99blackbird Posted February 11, 2005 Share Posted February 11, 2005 I like many people am having the same issues with KOTOR2 and my Radeon 9660 256mb card. I just bought the card a couple days ago and on most games noticed no significant improvement in performance over my old Geforce MX400. In fact KOTOR runs better on my 3 year old card than on this one i just bought. The issues in KOTOR2 may not be ATI's fault, but I have NEVER had a problem with any of my previous Nvidia cards. I was pretty brand loyal to Nvidia but stepped out on a limb this time and went with ATI. I may do so again in the future, but this sucker is going back to the store in favor of a new Nvidia card. I wish you guys with the ATI cards the best. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Demigod Posted February 11, 2005 Share Posted February 11, 2005 If you do swap your card the best current nvidia cards for performance / money are either the 6800gt if you want to spend that much or better from a performance/ price perspective is the 6600gt. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
99blackbird Posted February 11, 2005 Author Share Posted February 11, 2005 If you do swap your card the best current nvidia cards for performance / money are either the 6800gt if you want to spend that much or better from a performance/ price perspective is the 6600gt. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I've heard good things about the GT's but they are a bit outside the budget right now. I think i'm going to swap for the 5500FX. Or who knows, I may just run along with the MX400 until I can fit the GT in the budget. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jedi Master Ryan Posted February 11, 2005 Share Posted February 11, 2005 I have the 5500fx and it runs great on my system! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
99blackbird Posted February 12, 2005 Author Share Posted February 12, 2005 Well guys, swapped out the ATI 9550 for the NVidia 5500FXoc and haven't had a problem with gameplay at all. Seems KOTOR 2 just doesn't like ATI chipsets. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
geldonyetich Posted February 12, 2005 Share Posted February 12, 2005 Yeah, that's a fair no brainer. The original KOTOR had the same problems with ATI chipsets and KOTOR 2 uses the same engine. You could get the original KOTOR to work well with version 4.11 of the Catalyst drivers, but I noticed that KOTOR 2 locks up after the intro movie with them installed. Didn't bother to try any other movies. Somebody suggested that this was an unrelated bug. From what I understand, ATI and Bioware are still pointing fingers at eachother as to who should fix this problem. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JamieKirby Posted February 12, 2005 Share Posted February 12, 2005 Yeah, that's a fair no brainer. The original KOTOR had the same problems and KOTOR 2 uses the same chipset. You could get the original KOTOR to work well with version 4.11 of the Catalyst drivers, but I noticed that KOTOR 2 locks up after the intro movie with them installed. Didn't bother to try any other movies. Somebody suggested that this was an unrelated bug. From what I understand, ATI and Bioware are still pointing fingers at eachother as to who should fix this problem. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> from what i hear, 4.11 are the best drivers to use with Kotor II, your crash is just probably bad luck. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
geldonyetich Posted February 12, 2005 Share Posted February 12, 2005 Sounds like a plan, I think I'll go do that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Master Dahvernas Posted February 12, 2005 Share Posted February 12, 2005 Basically, it is an OpenGL issue at the core of why ATI cards do really baddly in the KOTOR series (I and II). ATI has just dropped the ball on their OGL drivers since 4.2 and is as if they don't even care anymore. I use a CAD program that runs on OGL and gives a diagnostic of how many vertices (triangles) are being rendered per second and ATI usually clocks in at around 22 million and Nvidia (since I swap cards in and out of my rig to test) around 55 million. That is a huge difference when we are talking gaming specs and not just design (CAD; Maya) specs where fill-rate counts. In all of the recent Catalyst drivers, the ATI OGL driver has maintained around 22 mil, but never actually surpassed that. Nvidia keeps going up believe it or not. The irony to all of this is that ATI does better in D3D/DX9c Pixel and Vertex shaders that a majority of games are rendered with. If it wasn't for John Carmack and Doom III... OGL would pretty much be dead from a development stand point and we wouldn't have the problem with the KOTOR series because it would have more than likely just been done in D3D and everyone (who owns an ATI 9xxx card and above) wouldn't have as many problems, driver or compatibility wise. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ThePro Posted February 12, 2005 Share Posted February 12, 2005 Before I downloaded the latest drivers, the game pratically crashed every load screen or randomly that I wanted to smash the game. Now I have a ATI X800 card with the latest drivers and no more crashes ever. I can play with everything at max with no slowdown. I am not disappointed in buying this card as it works for every game I played. I looked in the Troubleshooting Guide document for the supported drivers. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Johno Posted February 12, 2005 Share Posted February 12, 2005 Well why is it writen in OpenGL if its also on the Xbox - surely that means they would go Direct3D for compatiblity? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Master Dahvernas Posted February 12, 2005 Share Posted February 12, 2005 Well why is it writen in OpenGL if its also on the Xbox - surely that means they would go Direct3D for compatiblity? <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Because the Aurua Engine is OpenGL based. Also, people forget that the XBoxes integrated graphics card is a GeForce 3. Ergo, it's native Nvidia technology. Nvidia does better in OpenGL. Counter-Strike for Xbox is also OGL since the original Half-Life Engine is OpenGL. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Darth Ni Posted February 13, 2005 Share Posted February 13, 2005 If you do swap your card the best current nvidia cards for performance / money are either the 6800gt if you want to spend that much or better from a performance/ price perspective is the 6600gt. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I like the 6600 gt or the 6800 gt. The 5950 Ultra is pretty much beaten by the 6600 GT so don't bother going there. I have a 5950 Ultra but I bought it for a bargain price so I didn't really mind. The card itself is massive (about the same size as a 6800), takes up 2 slots, a hell of a lot of power and sucks with DirectX 9 applications. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MaglorD Posted February 13, 2005 Share Posted February 13, 2005 Basically, it is an OpenGL issue at the core of why ATI cards do really baddly in the KOTOR series (I and II). ATI has just dropped the ball on their OGL drivers since 4.2 and is as if they don't even care anymore. I use a CAD program that runs on OGL and gives a diagnostic of how many vertices (triangles) are being rendered per second and ATI usually clocks in at around 22 million and Nvidia (since I swap cards in and out of my rig to test) around 55 million. That is a huge difference when we are talking gaming specs and not just design (CAD; Maya) specs where fill-rate counts. In all of the recent Catalyst drivers, the ATI OGL driver has maintained around 22 mil, but never actually surpassed that. Nvidia keeps going up believe it or not. The irony to all of this is that ATI does better in D3D/DX9c Pixel and Vertex shaders that a majority of games are rendered with. If it wasn't for John Carmack and Doom III... OGL would pretty much be dead from a development stand point and we wouldn't have the problem with the KOTOR series because it would have more than likely just been done in D3D and everyone (who owns an ATI 9xxx card and above) wouldn't have as many problems, driver or compatibility wise. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> If it's an OGL issue, then how come other OGL games like Chronicles of Riddick & Jedi Academy run perfectly? What is the significance of vertices rendered other than fps? I don't think it explains all the issues being described in this forum. In fact, even some Nvidia users are getting crashes with this game. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Master Dahvernas Posted February 13, 2005 Share Posted February 13, 2005 We're talking about low FPS most in terms of performance. There are also crash related issues, but the main issues gamers have seem to be the game dropping to unplayable levels. Granted, this is shoddy coding, but it is only amplified by the poor OGL drivers ATI puts out which are compounding the problems. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MaglorD Posted February 13, 2005 Share Posted February 13, 2005 We're talking about low FPS most in terms of performance. There are also crash related issues, but the main issues gamers have seem to be the game dropping to unplayable levels. Granted, this is shoddy coding, but it is only amplified by the poor OGL drivers ATI puts out which are compounding the problems. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I think the crashing is more distressing than the fps, as there is a workaround to the fps issues but not the random crashing. Yes it's quite rare, but still. How is ATI's OGL poor if it works superbly in other OGL games like Doom 3 and games employing the Quake 3 engine? It may not be as good as Nvidia but it certainly meets the mark in other OGL games. The other explanation why Nvidia cards don't have so many fps issues is because the game engine was optimised for Nvidia. It was afterall designed first and foremost to run on an Xbox with an Nvidia GPU. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fraoch Posted February 13, 2005 Share Posted February 13, 2005 Well, not to downplay anything, but I am running the game on a FX5700 and I am experiencing the very same issues that haunted KotOR1: am playing on 1600x1200 w/ all bells on 4x, plays a dream, almost too fast even - until there's any smoke or much lighting, then framerate plummets. Game crashes during cutscenes, freezes which then has my party running into walls and getting stuck there....lot of switching graphics options on and off which doesn't help continuity of gameplay etc. So, just to say that not even Nvidia guarantees flawless results.....patch, anyone ? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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