Rant about ATI users

Post by **Graf Zahl** » Mon Nov 02, 2009 9:08

I'm sorry to say this but the attitude of the general ATI user here is starting to annoy me.
All I'm getting is stuff like these:

http://forum.zdoom.org/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=23783
http://forum.drdteam.org/viewtopic.php?p=40746#p40746

but when I ask for help to investigate (see the benchmark thread): Nothing. So far I only got 2 results for ATI cards and both from underpowered low end products. I still have no real idea how the engine really performs on a modern ATI card with good performance. All I got were the Hellcore posts in the thread at ZDoom.org. But this level alone hardly constitutes a good basis for information as it is an extreme case.

So here's the deal: I'm planning for an official 1.3 release by the end of this week. If you want me to look into ATI performance, take some time and run the benchmark.

If not, please don't blame me if there's things that have not been resolved (provided that they can.) But without any data I can't look into these issues at all!

Here's what I need:

- Benchmark results for a medium range ATI Radeon x1xxx card. (X1600/X1650)
- Benchmark results for a high end ATI Radeon x1xxx card. (X1800 - X1950)
- Benchmark results for a medium range ATI Radeon HD 2xxx card. (HD 2600/3600)
- Benchmark results for a high end ATI Radeon HD 2xxx card. (HD 2900 / 3800)
- Benchmark results for a mid range /high end ATI Radeon HD 4xxx card (HD 4600 or higher)

I also need some info for the Geforce 7 series although that's not as urgent as the ATIs. I think I can extrapolate that one from my own measurements with my old GF 6800 and my current GF 8600.

InsanityBringer · Post by **InsanityBringer** » Mon Nov 02, 2009 15:13

If I can get on my dad's machine any time soon I can get results on a newer (not very high end, but still up there) Raedon 4830 HD. Also, if it's of any use the machine I'm on right now has a Raedon X1950 Pro.

Post by **Graf Zahl** » Mon Nov 02, 2009 15:24

Oh yes. That's 2 pieces of hardware I'd really like to see the results from!

YouTube · Post by **Nash** » Mon Nov 02, 2009 21:17

As I've said in the other thread, as much as I'd LOVE to help, I simply do not have time right now to download the prerequisite WADs (that's a LOT of WADs to download)... you have a day job, don't you? I'm sure you know what it feels like.

Randy did post some results for a super new ATI card though (the 5 series).

Damn... I really want to participate... I wish there were more than 24 hours in a day! >:(

Post by **Graf Zahl** » Mon Nov 02, 2009 21:20

I have seen Randy's values as well as InsanityBringer's. These are well below what such a card should be able to do. Either I'm doing something ATI really does not like or their GL driver is utter crap.

Post by **Rachael** » Mon Nov 02, 2009 21:39

Graf Zahl wrote: or their GL driver is utter crap.

Yeah, um... try the Rage series GL drivers...

If that doesn't make you puke, you've got one tough stomach...

Point being, ATI has never made good drivers. Period. They've gone lightyears better than they used to be, though. The improvement definitely shows. Overall, without drivers, some people argue that ATI's cards benchmark better than nVidia's equivalents - and that is actually very believable, considering the shitty history ATI has always had with drivers.

InsanityBringer · Post by **InsanityBringer** » Mon Nov 02, 2009 21:45

The 4830 isn't the best card ever (there are many better than it), but it shouldn't be that bad at all with such a simple application. And yet it runs games like doom 3 very well.

Post by **Graf Zahl** » Mon Nov 02, 2009 22:03

THe 4830 should be at least on the same level as my GF8600 - not half of it. And Randy's tests on a HD5800 aren't much better. The driver must waste a lot of time getting the data to the GPU it seems...

One interesting bit: When I look at the task manager with GZDoom running I get a CPU load of slightly less than 50%, meaning that 2 of my 4 cores are in full use. Now, one is GZDoom itself but the other can only be the graphics driver as I was running without sound. If that's the case it's obvious that it'd block the main application far less as if it was running in the same thread.

BlazingPhoenix · Post by **BlazingPhoenix** » Mon Nov 02, 2009 23:16

I took some screenshots with 1.3.08 from some of the wads, but not all of them. When I get around to trying them I'll post the results.

X1330/X1500 btw.

