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Fairly poor performance with ATI 4850's


Mutantant

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Hello all.

 

I have a crossfire setup with 2 HD 4850 cards.  I of course run into the famous Catalyst AI bug, etc, so I need to run the game with AI off (which, for those who may not know, disables crossfire...cant use both cards is AI is off, which is pure crap)

 

I am getting pretty poor performance in general when it comes to lighting.  In most areas of the training map, no issues.  A solid 60fps, with AA set at 2, and AF at 16.  1600x1200 res, interaction at high.

 

But, when I get to an area lit by quite a few light sources, my frame rate drops in half.  An example is in the training mission, right where the swinging rope is 1st introduced and there is a bunch of ledges and water, I end up at almost exactly 30fps.  Another example is in the 2nd room of the 'business as usual' level, with the mirror.  I face that mirror, and its chop city.  When I turn off lighting or lower the distance of the lighting via console commands, back to 60fps, so def a lighting issue rather than a geometry one.

 

This would not bother me too much except for 2 things - one being that at 30fps it feels quite choppy, choppier than it should be since we see things at 25-30 frames a second with our eyes.  30 should be plenty good, but it feels more stuttery, like it was really at 24 or lower.  Second is that I have the well known 'micro-stutter' issue that many ATI owners have had, so I have to set com_precicetic to 0 and com_fixedtic to 1, which irons out the micro-stutter like a charm, but when the frames drop things go into slow-mo.  Literally, everything is then moving at half speed.  Very sucky.  So I either play with the 2 console commands at default, and have choppy FPS at these areas, and micro-stutter every 1sec or so, or I play with these console commands set at the values presented above, fixing micro-stutter but putting things in super slo-mo when turning corners into well lit rooms.

 

I have tried everything from modifying the interactions shader file, to trying with all options low, and tampering with may console commands involving lighting, to no avail.

 

Just to fill in all the blanks, my system is a Dell XPS 630i, quad core proc, 2x4850 cards, 8gig ram.

 

I play some of the top-line modern games better than the doom 3 engine from years ago is running for me.

 

If anyone has any ideas, I would be grateful.

 

 

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disable vsync, disable crossfire.

 

Also doom3 has a lot of stuff which hogs performance, adding in a fairly large mod and textures etc which are far above what doom3 really expected and you're gonna run into strange performance all the time. Vsync itself runs into problems in d3 as the physics etc are all bound to fps, as such it generally limits itself to strange numbers to make physics and such consistent. Make sure you dont have any overlays (vent/ts/mumble/steam community etc).

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disable vsync, disable crossfire.

 

Also doom3 has a lot of stuff which hogs performance, adding in a fairly large mod and textures etc which are far above what doom3 really expected and you're gonna run into strange performance all the time. Vsync itself runs into problems in d3 as the physics etc are all bound to fps, as such it generally limits itself to strange numbers to make physics and such consistent. Make sure you dont have any overlays (vent/ts/mumble/steam community etc).

 

 

 

 

Thanks much for the reply.

 

 

I have only one issue that really messes everything up, and its the micro-stutter that doom 3 engine games have with some hardware configs.  The reason I keep vsync on is because the com_fixedtic command that irons out the stutter, also uncaps the FPS :)  So without vsync the game runs 4x too fast most of the time.

 

But I suppose there is nothing for it, I will remove the stutter fixing commands, and play with that micro-stutter problem for now.  I have been following this project for years, and now that its available my computer doesn't like the engine lol

 

Anyway, if anyone has had a similar issue or a fix, prob involving an ATI card (I have had some big problems with ATI and the drivers over the past year, so nVidia may get my business next time) please post

 

 

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Anyway, if anyone has had a similar issue or a fix, prob involving an ATI card (I have had some big problems with ATI and the drivers over the past year, so nVidia may get my business next time) please post

 

If only you knew how bad nvidia drivers are at the moment.

 

As for uncapping fps etc, I would suggest just using a completely vanilla install(i.e no mods, no fancy configs), there is a lot of stuff that is tied to fps and you are most likely going to just cause trouble for yourself by using fancy configs. I cant say I notice any of the stuff you are talking about on a a nice overclocked i5+5870, so I'd either point my finger at configs or dual cards... still.

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I have a crossfire setup with 2 HD 4850 cards. I of course run into the famous Catalyst AI bug, etc, so I need to run the game with AI off (which, for those who may not know, disables crossfire...cant use both cards is AI is off, which is pure crap)

Why not sell the 4850's (they will sell all day long) and get a HD4890

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Why not sell the 4850's (they will sell all day long) and get a HD4890

 

 

 

 

Thought had crossed my mind but the dell xps 630i I got has a mobo that would need to be upgraded as well (due to nerfed pcix slots)- just have not had the money for that right now.  

 

 

 

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Much of your performance drain is actually from AI & Physics CPU processing as well as your GPU. Doom 3 can use your processor, but it can't make use of multiple cores like most modern games.

 

As mentioned above, vsync clamps your fps at 60, 30, and so on.

 

I, too, have an HD 4850 (1GB model). Currently, I can run TDM with Catalyst AI on, because the latest drivers and catalyst version don't force you to "pull out all the stops!" whenever you turn on the AI. With standard (rather than advanced) AI acceleration, I don't get those problems.

