OT...ATI-AMD Vid Card drivers...

[Duckie]

Any ATI/AMD video card users here on the latest Catalyst drivers (14.501.1003xxx)?

If so, any problems? Any improvements over pervious generations?

My card is a Sapphire Radeon Dual-X R9 270 2GB GDDR5 and I have not upgraded drivers since the install over a year ago. My current driver = 14.10.1006xxx

I'm not experiencing any problems but if there are performance improvements in a upgrade then I'd interested to know. If not, well, it ain't broke so I won't fix it!

Thanks,
Steve

[StormILM]

I have the latest drivers (non-beta) installed. No issues.

[YoYo]

I have the latest drivers (non-beta) installed. No issues.

I have 14.12, no any problems too.

Someone has Fury X? Id like to know how it works with P3D and FSX . I'm thinking.....

[Hdguy]

I never change them unless the release notes say they fix an issue I am having... They don't, and I have no issues.

[StormILM]

I will say this, I have my Catalyst set up with different presets which one is specifically optimized for FSX. Reason being(and in my experience) that some settings render better FPS & Visual performance from one program to another as opposed to keeping one general setting. The preset option makes performance adjustments easy!

[Duckie]

Thanks very much for the responses, guys.

StormILM, I too use presets for much the same reason as you.

[Stefano Zibell]

14.12 gives me the best performance. I Tried newer betas, they were so bad I reverted back.

[YoYo]

Btw. the new driver OUT! 15.7

http://support.amd.com/en-us/download

For owners from 7790 and better GPU new option - Frame Rate Target Control (FRTC) .

It will work as external FPS limiter but perhaps it not will work with Dx9 and FSX (Dx10 and more only, not tested).

[Duckie]

Thank you for the replies.

I went with the 14.12 which is the latest approved driver for my card. Still a PITA to have to setup everything all over again but I can see a little improvement.

[CG_1976]

I'm on 15.4

[StormILM]

Made the jump to AMD 15.7 just a little while ago(making sure I still had my previous drivers on hand just in case the new version cause problems). After a brief test, 15.7 is a very significant improvement for me in terms of rendering, texture loading speed and enhanced smoothness in the video performance.

[YoYo]

Made the jump to AMD 15.7 just a little while ago(making sure I still had my previous drivers on hand just in case the new version cause problems). After a brief test, 15.7 is a very significant improvement for me in terms of rendering, texture loading speed and enhanced smoothness in the video performance.

Thx. I must install it too. Did You check this FPS external limiter in FSX or P3D?

[Duckie]

@Storm and CG_1976

What is your OS? I'm on Win7 64 Home Prem. If you are Win7, any problems. Reason I ask is that AMD site recommends latest preview version of Win 10 to ensure stability and no support for these drivers (15.7) until Win 10 is released and then 10 only.

[StormILM]

Thx. I must install it too. Did You check this FPS external limiter in FSX or P3D?

Unfortunately my video card falls a couple short of the 7790 bottom line, I have the HD7770 Pro 2gb. FPS still seems smoother.

[fuzz1]

Just installed the 15.7 drivers. I couldn't believe what my eyes were telling me, for this is the single most effective performance enhancement to fsx I've yet experienced in my many year quest chasing this unicorn. Something quite significant seems to have been done by AMD that affects fsx, and I'm guessing other DX9 titles. I'm using an XFX HD7870 under windows 7 - 64 with a 3.6 oc'd i7 920. My frames have literally doubled in poor weather and I can finally fly in heavy thunderstorms (DX9 locked at 30fps...Orbx, Rex4, 1440p). With the 14.12 drivers I was getting 11-14 fps in similar situations, and up to that point the 14.12's were the best that I'd tried.

Textures also seem to load faster. There's a trade off that I will attempt to research further....more shimmering surface textures and 'dot crawl' is evident, as though the antialiasing isn't quite 'taking' 100%, but I haven't had a chance to play with new Catalyst and fsx settings for a possible cure. These artifacts are comparatively minor and appear more evident with exterior aircraft rivet lines, airport flagpoles, etc. If this can't be fixed I'll happily live with it for the dramatic performance increase I appear to be enjoying. Overall the fidelity doesn't appear as crisp as with the 14.12's but it's not that far off.

