ATI 11.4 Preview Problem

[LavCat]

Have any other ATI users tried the 11.4 preview (e.g. beta) drivers? With 11.4 I was getting only about 20 fps outdoors in Ramkahen with few characters in town. With 11.1 drivers I get 40-60 fps in same area.

[Concillian]

I have it and am using it. Didn't check FPS compared to the old drivers. Hasn't been so bad that I've noticed a degradation though.

[LavCat]

I have it and am using it. Didn't check FPS compared to the old drivers. Hasn't been so bad that I've noticed a degradation though.

From what I've read almost all games are working better in 11.4 for almost all people. I wonder why it doesn't like me? I tried playing with driver and game settings but did not find anything to account for the degraded performance.

With 11.4 at the inn in Ramkahen I get around 200 fps. As soon as I turn so that the smallest amount of the doorway is in view the frame rate drops to 16-20 fps. With 11.1 it is 250 fps, then when I turn to the door the frame rate drops to 35-60, which is playable.

From a fps standpoint Ramkahen is the worst place I've found.

Considering that quite a few AMD (formerly ATI) users probably play WoW, I would have hoped someone else would have seen the problem. I feel very much alone.

[Concillian]

I have it and am using it. Didn't check FPS compared to the old drivers. Hasn't been so bad that I've noticed a degradation though.

From what I've read almost all games are working better in 11.4 for almost all people. I wonder why it doesn't like me? I tried playing with driver and game settings but did not find anything to account for the degraded performance.

With 11.4 at the inn in Ramkahen I get around 200 fps. As soon as I turn so that the smallest amount of the doorway is in view the frame rate drops to 16-20 fps. With 11.1 it is 250 fps, then when I turn to the door the frame rate drops to 35-60, which is playable.

From a fps standpoint Ramkahen is the worst place I've found.

Considering that quite a few AMD (formerly ATI) users probably play WoW, I would have hoped someone else would have seen the problem. I feel very much alone.

Just spent some time running around the doorway there, lowest I could get was 47-49ish.

5770 running 2560x1024, but with viewport essentially 1280x1024 with 4x multisampling / 16xAF shadows good, everything else ultra, i3 @ 4GHz and more RAM than WoW would know what to do with.

[LavCat]

Just spent some time running around the doorway there, lowest I could get was 47-49ish.

5770 running 2560x1024, but with viewport essentially 1280x1024 with 4x multisampling / 16xAF shadows good, everything else ultra, i3 @ 4GHz and more RAM than WoW would know what to do with.

My card is a 6979. I run 1920x1200 8x supersampling, 16xAF, everything including shadows ultra. Phenom II X3 720, 4 gig RAM.

As an aside, I find that shadows for me flicker unless set to ultra, but on ultra they look really good.

Has anyone else here tried 11.4?


Edit: Card is 6970, not 6979. Duh.

[Concillian]

Check if it's CPU related, perhaps something in the new drivers causes a CPU hit at a specific point. A dip into the teens is a serious dip and is likely only one subsystem causing such a dip. If you can, underclock by a significant amount and see if it changes.

I don't have a before and after, so I have no frame of reference as to whether the CPU is causing any issues. A 6970 is over 2x faster than my 5770 though and shouldn't be slowing down, and the 720 should be slower than my CPU in WoW, so that's why I figure it must be CPU related. Could be related to the extra AA, but I doubt it.

[LavCat]

Check if it's CPU related, perhaps something in the new drivers causes a CPU hit at a specific point. A dip into the teens is a serious dip and is likely only one subsystem causing such a dip. If you can, underclock by a significant amount and see if it changes.

I don't have a before and after, so I have no frame of reference as to whether the CPU is causing any issues. A 6970 is over 2x faster than my 5770 though and shouldn't be slowing down, and the 720 should be slower than my CPU in WoW, so that's why I figure it must be CPU related. Could be related to the extra AA, but I doubt it.

I have not yet played with underclocking. The current situation is that Catalyst 11.4 preview and Catalyst 11.3 show the problem. In contrast Catalyst 11.1 and Catalyst 11.2 work fine for me.


Here is the problem report as I submitted it to ATI or AMD, or whatever they are called:

Unplayably low framerates in World of Warcraft, around 16-20 FPS outdoors (DX11), with Catalyst 11.3 or 11.4 preview.

Windows 7 Professional 64-bit
AMD Phenom II X3 720
ASUS M4A79T Deluxe
4GB OCZ3RPR16002G
PCP&C Turbo-Cool 860
VisionTek Radeon HD 6970
Samsung Syncmaster 275T 1920x1200 (just one monitor)

Catalyst 11.3 and 11.4 preview show the problem.
Catalyst 11.1 and 11.2 work OK.

CCC Settings:

Anti-Aliasing
Enhance application settings
Morphological filtering off
Filter Edge-detect

Anisotropic Filtering
Use application settings

Tessellation
AMD Optimized

Catalyst A.I.
Texture Filtering Quality High Quality
Enable Surface Format Optimization off

Wait for vertical refresh
Quality

Anti-Aliasing Mode
Quality

OpenGL Settings
Triple buffering on

Install Catalyst 11.3 or 11.4 preview
Launch World of Warcraft
Move character outdoors
Observe frame rates 16-20 FPS
Need to install Catalyst 11.1 or 11.2 to recover.
Catalyst 11.1 or 11.2 gives frame rates 35-60 under same conditions.

[LavCat]

I tried Catalyst 11.5 yesterday. The driver stops responding every time a character tries to load. I can't wait to see 11.6.

[Concillian]

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.

[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.