Just been watching a video on youtube of someone comparing a 5970 to 480 SLI running GTA IV and Metro 2033 and the guy says that ATI cards suffer from micro stuttering in both of these games while the Nvidia ones don't. Is this fanboy nonesense or has anyone else experienced this 'micro stuttering' with ATI cards with these or any other games?
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Do ATI cards 'stutter'?
- Thread starter magick
- Start date
Yeah that's maxishine you're refering to and yes I think he prefers Nivdia over ATI, saying that xfire is not perfect and you may well get stutter in games, can apply to SLI as well. GTA4 and metro, ATI have performance issues with these game and more so with xfire.
Micro stuttering is an issue that can be caused by Xfire and SLi setups. Having never had such a setup personally, I have no experience of it. I believe the vast majority of people will agree that the issue pretty much doesn't exist anymore or is very rare.
Soldato
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I had a pair of 5970s, bench numbers were ace, speeds were ace, micro stuffer was VERY evident... a royal pain I must say! Went back to nvidia and very happy with it.
Andy
Andy
So if you'r serious about playing GTA 4 with bells and whistles that means I should go for a single 480? I'd sooner go for a 5870 as these are much, much quieter and i'm very sensitive to noise. Hmm confused about what to go for?
EDIT
I'm after a single card system to play @ 1920x1200
In benchmark videos I have generally noticed more stutter in ATI cards than nvidia but here I am referring more to sli v xfire comparisons. You do see nvidia set-ups do something similar but a little less frequently or less pronounced imo.
As someone said I think you would find these problems quite uncommon and I really wouldn't let that worry you unnecessarily. I have had umpteen ATI cards over the years and I have always been pleased with the performance. You have more chance of stutter with dual gpu set-ups and even then it is generally not an issue. There is only a couple of games where that has happened when using my 4870x2 and I'll never know if it was something else anyway, user error of some kind etc. One of thee best cards I have ever had.
Magick - if you are after a 5870 then how about one of these :
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-147-XF&groupid=701&catid=56&subcat=1502
or..
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-002-HS
As someone said I think you would find these problems quite uncommon and I really wouldn't let that worry you unnecessarily. I have had umpteen ATI cards over the years and I have always been pleased with the performance. You have more chance of stutter with dual gpu set-ups and even then it is generally not an issue. There is only a couple of games where that has happened when using my 4870x2 and I'll never know if it was something else anyway, user error of some kind etc. One of thee best cards I have ever had.
Magick - if you are after a 5870 then how about one of these :
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-147-XF&groupid=701&catid=56&subcat=1502
or..
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-002-HS
I thought the sapphire was the best 5870?
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-214-SP&groupid=701&catid=56&subcat=1502
Soldato
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For overclocking? In all honesty I don't know the answer to that one. The warranty is the same for each card, so not sure. I chose those cards because of the lower prices, the Sapphire one though doesn't cost much more. I should imagine they all cool well, maybe the Sapphire card does edge the cooling slightly more than either of the XFX or HIS offerings which I'm sure cool very well anyway.
Edit : just checked the Sapphire user reviews and it would seem, according to one happy shopper, that it is a very cool running card. Probably worth it for an extra tenner or so.
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Can't say I noticed any stutter myself when giving 5850 crossfire a whirl, but I've heard a lot of ancedotal evidence from people with 5970 or 5870 cf setups that it can be quite apparent and I know a good number of people who swapped from 4870X2 to GTX280 cards because of it. Only time I really noticed it with nVidia was with the 9800GX2 but thats due to another issue altogether that was specific to that card.
The whole deal about microstutter first came about because the 3800 series in crossfire suffered from it badly (later fixed in a driver update) and the hardcore ATI brigade went around tarring all multi GPU systems with the same brush to hide the fact. The 9800GX2 having similiar issues only muddied the problem even more. (All multiGPU system have microstutter but very rarely is it at a noticeable level).
The whole deal about microstutter first came about because the 3800 series in crossfire suffered from it badly (later fixed in a driver update) and the hardcore ATI brigade went around tarring all multi GPU systems with the same brush to hide the fact. The 9800GX2 having similiar issues only muddied the problem even more. (All multiGPU system have microstutter but very rarely is it at a noticeable level).
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Caporegime
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Thing I find that causes "stutter" lately is something similar to a Raven thread on vsync, some games seem to of late, both Nvidia and ATi, cause a lot of stuttering with vsync on, but vsync off are perfectly smooth.
RUnning xfire myself, in some games I get what you'd call stutter, but I get the same with single card, there will always be the odd game that just sucks on either xfire, or sli, and frankly GTA4 just sucks balls on ANY card around, and both consoles, its just a a truly epic failure of a game in terms of engine/smoothness/optimisation. Night time over the bridges on consoles, the horrible lighting and painfully low fps make my eyes bleed(well not bleed, but hurt like a son of a *****). I've played it in both xfire and single and found very little difference, its smooth in certain area's and a little jerky and a lot slower in others. Dual core 4gb mem single card, quad core at 4Ghz + 8gb mem, xfire, heavily overclocked cards, its still a pile of tripe.
Basically I wouldn't base anything, any opinion about either company off that. Metro 2033, disable the unnoticeable tesselation, the frankly awful DOF and you'll go from very very meh performance on a 480gtx/5870, to completely smooth to be honest. Its a purdy game, with little substance, and tough on hardware even without the two useless options.