MP2E · Post by **MP2E** » Tue Nov 03, 2009 1:20

I run an NVidia Geforce 7100 (7 series, as you posted) and I have no framerate issues with GZDoom as long as I keep the resolution in 800x600. 1024x768 is quite smooth but it starts to lag from time to time, but this isn't JUST a GZDoom issue, my card just seems to act a lot weaker in the higher resolutions(in every game I've tried anyway)

So basically, my card runs GZDoom as it should.

Sorry for the undetailed nature of this post. If you want FPS readings I'll post them, but you just said "info is needed", and the 7 series seems to work perfectly fine.

playerlin · Post by **playerlin** » Tue Nov 03, 2009 5:10

I have 2 of 7300GT card but they were damaged

(both are heat problems, GPU/GMEM may damaged. they still can work, but somethings will get wrong because they damaged.)

Is damaged card's result still valid?

Nuxius · Post by **Nuxius** » Tue Nov 03, 2009 6:10

SoulPriestess wrote:
Graf Zahl wrote: or their GL driver is utter crap.
Yeah, um... try the Rage series GL drivers...

If that doesn't make you puke, you've got one tough stomach...

Reminds me of when I tried to get GZDoom to work on a friends old "Rage Fury MAXX" POS once. I eventually gave up. :p I ended up pushing him to get a GeForce 4 MX shortly thereafter (which was still a lousy card, but he had one of those stupid slimline cases [Dell 4600] and his options were limited).

SoulPriestess wrote:Point being, ATI has never made good drivers. Period. They've gone lightyears better than they used to be, though. The improvement definitely shows. Overall, without drivers, some people argue that ATI's cards benchmark better than nVidia's equivalents - and that is actually very believable, considering the shitty history ATI has always had with drivers.

Funnily enough, HardOCP just said almost the exact same thing in their RE5 performance review today.

HardOCP wrote:While we are sure AMD currently has a better GPU than NVIDIA, this game goes to show that AMD needs to step its game up when it comes to drivers. 45 days after launch and here will still have a AA title with graphical bugs galore on its new hardware.

This one is even more damning:

HardOCP wrote:However, while AMD is waiting to get that fix out to gamers, those same gamers can already enjoy Resident Evil 5 on current generation NVIDIA GeForce cards with no graphics bugs, no performance dips, and really great performance right now. Once again we see AMD lagging behind when it comes to driver support in new games, and in fact Resident Evil 5 isn’t even that brand new, it has already been out a month and a half on the PC. The fact we have to wait even longer until a new Catalyst release for these fixes is very depressing.

Hah! Pathetic. It's garbage like this that makes me stick with nVidia.

YouTube · Post by **Nash** » Tue Nov 03, 2009 7:06

My next high-end gaming rig will definitely be using nvidia. I've just about had enough with ATI and their crappy drivers.

I've given them plenty of chances... waited a whole year. One year later and their drivers still haven't improved much.

Post by **Graf Zahl** » Tue Nov 03, 2009 10:46

They seem to give a shit about older software that doesn't use the latest rendering gimmicks.

It reminds me of that hideous fog bug from a few years back. That stuck around for years and I'm still not sure they fixed it by now (it probably got fixed automatically on new cards by not using the fixed function pipeline anymore.) The most depressing thing is that they seem to invest all their time in making the latest games work well but older software doesn't seem to matter. Quite contrary to NVidia who managed to provide a massive performance boost with the driver updates over the last year.

In general OpenGL support for ATI has been notoriously poor and they still haven't managed to fix that.
Randy's results for his HD 5850 are only marginally better than what I got out of my 5 year old second computer with a GF 6800. Come on! That card was already old news when I bought it! How can anyone write a driver that limits a modern card like this?

So yeah, since I use a lot of OpenGL (as in open source engines for older games which rarely come as D3D) I see absolutely no point wasting money on ATI hardware.

Post by **Rachael** » Tue Nov 03, 2009 16:14

There's still custom drivers for ATI cards. Some of them are just hacked versions of stock drivers, some people actually bother to step through the API and fix some of the garbage. I don't know how many good ones are out there, though.

The reason why I bought an ATI card was because I've started having extremely terrible luck with nVidia cards - literally, every nVidia card that's ever touched this machine since I got it has kicked the bucket within a year or two - often sooner than that. I had one card that fubar'd within an hour of using it after I took it out of the box. This is the second ATI card I've had in the past couple of years, the first one is still fully functional but completely obsolete, and this one is still running rock solid.

As far as drivers, I rarely upgrade them. I stick with drivers that have been out for a while and aren't proven to incite cataclysmic destruction.

DRD Team

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