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RadarMan
Chief Captain
Joined: Aug 25, 2003
Posts: 16894
Location: U.S.A |
 Posted: Wed Mar 17, 2004 12:23 am |
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 Ok, my new card (ATI RADEON 9800PRO 128MB) came today (fast delivery). From the time it arrived to the time it was installed took 45 minutes.
The difference is nothing short of amazing. 
With everything turned up full I got 6.8 FPS when flying my DC3. Now with the new card and the 4.3 drivers I get a whopping 18.9 FPS and possible more. I have a stop at 19 FPS which I have to go in and change.
I'll report some other differences as I notice them
I have ordered but not yet received Ultimate Traffic, my computer can handle it now my Video card can also.
Simple job: 
I downloaded the new 4.3 drivers (and control panel) to a folder on the desktop.
I first deleted all the ATI drivers on my system from the old card.
I then went into the device manager and deleted the old card.
I did not reboot but I did shut down the computer.
I uninstalled the old card and installed the new card (cool built in fan).
I rebooted but did not let the new (built-in) drivers install themselves.
I now used the new drivers that were in the desktop folder, installed the rebooted and was off to the races.
It worked like a charm, beautiful,no problems. 
 |
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harleyman
First Officer
Joined: Feb 23, 2004
Posts: 195
Location: Statesville NC |
| Posted: Wed Mar 17, 2004 12:38 am |
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Cool....Lucky dog.......Wish it was that easy for me....HeHe...lol But then again,we all know I'm a stupid puter person.......
So glad it went well for you.......
Happy flying.........Mason.......Gotta go fly now.....see Ya.... |
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Geordan
Guest
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| Posted: Wed Mar 17, 2004 2:45 am |
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Nice!
May I ask what resolution and AA fliltering level you're running?
I get average 30-35 on my fx 5900 with 4x AA at 1024 x 768 and maximum settings. over a big city with lots of clouds in the sky it drops to about 22 but nothing too horrid.
-Geordan |
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RadarMan
Chief Captain
Joined: Aug 25, 2003
Posts: 16894
Location: U.S.A |
| Posted: Wed Mar 17, 2004 3:30 am |
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Right now I'm maxed (graphically) out and running 1024x768x32 and haven't played with the anti-aliasing as of yet. 
I see where the night flying eats up the fps more than day, I usually don't care for night flying, except to see the sights in Las Vegas.  |
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Rambunctious
First Officer
Joined: Mar 29, 2003
Posts: 110
Location: Sydney |
| Posted: Wed Mar 17, 2004 5:43 am |
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Hey there, I'm glad you're enjoying your new card!
Could someone explain how you measure the framerate while you're playing the game? Is there a freeware utility for this? |
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RadarMan
Chief Captain
Joined: Aug 25, 2003
Posts: 16894
Location: U.S.A |
| Posted: Wed Mar 17, 2004 5:54 am |
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Rambunctious wrote:Hey there, I'm glad you're enjoying your new card!
Could someone explain how you measure the framerate while you're playing the game? Is there a freeware utility for this?
After you chose your aircraft and it's sitting on the runway, press -Shift then-Z and do it 2 or 3 times until you get 2 lines of red figures at the top of the screen.
They will show you your frame-rates, speed, heading, altitude etc. It isn't beautiful looking but it does have quite a bit of information.  |
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Rambunctious
First Officer
Joined: Mar 29, 2003
Posts: 110
Location: Sydney |
| Posted: Wed Mar 17, 2004 8:19 am |
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Thanks, R |
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Flyaway
Site Admin
Joined: Jun 28, 2003
Posts: 1256
Location: UK |
| Posted: Wed Mar 17, 2004 6:13 pm |
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RadarMan, whats the technical on the 9800 Pro? Does she outrun the FX5900 from Nvidia? |
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RadarMan
Chief Captain
Joined: Aug 25, 2003
Posts: 16894
Location: U.S.A |
| Posted: Wed Mar 17, 2004 8:53 pm |
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flyaway wrote:RadarMan, whats the technical on the 9800 Pro? Does she outrun the FX5900 from Nvidia?
