Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[djt]

I gave the 12.11 Beta 11's a try with the AMD 7970 and much to my surprise I'm getting pretty good results with Outerra (finally).

Right after installing Outerra I was able to start the program and update without any issues. After changing a few options in the Catalyst Control Center I tried to restart Outerra and received an error message that said I did not have a GPU that supported OpenGL 3.1 installed? I then returned the settings in the AMD CCC back to default and Outerra loaded without any problems. After changing some settings a second time in the CCC I didn't see the error message again.

FXAA is the only anti-aliasing method that works (I was unable to use the multi-sample AA options which I think is a known bug with Outerra and AMD GPU's).

Performance isn't up to what I've seen with the Nvidia 680 GTX and Outerra but it's getting there. So far the only graphics related glitch I've found is an unusual horizontal line across the terrain that can be seen in this screen shot just above the aircraft's instrument panel -

[cameni]

After changing a few options in the Catalyst Control Center I tried to restart Outerra and received an error message that said I did not have a GPU that supported OpenGL 3.1 installed? I then returned the settings in the AMD CCC back to default and Outerra loaded without any problems. After changing some settings a second time in the CCC I didn't see the error message again.

Odd, never saw anything like that. Was it after installing new Catalyst?

So far the only graphics related glitch I've found is an unusual horizontal line across the terrain that can be seen in this screen shot just above the aircraft's instrument panel

That glitch is because of some driver-enforced setting on textures that are used internally for math. I think it's anisotropic filtering - on textures that are not used for rendering but internally for computations it does what it's not supposed to do. I actually forgot that I wanted to ask AMD guys how to stop that behavior.

[djt]

Odd, never saw anything like that. Was it after installing new Catalyst?

I haven't either, the 12.11 Beta 11's were installed on a fresh OS so it's not an issue related to uninstalling the previous driver revision.

The only thing I can think of is a glitch in the CCC (possibly related to dot Net) after changing settings that made the GPU momentarily unrecognizable to Outerra.

That glitch is because of some driver-enforced setting on textures that are used internally for math. I think it's anisotropic filtering - on textures that are not used for rendering but internally for computations it does what it's not supposed to do. I actually forgot that I wanted to ask AMD guys how to stop that behavior.

That actually brings up some questions about how we should even have AMD GPU's configured in the Catalyst Control Center when running Outerra.

Anti-aliasing of course should be set to application preference but what about anisotropic filtering? Is Outerra using 16x AF by default (which would mean application preference should be used for AF also)? I also have AMD optimized unchecked to turn Tessellation off since it only effects DirectX 11 applications, would this be correct?

Finally the only other option I use for Outerra is the OpenGL triple buffering setting.

[cameni]

The problem with AF is the one I described above, it cannot be applied universally, at least not until we find a way to turn it off for internal textures. I think we are using 8AF now.

Triple buffering is ok to enable, tesselation does not have effect.

[djt]

The problem with AF is the one I described above, it cannot be applied universally, at least not until we find a way to turn it off for internal textures. I think we are using 8AF now.

Thanks for clearing that up, this issue with AF and Outerra, it does apply to Nvidia also right?

Has there been any progress on getting multi-sampling AA available to ATI/AMD GPU's?

[cameni]

I haven't tried it on Nvidia, it's generally suggested to leave these settings on the application so we rarely encounter this. There should be a way to avoid it by using a different sampling method, effectively not using AF for stuff that can't cope with it. I'm going to test it.

MSAA on ATI - we still haven't received reply from our primary contact, time to spam other ones we have there ...