AMD drivers are terrible for Open GL

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Though I do love my Radeon 5970, AMD needs to seriously improve/fix their drivers, particularly for OpenGL. I am finding that very few OpenGL games will run for more than a few minutes (Quake 4 and Doom 3 seem to be fine). Most Quake 3 based games will run for 2 - 5 minutes fine and then the game will crash and do a VPU recover. Some games, the menus are either garbled or totally blank. It's kind of a bummer. Here I have a sweet new video card and I wanted to play some of my old favorites with 24X edge detect AA and the games won't even run :( Also, I doubt ATI is much interested in fixing driver issues for older games :(

Quake 3 (Open GL) Menu:



Quake 3 (Open GL) In Game:



Unreal Tournament (Direct3D) Menu:

 
Ironically, the AMD GPUs that are in my work machines don't work with the microscope imaging software due to an OpenGL issue. Has the issue even been acknowledged by AMD as a problem?
 
inotocracy said:
ATI has always had bad OpenGL support. Always.
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And if they worked with an OpenGL game even if the ATi GPU was faster than the nVIDIA equivalent in Direct3D the nVIDIA card would always spank any ATi offering in OpenGL. Again, if it works. nVIDIA always has had superior OpenGL drivers.
 
A couple quirks doesn't equal "bad" or "terrible." That's two old games, could it be more related to the fact that they are old and don't run well on a newer OS or x64 compatibility? I'd like to see more data. I recall they were usually slower then Nvidia in OpenGL, but OpenGL usually still worked fine.
 
OldPueblo said:
A couple quirks doesn't equal "bad" or "terrible." That's two old games, could it be more related to the fact that they are old and don't run well on a newer OS or x64 compatibility? I'd like to see more data. I recall they were usually slower then Nvidia in OpenGL, but OpenGL usually still worked fine.
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I just used those 2 games as examples. I can tell you that Jedi Outcast (Quake 3 engine) will play fine for 2 - 5 minutes then the display driver will stop responding and the game will crash. The same game runs fine on my Q6600 / GeForce GTX 260 / Windows 7 Pro 64 bit machine. Furthermore, the same game ran fine on the system in sig when the video card was a GTX 260 instead of Radeon 5970. Note that I have formatted and re-installed Windows 7 as part of the troubleshooting process.

While googling the Jedi Outcast problems I am having, I found many links to users having the same problems. In each case, the user had a Radeon 3xxx or 4xxx card. So if any of the [H] have a Radeon video card and have access to Jedi Outcast (available on Steam as part of the Jedi Knight collection), I'd be interested to see what your experiences are.
 
The awful OpenGL support with AMD/ATi cards has been the primary reason why I always go with nVidia GPUs. Only thing ATi does right now and then with OpenGL is introduce interesting extensions, such as adding hardware tesselation a number of years ago. Beyond that their implementations suck, their drivers suck, and performance is terrible all around.

True, OpenGL applications really should work on ATi cards - I can't remember having seen the crashing behaviour the OP describes before - though it is also true that drivers have to compensate a lot for particular applications, be it D3D or OpenGL applications/games.
 
Colt is it possible to disable one of the 5970 chips to see if that is the issue?

i have a 4850 and jedi outcast runs ok, i don't recall any crashing issue.

i'll try and do some testing on a bunch of older opengl games tonight, quake2 (like was in my other thread) really didn't have any issues. i've played through quite a few levels with my 4850.


this may not help you as the 5970/ (5x00) opengl drivers may not be as mature.

I remember back in the day, we used to swap out the opengl.dll (in the wind98se system32) for different dlls from different versions of drivers. its been a loooong time since i've had to do anythign like that but may be worth looking into.

also just as a fun note, if you have MDK2, it is a great old game to install if you are interested in benchmarking. it has the ability to do Direct3d, openGl, and turn off and on TnL :) Not to mention its just a fun game to play.
 
I have a 5850 and I had a 4870 before that, Quake 3 runs fine on both.

It locks up in single player mode (I dont get any errors relative to VPU recover), but I only play on OSP CTF servers and it runs fine there.
 
Also, are you running 1.32 point release on Q3? Team Arena is a different beast, noticed you were running that.
 
dook43 said:
Also, are you running 1.32 point release on Q3? Team Arena is a different beast, noticed you were running that.
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Yeah, I bought the id collection on Steam so it is 1.32 with Team Arena also installed. Team Arena plays fine for what it's worth, just vanilla Quake 3 has the menu rendering issue and sometimes in-game rendering issue that I posted screenshots of. Sometimes the in-game play will be fine. However, the menu is always messed up.
 
I definitely remember the Rage series having OpenGL problems, but once they acquired ArtX and started making Radeons, (I've played on a RAdeon 8500, 9600, 9700 Pro, HD 2400 Pro, HD 2600 XT, HD 4870, HD 5850) I haven't seen any issues with OpenGL. I have been playing Quake 3 since 2000 and each of the aforementioned video cards have not had issues for me.

