ATI Radeon X850 Video Card

dforrest · Post by **dforrest** » Sun May 08, 2005 9:42 pm

I have got my new Dell XPS system and they have supplied it with an ATI Radeon X850 XP Platinum Edition video card and not the PCI Express x16 NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GTO card I ordered. Has anyone any experience with this in MSTS?

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dforrest · Post by **dforrest** » Tue May 10, 2005 10:45 am

Is anyone else using this video card for MSTS?

thenudehamster · Post by **thenudehamster** » Tue May 10, 2005 1:13 pm

I'd grouch at Dell first for not supplying what you ordered.

Second thought is that TMTS is being built very much with nVidia cards in mind, in view of ATi's habit of hard coding anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering, so if you're thinking of TMTS when it arrives, the ATi card won't be so useful.

rabid · Post by **rabid** » Tue May 10, 2005 2:17 pm

thenudehamster wrote:I'd grouch at Dell first for not supplying what you ordered.

Second thought is that TMTS is being built very much with nVidia cards in mind, in view of ATi's habit of hard coding anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering, so if you're thinking of TMTS when it arrives, the ATi card won't be so useful.

I find it very difficult to believe that ATI cards "won't be so useful" with TMTS. As long as the program uses DirectX 9 why shouldn't they work? Have PI stated this publicly? (/me panicking as owner of X800 XT)

thenudehamster · Post by **thenudehamster** » Tue May 10, 2005 2:25 pm

rabid wrote:
thenudehamster wrote:I'd grouch at Dell first for not supplying what you ordered.

Second thought is that TMTS is being built very much with nVidia cards in mind, in view of ATi's habit of hard coding anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering, so if you're thinking of TMTS when it arrives, the ATi card won't be so useful.
I find it very difficult to believe that ATI cards "won't be so useful" with TMTS. As long as the program uses DirectX 9 why shouldn't they work? Have PI stated this publicly? (/me panicking as owner of X800 XT)

Perhaps the incompatibility might be better applied to the RailDriver applications, but, as I understand it, ATi have not offered technical assistance to the PI development team, neither have they responded to requests for information. nVidia have co-operated closely with PI, so the graphics on the new sim are have been tailored to work within the detailed nVidia technical specifications. As no-one is sure what ATi may produce or which way their systems will go, it's not possible to predict how compatible thier cards may be. As it is right now, they hard code anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering into some of their cards - you cannot switch them off or change settings; this causes problems for the RailDriver interface software on MSTS; whether it will have a similar effect in TMTS, I don't know - but I'm not taking a chance on it.

rabid · Post by **rabid** » Tue May 10, 2005 5:45 pm

thenudehamster wrote:...they hard code anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering into some of their cards - you cannot switch them off or change settings; this causes problems for the RailDriver interface software on MSTS; whether it will have a similar effect in TMTS, I don't know - but I'm not taking a chance on it.

Barry, I use 6xFSAA and have never had any probs with my RailDriver/ATI card!

David.

thenudehamster · Post by **thenudehamster** » Tue May 10, 2005 6:00 pm

I'm only going by what Tim told me last time we were chatting about it. It's not every ATi card that's affected - but I don't know which ones ARE... I'm not even sure what anisotropic filtering is, and I only have a vague idea of what anti-aliasing does, but I know my nVidia card lets me (or the application) turn them off if I need to.

BobLatimer · Post by **BobLatimer** » Tue May 10, 2005 7:19 pm

I have an ATI 9800XT and I'm pretty sure it allows me to turn on and off both anistropic filtering (whatever that is) and antialiasing. I must admit, I've never had the nerve to play around with the settings though!

PaulH2 · Post by **PaulH2** » Tue May 10, 2005 7:29 pm

As I understand it, the anti-aliasing / anisotropic filtering issues are more down to drivers than anything forced in hardware. If the official ATi drivers don't support changing the settings, 3rd party drivers (such as Omega's) do (and I'd strongly reccomend using Omega's drivers anyway).

As for compatability, as long as PI are writing their code in accordance with the DirectX 9 standards (and they'd be foolish not to), there is no reason it shouldn't work perfectly well on any graphics card (obviously a newer card that supports DirectX 9 in hardware will work best).

Frankly I think the days of software working on Nvidia products and not on ATi (or vice versa) are long behind us. Some software might perform slightly better on some brands than others, but updating drivers usually fixes that type of problem, and the differences are usually only noticable by hardcore frame rate junkies anyway.

As for MSTS, in principle it should work just fine with a Radeon X850, indeed with a Platinum Edition card, it should run as fast as on anything currently available. I remember seeing some comments that people have seen some graphical glitches with X800 series cards (I think there was some discussion of this in one of the Yorkshire Coast threads), but whether this is (was?) just a driver issue, I don't know...

Paul

PaulH2 · Post by **PaulH2** » Tue May 10, 2005 7:32 pm

latimers wrote:I have an ATI 9800XT and I'm pretty sure it allows me to turn on and off both anistropic filtering (whatever that is) and antialiasing. I must admit, I've never had the nerve to play around with the settings though!

Anisotropic filtering can help greatly with texture scaling, I'd highly reccomend playing with the settings as I've found it can lead to much better graphics in MSTS. I have a Radeon 9800 PRO and have anisotropic filtering set to 8x with no obvious performance hit and much nicer graphics (e.g. track textures look nice way into the distance). I also have anti-aliasing set to 4x with no apparent problems.

Above all, playing with the settings won't break anything, and you can always change them back if you don't like the results!

Paul

lemberg · Post by **lemberg** » Tue May 10, 2005 8:57 pm

Paul's spot on with tis , I also have a radeon 9800pro and I run with max settings on sim and AA and AF, in fact this card actually runs worse when the settings are turned down.
Lemberg

BobLatimer · Post by **BobLatimer** » Tue May 10, 2005 9:07 pm

Thanks for the tips guys. I'll cross my fingers and give it a go. I did find that I get better frame rates at the higher resolutions than at the lower ones, which seemed a bit strange to me.

rabid · Post by **rabid** » Wed May 11, 2005 8:28 am

I made some comments about FSAA and AF in THIS thread recently. It may be of interest (or not of course!).

dforrest · Post by **dforrest** » Wed May 11, 2005 11:53 am

rabid wrote:I made some comments about FSAA and AF in THIS thread recently. It may be of interest (or not of course!).

Thanks. I have commented in the Alco Magic thread.

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dforrest · Post by **dforrest** » Wed May 11, 2005 11:56 am

lemberg wrote:Paul's spot on with tis , I also have a radeon 9800pro and I run with max settings on sim and AA and AF, in fact this card actually runs worse when the settings are turned down.
Lemberg

Interesting. What actual MSTS settings do you use? I am getting a lot of MSTS freezing and crashing with may Radeon X850.

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