ATI drivers are still buggy.

[AlphaWolf]

Well, everybody insisted to me that ATIs drivers have improved over the years, but they still have these little issues here and there. Granted, the overall speed and image quality of this card is far superior to my previous one, half life is seriously borked with ATIs drivers. Large polygons on walls will occasionaly just dissapear out of nowhere, and in NS if you walk into a hive spot, the FPS drops like hell (to the sub 10fps range), whereas on my nvidia card it had no such problems.

I don't suppose anybody knows of any half life/ati troubleshooting/tweak guides?

 

[nephalim]

Hey Alphawolf, would you consider you Geforce 2go more compatible (generally, have you given N64 emulation a good go-around?) but slower? In which case i'd prefer it I think. I'm still waiting for your response in your thread, I think.

 

[AlphaWolf]

As a universal rule, I would say that nvidia cards are BY FAR more compatible with anything. Having this card for only 2 days is beginning to remind me of the problems I had with ATI cards years back. ATI drivers just suck hands down, don't let anybody ever tell you otherwise. People say that they have improved over time, but speaking from first hand experience, they are lieing. So far I have tried both the catalyst 3.4 and 3.5 drivers, and both give me problems.

So far I like this card much better than the geforce 2 because of the speed and image quality differences in pretty much everything else I have tried (which isn't much; mainly warcraft 3, GTA:VC, ut2k3, and epsxe.) are far superior. The closest running nvidia competitor to this card was the GF4go 440 which doesn't have as many hardware features as the m9, and its a bit slower as well as consuming more battery power.

If you have a choice between two cards that are roughly the same though, and one of them is ATI, and the other is Nvidia, trust me when I say pick the nvidia one. I am not picky about brands at all, and although ATI has proven to be faster than them recently, nvidia cards are good because their drivers actualy work.

So far I have managed to improve the overall frame rate in half life to 30fps by adjusting a console cvar called "ati_npatch" to zero, which also fixed most of the dissapearing polygons as well. Nevertheless though, this cards anasotrophic filtering in half life sucks compared to my gf2go, and the gf2go was able to stabilize a 40fps frame rate, whereas this one often drops to 20. Yeah theres probably an easy software fix since most people with this card run it at 70+fps, but god damn, it shouldn't be this hard to find. A sure sign of shitty drivers right there.

BTW, which response were you looking for? I thought I covered all of your questions.

 

[flow``]

good luck browsing through the pages and pages of hl/cs/hl-mods and ati card and driver problems over at the rage3d.com board

 

[AlphaWolf]

Yeah, ATI cards always have numerous issues with just about any game actualy. This is a painfull reminder of why I originaly quit buying ATI cards a few years back.

 

[mightyrocket]

I still remember my Ati Rage Pro. I downloaded new drivers, and with N64 emulation it destroyed more than it fixed. However, it was working excellent with Max Payne and Return to castle Wolfenstein!

 

[vampireuk]

People say that they have improved over time, but speaking from first hand experience, they are lieing

That is your own personal experience, just because someone else has had no problems it does not make them a liar does it? ATI's drivers have come a long long way and NVIDIA are now the ones churning out bug filled crap. I have had no problems with the cats whereas the dets I am using on the 5200 give me all sorts of problems. The latest dets also give a crap load of problems to the 5200.

 

[Malcolm]

Alpha, ever thought your problem is that the laptop ATi cards just suck? I have an M6 (7500 equiv) and when I tested it against my friends tower with a 7500 card his results were always better, even though i had more ram and a better CPU.

ATi cards are great, the laptop chips are something completely different.

 

[AlphaWolf]

Alpha, ever thought your problem is that the laptop ATi cards just suck? I have an M6 (7500 equiv) and when I tested it against my friends tower with a 7500 card his results were always better, even though i had more ram and a better CPU.

ATi cards are great, the laptop chips are something completely different.

I don't think so, I read the ns forums, and several desktop radeon 9000 pro users were having the exact same problems I was having. Most of them seem to fix it by downloading older drivers, namely catalyst 3.1 which apparently had most of the issues with half life fixed (the 3.2+ drivers borked them again). I am going to try that version as soon as I can find it.

 

[AlphaWolf]

That is your own personal experience, just because someone else has had no problems it does not make them a liar does it? ATI's drivers have come a long long way and NVIDIA are now the ones churning out bug filled crap. I have had no problems with the cats whereas the dets I am using on the 5200 give me all sorts of problems. The latest dets also give a crap load of problems to the 5200.

Well, these are the specific problems I used to notice back when I originaly bought ATI cards. They would work great with a few major software titles, but everything else you'll have an issue here, need a patch there, something unfixable here (or at least ATI doesn't want to fix it), etc.

