AMD: 2D Performance Progress in Windows 7 With Catalyst 10.4?

[Guest]

Igor,
Do you think the image increase could come from Windows 7 double buffer thing? (something Win XP does not have, and implemented in Vista to prevent windows from hanging if one application has a delay in updating the video card about it's changes; ...hard to explain..)?

Second, did you do some power saving benchmarks when running these tests in the regular and accelerated state?
You could see if the graphics card treats the polygons as 3D instead of 2D, and see if the 2D powerdraw increases significantly with this boost or not.
If the GPU does not increase it's powerdraw, it may be that the CPU helps out drawing those polygons and lines.
You gotta look into that possibility too!

 

[Guest]

As for the comment that noone uses 2D, I perhaps think that watching DivX, XVid, and H264 video uses 2D acceleration. Some players like Media player Classic you can choose between 2D or 3D acceleration (with one of the latest FFDSHOW and CCCCodec Pack), and I am of the impression that on slower computers, and laptops using the Intel GMA video hardware, that some of those computers have problems showing 720p and 1080i video's with a lot of panning, or where large parts of the screen are panning.
I could be wrong here, but hope that somehow this driver update could also benefit 2D panning (often seen in anime) in compressed movies.

 

[knowom]

"One Small Restriction

Despite significant improvements made by the ATI driver developers and Nvidia, the two graphics manufacturers are not exactly soiling themselves with glory. The performance level that Windows XP sported in 2D is still very much missing."

Ironically that's the biggest restriction preventing me from even considering the thought of wanting to switch to windows 7, but it's got a few other fairly big issues I dislike with the OS as well.

 

[falchard]

I don't think you quite get where I was going with that. I didn't say anything about Video Decoding. I said for modern game development you just don't use Direct 2D anymore because Microsoft no longer keeps up with it and its advised to use 3D instead.

There is the point of reason, why would you need to playback movies at above 1080i over 200 fps? Its just not worth the investment to put that man transistors in for video when you can get a few thousand more polies to run in real time.

 

[ready4dis]

My guess is the card is staying in some sort of power savings mode, then when launching something that requires 3d, it bumps out and increases speed. That's the most logical conclusion, you should also do power comparisons to verify, it's possible ATI simply got rid of a bit of power savings to bump performance also.

 

[frostyfireball]

My 4870 doesn't throttle it's clock speed down at all, it sits at 775 no matter what I'm doing. Anyone know how to fix it?

 

[MCMunroe]

[citation][nom]Poisoner[/nom]What was insane about his post?[/citation]

He was quoting from Old School. A bit of a long quote but fun.

 

[MCMunroe]

I remember an simular odd performance issue that plagued Never Winter Nights 2. The game used both 3d portaits and 2d bic portaits. For some god forsaken reason having the 2d portaits on screen in the game killed the game performance. Often from smooth to slide show. This was verified by editing the same creatures to use the 3d dynamicly generatated portaits instead of the 2d art and replaying the same area.

This issue was so odd that I was considered a heritic in the larger community. But the solution was effective enough to be implemented by several Persistant Worlds with good results.
Any chance that some sort of simular issue is happening in this NWN2 case. Rendering 2d caused a huge performance hit?

 

[liquidsnake718]

eh... i never had a problem with my card

 

[Guest]

Anyone know what the cpu heatsink is?

 

[mitch074]

@ready4dis: 2D performance doesn't actually rely upon the GPU's clock - not by a long shot, considering how powerful even an IGP is nowadays. Personally, I would guess that the presence of a D2D device changes the timings or buffer size of a userspace->kernel space buffer somewhere at a lower level than both D2D and GDI, making sending a bunch of operations much faster. XP wouldn't have that problem since there was no userspace->kernel space translation on GDI operations, and would be much faster (but may need more polling, which is detrimental to power consumption)

It's like a highway: if you open all toll booths, you'll have much less traffic jams than if you only have a few open; but if you remove the toll booths, you have no jams at all - but run the risk of having a toy car (the kind you can drive without license) winding up on it.

 

[Guest]

To "fix" the high idle clocks, volts, and temps, press Default button in CCC. It will put you back to the lowest power play setting. Unfortunately that also dumps your overclocks. To work around that, you can set up profiles to turn on in CCC or afterburner when you play games. Enough people have complained about this that hopefully they fix this in the next driver.

 

[amdfangirl]

Kudos, sweet article.

 

[demonhorde665]

eh this doesnt really affectme , sicne i'm stil on win xp (thoguh as soon as i can im updating to win7 64 bit)

oh and wow on that 4870 idleing at 600 , my 5770 idles at 157 mhz

 

[Transsive]

My 4780 card wasn't idling... it was stuck at 750 mhz. A restart fixed that though, back to 500.

I wonder if 2D performance is related to the performance in the new Steam client.
Middle click scrolling is very laggy for me. (maximized at 1920x1200)

 

[JohnnyLucky]

Went to check on downloads. Discovered ATI CCC 10.5 was available.

 

[scrumworks]

Nice to see improvements. Does anybody notice difference in everyday use? Unlikely.

 

[kokin]

How strange, my 4890 Toxic idles even lower at 240mhz. It does go up to 500mhz, though it needs to run multiple videos to get it going and a full 3D game to run it at 1000mhz.

 

[nukemaster]

I think the cards firmware has control over the 2d/3d speeds. My 5870 idles at 157mhz and 300mhz mem. Mine are all the Stock ATI one, I think Saphire has custom firmware settings

 

[mitch074]

@demonhorde665: the R700 chip family was set up with very conservative idle speeds, for the power stages on all cards may not have been able to handle such drastic power variations. The power stage requirements on R800 were redesigned to ensure that they had no problems handling these, and also to circumvent the effects 'power viruses' like FurMark may have on them.

This is written on a screen running from an original 2008 HD4850 with its VBIOS modified to run at 160/500 MHz at idle.

 

[1pp1k10k4m1]

[citation][nom]the greater good[/nom]TA152H, what you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.[/citation]

thegreatergood...what you did was steal a line from Billy Madison without crediting it. And you tried to use it against someone who had a very rational response.

 

[howiejcee]

We are the consumers who pay for, and thus expect, a quality product. If ATI and NVIDIA are smart and not lazy, then they would do their best to provide said quality product in all possible aspects, maximize performance in any way possible to keep their customers happy, and to thus increase their respective market share.

Also, the argument that 2D doesn't affect users is invalid because there are applications that are affected significantly...

 

[kokin]

[citation][nom]howiejcee[/nom]We are the consumers who pay for, and thus expect, a quality product. If ATI and NVIDIA are smart and not lazy, then they would do their best to provide said quality product in all possible aspects, maximize performance in any way possible to keep their customers happy, and to thus increase their respective market share.Also, the argument that 2D doesn't affect users is invalid because there are applications that are affected significantly...[/citation]
Especially some of us who do play old 2D games or use browser applications.

 

[Guest]

TA152H: Vista was indeed a problem but win7 performs really better. Of course it needs more memory and HDD, but this is not a big problem, since hardware is also improving.
And about OS/2 Warp4. It was more stable and knew more than nt4, but it was not really fast... And IBM missed to improve driver-support and app-transfer. An missed to force MS to abandon penalty-prices for win in case a PC-manufacturer installed other OS beside win. What did they pay their lawyers and developers for?!?

 

[Reynod]

A great little bit of research Igor.

Well done.

I'd be interested in how other cards are affected.