 256bit memory bus is explained well.

Sven

Personal opinion following:
I used to have a video card from Cyrus Logic, a S3 Virge64, a Matrox Mystique, a RivaTNT (<= NVidia!), a KyroII, a Radeon 9200, a 9550 and by the end of the week a 9800PRO. The reason for the row of ATI cards is simply that I do not trust NVidia after their cheating with 3DMark scores and that they treat speed for quality. My latest order, the 9800PRO, might have been a wrong decision and a 6800LE the better choice. However, I am not willing to find out if the NVidia card is going to fry my PCs interior or makes me unhappy in some other way. It would make me regret my decision. I'm simply not open to a company that acts as aggressively as they do ... They have built a good chipset (nForce2, dual-channel) and it seems as if the nForce4 might be another good one (non-SLI, not sure what to make out of this feature yet). If I had to suggest anything from NVidia, it would be chipsets.

sdack

07-04-2005, 02:23

will these cards work?

ATI Radeon 9250 256MB 128bit DDR AGP
Radeon 9550 256MB DDR AGP8x

????????????

Works fine with my 9550. However, I have the core overclocked by about 70% of its intended frequency (now at 425/270) and got the DNA drivers. Maybe you already heard of its overclocking potential ... I only have 128MB of RAM on it, IMHO still enough, and can run the game at 1024x768x32. Set it once to 1280 and texture quality to "high" with only a little loss in performance. My 9550 has a 128bit bus. It is not an SE.

For the 9250 I would not expect too much. You can set the grahics down to 800x600x32 and texture quality to "low". I guess that it will make it playable on a 9250 with its 64bit memory bus. Cannot really tell.

Sven

EDIT:
The 9200 was not a DirectX9 card. If the 9250 is neither it will not run it!

2. EDIT:
It needs to have shaders and must support atleast DirectX 8.1 according to the README.

GTec

08-04-2005, 20:06

screetch

09-04-2005, 17:41

New catalyst 5.4 driver available from www.ati.com

Note from the readme file :

Known Issues for CATALYST™ Software Suite 5.4

The following section provides a brief description of known issues associated with the latest version of CATALYST™. These include the following:

* Act of War: Playing the game under Windows XP SP2 with Anti-Aliasing enabled results in display flashing being noticed. To workaround this issue, change the mouse cursor size in the game options to small. Topic number 737-18944

screetch

09-04-2005, 17:43

i just wanted to add that Act of War team recommends disabling AA on ATI cards and Ati recommends disabling big cursors on act of war, but both solutions will work :biggringr only political issue

teamcooperuk

09-04-2005, 17:50

since i have installed the new DNA-Driver 3.8.5.3 SLE the game work great!!!
i played now more then 3 hours with no problem's :D kick to dektop, ect. ...
(gfx: x800xt-pcie@535/574, VPU recovery enabled)

DNA-Driver 3.8.5.3 SLE are based on Cat. 5.3 Info & Download (http://www.dna-drivers.com/index.php)

ATI released the CAT 5.4's and a new 64-bit driver, may that help's too www.ati.com (http://www.ati.com)

Excuse my ignorance but what are these DNA drivers? Is it just a group of people just trying to improve the official ATI drivers? Do they make much of a difference performance wise?

sdack

09-04-2005, 19:09

Excuse my ignorance but what are these DNA drivers? Is it just a group of people just trying to improve the official ATI drivers? Do they make much of a difference performance wise?ERROR WHILE PROCESSING QUOTE: YOU CANNOT EXCUSE WHAT DOES NOT EXIST.

DNA are modified drivers. Nobody knows what they do with the reference driver, but the driver helps when:

- You have a grahpics card that does not get identified by the ref. driver. This seems to be mostly the case with a few mobile chips.
- You want to overclock. The reference driver locks the timings and resets any changes now and then. The mod removes that.
- You have a downgraded version of a chip (i.e. 9500 or 9800SE). The mod then can unlock features and upgrade your card.
- You play CS (or any other game based on their 3D engine) and do not care for the latest OpenGL driver. The DNA driver then replaces the newer one with an older version and thereby increases the FPS rate.

Do not use modded drivers when you are not sure if you are gaining from them. There is no description of what really changed. Most of the 'facts' is hype and if you do not believe them you are uncool and do not deserve to live. Also keep in mind that the modded drivers get released like a month after the original reference driver and then things might have changed again. No sense in keeping a modded driver up to date.