 

[AlphaWolf]

I just tried the catalyst 3.1 drivers, they fixed every issue that I was having in half life, except that the anisotropic filtering is still worse than my gf2go was, but fortunately thats only noticable in certain areas on certain levels.

That means the hardware isn't the problem. Thats not very good in terms of quality to have drivers that are several months old outperform the latest ones though. I think ATI should bribe some of nvidias driver developers to write their drivers for them.

Overall, I am still satisfied with this card, but lets just say that if there were an nvidia equivalent to this card, I would have sent this one back yesterday.

 

[Cyberman]

Alpha.. just so you know writting drivers for cards is not easy, the biggest problem I've come across is poor management practice for handling bugs. Often what happens is they fix a bug then have to revert after they fix another bug and loose the fix for the first bug they fix. From your conversation it sounds like ATI's driver team just needs to have a good manager (IE someone to enforce sane coding practice).

Been there done that and it's REALLY stupid too!

Cyb

 

[nephalim]

I don't think i'm getting the M9. I want the Geforce 2go.

I have one major question at this point: what is the 2go equivelant to in a desktop card, and is it 100% (or nearly) with most N64 emulators?
Also, how's the image quality (better than the Mobility M4, I hope?) Is the TV-OUT good? Is the scaling good? (The Mobility M4's scaling is excellent to the point of unnoticable.) The 2go was Nvidia's first try at a laptop card, and i'm worried it'll have laptop issues.

 

[AlphaWolf]

I am not sure how the tv-out compares to the ATI m4 as I never realy use it (my TV has a vga input, so its not necessary). I have heard that the gf2 is slightly worse, but I am not 100% on that. The scaling seems to be a bit better to me though, but it still doesn't compare to the M9s scaling.

So far as performance, the Geforce2Go fits right between that of a GF2mx and a classic GF2, or at least with my comparisons anyways. It works with emulators quite well from my experience. If you want performance though, it would be best to try the M9. The GF2 barely sustained 20fps in the 3dmark 2001 tests, whereas the M9 kept in the 70 range.

 

[ScottJC]

Half life I think they are working on with the next release *shrug*

all the games i've tried work great with the radeon, its emulator plugins that are a tad borked.

 

[AlphaWolf]

Ok heres a challenge to all of you ATI evangelists out there. This card absolutely sucks at anasotropic filtering, and I haven't seen one screenshot depicting otherwise, but then I haven't realy looked either. Lets see if its even possible to fix it.

Here are a few screenshots of half life running at the MAX anasotropic filtering level, on the natural selection mod, running the map ns_eclipse. Notice here the ugly seem I circled in red, where after this seem theres an ugly moir effect that annoys the royal crap out of you. Yeah it may not seem like much in this screenshot, but trust me, when you are walking around and that seem crawls around, it realy starts to piss you off after a while when that moir effect flickers around.

My geforce2go didn't have this problem. Although the blurring was there (of course), there was no moir effect, and there wasn't a rectangular seem, it was just smoothed all 360 degrees.

 

[AlphaWolf]

Now if I were ATI, I would consider this an embarrassment, but naturaly, ATIs driver development team is the trailer trash of all driver development teams, who wouldn't mind a rusty old car with no wheels and a 10 year old washing machine sitting in their front lawn.

This is taken from ns_eclipse, looking at the back wall in the eclipse command hive cluster area. Moir effect extremely gone bad.

 

[ScottJC]

You seem content on blaming ATIs entire card because of one game, Half life is a known problem for the drivers, or the game just doesn't like the card.

I haven't tried half life but i wouldn't judge everything on it, but i'll play it to see if that happens to me anyway... still every other game i've played is better than before, did i say better? i meant much better.

if you hate your ati card so much then you should put the geforce2 back in, end of story.

 

[The Khan Artist]

Yeah, ATi drivers are still quite buggy... http://rage3d.com/board/showthread.php?s=&threadid=33697394

 

[The Khan Artist]

Yep, the AF is horrid. Moire patterns on lots of things. This shot is from Lon-Lon Ranch in OoT, the underside of a roof.

Add to that the lack of Super-sampled AA, and nVidia still comes out on top in emulation.

FiveFeet8 says his new GeForceFX 5900 Ultra has damn fast framebuffer reads, too.

I hope ATi fixes all their problems... soon... too bad nVidia doesn't make something like the All-in-Wonder line.

Oh, BTW, that "seam" you see: are you using "Performance" AF or "Quality"? Performance uses bilinear filtering, which would cause those seams. Quality uses trilinear, or should, any way. I've heard that for some games it still uses bilinear for some textures.