If you don't know what problem I'm talking about, [url=http://forums.amd.com/game/messageview.cfm?catid=279&threadid=108194]here's a thread on the AMD forums about it.[/url]
Basically, Catalyst has a problem in which it doesn't allocate any video memory for OpenGL games. So, on my HD4850 (which died a few months ago and I've been using onboard since), I had 512MB of video ram and Second Life would use all 0MB of it. Any OpenGL game would use 0MB of video memory, and thus they ran horrendously.
I asked this question on the AMD forums and a moderator said "Why don't you buy an AMD card and try yourself?" and locked the thread.
Does anyone have an AMD/ATI card that can verify that the problem is fixed or broken? If not, I'm just going to buy a GTX460 or something so I can actually play Second Life at over 10fps.
It's definitely AMD's fault, seems to happen only on Windows. I have horrible framerates on [b]every single game[/b] with OpenGL on Windows, well atleast excluding GLQuake. :downs:
On OSX (hackintosh) and Linux (Debian, Arch, Ubuntu) I haven't noticed any performance fuck up.
I have a HD4850 (if I recall right, it's a Sapphire one)
Hope this helps.
Thanks. Yeah, I had a Sapphire HD4850 as well and OpenGL was horrible. AMD seems to be ignoring the problem. I don't know why they bother to update their cards to support OpenGL 4.0 if it can't even run it properly.
I just went through HL1 with the OGL driver and got 300-700FPS at 1920x1200 with a HD4870. Does this only happen on the 50?
[QUOTE=Panda X;27673838]I just went through HL1 with the OGL driver and got 300-700FPS at 1920x1200 with a HD4870. Does this only happen on the 50?[/QUOTE]
You probably won't notice a difference with HL1. The glitch is that OpenGL is not using the GPU's memory, but instead the system's memory, which is way slower and causes a severe performance decrease in OpenGL games with lots of textures (like Second Life).
Is it a problem only with a certain driver version? I remember maxing out Prey and Wolfenstein was a piece of cake on my 4850.
I'm not sure; as stated above, Linux doesn't seem to have any issues (run games in wine fine, where it translates all directx calls to opengl), and I don't really have any OpenGL games to test. I play Xonotic occasionally, but I suspect that might run on directx on windows. I have a 6870; perhaps someone can suggest an OpenGL program or game for me to test?
[QUOTE=pebkac;27688527]Is it a problem only with a certain driver version? I remember maxing out Prey and Wolfenstein was a piece of cake on my 4850.[/QUOTE]
It seems to be like that for me. I remember maxing out Prey aswell, but that was long ago.
I have a 5850 and I get the same sort of FPS in the UniEngine Heaven benchmark using OpenGL as I do when I use DirectX.
I believe it only happens in windows 7.
I tried doom 3 in windows 7 I get 20-30FPS
I tried it in XP (dual booting) I get constant 60FPS
specs
AMD Athlon II X4 640 3.0GHz
4GB Corsair XMS3 DDR3 Ram
1GB Radeon HD5750 Vapor-X
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