One thing I noticed; I ran FSX right after the driver install without rebooting and the shimmering/dot crawl was more pronounced than after a reboot.
I'm hoping some AMD guru's out there will offer a few suggestions as to how to optimize Catalyst and fsx settings in light of these new fantastic drivers. The changes to these drivers possibly makes
previous well-known catalyst/fsx tweaks redundant or event counter-productive.

If you have an AMD card that would benefit from these drivers I think it is a no-brainer that you should try them. I think AMD customers have finally been tossed a much needed and long overdue driver overhaul that actually does something for fsx.

[Navy Chief]

I installed the new driver as well. Haven't put FSX Steam through its paces yet. Just a cursory glance. No problems noted yet though.

Only thing I had to do was make a minor adjustment to my monitor settings. So far so good.

Am still running a HD5870 card

NC

[Duckie]

Just installed the 15.7 CCC suite. 1st impressions are that, in general, apps and textures seem to load noticeably quicker. FSX, I don't see any noticeable improvement in frame rates. Frames locked at 30 and general stay bumped up against that threshold. Running Orbx Global and Vector. The Milviz F-4 still puts a good strain on it bouncing between 16 and 30 FPS. Unless something else changes I'll probably stick with these drivers.

[fuzz1]

Well, after further tinkering I seem to have jumped the gun as to impressions over my 100% frame rate increases in cloudy weather from the 15.7 drivers.
Turns out, having installed the 15.7's over my 14.12 installation, for the first time in over a dozen times of doing it this way there were consequences.
I used to religiously uninstall and thoroughly clean prior driver versions before installing new ones, but for the last few years I've gotten lazy and simply
installed the new ones over the old with absolutely no ill-effects.....until now.

What appears to have happened is the new install didn't quite agree with the old and many Catalyst features were not functioning properly, creating
a witches brew of active and inactive features as between Catalyst and FSX settings. It somehow borked my fsx Catalyst profile and I could not even change
any of the parameters to have effect in fsx. The end results were compromises in image quality but massive performance gains, particularly with clouds.
The result of this 'forced' configuration Catalyst chose for me wasn't too bad really...I've never quite experienced such silkiness with massive cloud/low visibility
situations before. Anyway, at least I learned a little more about what features in ccc and fsx enhance or detract performance, particularly in bad weather.

I uninstalled the mess I created, thoroughly cleaned with a driver utility, reinstalled and all is ok again. Set up a new fsx profile and catalyst now works as
it should, meaning the changes applied or inactivated have a very visible effect in fsx once again. Lesson learned, henceforth I'll always uninstall and clean out old
drivers before installing the new ones.

A tip for those experimenting with settings: You can alt-tab into windowed mode, launch Catalyst, make desired changes and alt-tab back to full screen to see the
effect immediately applied.

Overall the drivers are an improvement nonetheless. I've gained a few valuable frames, textures load faster and image quality is, as it always has been with
MD, superb. So although these drivers aren't quite the magic I thought they were on account of my installation malfunction, they are in fact an improvement.

For those contemplating the new drivers, avoid the headaches I encountered and perform a proper uninstall of your prior version. The 15.7's seem particularly sensitive to this.

Is there a way to set up multiple catalyst profiles for the same .exe file? I'd like to have an instant configuration for performance and another for eye-candy if possible.

[StormILM]

Glad you got that sorted out. I learned the same long ago and as a habit I use the express-uninstall option and keep the new installer and previous version handy on the desktop so I can both easily facilitate the switch but also revert if something goes wrong(which has happened with some older versions of Ati/AMD driver packages). For me, my Catalyst profile presets were kept and reapplied to the new version and but clearly, all the other elements of the previous version were removed and replaced. With my custom FSX config and other tweaks, some models work well and stay at target FPS when set at 30 FPS but with some models, I need to set to Unlimited FPS to get smooth FPS performance. However, when I fly some models, I need to revert back to the 30 FPS setting or I'll end up getting artifacts in the REX sky textures. One other thing I do to help with faster texture loading is temporarily disabling the Superfetch in my services.msc. Using that tweak made a noticeable enhancement with texture loading speed/smoothness.

[CG_1976]

I sit on Windows 8.1 with a reservation for W10. I am 110% fluid performance.