Source & 9700 Pro

[VIAN]

My 9700 Pro is clocked at 395/370.

Fillrate: 3.16GPps (9800 Pro-ish)
Bandwidth: 23.68GBps (9800 XT-ish)

Although in Dust, with the RECOMMENDED settings Valve said would run well, 1024x768 w/ 8xAF was not possible. It would drop below 20fps and it would play at an average of 22fps. So I tried to lower some settings and all I lowered was Shader from High to Low and my framerate triples above 70 and to about an average of 60 or so.

That's crazy, did the 9700 Pro suck that bad at shaders?

No wonder the 5xx0 went DX8.

 

[otispunkmeyer]

play with out 8af? 9700pro wasnt nearly as bad as the 5800 , sometime oc's dont actually help...hl2 stutters n has more slow downs whrn my 6800gt is at 400/1.1 than it does 380/1.05.....380 on the core seems to be the sweet spot for me...its jus butter smooth all the time. 395 is a much oc on a 9700 tho, even tho my 9500pro coul knock on the door of 390.

my friend is playing hl2 on his 9700pro at stock speeds.....says its totally fine, without aa and af

 

[VIAN]

Without AF, it looks like pooh. I don't think I would ever play without AF unless I absolutely had to such as in Doom3 and maybe FarCry.

 

[2Xtreme21]

When I had my old 9700pro OC'ed, my FPS would drop dramatically in CS:Source. It wasn't until I brought it back down closer to stock speeds that the FPS began picking up. I really do not understand why.

 

[VIAN]

Yeah, someone should do an article about why this happens, please Anand.

 

[ronnn]

I had that happening also, poorer gameplay with an oc on my 9700pro. I ran ati tool and found out the memory oc was too high. Only had it at 351 with no visible artifacts. Dropped my oc to 396/341 and suddenly big gain in frame rates, was handy with doom3, made it quite playable. Also helped with farcry.

 

[otispunkmeyer]

there u go then too high an overclock does kill performance.....will it be something to do with current leakage or core gettin too hot an thus either being less efficient or being clocked down to save itself?

 

[VIAN]

It' weirder than that.

When I had everything lowered (1024x768, 8xAF, In game settings low), and I went back another time, it was giving the same crappy framerate. So I felt like experimenting and I put on a widescreen res 1280x720 and in game settings high and it was giving better framerates, then I switched the res up to 1280 x 960 and it was still good, but at some points would stutter. So I backed it down to 1024x768 and it was still good.

This is weird.

custom driver settings:
8xAF
AI Advanced
Vsync Always Off
Geometry Instancing support


I think it might have been that I forced AF without doing it in the app. Not sure though.

 

[gururu]

HL2 runs super nice at 1024, medium settings 16X AF on mine....

 

[otispunkmeyer]

16xaf has very little if any impact so its a mite as well enable it. choice

my rig sometimes bogs down in cs and im unsure as to why, something sends the fps plummeting and it hovers in the red for a while, then itll pick right back up to 80+ fps again....funny that when i go to the same spot the same thing never happens is it true that CS;S is still beta?

also i found that enabling AA and AF in the drivers control panel gave better results than thru the app

 

[Appledrop]

if u have enabled it, disable Temperal Antialiasing, this causes BIG drops on my x800xtpe, down to 40 with it on (6aa/16af), and in same situation with it off, 80+ hope this helps somebody!