Sun bloom working on a Radeon in Sh4!!

[XanderF]

Sorry to be an ass about the headline, but this isn't as good news as most here probably hope. After trying EVERYTHING to get this working on my Radeon X1950 Pro...I was never successful.

But it's still working with a Radeon, yes it is! Just picked up a Radeon HD 3850. Any why not? It's well under $200, about double the performance of the Radeon X1950 Pro I *had* (I played at 1280x1024, and Sh4 seems closest to mirroring 'Oblivion' in performance, so check those graphs), LOWER power consumption and heat output, etc. What a difference a year makes!

But...yeah. Same driver version I was using with my X1950 Pro. Same settings - in-game and in the CP. And sun bloom works on this card when it didn't on the X1950 Pro.

Moreover - note the 2d texture of the gunsight. See anything interesting? Why, yes, adaptive AA *is* working. And no green border on the screen!

Quite an amazing card, this - faster, lower power demands, modest price, seems to fix all the bugs the X1K series had.

[-Pv-]

It's important to note the X1950 is not on the list of supported cards for SH4.
-Pv-

[XanderF]

Originally Posted by -Pv-

It's important to note the X1950 is not on the list of supported cards for SH4.
-Pv-

Neither is the Radeon HD 3850.

Both cards had been released after the game was launched.

[swdw]

If you look in the AGP thread you'll see the sun bloom from the 2600, so the 2900 should have it too.

This is irritating since SH4 is a Dx9 game and the 1950 is a dx9 card. You shouldn't need a Dx10 card to get it. Methinks Ati needs to fix something in their drivers.

However, with newegg selling 512mb versions of the 3870 for only $219, you may see a lot of them in people's computer's soon.

[XanderF]

Originally Posted by swdw

If you look in the AGP thread you'll see the sun bloom from the 2600, so the 2900 should have it too.

This is irritating since SH4 is a Dx9 game and the 1950 is a dx9 card. You shouldn't need a Dx10 card to get it. Methinks Ati needs to fix something in their drivers.

Well, there is nothing DX10 about it. I'm running in Windows XP, so this is just as straight DX9 as the X1950 Pro.

My thinking is that it's just down to differences in how the hardware handles shader instructions.

[BadKarmaPT]

Originally Posted by XanderF

Neither is the Radeon HD 3850.

Both cards had been released after the game was launched.

I don´t think so. I got my 1950XTX in January and SH4 came out mid/late March 2007?

[stabiz]

The 1950 was launched way earlier than SH4.

[XanderF]

Originally Posted by stabiz

The 1950 was launched way earlier than SH4.

Hadn't the discussion at the time been that the box art/min specs/etc for the game had been completed a bit before the X1900 series launched?

In any case, it's rather a moot point - none of the X1Ks differed much in design, just number of shader units/etc. And the "X1300 to X1800" were listed as 'supported' cards, and none of them work with sun bloom. I would imagine the difference is simply between the X1K's not-quite-full SM2.0 support compared to the HD 2900/38xx series. Or, perhaps, there is something about the built-in "gamma-corrected AA" quality on the X1K cards that caused it (GeForce 8-series users are well aware that enabling "gamma-corrected AA" disables the sun bloom on those cards).

But that's kind of spinning off into the weeds.

Point is, the X1K series never worked with sun bloom in Sh4. It's now two generations old, and ATI has 2 generations newer cards that DO all completely, in every detail work with SH4. And the new 3850 - as affordable as it is - blows the doors in performance off in it, too. Not only does it WORK better than my X1K card, but it's twice as fast, and it is a LOT more quiet (no kidding - when the X1K went into 3d mode, I could hear it over the case - but I cannot hear my HD 3850 at all, ever, under any circumstances. It stays whisper quiet!)

[swdw]

Just a note of interest. I saw at anandtech that the 8800 was blowing the doors off the 3870 with the 8800 using the 169.x drivers in Crysis tests. Their testers noticed a huge difference in the rendering quality of the water with the 8800 being worse than the 3870, so they rolled back the 8800 drivers, got the much better image quality and lost 17fps!.

Turns out Nvidia has tweeked the 169 drivers to give better testing performance at reduced rendering quality.

Oh well, to me anything over 30-40 fps is a moot point anyway. Difficult for the eye to pick up the difference over 30fps and much harder over 40fps. Considering movies are 24fps and video 30fps, I'm kind of tired of the "I can do 100fps" p*ssing contests. Gimme better image rendering with minimum framerates in the 30-40fps range (never dropping below 30) and I'll be happy as a clam. From what I read, ATi decided to take this approach and focus on quality with the 3800 series cards (plus make them a LOT quieter).

[kapitan_zur_see]

come on! did you felt obliged to actually gives people some false hopes with a thread entitled that way!?
People who really tried to find a solution to that ATI issue already knew that newer ATI cards worked with sun bloom!! Someone should post a "i found the ATI issue solution" thread only if he managed to find a way to make it works with cards that didn't (like ,say, an x800)!
It's completely pointless... It's as usefull as someone asking for example "i must be at an important meeting in 2 hours but driving there will take me 5 hours", and you replying "hey i found THE solution!! why not buying a jet liner instead of driving? "...
Or in this case, everyone could have post a thread entitled "solution for ATI card sun problem" and write in it "buy an nvidia card"...
Doesn't help people a bit

[Reece]

I had only purchased my X1950 Pro card just before the HD 3850 (around 2 months ago) was released for my aging AGP motherboard so I certainly can't afford to just throw it in the bin & buy a new card. Mind you I still haven't installed SH4, waiting for 1.4 patch, to actually know what the problem looks like, can someone post a screenshot of this please?