ATI 11.4 Preview Problem

[LavCat]

Anti-Aliasing Mode
Quality

Sorry I didn't catch this earlier...

ATi's Quality mode is Supersample AA. 8x SSAA is some very heavy lifting.

SSAA is not to be used lightly, especially 8x. 8x SSAA will render each frame, in it's entirety, 8 times. If you're seeing 20 FPS, that's actually pretty good for 8xSSAA

"As mentioned before, this is done by rendering the image multiple times, so 8xSS renders the image eight times and averages eight samples for each final pixel."

http://alienbabeltech.com/main/ati-5770-...analysis/5

Does a good job discussing differences and demonstrating framerates of games using 8xSSAA. It's very common to see games at <15 FPS with 8xSSAA enabled.

Thanks for the reply. Everything I've seen, including the article you linked, has said that super sampling really does not do super sampling in d3d11. Of course if ATI had introduced super sampling for d3d11 in Catalyst 11.3 it might explain my frame rate hit. Then again if they had, the news would probably be all over the Internet. It would also not explain why other people are not seeing this frame rate hit. Some people report high frame rates with 3d311 and 8x using any of these Catalyst versions.

What's worse, with Catalyst 11.5 and 11.5a hotfix, I am still crashing at the character loading screen. I am using a freshly downloaded vanilla installation of WoW for testing. I get a black screen or a message that the display driver has stopped responding and has recovered. From my tests it seems that two conditions are necessary for the crash: d3d11 and 8x multisampling. However there are slight texture artifacts with d3d11 and 4x multisampling (again, this is with Catalyst 11.5/11.5a). The crash is instant and happens 100 percent of the time. I can enter the game at 4x and then get the crash by switching to 8x. In the vanilla test setup I am not using super sampling because everything is at the Catalyst defaults, as well as at the game defaults except for the parameters I'm testing.

Other 6970 users are getting high frame rates with d3d11 and 8x multisampling though, even using the latest 11.5a! Blizzard tech support thinks I may have a bad card, but with Catalyst 11.1 or 11.2 I have high frame rates (for me) and no crashes. If I were to ask to RMA the card, I'm sure VisionTek would laugh at me. I would if I were they.

Now I'm wondering if it might be my BIOS. Various vendors have released more recent BIOS versions for the 6970. On Guru3D I just asked one of the people reporting good results what BIOS they were using.

Another variable is that all the people reporting good results with the 6970 (post Catalyst 11.2) are running on Intel hardware, not AMD hardware.