Shadows in FEAR kill my performance on X1950pro

[Phat_Larry]

This isn't even with soft shadows, even ordinary shadows at minimum just kill my performance to the point where at times it's running at 10-20 fps even with everything else at minimum. At one particular point if i enable shadows with minimum settings my frame rate drops from 110 fps to 10 fps. That's a 100 fps performance penalty just from having minimum shadows enabled!! I realize shadows are quite stressfull for a graphics card but even my 6800 vanilla did better than this, surely something has to be wrong here.

Does anyone have any ideas on what might be causing this?

 

[Richdog]

Shadows are also incredibly stressful for the CPU... what is your A64 colocked to?

 

[Phat_Larry]

I've now got a x2 4200 @ 2.4Ghz so that shouldn't be a problem, my A64 3000 handled it fine even at stock speeds. I may reset to stock settings to see if that helps though.

 

[liamcrane]

my 8800 runs fear a treat on max settings i would stay clear of ati i had an ati card b4 always have done then i changed to nvidea for the 1st time and i can i will never look back how do u no how many fps your game is running at mate

 

[MadMatty]

fear run pretty well maxed out on my machine(not soft shadow as 2x aa used). The expantion pack is a different beast completely though and often crawls in places especially the final showdown.

 

[LoadsaMoney]

Fear ran maxed out in 1280x1024 with max shadows fine on my old x1800 XT 512mb with a A64 3500+ all stock, and that was with 2xAA/16xAF, x1950pro should be handling it fine so theres definately something a miss.

 

[Phat_Larry]

fear run pretty well maxed out on my machine(not soft shadow as 2x aa used). The expantion pack is a different beast completely though and often crawls in places especially the final showdown.

This is actually the expansion I playing a the moment, even so though, I can't see that whatever changes that have been made would cause such a severe performance problem just from shadows being enabled, 100fps with minimum shadows is one hell of performance hit.

how do you know how many fps your game is running at mate

I think ATI tray tools has FRAPS built in, but you can download FRAPS on it's own if need be.

 

[drunkenmaster]

my 8800 runs fear a treat on max settings i would stay clear of ati i had an ati card b4 always have done then i changed to nvidea for the 1st time and i can i will never look back how do u no how many fps your game is running at mate

you bought a new card thats twice, or up to 3 and a half times as expensive and use this as a reason to tell people to stay clear of ati?

as for dropping from 110 to 10fps, there is very very much something wrong with drivers or setup somewhere for that to happen. as someone else said, shouldn't be anywhere near that kind of an issue or a drop off. reinstall the game maybe, try diff drivers. soft shadows shouldn't even really kill performance off that much, even though soft shadows general look pants in FEAR(never tried in the expansion, they looked worse to most people) and impact performance way more than they need to. the shadows look pretty good as is. i believe with a x1900xt/1800xt and the like i was playing fairly close to maxed out in fear. so deffo try reinstall and after that maybe new drivers.

 

[queamin]

2 gig of ram will help i had to upgrade to 2 gig when i was playing fear as it was using hd to much.

as for dropping from 110 to 10fps, there is very very much something wrong with drivers

I got the same thing in vanguard with my 8800 320,but that a rushed game and drivers

 

[Phat_Larry]

as for dropping from 110 to 10fps, there is very very much something wrong with drivers or setup somewhere for that to happen. reinstall the game maybe, try diff drivers. so deffo try reinstall and after that maybe new drivers.

I've done all of this, just installed the 7.1 Omega drivers and still the same problem. I'm at a bit of a loss as to what would cause this.

 

[liamcrane]

i no i have a bigger card than u mate all im saying is that you should look to nividea cards i think they are so much better and offer much more than ati thats just my opinion though

 

[dun]

i no i have a bigger card than u mate all im saying is that you should look to nividea cards i think they are so much better and offer much more than ati thats just my opinion though

The 1950pro was the best performance for £100 mate. Doesn't matter whether its ATI or Nvidia, who ever has the best performance for the amount of money you want to pay wins imo.

 

[BlackDragon]

Could it be that your card can't handle all the advanced graphics features such as: AA, AF, HDR (not sure if thats in FEAR), and shadows all at the same time? I know all of them are really demanding features, and it may help you to turn down AA and AF, reduce the lighting/turn off HDR, and possibly turn off shadows?