Flyaway,
Iv'e always been an "ATI Man" so my knowledge of the Nvidia line is limited to friends and hardware reviews.
Ati 9800 Pro
FX5900
One against one, this might interest you.
http://www.digital-daily.com/video/fx5900-vs-radeon9800pro/ |
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Geordan
Guest
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| Posted: Fri Mar 19, 2004 6:45 am |
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Yeah the 9800 is substantially faster.
The fx 5900 is on par with the 9700 and the 9800 is usually 10 percent faster than the 9700. The 9800 processes high level filtering significantly better than both though. This round of cards, ati has a lead in both overall speed, as well as filtering quality.
-Geordan |
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RadarMan
Chief Captain
Joined: Aug 25, 2003
Posts: 16894
Location: U.S.A |
| Posted: Fri Mar 19, 2004 6:29 pm |
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Geordan wrote:Nice!
May I ask what resolution and AA fliltering level you're running?
I get average 30-35 on my fx 5900 with 4x AA at 1024 x 768 and maximum settings. over a big city with lots of clouds in the sky it drops to about 22 but nothing too horrid.
-Geordan
You asked the other day about my settings and I wasn't ready to play around with them. These are the "final" settings that I arrived at.
I noticed that my FPS has increases 4 fold since I initiated these two new settings, faaaannnnntastic!
Anti-Aliasing 4x
Anisotropic Filtering 8x
http://www6.tomshardware.com/graphic/20030306/radeon9800pro-29.html
Again it's 1024x768x32. I could set it higher but this is what I've always used. |
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Geordan
Guest
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| Posted: Fri Mar 19, 2004 9:31 pm |
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Bitchin'
-Geordan |
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Guest
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| Posted: Sat Mar 20, 2004 4:59 pm |
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Greetings! Congrats on the 9800Pro, aweseme card. I have one and I'm getting a constant 20-25fps at 1280x1024x32 with some AA and AF on. I'm limited by my processor which is a P4 1.8. Anyways, enough with the technobabble.. I have a question. When you're flying, do things in the distance (on the ground, buildings, fields, etc.) kinda "blur and wiggle"? It's kinda hard to describe what it's doing, it just looks really weird. It's kinda like the moire effect, only different. One other thing I notice is that when I'm in virtual cockpit mode (regardless of aircraft) when I turn my "head" from left to right, it takes a second to fill in the texture on the ground so I have these big blocks of blank color, then the texture fills in. Other than the two problems I listed above, I have no issues what-so-ever and things look incredible. I had never noticed these issues with my old GeForce2.
Thanks in advance!
One other thing, what kind of processor are you running RadarMan? Just curious... You should be able to get some more out of that card easily if you're running a decent processor. |
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RadarMan
Chief Captain
Joined: Aug 25, 2003
Posts: 16894
Location: U.S.A |
| Posted: Sat Mar 20, 2004 5:16 pm |
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Anonymous wrote:Greetings! Congrats on the 9800Pro, aweseme card. I have one and I'm getting a constant 20-25fps at 1280x1024x32 with some AA and AF on. I'm limited by my processor which is a P4 1.8. Anyways, enough with the technobabble.. I have a question. When you're flying, do things in the distance (on the ground, buildings, fields, etc.) kinda "blur and wiggle"? It's kinda hard to describe what it's doing, it just looks really weird. It's kinda like the moire effect, only different. One other thing I notice is that when I'm in virtual cockpit mode (regardless of aircraft) when I turn my "head" from left to right, it takes a second to fill in the texture on the ground so I have these big blocks of blank color, then the texture fills in. Other than the two problems I listed above, I have no issues what-so-ever and things look incredible. I had never noticed these issues with my old GeForce2.
Thanks in advance!
