BioShock Performance with AA

[JPB]

Why did they not test the HD 2900XT also in this review ?

Bioshock Performance with AA

 

[Laminator]

As it stands now, AA only works in BioShock?s DX9 mode, and only with GeForce hardware. We tried forcing AA with the Radeon HD 2900 XT under both Windows Vista and WinXP with all four custom filter AA modes (including edge detect) and couldn?t get AA to work properly in BioShock. We asked AMD if they plan on adding AA support to BioShock in a future Catalyst driver revision but couldn?t get a direct answer. The only way to enable AA under BioShock with Radeon cards is to rename the BioShock executable from ?bioshock.exe? to ?Oblivion.exe?. Keep in mind by doing this though, AMD?s driver-level optimizations for the game are automatically disabled, and as a result, performance suffers ? we recorded a frame rate of just 26.7 fps for the 2900 XT with the executable renamed to Oblivion.exe running our manual walkthrough sequence under 4xAA at 1600x1200. (Surprisingly enough, the Radeon X1950 Pro delivered a frame rate of 20.9 fps under the exact same scenario) Because of this, AMD?s Dave Baumann told us flat out not to run the game with the renamed executable.

 

[cmdrdredd]

Originally posted by: Laminator

As it stands now, AA only works in BioShock?s DX9 mode, and only with GeForce hardware. We tried forcing AA with the Radeon HD 2900 XT under both Windows Vista and WinXP with all four custom filter AA modes (including edge detect) and couldn?t get AA to work properly in BioShock. We asked AMD if they plan on adding AA support to BioShock in a future Catalyst driver revision but couldn?t get a direct answer. The only way to enable AA under BioShock with Radeon cards is to rename the BioShock executable from ?bioshock.exe? to ?Oblivion.exe?. Keep in mind by doing this though, AMD?s driver-level optimizations for the game are automatically disabled, and as a result, performance suffers ? we recorded a frame rate of just 26.7 fps for the 2900 XT with the executable renamed to Oblivion.exe running our manual walkthrough sequence under 4xAA at 1600x1200. (Surprisingly enough, the Radeon X1950 Pro delivered a frame rate of 20.9 fps under the exact same scenario) Because of this, AMD?s Dave Baumann told us flat out not to run the game with the renamed executable.

This game was paid for by Nvidia. It shows. It's not that the Radeon cards can't do it, far from it. It's that the game is specifically made so that it will skew results in favor of Nvidia. It is a TWIMTBP game after all :roll:

 

[Ackmed]

HardOCP used AA. Seemingly without issues. They renamed it to Oblivion though.

 

[cmdrdredd]

Originally posted by: Ackmed
HardOCP used AA. Seemingly without issues. They renamed it to Oblivion though.

Hence the issue here...you lose performance. They deliberately made it difficult for ATI cards to function 100%. The same thing happened in UT2004 at release, it would run terribly on the fastest ATI cards, but was nice on Nvidia ones. Later after ATI got the drivers updated for it the Nvidia advantage disappeared and the cards from ATI were performing better at certain resolutions and aa/af levels.

 

[Sonikku]

It reminds me of the time Half Life 2 suspiciously ran poorly on Nvidia hardware at release when compared to ATI, only to see the gap narrow considerably when Nvidia fans found work arounds to Valve's engine. It seems this time around Nvidia has done something similar. It's things like this that really make me hate the PC industry. -_-

 

[cmdrdredd]

Originally posted by: Sonikku
It reminds me of the time Half Life 2 suspiciously ran poorly on Nvidia hardware at release when compared to ATI, only to see the gap narrow considerably when Nvidia fans found work arounds to Valve's engine. It seems this time around Nvidia has done something similar. It's things like this that really make me hate the PC industry. -_-

Actually Half-Life 2 didn't cripple features of a card this is totally different.

 

[Cookie Monster]

I smell a troll.

 

[quattro1]

Originally posted by: cmdrdredd

This game was paid for by Nvidia. It shows. It's not that the Radeon cards can't do it, far from it. It's that the game is specifically made so that it will skew results in favor of Nvidia. It is a TWIMTBP game after all :roll:

lol, pure comedy, wonder why you say that, because you have an ATI card? Bioshock's engine does not support AA. Any AA to be applied to the game has to be done in the driver(correctly), by either NVIDIA or ATI. Nothing keeping each one from adding that support in their own driver, it's completely independent of the game.

