AMD (ATI) 69xx cards & CrossfireX Performance Improvement Request (+Triple Buffering)

[Zjosh86]

I get 30-60fps usually.

there's soon to be a whole new line of Nvidia cards coming out soon. So we'll see how well those new cards are supported and how well they perform I'm sure. Far as I read of the rumors they'll be the best buy cards available for performance as well.

[Mirimon]

nvidia.. wont be issues, their support is phenominal, their products are reliable, and rift was sponsered by and developed with nvidia products in mind., stop trying to jam 8track cassets into a blueray player.

get nvidia or get off the interwebs

[Ariant]

1. CPU: Intel i5-2500k CPU @ 3.30GHz
2. GPU(s): 1x ATI Radeon 6950 1GB
3. 1920x1080, windowed fullscreen, ultra, ultra shadows, no AA, no occlusion, mid clutter.
4. none
5. 10-20fps in meridian (high pop server), 30-45 fps questing with a few players on screen, 15-20fps in 5mans

[Zahne]

I get 30-60fps usually.

there's soon to be a whole new line of Nvidia cards coming out soon. So we'll see how well those new cards are supported and how well they perform I'm sure. Far as I read of the rumors they'll be the best buy cards available for performance as well.

Nvidia cards are always the first and best supported.


In over 20 years of gaming on computers, I have learned one thing about ATI cards and ATI as a company. They turn out flashy hardware that tops the benchmarking scores, but suffers terribly in the supported software and driver department.

I have tried ATI over and over and over and had nothing but trouble with them as a brand.

Good luck on your problems, but I'd buy a Geforce personally.

[Dexter_]

While this is not 100% related, I found something that may help people gain some extra FPS.

Apparently Rift doesn't like HyperThreading much, even with MainThreadCPU set to 0. I seem to have gained quite a few FPS by disabling HT in BIOS on my machine. I can't say that it's a dramatic change, and it didn't seem to make much difference in Sanctum, but it definitely made the game run smoother during massive combat (PvP, for example). I really don't think that is a placebo effect.

The issue could be more pronounced on the first generation of Core i7 CPUs (920-975) since their HT is not quite as polished as those of Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge CPUs, that's why we may see those CPUs generally perform better. Nevertheless, it may be worth trying to disable it regardless, to see how much of a difference it makes.

It is by no means a cure to horrible ATI graphics cards performance in this game (Trion needs to sort this out), but it may help some people make their experience more pleasant. Give it a try and report back!

[Dexter_]

And still no Triple Buffering option in the game for either video card brand, grr...

[Machiko_Naguchi]

Nvidia cards are always the first and best supported.


In over 20 years of gaming on computers, I have learned one thing about ATI cards and ATI as a company. They turn out flashy hardware that tops the benchmarking scores, but suffers terribly in the supported software and driver department.

I have tried ATI over and over and over and had nothing but trouble with them as a brand.

Good luck on your problems, but I'd buy a Geforce personally.

Yup, after MANY years of being an ATI buyer (from the 9800 to 3870 to 4870 to 4870x2, in all combinations of Crossfire ... even Quad GPU 2x4870x2's), I finally went over to nVidia with my GTX 580 FTW Hydro Copper 2 ... and never looked back.

Drivers are awesome. FPS is incredible, and while not everyone's cup of tea, the water cooling has me going BTTW fast while remaining nearly totally silent.

[Trisian]

I get over 51 fps in sanctum using a 6870HD 2GB. As soon as I turn my camera to face a group of players it plummets to about 24fps. This happens on every setting from medium to ultra.

1 word...
Gamebryo

[Violacea]

I get over 51 fps in sanctum using a 6870HD 2GB. As soon as I turn my camera to face a group of players it plummets to about 24fps. This happens on every setting from medium to ultra.

1 word...
Gamebryo

Hmm, sounds like the cards from radeon I guess :/

i5-2500k overclocked with a gf gtx570 and I get great performance in max setting minus a few minor selected settings down (ground floral distance and took rendering distance a notch down - I can still see rocks in Droughtlands from Meridian doorsteps, seems far enough to me ).

I also only run 1680x1050. Two things hold me back from upgrading my monitor. 1. it looks more amazing than most decent price 30 inch ones and 2. I wonder about performance as resolution scales. I know back in the early days one of the best FPS tweaks was to just learn to play in 800x600 instead of 1024x768, so I know resolution maybe has a big impact.

