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At this point I am mostly done investigating weird video card behavior: these two pages are now reasonably accurate for X-Plane 10.

We are still trying to resolve as many of the known issues as we can, but now that we know what cards are in and out, it gives me more time to work on performance and scenery tools.

 

About Ben Supnik

Ben is a software engineer who works on X-Plane; he spends most of his days drinking coffee and swearing at the computer -- sometimes at the same time.

23 comments on “Working Through the Video Cards”

  1. Thanks for the links Ben. Glad to know my performance issues with the 6970 are not an isolated case. Let me know if you need a card to use for testing, I can lend you one 🙂

  2. Ben,
    I’m using a EVGA GTX 580, Driver 290.36 beta, I’m still getting a square cloud box, I’m not getting any color effects, with this. I sent you screens yesterday.
    I also tried the other drivers, but got the same results.
    So your saying these are a driver bug. I didn’t receive these until I updated to Beta 9, I’m using Beta 10 now. Are you still trying to find this issue.
    Thanks,
    ed

    1. I am not saying that your bug is a driver bug. Getting green and blue runways with cloud shadows and 285.62 drivers is a bug. I will get to any filed bugs in the future; please do not inquire into the status of filed bugs on the blog.

  3. I just moved from a EVGA GeForce GTX285FTW (supported) to an MSI GeForce GTX560-Ti (supported, some graphics artifacts under investigation.) With it stronger hardware, 2G of VRAM and out-of-the-box overclock, it’s letting me really rev up XP10. Not surprisingly though, I guess, I’ve got some of those artifacts. Is there a way I can help by submitting images, or whatever? Or do you have it all well in hand?

  5. Thanks Ben, I see “Poor performance with high-end ATI” is only under Windows. I’m getting bad performance on high-end ATI (6970) on Mac OS.. Is that expected?

        1. You don’t have the high end 6970. You have the 6970M (mobile) – compare fill rate between the two on Wikipedia!

          http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_AMD_graphics_processing_units

          Your machine also comes with a huge 2560 x 1440 monitor. So you have a ton of pixels on what is fundamentally a laptop GPU.

          We do want to improve fill rate efficiency, don’t get me wrong! But you are also trying to get a lot of performance out of a machine that has been optimized to be thin, not fast.

      1. Damn! Just got a 6990 for use with a multi-monitor setup..sure hope this gets fixed before I start using the sim seriously…

        1. Ilari,

          keep in mind that the Radeon 6990 is a Dual-GPU card (just as GeForce 590 GTX is). This means that the card has two GPUs in it, and behaves exactly like You had two traditional single-GPU cards configured in Crossfire to share workload.

          It is known that a 3D application must be developed according to specific guidelines to take advantage of multiple GPUs, and *at the moment* X-Plane does NOT support such a configuration.

          Therefore You can actually expect similar performance figures as You had a single-GPU Radeon 6970. As for future improvements on this aspect, it is up to LR folks…

          Regards,
          Filippo

      2. 27″, mid 2011 (latest) iMac with 6970M 2GB VRAM – any reported problems?

        I bought one this week and still waiting for it. Hope it will run very smoothly…

  7. Very interesting Infomation. Thanks for the links and still browsing through them.
    I am using the Asus version of Ge-Force 285. (ENGTX285)
    Should I use the Asus provided driver or the Ge-Force one. I am instictivly using the Ge-Force one at present which serves me well so far on both FSX and X-Plane 10.
    How ever what is recommended and are there any problems with this card.
    PC is a Dell XPS 420 with 8 gigs of mem and the quad proc.

  8. Thanks for all the excellent work! I’m getting consistent (and quick) flashing on-off of most objects including residential buildings, bridges, etc., on an Intel HD card working on OS 10.7. This occurs regardless of how rendering options are set. FYI…

  9. I have the 27in iMac with the 6970m and XP10b10 runs great with everything high or very high except visibility medium. HDR is the killer. Keep that odd and I can hardly tell the difference. You guys can poo-poo that card if you wish. I will just continue to have fun.

    1. Hey, if YOU are happy then I am happy! My point is only that you can read its stats and the 6970M is cut down quite a bit compared to the 6970, so users should expect to tune settings accordingly. (Users who do not realize the 6970 and 6970M are quite different might be surprised that HDR at 1440p is slow.)

      We _are_ trying to optimize fill rate – it’s a top prio. So things may get a bit better.

  11. Hi Ben,

    Thanks for the info on known issues for GPUs.

    I’m in the process of building a system to run my newly arrived XP10 discs…. I had planned on buying the Radeon 7970 as on paper it blows away all the other single GPU cards. However I note that several ppl are having very poor performance on this card at the moment.

    Can you do a piece on what the high end ATI/AMD card performance issue is? Any more info would be useful to help inform peoples decisions.

    Many Thanks

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