TS2013 ATI Radeon card performance

[Squatch]

I'm in kind of the same boat - had a decent 7970, but the flickering in TS2013 was awful - decided to sell it and put back the GTX570 I had before in, flickering mostly gone, and FPS not too diminished - even gaming at 2560x1440, it just seems to point more and more to being a CPU hungry game. Hoping to move from an i7 920 to a Haswell build in a few weeks, hopefully will see some improvements from that - might have a go with just the HD4600, see what happens!

[Trev123]

Don't get any flickering on my system. Just get a stutter every now and then when extra scenery loads, which I can live with. I run at 1920 x 1080. Try lowering your resolution.

[mjoliver1]

Sorry to jump in here, but just before I commit myself - would I be right in assuming an AMD Radeon HD7870 2GB 16 x PCIe 3.0 would be ok for handling TS2013?

Thanks
Ken

Difficult to determine. It seems a combination of factors are needed to have this cranky old program run really sweetly. My HD7950 with 3gb on board and a core i7 @ 3.8GHz allow 20'ish fps with all sliders full except for the in-game AA.

Mike

[chezafield]

I couldn't disagree more about AMD and nvidia. I am a long time ATI AMD fan....for the exact reason you mention price per performance, but they have all but lost me because of micro stuttering issues. I had the HD7850 a fairly decent card and sure on benchmarks it pushed respectable numbers....but the play experience was full of stuttering. This is a known issue with most of the current series of AMD cards...it's no myth and there are plenty articles on it. I finally replaced it with a GTX 670, which granted is also a faster card...but even if I push it with my massively modded Skyrim game it does not stutter like HD7850 did.....

I recently picked up a 7790 for the purpose of getting back into TS2013 after multiple stores didn't have the specific 650 Ti I wanted in stock, and the game doesn't run as smoothly as I'd like, but I won't know unless/until I swap the 7790 for a 650 Ti just how much the video card is responsible. In TS2012, tests showed much of the stuttering was related to the game engine's reliance on loading stuff from hard disk (you could drop the res to 800x600 and it wouldn't make any difference to the stuttering).

To the extent the AMD stuttering issue affects TS2013, the problem for us is they've been focusing their driver optimisation on popular titles (so they don't look bad in the new frametime-based benchmarks review sites are switching to), while addressing the underlying issue in a way that would benefit niche titles is a promise without a deadline and something that could easily end up on the backburner.

[sargnickfury]

Well I hope for their sakes they don't have this micro stutter issue on their APU's for the consoles.....or they may have really burned an opportunity. I know with my eVGA GTX 670 FTW I have everything maxed with the exception of AA because at the highest setting it blurs details too much for my taste, I also am running a FXAA_Tool to do additional duties including post process sharpening, correcting some colors with a fog, as well as increasing exposure for more sunshine like lighting, etc etc....even with these extra duties it stays rock solid at 40FPS which is what I have it limited to on my command line. I do have a SSD for the OS, but not steam which is on a regular drive....I had the SSD with the HD7850 as well did not help with driver issues. Sometimes a price difference isn't the only difference. Also some articles say the micro stuttering only is a major issue when using multiple cards, I had the issue with just one card.....speed wise it was a great card but it stuttering just kills submersion in games. I still wonder about this engine though....it just does not seem to make use of the power of either the 7000 series, or the Nvidia 600 series like other games.....not technical enough to fully understand why, but it seems far to CPU dependent...if it's a matter of physics I can't imagine why it would not take advantage of the GPU's for that.