Hi,

I today installed the latest Cat drivers for my ATIX800pro, and have shown a reasonable performance hike in all of my games except LFS.
It used to run at 100fps+ , but now I am lucky if I get 20fps, averaging around 15fps which is frankly unplayable.
I havent changed anything in my system apart from the drivers, my specs are P4 3.4ghz, 1gb ram, and the X800pro.

Any help would be great.

Dan.

Go back to 5.11 then, possibly even go for the Omega ones:
www.omegadrivers.net

In testing I have found Omega's to not be as good as people say they are, also, why should I be forced back to an older driver?, everything else works fine with the new one, so should LFS.

Dan.

Quote from danowat :

why should I be forced back to an older driver?

Cuz it works

For the first time EVER the latest drivers have been worse than the previous ones.(for me anyway) I too have a P4 3.4 X800XT and 1.5gig of ram. With 5.11 I was getting 85-95 fps under any circumstances with 8x AA and 16x AF. With 5.12 it plummeted to 10-15 fps!:yikes: Moved back to 5.11 pretty damned quick!

Thank God I saw this thread. Got the same problem, Cat 5.12 run great with most games (I tried 10 different games) except LFS


Just roll back to the previous driver for now

Yes, but why?, why is it that LFS suffers so much with the new drivers and other games dont, all other games show improvements, but LFS has problems.

It doesnt bode well for future versions of drivers, so are well all stuck with 5.11's to get decent LFS performance?.

I would appreciate Scawen's input if possible.

Dan.

Quote from danowat :

also, why should I be forced back to an older driver?, everything else works fine with the new one, so should LFS.

Hmm.. lets see..
Previously all worked fine
You update a driver and don't change anything in LFS at all
Things go wrong

Who is at fault here? LFS or ATI?

Often there is little or no reason to upgrade the drivers. They rarely provide an increased performance for any but the newest cards, and when they do its minute (of course, there are bug fixes).

Basically graphics drivers need to know about the game in order to drive the game in the right way. By changing default behaviour, you can break support for games which the drivers do not "know". I'm 95% certain you'll find that theres some obsecure setting, or behaviour change in the new drivers.

The point I am trying to make is this, with the new drivers I get increased performance in 2 of my 3 main games, FS2004 & GTL, but the 3rd, LFS, gets poor performance, in my eyes LFS is at fault.
Why should I be FORCED to fore-go the perfomance increase in 2 games to solve the performance decrease in 1?.
What happens if someone new were to have 5.12 installed in their machine?, they would install the game thinking, well I have the latest drivers, this game must be shit because it runs so poorly.
Yes, I could go back to 5.11, but should I have too?

Dan.

Quote from danowat :

The point I am trying to make is this, with the new drivers I get increased performance in 2 of my 3 main games, FS2004 & GTL, but the 3rd, LFS, gets poor performance, in my eyes LFS is at fault.

Well your eyes are wrong

Regression Testing, that's what the ATI driver developers forgot. If ATI changes something in their drivers, it's not LFS's fault that it doesn't work with the new version as good as it did in their previous driver version.

Edit: Besides, ATI is really infamous of their drivers not working well with other than the mainstream games

Do you honestly expect Scawen to release a patch (if one were actually possible) for every new graphics driver? Thats just silly...

Situation1. Driver x and LFS 0.5Q = fine
Situation2. Driver (x+1) and LFS 0.5Q = not fine.

Looks like ATi as a(nother) bug in it's drivers. It's not the first time, and it won't be the last. Or, at a long shot, it's some obscure setting you've forgotten to change/update etc.

Why the hell is LFS at fault? This could happen to any number of games, and it HAS happened in the past MORE than once. HL2 didnt work on any new nvidia drivers for a long time. Is this the fault of Valve? No. Its nVidia. There is nothing a programmer can do, other than detect the current version of the drivers and say "Sorry, there are known issues with this driver version.".

All LFS does is push pologons at the graphics engine, which then does some culling, and shading and then passes this information to the chosen graphics framework, in the same manner as other games - using the DirectX framework. This could be an issue with all DirectX 8 games. If its just an issue with LFS then, as I say, its most likely an arbitary change in behaviour in the driver.

Quote from Danowat :

What happens if someone new were to have 5.12 installed in their machine

They should do the sensible thing and ask questions/do some debugging. I must admit I was well pissed off with getting HL2 and discovering I had to downgrade my driver over 3 revisions to play it; But its the choice of the user what they do. I chose to downgrade. Once fed up with this, I changed back to the latest version of the driver. No one is FORCING you to do anything. No one is FORCING you to upgrade and get an arbitary performance increase. I'm sure that those games dont run that slowly on your card.

Inform them about the bug.

I don't have them but make sure adaptive antialiasing isn't on if it's in the drivers.

Omega 5.12 works just as well as 5.11.
9800PRO

The strange thing is, I have found LFS to be one of the lesser nigglely programs in regards to drivers, I have had rock solid fast performance with every release of the ATI driver forever, but not with this latest one, infact, I dont think I can ever recall any program have such an adverse effect (100fps to 15fps) to a new driver.
Hopefully Scawen can look into it and discover why, it might be a simple switch that can be switched.

Dan.

Quote from danowat :

The strange thing is, I have found LFS to be one of the lesser nigglely programs in regards to drivers, I have had rock solid fast performance with every release of the ATI driver forever, but not with this latest one, in fact, I dont think I can ever recall any program have such an adverse effect (100fps to 15fps) to a new driver.

I agree 100%

Quote from danowat :

Hopefully Scawen can look into it and discover why, it might be a simple switch that can be switched.
Dan.

As has been said already, it's not LFS's problem. This is a case of "Mmm, odd that" Revert to the old drivers and return to enjoying life.

The new drivers has slowed down my games too. How do you go back to the older ones? You just re-install them?

And where can I download the 5.11 drivers?

Yes, just use the ATI uninstall routine from your add/remove programs box, I have gone back to 5.11's, back up to 100fps again.

Dan.

Well, I dunno about ATi drivers, but I guess that has to be a 'feature' that probably was disabled due to a bug in the old drivers. Maybe it's something like the adaptive antialiasing screwing with LFS, but I'd first try to change some driver settings before giving LFS the fault.

Changed ALL driver settings, no joy, changed settings in LFS, no joy, changed back to 5.11's fine, bottomline is 5.12's do not work well in LFS, regardless of "blame".

Dan.

Quote from Vinc :

The new drivers has slowed down my games too. How do you go back to the older ones? You just re-install them?

And where can I download the 5.11 drivers?

https://support.ati.com/ics/su ... knowledge&folderID=27
Look for 'previous drivers'

Quote from danowat :

Changed ALL driver settings, no joy, changed settings in LFS, no joy, changed back to 5.11's fine, bottomline is 5.12's do not work well in LFS, regardless of "blame".

Dan.

sry to hear this Dan ,

This slowdown has not affected my system with 5.12 however I have a 9800 pro not an x8xx card , Dan is it PCIeX or AGP?

I take it you have tried with haze effect on/off and with aa at different settings ect ? do you use the ccc or just the display drivers ?
either way if you email ATI support they should look into it.

SD.

Quote from Doorman :

https://support.ati.com/ics/su ... knowledge&folderID=27
Look for 'previous drivers'

Thanks.

Hi Dave,

Yes, I have tried pretty much every setting, I suspect it could be due to the ccc, as this is the first driver release I have used with it.
I get a max of 15fps with the 5.12's and 100+fps with the 5.11's, thats a HUGE difference just for a set of drivers.
I will speak to ATI support.

Cheers

Dan.