AA might be hurting your frame rates with everything enabled, and could kill any chance you have of running the hi res texture pack with playable frame rates.
I'll try the high res texture pack, but it is supposed to be run only on 1gb + cards. Might have to try to hack it I guess...
IMHO nvidia has taught amd the advantages of TWIMTBP-type agreements. It was very big news when SC2 came out with issues on AMD cards, and batman was just a fiasco for AMD (at first). Now, AMD is going for some payback. It would be cool for all of us to hang out in fields and look at double rainbows all day while singing hymnals. However, I suspect that as long as AMD/Nvidia think that $2 million given to crytek/EA/etc will sell them more cards than spending that money on better components/additional R&D/etc, we're going to see this trend continue.
http://www.geforce.com/#/News/articles/r270-driver/
6.2 times faster is quite the improvement. There was obviously some major bug in the nvidia driver that DA2 hit on which has apparently been resolved. Now they perform like normal cards.
Has there been any IQ reviews? While I'm not accusing anyone of anything, such a huge performance gain makes you wonder who threw the monkey wrench into something or are there corners being cut some where.
With all these recent "driver optimization" stories going around consider me weary of any of the two brands suddenly gaining in excess of 200% performance increases.
http://hardocp.com/article/2011/04/04/dragon_age_2_performance_followup
There goes the 300-500% performance jump. It's more like 30% :awe:
30% is not correct for most systems/settings, before grooveriding's vacation he mentioned that it was much more than that for him. DA2 does appear to be a game that favors AMD, however.
NVIDIA was aware of the performance problems with Dragon Age 2, and have been working on performance. The official response from NVIDIA was that NVIDIA did not have access to early builds of DA2, however once it gained access to the game the driver team did jump on it and tuned up application performance. We have seen this happen with many games in the past, on both sides either favoring NVIDIA or favoring AMD by not having access to early builds, which means that when the game is launched the driver has not been properly tuned. It is a shame really, because from a gamers perspective we want the best experience we can get on game launch, not several weeks later. It is a state of the gaming and video card business, and it sucks mostly for us, the gamer, we always seem to get the short end of the stick due to these practices. Honestly we think teams Red and Green actually think this gives the companies some sort of competitive benefit, but truly we think it just shows how little the companies care about its customers' needs.
from the article:
I agree with that conclusion... this kind of behavior does NOT impress me.
we think it just shows how little the companies care about its customers' needs..
http://hardocp.com/article/2011/04/04/dragon_age_2_performance_followup
There goes the 300-500% performance jump. It really is like 300-500% :awe:
I could never imagine a driver issue of this magnitude. NV's driver team needs a bonus.
But can AMD's driver team fix their Need for Speed Shift 2 performance in much the same way?
The 580 is over 50% faster than the 6970 in a dx9 game, LOLBut can AMD's driver team fix their Need for Speed Shift 2 performance in much the same way?
Yeah that xbit one just proves what you can find when you try out every setting then opt for the one which shows Nvidia in a good light. HQ and 8x AA? What a joke, no gamer would ever choose that option.
I am curious, what option would a "gamer" choose then?
I'd suggest most would aim for 60fps minimum. They sure wouldn't sacrifice 30 fps or more for 8xAA.
Well sure there are no set rules, but I would definitely take issue with a benchmark that doesn't have the highest IQ settings yet has 8xAA. There is only one reason to do that, and it's all about benchmark numbers looking good on one colour of card.