ATI sun glare issues
 

now, i know for a fact that ATI cards have no sun glare, and people have gone into extensive detail over this, but i cannot find it, so can somebody please let me know if there are any fixes?

This post might help. A word of warning, however: you might suffer an FPS hit, depending on your machine's specs. I know I can't use it on my old rig, cause it plummets my FPS from low 20s to low 10s.

Hi, ati it does not have fixed this problem with the new catalyst 8.3???

As far as I know, no ATi drivers will fix that problem. Then again, I haven't checked for new drivers for a while. I'm quite happy with the Omega 7.12 drivers I'm using, and the new ATi I'll be getting this week (hopefully!) does show sun glare (a HD3650, in case you wonder) :yep:

im running ATI X1650, if i remember correctly

Great, it seems it works. I got the sun glare too. However, it seems this feature mess up with the reflections ingame. I got some artifacts following my sub path etc.
You earn something, you lose one lol
I suspect forcing z test on old ati card is messing up with something used to generate the reflections. Would make sense why they never corrected it in a patch.

Could someone confirm he has this issue too?? i'm using an x800 pro.
Not that big of FPS dropped though, if any.

what do ya think, 2600xt (512mb supercolck) can it handle it??

Oh my god... another disguised "look at my great specs" post again... lol you just can't avoid them in a thread dealing with gfx cards i suppose... :rotfl:

If you had read carefully my last post (and i'm sure you had *sick* lol). I told people i had few FPS drop down so far, if any with a x800 pro 256mb. So why are you asking if a 2600xt 512 mb OVERclocked would suffer some, or won't run it???? :doh:

It's like someone saying, "i got an old ford car, i might reach this place in about 2 hours". And you asking, "i got a Ferrari (well, a 2600 wouldn't really be one but just so you get the idea), do you think i might too, driving at full speed??, i'm not sure i will as quick as you"

lol that's just an irrelevant question :p eheh
And just why you don't try for yourself in the first place???? why asking first?? are you honestly fringhtened your gfx card is going to explode or something?!? :roll: turn into an alien maybe?

no that's not a really good card...lol i cant even AA without my frames goibng in the pooper....

A list of pros and cons that I found using that application, here. Mostly cons, as you can see :p
Specs (how many times have I written those!):

Intel P4 Northwood @2.4GHz, o/ced to 2.6GHz
1280MB DDR RAM
Dying four-year-old MSI motherboard
ATi X1650Pro 256MB DDR3 w. Omega 7.12 drivers
Computer case with numerous dents from kicking it in frustration.

Really?? pretty strange. Is the x800 not that old after all lol?!? she was an outstanding card but back then. It's been "many" years since it was released... Anyway, on surface with sub only and the sea, i get around 16-21 FPS with AAx2. What do you get using this? underwater is a bit slower as the impurities ar also antialiased though it's of no real use, hence degradating FPS to an around 12-16.
What catalyst version are you using? are you using Pacific environment or ROW? cause if so, i might have a small tweak for you.

As for GPUperf, dunno, i didn't lost lots of FPS, at least with just the sub and the sea, but clearly it messes up the reflections.
I believe we have to keep in mind it's more of a debugging tool than anything. That's why it messes things/drops fPS etc. Clearly for testing purposes. Now if they could like find a way to force that z test on proper drivers, maybe would solved the problem.

yeah....with no AA may card gets nearly 60fps on the surface with everythign on...but OH NO!!! turn on AA and it KILLS IT! I'm told it can't AA very well....and man is that right...

The 2600 shows the glare with no hacks / workarounds. All ATi HD series cards do so. It's the older series that need a workaround.

wow, that's strange!
I mean,ok, AA is pretty hungry in terms of processing power. But it's suprising how much it kills FPS on your card!!
Clearly i lose something like only 2 or 3 FPS using AAx2. 3 to 4 with a max of sometimes 5 using AAx4 on SH4.
Is it specific to that series of your card??? have you done some searching on this with google?

I think it's because of the limited bandwidth of that series of cards. If memory serves, it's only 64-bit. So, since it has to pass along the rendering information twice (on 2xAA), the limited bandwidth effectively becomes the bottleneck.