 

[Raikiri]

i no i have a bigger card than u mate all im saying is that you should look to nividea cards i think they are so much better and offer much more than ati thats just my opinion though

The performance hit is big on Nvidia cards from the same gen as the x1950pro as well. They don't offer any more than ATi at the price point of the x1950 pro, there really isn't any other choice.

P.S

http://spellbound.sourceforge.net/
http://www.iespell.com/download.php

@ OP try some older drivers as well, make sure the game is patched etc.

 

[dun]

*snip*

http://spellbound.sourceforge.net/
http://www.iespell.com/download.php

lol

 

[HangTime]

This is actually the expansion I playing a the moment, even so though, I can't see that whatever changes that have been made would cause such a severe performance problem just from shadows being enabled, 100fps with minimum shadows is one hell of performance hit.

I do remember right at the start of the expansion, when you are in some 'bombsite' building it was really slow due to all the flames casting shadows etc. I had the game setup to give a MIN fps in the benchmark of 50+, and yet fps were dropping to around 25 in that area.

However, going from 110 to 10fps definitely sounds wrong. What I would recommend is that after reinstalling drivers and patching the game to the latest version, that you try it with default settings. I.e. don't enough any fancy stuff in your driver control panel etc.

 

[drunkenmaster]

i no i have a bigger card than u mate all im saying is that you should look to nividea cards i think they are so much better and offer much more than ati thats just my opinion though

well, you don't have a bigger card than me, infact i have a x800 pro here, and a x1950pro, and a 8800gts 640, and errm, a 8800gtx ¬_¬

i have issues, leave me alone /cries

but that doesn't change that fact that you don't need a £350 card to play fear smoothly, a x1950pro will do it. infact if i did around i might be able to find fear and install it, see if what happens for me. yeah thats right Mr bigshot thinks he has a better card than me, i have a 8800gtx but i have the x1950pro installed in my computer right now? why, well it doesn't crash in lotro constantly, it doesn't crash when trying to play a video game windowed and playing media files at the same time. funny thing how £350 of silicon isn't nearly as useful as those free to download but oh so stable ati drivers

its definately possible that a higher option is taking you past the 256mb memory buffer the card can handle and its causing ridiculous slowdown far in excess of what their should be if you have the 256mb version. errm, not really sure what else it could be, bug in the game, bug in a new patch you have installed for the game. AV software is causing quite a lot of widespread issues in vista with performance. errm, something stuck open in background eating cpu cycles, shut down everything you can, errm, turn off av real time monitoring briefly and see if framerate issues are any better. if not, time to head over to tech support forums for the game, or, ati support forums, i think rage3d.com is one of the main forums to get ati help.


EDIT:- http://www.elitebastards.com/cms/in...sk=view&id=192&Itemid=27&limit=1&limitstart=4

have a look at those numbers, run the ingame benchmark, see if you can come up with similar numbers of if anything is very significantly wrong.

 

[LoadsaMoney]

Are they hell better, they dont support their cards with drivers for a start off.

 

[drunkenmaster]

Are they hell better, they dont do driver support for a start off.

who don't do driver support m8? are you talking to the other guy saying nvidia are better?

if me, i for sure know that ati have their issues too, everyone does. a huge number of games in the past few years have issues with both ati and nvidia drivers, but ati very often have hotfixes even inbetween their monthly releases to fix game issues very quickly. when Nvidia will get around to trying to get Lotro to work stably in vista i have not a clue otherwise i'd probo keep the card.

i'm having a hard time deciding if i should sell the 8800gtx now or not. in a bad mood, ordered the x1950pro the day before the drivers two weeks ago after months with nothing, which seemed ok at first, but think it was overheating(judging by temp it felt when i pulled it out the comp), finally opened/installed the x1950pro and a working ntune and rivatuner came out next day which might have fixed it

 

[LoadsaMoney]

Yeah sorry, Nvidia dont do driver support, their 8 series support is absolutely dire, only 3x sets of drivers in over 5 months for XP which were utter garbage, even their Vista support is atrocious, then ATi have a new card due, so they start slinging drivers out on the hr as they know ATi do driver support (release an Official set every month for both XP and Vista for all their cards), and everyone is waiting for their card because of it, and they know they are going to get a lot of defectors getting shot of their 8 series cards for ATi's, so they slung more drivers out in 2x days than they have ever done in over 5 months to stop that happening, make ppl think they are now doing support, not to wait for the ATi card and buy their 8's now instead, and also the ppl with 8's stay with them and not dump em for the ATi card as they are now doing drivers.