 

[cmdrdredd]

Originally posted by: quattro1

Originally posted by: cmdrdredd

This game was paid for by Nvidia. It shows. It's not that the Radeon cards can't do it, far from it. It's that the game is specifically made so that it will skew results in favor of Nvidia. It is a TWIMTBP game after all :roll:

lol, pure comedy, wonder why you say that, because you have an ATI card? Bioshock's engine does not support AA. Any AA to be applied to the game has to be done in the driver(correctly), by either NVIDIA or ATI. Nothing keeping each one from adding that support in their own driver, it's completely independent of the game.

The Unreal3 engine does support AA though...poor code is poor code. How else do you explain being able to rename the .exe and then enable AA? It's a simple fact that they wrote it in for Nvidia's benefit since they paid for the logo on the box etc.

ATI had a slight advantage at the first release of half-life 2 as well, being sponsored by ATI in some way. I don't agree with either case. Should be open code really in that it works with every card equally to the best of its ability.

FYI: every single game that has had the logo from nvidia on it had some issue that made ATI cards suffer forcing a rewrite of the drivers while other games run perfectly fine. Why do you think that is?

 

[Cookie Monster]

Its called marketing. Get use to the term. And unless you have any evidence backing up your bold statement, stop making yourself look like a ATi fanboy.

Do you want me to start a thread on COJ and the removal of hardware based AA that caused at least 15% performance drop on the G80s?

 

[Cookie Monster]

Its most probably a driver issue, so dont jump into rather bold conclusions.

 

[PhatoseAlpha]

Seems pretty cut and dried to me. You know Ati's drivers are keying on the executable file name and altering the way they do things. They've said so. Suspect #1 here is that Ati's driver optimizations are what's killing the AA.

 

[cmdrdredd]

Originally posted by: PhatoseAlpha
Seems pretty cut and dried to me. You know Ati's drivers are keying on the executable file name and altering the way they do things. They've said so. Suspect #1 here is that Ati's driver optimizations are what's killing the AA.

And Nvidia never does this?

my facts are that Nvidia pays out money to companies to optimize a game for their cards over the competition. "The Way it's Ment to be Played" has always been this way.

But still, the game should have AA options in the settings. By todays standard, regardless of my statement above or not, this is pretty poor quality from a developer.

I'm done here anyway, the game runs fine on either hardware. If you think that 50fps is unplayable in a game that is this slow, then I cannot help you there. It's fine...AA aside

 

[BFG10K]

They deliberately made it difficult for ATI cards to function 100%.

That's not happening here because AA is forced through the driver, not through the application. Also it uses nVidia's R6 Vegas flag which nVidia had working a while ago but AFAIK ATi still don't have AA working in that game.

What ATi needs is a Chuck patch for Bioshock.

The Unreal3 engine does support AA though

Only through DX10 according to the developer which again has nothing to do with nVidia's driver level implementation.

How else do you explain being able to rename the .exe and then enable AA?

Because it activates the AA flag that Oblivion uses ("Chuck patch"). Again that has nothing to do with the application, it's at the driver level.

Having said that it's rather strange they're getting AA since the Chuck patch doesn't account for deferred rendering which Bioshock uses. I'd wager they're getting a performance hit but no actual AA.

 

[BFG10K]

It reminds me of the time Half Life 2 suspiciously ran poorly on Nvidia hardware at release when compared to ATI,

HL2 ran poorly because NV3x shader performance sucked balls. That wasn't Valve's fault, nor was it their fault they had to implement a mixed mode path to get acceptable performance.

only to see the gap narrow considerably when Nvidia fans found work arounds to Valve's engine.

Details?

 

[cmdrdredd]

Originally posted by: BFG10K

They deliberately made it difficult for ATI cards to function 100%.

That's not happening here because AA is forced through the driver, not through the application. Also it uses nVidia's R6 Vegas flag which nVidia had working a while ago but AFAIK ATi still don't have AA working in that game.

What ATi needs is a Chuck patch for Bioshock.

