Catalyst 4.12: Massive improvement over 5.10!

[seebs]

Someone at Civfanatics said to try Catalyst 4.12.

I have a game which was unplayably slow on a huge map. I mean, hopeless. This is on an Athlon 3500+, 1GB of memory, Radeon X800pro.

So I tried the Catalyst 4.12 drivers. "Unable to initialize renderer." So I got the Pak utility and unpacket Art0.FPK.

... And now I can load that game and play all I want. It's snappy and responsive by comparison (if a little slower than I'd like in absolute terms). I was crashing twice a turn, and I haven't seen a single crash since I "downgraded".

[seebs]

Just a followup on this: I've been playing for however long it's been since I posted that. I've alt-tabbed out and back. I'm running on an extra-huge world with no water, I have about 50 cities and future tech, and there are three other large civs on the map.

No slowdowns. No crashes. I can scroll around the minimap, I can use all my units however I want... When I was using the newer Catalyst drivers, I had a save that would crash 100% reliably if I tried to settle a particular city. With the older drivers, the city has grown to about 10 population and has most of its buildings done.

Conclusion: The bug that's been biting most of us is in the Catalyst 5.10 drivers, or is at least dependent on them.

[jeff3f]

Well, I tried these drivers, and they solved one set of crash problems but created others. Also, my performance went down the tubes, from smooth to slide show.

(8500DV)

edit to include:

Boy am I slipping. I almost forgot; I was inspired by your post to get the 4.12 cats, and they didn't work for me. So I went looking in the other direction; from a link on a DL mirror from the omega drives site, I found leaked 5.11 (beta) cats. They provide good performance and solved my crashing problems, but may have introduced new, different crashes (now crashes when scrolling around!). However, the game is now playable (in small doses with frequent saving). Almost.

[seebs]

Interesting. I had consistent crashes while scrolling around (just clicking in the minimap window WOULD crash the game eventually) with the 5.10a drivers. With 4.12, everything's smooth and fast.

It could be that the 8500's underlying performance is slower, or it could be that the 5.x series improved performance in a way that created vulnerability to crashes.

[hunterhavoc]

can u put a link to where u found it. ive been looking but cant find it

[jeff3f]

It's on the website, "http://www.ngohq.com/".

Off to the right side of the page is an area called, "recent files".

I didn't link directly because sometimes webmasters get a little funny about that. But it's on that site and it's featured pretty prominently so you should be able to find it.

[seebs]

I found a version in the archives for omega drivers.

FWIW, I do have some weirdness with blackness over terrain now when I have a totally unexplored map. I hadn't noticed because my game had gotten up through space technologies before.

[BleckLord]

Thats not that bad. We can just play up to modern tech with the 5.10s and then switch to the 4.12s. Its only two reboots.

[jeff3f]

Yeah, I think there's a combination of things; underlying performance is poorer, and things are usually a trade-off (stability versus performance).

Also, the 8500 wasn't so far in the rear view mirror (might even have been visible) when the 4.12's were released. So driver designers would have cared about that card--now, it's hard to believe that ATI wants to spend much time making the 8500 cards run properly. I imagine they'll drop support entirely in the near future. 3 years is a fair run with a vid card.

The 5.11's seemed to address those crashes plus kept the performance. Here's hoping that 5.11 plus a patch will give the 8500 one last trip to the place where I go when I play Civ for 10 hours!

[seebs]

I'll try the 5.11 when they come out. I have yet to be convinced that there's a real difference between omega and DNA drivers and the official ATI catalyst drivers. I guess we'll see, though.

[wysiwygbill]

I had the crash when scrolling with 5.09 as well as 5.10 so the problem isn't caused just by 5.10.

I installed the Omega 5.10a drivers and ran for two days with only two crashes. A big improvement from the every-15-minutes-even-when-I-try-not-to-move-too-fast crash.

Omega Drivers

[EPhillips]

no luck on the omega or the 4.12's for me, its still as stable as vanessa feltz on acid