Theres more issues with individual games that simply show up with certain settings, than actually run specifically badly on AMD/Nvidia hardware.
In Just Cause 2's case, I have no idea why but without vsync I can stay pretty much above 100fps max out with ease anywhere, I put on vsync (xfire or single) and the framerate is a jerky crappy mess. Raven's had that with GTA4 aswell and I've noticed more and more games with the issue in the past couple years.
The other problem is, peoples eyes vary, screens vary in quality wildly, people setting various options changes and things as simple as one person calling a problem tearing another person calls microstutter and another person calls GTA4 issues.
I still wish, Nvidia, AMD, Intel, Asus, Gigabyte, basically everyone had a "standard" settings page on their websites listing every update, every gaming performance, every setting that is known to work so everyones got a check list of things to do and options that don't work in games to work from.
I think you can take pretty much any gpu setup, Single/sli Nvidia, single/xfire AMD and find settings that make a game work very well, and take any setup and find one setting that makes it run like crap, and thats really the problem. I've been saying it a lot lately, frankly neither company has "driver" issues, just different control panels, different options and different levels of experience, there isn't a game I can't get my AMD hardware running perfectly smoothly, and given time I'm sure the same is true of any Nvidia setup, I haven't used the Nvidia control panel in ages though and if I just set what I think equal my AMD settings I'll probably run into an issue or two and COULD just call it crap Nvidia drivers if I wanted, when infact its more experience and user error than anything else
RUnning xfire myself, in some games I get what you'd call stutter, but I get the same with single card, there will always be the odd game that just sucks on either xfire, or sli, and frankly GTA4 just sucks balls on ANY card around, and both consoles, its just a a truly epic failure of a game in terms of engine/smoothness/optimisation. Night time over the bridges on consoles, the horrible lighting and painfully low fps make my eyes bleed(well not bleed, but hurt like a son of a *****). I've played it in both xfire and single and found very little difference, its smooth in certain area's and a little jerky and a lot slower in others. Dual core 4gb mem single card, quad core at 4Ghz + 8gb mem, xfire, heavily overclocked cards, its still a pile of tripe.
Basically I wouldn't base anything, any opinion about either company off that. Metro 2033, disable the unnoticeable tesselation, the frankly awful DOF and you'll go from very very meh performance on a 480gtx/5870, to completely smooth to be honest. Its a purdy game, with little substance, and tough on hardware even without the two useless options.
Theres more issues with individual games that simply show up with certain settings, than actually run specifically badly on AMD/Nvidia hardware.
In Just Cause 2's case, I have no idea why but without vsync I can stay pretty much above 100fps max out with ease anywhere, I put on vsync (xfire or single) and the framerate is a jerky crappy mess. Raven's had that with GTA4 aswell and I've noticed more and more games with the issue in the past couple years.
The other problem is, peoples eyes vary, screens vary in quality wildly, people setting various options changes and things as simple as one person calling a problem tearing another person calls microstutter and another person calls GTA4 issues.
I still wish, Nvidia, AMD, Intel, Asus, Gigabyte, basically everyone had a "standard" settings page on their websites listing every update, every gaming performance, every setting that is known to work so everyones got a check list of things to do and options that don't work in games to work from.
I think you can take pretty much any gpu setup, Single/sli Nvidia, single/xfire AMD and find settings that make a game work very well, and take any setup and find one setting that makes it run like crap, and thats really the problem. I've been saying it a lot lately, frankly neither company has "driver" issues, just different control panels, different options and different levels of experience, there isn't a game I can't get my AMD hardware running perfectly smoothly, and given time I'm sure the same is true of any Nvidia setup, I haven't used the Nvidia control panel in ages though and if I just set what I think equal my AMD settings I'll probably run into an issue or two and COULD just call it crap Nvidia drivers if I wanted, when infact its more experience and user error than anything else
That's because just cause 2 uses old school double-buffered vSync. If the card can't hold a constant 60fps it'll nosedive to 30fps, giving a jerky effect to the gameplay. d3doverrider helps eliminate the stutter but dropping shadows to medium completely fixes the problem, at least it did for me when running a gtx480. Just a heads up.
Associate
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GTA4 doesn't work very well with catalyst 10.7. My twin 5850's perform like a single 8800gt with this current driver. It's weird, because it was pretty much perfect a few versions ago. IIRC 10.4 was fine for this game.
Generally though, no problems with my ATI's whatsoever. GTA4 is the exception because that game was coded by monkeys on typewriters.
Generally though, no problems with my ATI's whatsoever. GTA4 is the exception because that game was coded by monkeys on typewriters.
My single 5830 seems to stutter slightly with smoke particles. it does lag slightly if a smoke grenade goes off and it laggs in Railworks. But plays game normally on max no problem. I ran the heaven benchmark this morning at 1280x960 with 8AA and 8AF and score was 900 and something and this was in DX10 :S
I had some micro stuttering when I had an Asus 5870 when running the overclocking and monitoring software that came with it. I mainly had this in Mass Effect 2, with the OC software uninstalled it was ok.
I'd still say go for the GTX 480 the noise is over exaggerated.
I'd still say go for the GTX 480 the noise is over exaggerated.
+1 also I had a 4870x2 , that ran smoother with one GPU disabled