I can't speak to CAD or professional work though.
 
Colt___45 said:
Yeah, I bought the id collection on Steam so it is 1.32 with Team Arena also installed. Team Arena plays fine for what it's worth, just vanilla Quake 3 has the menu rendering issue and sometimes in-game rendering issue that I posted screenshots of. Sometimes the in-game play will be fine. However, the menu is always messed up.
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It might be specific to HD 5970, because I haven't had any issues running Q3 under most of the historic single GPU line of Radeon/Radeon HD. See previous post.
 
Colt___45 said:
I just used those 2 games as examples. I can tell you that Jedi Outcast (Quake 3 engine) will play fine for 2 - 5 minutes then the display driver will stop responding and the game will crash. The same game runs fine on my Q6600 / GeForce GTX 260 / Windows 7 Pro 64 bit machine. Furthermore, the same game ran fine on the system in sig when the video card was a GTX 260 instead of Radeon 5970. Note that I have formatted and re-installed Windows 7 as part of the troubleshooting process.

While googling the Jedi Outcast problems I am having, I found many links to users having the same problems. In each case, the user had a Radeon 3xxx or 4xxx card. So if any of the [H] have a Radeon video card and have access to Jedi Outcast (available on Steam as part of the Jedi Knight collection), I'd be interested to see what your experiences are.
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I didn't purchase JK2 through Steam as I still have a copy of it and it runs just fine for me on the system in my sig. Ran through it 2-3 weeks ago in fact just because I wanted to chop up some Stormtroopers. :D

Never had JK2 give me issues on Crossfired X1950 Pros or Crossfired HD3870s as well. My brother likewise has no JK2 issues with X1950 Pros under Vista HP x86.
 
I run Quake Live which is Quake 3 for hours on 5970 with no coruption and no lockups.
Doom 3 pefectly fine for hours, Quake 4 same no problem.
It might be the drivers you are using or the card itself.
Try running on default speeds dont OC. every lock or corruption i ever got from 5970 was cause of OC, as soon as i run at default speeds never had any issues with any game or whatsoever.
 
gamingarena23 said:
I run Quake Live which is Quake 3 for hours on 5970 with no coruption and no lockups.
Doom 3 pefectly fine for hours, Quake 4 same no problem.
It might be the drivers you are using or the card itself.
Try running on default speeds dont OC. every lock or corruption i ever got from 5970 was cause of OC, as soon as i run at default speeds never had any issues with any game or whatsoever.
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Doom 3 and Quake 4 run fine for me. I haven't even tried OC-ing the card yet. I may try uninstalling the drivers I downloaded off of ATI's site and try the drivers on the HIS cd and see if that makes a difference cause I would really like to play Jedi Outcast with all the bells and whistles for more than 5 minutes without a VPU recover error.
 
Using the Doom 3 engine or derived to fuel the "ATI OGL sucks" fire is dumb, because it was written with an Nvidia only function in mind, as admitted by someone in Id in at least one interview.
 
MrLonghair said:
Using the Doom 3 engine or derived to fuel the "ATI OGL sucks" fire is dumb, because it was written with an Nvidia only function in mind, as admitted by someone in Id in at least one interview.
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I'm not trying to fuel a fire. I'm saying that older games, particularly OpenGL games, have lots of issues with my Radeon card and that I think it is a driver issue based on the screenshots I provided. I don't think my card is defective, it will handle Crysis for hours on end and other demanding games without issue. It's not the end of the world and I'm not saying that I regret my purchase, but I am disappointed with some of the issues I have experienced.
 
Dethred said:
Ironically, the AMD GPUs that are in my work machines don't work with the microscope imaging software due to an OpenGL issue. Has the issue even been acknowledged by AMD as a problem?
Click to expand...

Ironically? Coincidentally, on a related note............:p

Quake3 is running just dandy in my 2nd rig which houses a HD4870 (still playing it on-line after all these years, game's got lasting appeal).
 
As an update on this issue:

Quake 3 - If I disable the Catalyst AI, the menu never corrupts/distorts and the game plays fine.

Unreal Tournament - If I disable Adaptive AA and just use MSAA, the menu renders correctly and the game plays fine.

Jedi Outcast - In the config file, there is a line "r_modelpoolmegs = x". It was originally set to 128. I changed it to 512 and the game played fine for over an hour with no crashes / vpu recoveries.

Update: The r_modelpoolmegs is not a permanent fix. However, I have found that disabling OpenGL extensions via the ingame menu does stop the game from crashing. However the framerate is borderline unplayable and there are lots of visual glitches.
 
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UT99 and Quake 3 play fine for me on a 4890 and a 2600XT at work with AA and AF cranked in ATI control panel.
 
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