Sometimes there are versions which base on a beta release. Keep your fingers of them until you really know what they improve. The best you can expect from these geeks is a "use at your own risk". They will not tell you what is wrong with it, since they are so freaked out because they get their hands on a beta (poor *******s).

Sven

Serg..ik

12-04-2005, 17:31

Will I get a Full graphic (reflections and shadows too) with 9600 XT?It has Shader 2.2 (not lower 100%)/

teamcooperuk

12-04-2005, 18:34

Can't say for the exact model of your card but I have a Radeon 9600 Pro and it runs perfectly for me and the XT is the next model up isn't it? I reckon you'll be fine.

Peoples-Agent

12-04-2005, 19:31

teamcooperuk

12-04-2005, 19:49

Depending on how much they are , you would be definately better off going for a 6600 GT ....faster memory, more overheard for overclocking and newer technology which supports easily upto SM 3.0 ..... for around the £150 mark, would be a better buy, it's current technology .....9600s... 9800s are dated now.

That they may be, but not everyone wants to spend £150 on a graphics card every month, and like I say I have no problems at all with my card. In fact it couldn't really run much smoother. I'm not bothered about 0.000025 extra fps.

sdack

12-04-2005, 20:07

Depending on how much they are , you would be definately better off going for a 6600 GT ....faster memory, more overheard for overclocking and newer technology which supports easily upto SM 3.0 ..... for around the £150 mark, would be a better buy, it's current technology .....9600s... 9800s are dated now.
Noone has asked what to buy or which is better. Yet you keep telling people in an ATI thread(!) to buy a 6600GT. Ridiculous. Are all owners of NVidia cards like that?

Sven

screetch

22-04-2005, 20:22

It seems PCI express cards dont go along very well with AOW vidos, can come from directx/AOW or ATI, but the following settings should make the game run properly without blue screens or hard reboots :

I've got the game working with all bells and whistles now... well - not all whistles !

In the advanced dispay properties I manually configured :

Anti Aliasing x2
Anisotropic Filtering x16
Quality ticked
Texture Preference High Quality
Mipmap Level High Quality
Vertical Sync Off
Trueform Off

In the AOW options 3D Sound, 1280x1024, Textures - High and Shadows -MEDIUM ( the only change is the shadows ). I might be going crazy... but the shadows actually look better to me on medium

And it actually plays everything without crashes now...

DeeVeeOss

11-04-2006, 18:08

Someone asked about constant Loop errors from a different link.

He had an x800. The x800 are well known for their loop errors and will frequently crash.

I'm not positive if it is from SP2....it may well be the case, or it may be from ATI's "official" catalyst drivers etc etc.

x800 runs hot. ATI has acknowledged it and claims it is a natural occurence. All the same you'll want it watercooled, or my cheap fix is to open the case and point a quiet house fan at the card.

The stuck in loop error, is however, NOT related to this!

I've tried every-single ATI retro and current driver to solve a fix for the loop error, NONE work. 5.1 5.10 5.11 5.12 5.4 etc etc etc etc etc etc NONE WORK.

I did, however, NOT reformat after every install......I DID uninstall and drivercleanpro all relavent files....excuse me, "all" relavent files.....

So it is possible that after a format one of these drivers may be OK...

There are 3 things you can do to completely sove this issue for you if you are having it.

1.) omegadrivers.net ***Ignore ATI and get the reworked drivers.***
(the current omega 6.3 works for me)

2.) Dont bother with SP2...it may be the cause. Stick to SP1.

3.) Dont "uninstall" your drivers, or SP1. Reformat and start your comuter from fresh.

It's been rumored that you can "uninstall" ATI drivers with the uninstall program they supply, and then to run drivercleaner pro after......HOG-WASH.

There is so much **** in the registry, and Windows/SPacks make so many related yet not synonymous changes to accomodate drivers, that you'll never get back to stock without a format. This is my experience of many many.....many.....hours of formatting, tweaking, troubleshooting, ATI tech support, etc etc etc. Try this to get rid of those annoying Stuck in Loop errors.

DeeVeeOss

11-04-2006, 18:16

BTW, do you simpletons want to stop arguing about Nvidia vs ATI? It's an innane topic for argument.

They both have upsides they both have downsides.

Neither is "better" it is not black and white. You momos are arguing apples and oranges.

>SaluteS<