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When you have AA at its highest, is there still a reason for such a high resolution? I always thought it is good for reducing the 'stair effect' (this is the german description) but with AA16x I have only 1024x768 and it´s not always best performance so I don´t thinking about raising the resolution. Doesn´t a higher resolution eat more performance than Anti Aliasing?

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No, no it's not. :huh: I run at 1920x1200, and the new desktop computer downstairs runs at 2560xsomething.

It is.

 

1920x1200 = 2.3m pixels

1600x1200 = 1.9m

1280x1024 = 1.3m (the most popular native res as of March 2010)

1024x768 = 786k

 

All of a sudden widescreen monitors come out and people think they can get away with higher res's without blinking, just because it's their native desktop res. Native res has nothing to do with what res you should be running games at. Almost every system will have to go lower than native for best performance.

 

That's why you get tons of people complaining that their i7 blah blah blah can't run Bad Company at 16x AA and the highest res. It just can't. And like LEGIO said, just lower the res and up the AA.

 

But anyhow. Doom 3 with a few shadow-casting lights will bog down any system.

Edited by Stardog
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It is.

 

1920x1200 = 2.3m pixels

1600x1200 = 1.9m

1280x1024 = 1.3m (the most popular native res as of March 2010)

1024x768 = 786k

 

All of a sudden widescreen monitors come out and people think they can get away with higher res's without blinking, just because it's their native desktop res. Native res has nothing to do with what res you should be running games at. Almost every system will have to go lower than native for best performance.

 

That's why you get tons of people complaining that their i7 blah blah blah can't run Bad Company at 16x AA and the highest res. It just can't. And like LEGIO said, just lower the res and up the AA.

 

But anyhow. Doom 3 with a few shadow-casting lights will bog down any system.

 

I run at 1920x1200, too and D3 runs just fine, shadows or not. Geforce 9800 really helps :) Lowering the resolution (or lowering the AA or the texture filtering) has almost no impact on performance here at all. The graphic card simple idles around more while still pushing 60 FPS.

 

What really bogs down is the AI (plus the shadow re-calculation) and many visportals/drawcalls etc, because these all fight to run on the single CPU core that D3 supports.

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It is.

 

1920x1200 = 2.3m pixels

1600x1200 = 1.9m

1280x1024 = 1.3m (the most popular native res as of March 2010)

1024x768 = 786k

 

All of a sudden widescreen monitors come out and people think they can get away with higher res's without blinking, just because it's their native desktop res. Native res has nothing to do with what res you should be running games at. Almost every system will have to go lower than native for best performance.

 

That's why you get tons of people complaining that their i7 blah blah blah can't run Bad Company at 16x AA and the highest res. It just can't. And like LEGIO said, just lower the res and up the AA.

 

But anyhow. Doom 3 with a few shadow-casting lights will bog down any system.

 

No shit, we can do the math also. I also don't use AA, so I have no issue running The Dark Mod at 1920x1200 even with just one video card on my laptop. That's right, I run games at 1920x1200 on my laptop. And you can ALWAYS get better performance by lowering the resolution, and anyone who uses 16xAA is a retard.

I've done visual comparisons on my laptop in several games, and there's really only a small increase in visual quality between 8xAA and 16xAA, and the same goes for 8xAF and 16xAF, but even less so.

And Doom 3 with a few shadow-casting lights will bog down any system has nothing to do with the resolution you are running at. You can be running at 640x480 and put like 10 shadow casting lights in one room so they overlap, and the system will slow down incredibly.

Also for games these days (that includes Doom 3) you will get a bigger performance increase from upping your GPU not your CPU. For me, going from a Core2Quad to an i7 would not give me much of a performance improvement in Doom3, but upgrading from GTX260M to say GTX 285M would greatly improve my performance in games.

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shadow re-calculation

 

This is the CPU's domain? I did not know that.

 

Well, that is a problem

 

But I suppose it'll be a great positive if the system can somehow offload all of this on to one of the idle cores, here's hoping that will be "addressable" when the SC is released? ? :blink:

Edited by aidakeeley

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This is the CPU's domain? I did not know that.

 

Well, that is a problem

 

But I suppose it'll be a great positive if the system can somehow offload all of this on to one of the idle cores, here's hoping that will be "addressable" when the SC is released? ? :blink:

 

That would indeed be of incredible benefit, if someone could code in some multi core support.

I always assumed I'd taste like boot leather.

 

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That would indeed be of incredible benefit, if someone could code in some multi core support.

:wacko: I Wish.

 

What I would love just as much as the D3 source, is the Prey source.

 

Multi-core support, ability to select a specific interaction.vfp per-texture-def (parallax mapping anyone?), optimized physics...

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:wacko: I Wish.

 

What I would love just as much as the D3 source, is the Prey source.

 

Multi-core support, ability to select a specific interaction.vfp per-texture-def (parallax mapping anyone?), optimized physics...

 

Yeah that would be nice, even the Quake 4 source, it does have some basic multi core support built in, also megatexture implemented.

I always assumed I'd taste like boot leather.

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

Yeah, I was surprised that this mod didn't move to either Q4 or Prey... I wish Id would've back-ported the improvements to Doom III... I saw some recent Nvidia developer slides showing Doom III models with full polygon count (verses faked with normal maps) via Tessellation so maybe they'll give the engine one last shot in the arm... And with that many poly's they would either need very robust multi-core support or... dare I hope... on-GPU shadow calculation (via OpenGL 3.0 or OpenCL). But it was probably just a teaser for Doom IV (if anything) and will never be released for Doom III users...

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