The Unreal3 engine does support AA though

Only through DX10 according to the developer which again has nothing to do with nVidia's driver level implementation.

How else do you explain being able to rename the .exe and then enable AA?

Because it activates the AA flag that Oblivion uses ("Chuck patch"). Again that has nothing to do with the application, it's at the driver level.

Having said that it's rather strange they're getting AA since the Chuck patch doesn't account for deferred rendering which Bioshock uses. I'd wager they're getting a performance hit but no actual AA.

Interesting last note there. No AA but crap performance. Anyway the game looks decent enough and it runs fine for me. No complaints really.

 

[BroadbandGamer]

I'm still kind of pissed I can't enable AA on Vista with an 8800 GTX.:|

 

[Keysplayr]

Originally posted by: BroadbandGamer
I'm still kind of pissed I can't enable AA on Vista with an 8800 GTX.:|

What happens when you enable AA in the drivers? Or is that option greyed out when in the Bioshock profile in Vista? I haven't tried it yet. AA in the drivers works nice in XP though, (sorry ). Hopefully, 2K will release some game patches to address these issues.

 

[n7]

Originally posted by: keysplayr2003

Originally posted by: BroadbandGamer
I'm still kind of pissed I can't enable AA on Vista with an 8800 GTX.:|

What happens when you enable AA in the drivers? Or is that option greyed out when in the Bioshock profile in Vista? I haven't tried it yet. AA in the drivers works nice in XP though, (sorry ). Hopefully, 2K will release some game patches to address these issues.

Nothing happens.

It's not greyed out in the profiles, but then again, profiles haven't worked on the last few driver sets IIRC, so i force things globally.

You can set 16x AA & it does nothing.

 

[Keysplayr]

Originally posted by: n7

Originally posted by: keysplayr2003

Originally posted by: BroadbandGamer
I'm still kind of pissed I can't enable AA on Vista with an 8800 GTX.:|

What happens when you enable AA in the drivers? Or is that option greyed out when in the Bioshock profile in Vista? I haven't tried it yet. AA in the drivers works nice in XP though, (sorry ). Hopefully, 2K will release some game patches to address these issues.

Nothing happens.

It's not greyed out in the profiles, but then again, profiles haven't worked on the last few driver sets IIRC, so i force things globally.

You can set 16x AA & it does nothing.

And it's set to "override game options"?

 

[Sonikku]

Originally posted by: BFG10K

It reminds me of the time Half Life 2 suspiciously ran poorly on Nvidia hardware at release when compared to ATI,

HL2 ran poorly because NV3x shader performance sucked balls. That wasn't Valve's fault, nor was it their fault they had to implement a mixed mode path to get acceptable performance.

only to see the gap narrow considerably when Nvidia fans found work arounds to Valve's engine.

Details?

http://shenmue.planets.gamespy...2703&highlight=#552703

 

[n7]

Originally posted by: keysplayr2003

And it's set to "override game options"?

Yeah.
But it doesn't matter.
None of the AA modes work. At all.
It's all a pretty Biojaggieshock.

 

[cmdrdredd]

Originally posted by: n7

Originally posted by: keysplayr2003

And it's set to "override game options"?

Yeah.
But it doesn't matter.
None of the AA modes work. At all.
It's all a pretty Biojaggieshock.

Well, I'm almost finished with the game at this point. Then I'll uninstall it. Don't need AA or 2 thousand fps.

 

[tuteja1986]

Originally posted by: Cookie Monster
Its called marketing. Get use to the term. And unless you have any evidence backing up your bold statement, stop making yourself look like a ATi fanboy.

Do you want me to start a thread on COJ and the removal of hardware based AA that caused at least 15% performance drop on the G80s?

We all know your an Nvidia fanboy. Anyways :! AMD driver are pretty awesome for XP if think about it.

Bioshock
Company of heroes Dx10 patch
World in conflict

All went gold knowing ATI gpu would have some issues for Vista/XP DX9 and Vista DX10. Then ATI does it magic and we get some tweaked driver that keep up or beat up in some cases the 8800GTS 640MB. Bioshock DX9 hotfix for XP is an example as it keeps up with 8800GTX.

Crysis is pretty much the only DX10 game that i know that has been throughly tested for ATI and Nvidia GPU.