Need for Speed Racing Games

Guys patch out at the end of November and guess what, BIG perfomance for ATI cards!

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2009/11/10/need_for_speed_shift_gameplay_performance_iq/1

nfs_web.f0xx wrote:Guys patch out at the end of November and guess what, BIG perfomance for ATI cards!

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2009/11/10/need_for_speed_shift_gameplay_performance_iq/1

How about this quote on page 7 though?

"Since we didn’t see the performance increased we hoped to see with patch 2, but we were seeing some performance gains throughout testing on the Radeon HD 5000 series video cards, we could only assume that the Hemlock driver was causing it."

It looks like ATI have added a Shift performance profile in the new drivers. This is similar to the Grid profile that some have taken advantage of by renaming the shift.exe file.

Looking back to previous reviews, I can see that they were getting half decent number on a 4870 during the 5770/5750 review 1 month ago. This is in no small part due to high clock speed of the used CPU during the test.
http://www.hardocp.com/article/2009/10/12/amd_ati_radeon_hd_5770_5750_review/5

I'd like to see some numbers on a mainstream CPU that allow a decent graphics card to get 60 FPS average without 12xMSAA etc. That would really seal the deal for me.

**Update**

Also from page 7.

"Between Patch 1 and Patch 2, we found a small decrease in performance when using Patch 2 vs. Patch 1 with the Hemlock driver. The difference was small, at about 7%, but it was consistent. And yes, this graph and analysis are correct."

Well done SMS, good work. If these results are to be taken as an indication of how the final patch will perform, then it's taken you over 8 weeks to write a patch that actually makes the game slower... EPIC fail!

I've got a sneaky suspicion that the "ATI Support" statement just means Crossfire support.

I didnt read it al but from what ive read to achieve the best performance we will have to play with this nex patch + the latest drivers in that time... possibly 9.12 catalyst that will be released in mid december...

nfs_web.f0xx wrote:I didnt read it al but from what ive read to achieve the best performance we will have to play with this nex patch + the latest drivers in that time... possibly 9.12 catalyst that will be released in mid december...

I know what you are saying. It's just more than a little disappointing reading in HardCOP's article that the new patch actually gave them a lower frame rate.

The drivers look good, giving about a 15-25% performance increase. So well done ATI. Unfortunately in my situation that doesn't translate into a decent frame rate or a good gaming experience.

I'm still holding my hopes up, because that article was more a review of the graphics cards at high AA, instead of a comparisson of real world frame rates using real world hardware and settings. In my opinion any good reviewer would take frame rates with settings on medium to measure the highest FPS you can achieve (after all 60 fps is the holy grail of racing gaming). Also you can't do a game specific performance article, without even mentioning CPU scaling. Poor show HardCOP!

After reading the review twice I can't say that it tells me anything.

Testing only the latest ATI cards and not the cards that the majority of us run, only testing at max FSAA, only using a beta driver to be released in December and not testing the patch with a driver that ATI owners are currently using, only testing one track and not the tracks that ATI owners have the most trouble with (e.g. Tokyo).

Indeed, poor show.

nfs.GCReDi wrote:After reading the review twice I can't say that it tells me anything.

Testing only the latest ATI cards and not the cards that the majority of us run, only testing at max FSAA, only using a beta driver to be released in December and not testing the patch with a driver that ATI owners are currently using, only testing one track and not the tracks that ATI owners have the most trouble with (e.g. Tokyo).

Indeed, poor show.

Agreed. If it wasn't for the 7% worse performance statement, I'd be thinking that they were bound by NDA or something.

Let's just hope that wasn't the finished patch and it works better in the real world.

WELL HERES HOW I FIXED THIS PROBLEM: I HAD TO INSTALL NVIDIA 8800GT FOR PHYSX OTHERWISE IT WOULDNT PLAY AT ALL

cem_ea_id.overclocking101 wrote:WELL HERES HOW I FIXED THIS PROBLEM: I HAD TO INSTALL NVIDIA 8800GT FOR PHYSX OTHERWISE IT WOULDNT PLAY AT ALL

This game uses CPU PhysX, so having a second Nvidia card with PhysX enabled will not affect your frame rate.

I've tested this myself. Having a PhysX card with my ATI 3870 tripples my Batman frame rate, but makes absolutely no difference in NFS Shift.

This game is full of bugs, so there must have been some other reason why it wasn't working before you added the Nvidia card.

I got the same problem with intro movies and game it slows down unnexpected .I have downloaded the newest catalyst 9.10 and it crashes again all the times my config is amd phenom x2 ,ati radeon 4730,2 gb ddr2 ram,CAN ENYONE HELP plz

For anyone still using XP here's the next RC of the Hemlock Beta drivers used in the HardOCP article.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=EOL1XBKJ

I'm going to give this a try later today on my old XP partition.

cem_ea_id.proudmatt wrote:For anyone still using XP here's the next RC of the Hemlock Beta drivers used in the HardOCP article.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=EOL1XBKJ

I'm going to give this a try later today on my old XP partition.

