I recently bought HD3870 and i have notice that LFS stutters quite lot. I had nvidia 7900gt before and it never had that kind of problem. So if anyone else have 38xx card i would be interested to know how it's working.

Did you thoroughly uninstall the Nvidia drivers before you put the new card in? As in using a program like Driver Cleaner 3? Nvidia and ATI drivers do not play nicely together.

Does this happen only in LFS, or other games as well?

Yes i did and used Driversweeper and i have newest catalyst 7.12 too

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Quote from Lateralus :

Does this happen only in LFS, or other games as well?

No, not all games, but oddly with all driving games

I have a PowerColor 3870, and I have no problems at all.

Anywhere between 300 and 450 fps at 2560x1600 32 bit, depending on the view.
The CPU is overclocked, but the graphics card isn't ...

I'm using the latest 7.12 drivers, under Windows Vista Ultimate 64 bit.

Did you uninstall all the old drivers (nVidia or ATI) before installing the 7.12?
Tried closing all the programs open apart from LFS? Defrag? etc etc.
Tried updating other drivers in your system, sound, chipset, etc?

Try checking the settings in Catalyst as well, if you'd altered something, put it back to default.

I think it is texture loading related issue because it gets better after 1lap Well, it's always the same when you buy new computer equipment, it's the customers that do the beta testing BTW my 3870 runs on XP pro.

I have a 3850 and performance wise it works ok, almost never drops below 60fps, but I have not gotten AF nor AA working in LFS. Driver version is 7.11.

I got AA & AF working with hotkeys, but it's kinda emergency solution still something better gomes around (ati tray tools with rv670 support). Best thing would be that Scawen finally make options for AA/AF in the game, so we cant get permanent solution to the problem.

This is a bit worrying considering I'm planning on upgrading to a 3870 early next year. Well, apart from the 'Anywhere between 300 and 450 fps at 2560x1600' part... that sounds nice.

One reason- ATI is great at making cards, but fail at making decent drivers. My friend updated to 7.12 and it was so bad for him he went back to his previous driver.

Quote from h3adbang3r :

One reason- ATI is great at making cards, but fail at making decent drivers. My friend updated to 7.12 and it was so bad for him he went back to his previous driver.

The problem in this case is that the older drivers may not support this new card. I don't really know for sure. So if this is the case, he's really limited in terms of what he can do.

I updated my ATi Radeon Xpress 200 Series to the new Catalyst. I never had catalyst before untill my grafix started acting weird and my uncle told me to download that...I used to run inbetween .2-40 FPS constantly, now im running between 20-160 FPS..

Might be the drivers....make sure you uninstall everything about nVidia or which ever card you put in...I forgot to uninstall my old drivers to put catalyst in and it wouldnt work right so i uninstalled everything then downloaded catalyst and it started working right..

Quote from shiny_red_cobra :

The problem in this case is that the older drivers may not support this new card. I don't really know for sure. So if this is the case, he's really limited in terms of what he can do.

Yes, there ain't too many choices on drivers. As i know, there is only three drivers (cat7.10, 7.11 & 7.12) that supports 3870. If someone knows more i'm surely willing to test them

Not helpful really, but like romus74 I'm on a 3850 (which is basically a slower 3870) and I had no problems on neither the 7.11 nor the 7.12 drivers (Vista 64). AA & AF also works just fine if I set it in the control center, both manually and through profiles.

Have you tried completely removing the ATI drivers and installing them again? You could also try updating motherboard drivers. Could be an issue there I guess?

Also, you said it only happened in driving games? Sure it isn't related you your wheel/controller somehow? Have you tired disconnecting it to see?

Maybe 3870 works better on Vista or 3870 hates my other hardware.