One other thing, what kind of processor are you running RadarMan? Just curious... You should be able to get some more out of that card easily if you're running a decent processor.
Surprisingly enough I have a 2½ year old P-4 1.5gig with 512mb Rambus. I know just what you mean. I call the distance "shimmering", the buildings are crystal clear below and to the side but the far distance has that "look".
Nothing "fills in'" after a period of time as you say, maybe because I'm using the latest drivers, who can figure sometimes, the subtle differences can be attributed to anything.
All I know that it is a vast improvement over the old.
Did you download the latest DirectX and SP1, that may help.
By the way SP2 for WXP-Home is in beta, we may see some improvements there. |
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Guest
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| Posted: Sat Mar 20, 2004 5:40 pm |
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Yeah, I'm current on everything except Cat. 4.3 and that is by choice. I'm using Omega 4.2 Drivers for the vid card. I tried the 4.3's and the Omega 4.2's seem better. I'm at SP1... don't know anything else to do.... |
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RadarMan
Chief Captain
Joined: Aug 25, 2003
Posts: 16894
Location: U.S.A |
| Posted: Sun Mar 21, 2004 12:57 am |
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Anonymous wrote:Yeah, I'm current on everything except Cat. 4.3 and that is by choice. I'm using Omega 4.2 Drivers for the vid card. I tried the 4.3's and the Omega 4.2's seem better. I'm at SP1... don't know anything else to do.... |
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Rambunctious
First Officer
Joined: Mar 29, 2003
Posts: 110
Location: Sydney |
| Posted: Sun Mar 21, 2004 2:59 am |
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Heh!
I finally took the plunge and bought one too. Getting a US store to ship internationally is a right pain, though. I don't know whether the stress was worth the money I saved... 
Thanks radarman, and all the others who helped a lot in sorting out all the technobabble over these cards. |
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Guest
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| Posted: Sun Mar 21, 2004 3:06 am |
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Yeah.. just did those settings... still really shimmery. I don't like how it looks.... Like I said, don't remember having that with my old card.. I dunno. |
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RadarMan
Chief Captain
Joined: Aug 25, 2003
Posts: 16894
Location: U.S.A |
| Posted: Sun Mar 21, 2004 3:56 am |
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Rambunctious,
That's super , I know that you'll be more than happy with your choice. So far these are the settings that I've chosen. I don't know too much about this but so far it works,
(I hope the screen shots stay up, this is from a free host, I don't have my own website. 
Guest so far this is it for me, I'll let you know when I get hold of a (expert) friend of mine.  |
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jimmyglockner
Trainee
Joined: Jan 16, 2004
Posts: 92
Location: Upstate New York |
| Posted: Sun Mar 21, 2004 1:48 pm |
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Hello all. I am not much of a computer knowledgeable peson, so a lot of the chat here is way over my head. However, I will continue to read and maybe learn a little as I go.
I am going to try the 'Shift + Z' combination to try to see what my frame rate is.
Happy flying all.
JimmyGlockner |
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Brook
Trainee
Joined: Mar 12, 2004
Posts: 91
Location: San Francisco, CA |
| Posted: Tue Mar 23, 2004 6:18 pm |
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I've just ordered mine...
($219.69 pretax
Can't wait! |
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RadarMan
Chief Captain
Joined: Aug 25, 2003
Posts: 16894
Location: U.S.A |
| Posted: Tue Mar 23, 2004 6:53 pm |
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I paid $226.17, tax and shipping.
My bud paid $199.00+tax+shipping (about $11.00 less than me) a few weeks before and I was too late to get in on that one.
I came out pretty good.
By the way ATI has a trade in plan if you don't want to keep your old card, I did.
http://www.ati.com/buy/traderebate/tradeup.html |
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I've been playing around with the Anti Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering. I found that if I set them to 4x and 8x respectively and uncheck the 2 Application Performance boxes I get rid of the overwhelming majority of the "shimmering" amazing. 