Good Luck!

cem_ea_id.DirtyLeeds wrote:

cem_ea_id.proudmatt wrote:For anyone still using XP here's the next RC of the Hemlock Beta drivers used in the HardOCP article.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=EOL1XBKJ

I'm going to give this a try later today on my old XP partition.

Good Luck!

I've given it a crack and the results aren't brilliant.

This is testing the first 30 seconds of a race at Spa, from the car first appearing on the screen. 2 runs with 9.10 and a further 2 with Catalyst 8.68 beta (9.12 beta)

1280x720 - 60hz - 0xAA - V-sync on - All settings medium - 10 opponents

9.10 WHQL
Min 25.5 - Max 51.5 - Av 31.5
9.12 Beta
Min 29 - Max 60 - Av 32.75


I played a couple of races with the beta driver and found that I could get FPS drops to 22 when a whole bunch of cars corner in front of me, which is about the same as what I was getting with 9.10 drivers.

The only thing that I can think of to explain why HardOCP saw a big rise in the average FPS (OS and driver differences aside), is that the new drivers give a higher max FPS and that pushes up the average. Especially if the guy at HardOCP benchmarking overtook the AI opponents within the first couple of minutes. The test I did was only testing in a situation where there are performance problems and also I think having vsync on possibly prevented the FPS from getting any higher than 60.

It's better, so well done ATI, but does it come close to fixing Shift? No...

cem_ea_id.proudmatt wrote:

cem_ea_id.DirtyLeeds wrote:

cem_ea_id.proudmatt wrote:For anyone still using XP here's the next RC of the Hemlock Beta drivers used in the HardOCP article.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=EOL1XBKJ

I'm going to give this a try later today on my old XP partition.

Good Luck!

I've given it a crack and the results aren't brilliant.

This is testing the first 30 seconds of a race at Spa, from the car first appearing on the screen. 2 runs with 9.10 and a further 2 with Catalyst 8.68 beta (9.12 beta)

1280x720 - 60hz - 0xAA - V-sync on - All settings medium - 10 opponents

9.10 WHQL
Min 25.5 - Max 51.5 - Av 31.5
9.12 Beta
Min 29 - Max 60 - Av 32.75


I played a couple of races with the beta driver and found that I could get FPS drops to 22 when a whole bunch of cars corner in front of me, which is about the same as what I was getting with 9.10 drivers.

The only thing that I can think of to explain why HardOCP saw a big rise in the average FPS (OS and driver differences aside), is that the new drivers give a higher max FPS and that pushes up the average. Especially if the guy at HardOCP benchmarking overtook the AI opponents within the first couple of minutes. The test I did was only testing in a situation where there are performance problems and also I think having vsync on possibly prevented the FPS from getting any higher than 60.

It's better, so well done ATI, but does it come close to fixing Shift? No...

You are using Catalyst 8.68 beta
They used Catalyst 8.663.1 Beta
These are 2 different beta drivers...

MAIN.SneakyGunman wrote:

cem_ea_id.proudmatt wrote:

cem_ea_id.DirtyLeeds wrote:

cem_ea_id.proudmatt wrote:For anyone still using XP here's the next RC of the Hemlock Beta drivers used in the HardOCP article.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=EOL1XBKJ

I'm going to give this a try later today on my old XP partition.

Good Luck!

I've given it a crack and the results aren't brilliant.

This is testing the first 30 seconds of a race at Spa, from the car first appearing on the screen. 2 runs with 9.10 and a further 2 with Catalyst 8.68 beta (9.12 beta)

1280x720 - 60hz - 0xAA - V-sync on - All settings medium - 10 opponents

9.10 WHQL
Min 25.5 - Max 51.5 - Av 31.5
9.12 Beta
Min 29 - Max 60 - Av 32.75


I played a couple of races with the beta driver and found that I could get FPS drops to 22 when a whole bunch of cars corner in front of me, which is about the same as what I was getting with 9.10 drivers.

The only thing that I can think of to explain why HardOCP saw a big rise in the average FPS (OS and driver differences aside), is that the new drivers give a higher max FPS and that pushes up the average. Especially if the guy at HardOCP benchmarking overtook the AI opponents within the first couple of minutes. The test I did was only testing in a situation where there are performance problems and also I think having vsync on possibly prevented the FPS from getting any higher than 60.

It's better, so well done ATI, but does it come close to fixing Shift? No...

You are using Catalyst 8.68 beta
They used Catalyst 8.663.1 Beta
These are 2 different beta drivers...

Well spotted, the HardOCP article used earlier beta drivers, the 6.68 drivers are technically the 2nd release candidate.

The release date of the 6.68 RC2 drivers is 10th of November, which is the date the HardOCP article was published.

Here's where I found the link - http://www.rage3d.com/board/showthread.php?t=33955692

Here's a link to the Hemlock drivers for Vista/7 as used by HardOCP

http://www.nogripracing.com/forum/showpost.php?p=910178&postcount=10