I just went in meridian and found a spot where I got in 20 - 30+ models, some lighting effects from a forge, and zoomed far out. Spinning the camera around the room I hover between 30 - 40fps. hit 29 once in max setting. If I drop a critical setting like Supersampling I can strut around the entire city and in closer quarters stay above 50 and even hit low 60s. If I go into the center of the city I dip into some low 30's. But if I stand and let stuff actually render it goes up to 35+ fps usually. With super sampling on by strutting around I got the FPS to drop into the high 20's a few times. But again if I actually let stuff render it steadies out over 30. It's just when I run around making it constantly render stuff that it gets low 30's high 20s. I will say I did notice a nifty increase when I overclocked my i5. Def sounds like Radeon still sucks for this game or something else isn't right. Overall for gaming i5-2500k + gf gtx570 has pulled great weight and left me pleased. :/

[hardy83]

I never found this game to be very efficient.

I have an i5 laptop, 6gb of ram and a radeon 5470, which isn't great, but I should be more than enough to run it at medium to low, but I have to run it on low quality renderer and even then there's lots of point in the game where it chugs along.

And my desktop which is an i5 also, 6gb and a radeon 6870 should be able to run it on high, but I have to cut out most of the advanced graphical stuff to run it smoothly.

I just never found this game to be good with hardware. Maybe it's poor programming, or just the engine itself, but either way it does suck.

[Violacea]

Sounds like what people say, that it's bad with radeon hardware. On paper these PC's I see with radeon cards should be smoking this game.

[Mirimon]

lol, stop blaming trion for not catering to an inferior gfx card...

it's not a Rift issue, it's simply a fact that amd/ati is bad for gaming

more to the point.. the real issue is the player trying to get something good from a piece of crap.

UPGRAYD YO GAME!!!

get Nvidia

[the_real_seebs]

lol, stop blaming trion for not catering to an inferior gfx card...

it's not a Rift issue, it's simply a fact that amd/ati is bad for gaming

This is not how troubleshooting works. See. In actual troubleshooting, when the goal is to understand why something isn't working, instead of starting with unquestioning acceptance of some advertisement's claims, we run multiple tests to allow us to isolate issues.

So for instance, one thing we might do is take these same computers, and run many different games on them, and record frame rates in all of them.

Imagine that I showed you the following frame rate numbers for five games, on two different graphics cards:

Graphic card 1:
Game A 60
Game B 55
Game C 60
Game D 45
Game E 25

Graphic card 2:
Game A 60
Game B 57
Game C 60
Game D 47
Game E 37

You might reasonably conclude that graphics card 2 is faster... but game E is still clearly having performance problems which are not justified by the alleged difference between card 1 and card 2.

[Malark]

Well, it's a little late.


I run a single AMD 6950 and it's been fine except that I can't alt-tab out of fullscreen for too long or the game will crash/blackscreen when I come back to it. It's remedied by alt-enter into window mode and back though so it's not the end of the world.


If crossfire was problematic it was in Trion's best interest to sort it out since it is an application that could have benefitted from it. Rift is a very pretty game, so just saying "should have got nvidia", to anyone who tried to play the game in crossfire seems like a good idea if you're looking to alienate a percentage of paying customers.

[jerwel]

lol, stop blaming trion for not catering to an inferior gfx card...

it's not a Rift issue, it's simply a fact that amd/ati is bad for gaming

more to the point.. the real issue is the player trying to get something good from a piece of crap.

UPGRAYD YO GAME!!!

get Nvidia

Oh look Mirimons fan boying again. Seriously for the price to performance ratio ati is better 85% of the time. I have no problem with my dual 6850s in any other game BUT rift. And I have many that are much more graphics intensive than rift is. Further why would trion want to alienate about half the possible customers on the market because their game doesnt perform well with their video card, but other mmos DO?

This is not how troubleshooting works. See. In actual troubleshooting, when the goal is to understand why something isn't working, instead of starting with unquestioning acceptance of some advertisement's claims, we run multiple tests to allow us to isolate issues.

So for instance, one thing we might do is take these same computers, and run many different games on them, and record frame rates in all of them.

Imagine that I showed you the following frame rate numbers for five games, on two different graphics cards:

Graphic card 1:
Game A 60
Game B 55
Game C 60
Game D 45
Game E 25

Graphic card 2:
Game A 60
Game B 57
Game C 60
Game D 47
Game E 37

You might reasonably conclude that graphics card 2 is faster... but game E is still clearly having performance problems which are not justified by the alleged difference between card 1 and card 2.

And here is why most believe the issue is on Trions end. As I said, dual 6850s and I get crap performance in this game. Crowded areas in this game I am lucky to get 20 fps, in comparison I NEVER drop below 60 fps in skyrim, battlefield 3, and never dipped below 45 fps with ultra graphics in gw2 beta weekend. Further their other technical issues also lead me and others to feel that the issue is with the engine, for example their lack of multicore support, no 64 bit, poor performance from hyperthreading (though this is just here say atm), and no triple buffering support.