5870 owners: Catalyst 10.6 Beta is FAST

http://www.station-drivers.com/page/ati%20catalyst.htm

http://www.rage3d.com/board/showthread.php?p=1336278288

Beta2 (8.741) only leaked for XP. Original beta (8.740) is available for all OSes.

EDIT:

Above are only 8.740 & 8.741.

Here is 8.743 (Vista/7 Preview).

EDIT2: The 8.743 drivers seem to be fake. Use the ones from station-drivers only.

Users of Crossfire reported for 8.740

~10fps Crysis bench
~5fps Metro
~3fps AVP
~2000points vantage performance 5970 (@initialised)
~3000points vantage GPU score tri-fire

over 10.5 retail.

EDIT3:

Single card performance increases appear to be minor, but noticeable in Crysis (@Eastcoasthandle).

Fast in what? BF? Dirt? Vantage? Crysis?

You say FAST... how fast?

Ya fast but being fast could stil means its slower then 10.5 :D

Users of Crossfire reported

~10fps Crysis bench
~5fps Metro
~3fps AVP
~2000points vantage performance 5970
~3000points vantage GPU score tri-fire

over 10.5 cats.

And for single GPU?

Sweet, got to use this sucker for the HD5870 review!

EDIT;
No win7 64bit...

Use the 8.740s, those are actually the ones used for the numbers above.

10 FPS gain in Crysis :eek:

That sounds kind of fishy to me. Did anyone ever do a follow up to PCgameshardware's analysis, which claimed that ATI was doing some kind of "brilinear" optimization in Crysis to improve frame rate?

10 FPS seems like a really big jump!

Scaling in Crysis wasn't that great with the 10.5 drivers to begin with.

Plus, I don't put any stock in Vantage results.

Who does? Vantage is a biased, crap, ugly benchmark tool. Thats why 3DM06 is still a lot of peoples fav :) I'd like to see numbers for stalker COP, thats one of the worst looking worst performing games I've ever played

who would like 06 being so cpu dependent?

Nobody here with a 5870 going to test the 8.740 :(

:'(

Quote:

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Originally Posted by damha

Nobody here with a 5870 going to test the 8.740 :(

:'(

---

I doubt that many people on this forum still use XP as primary OS and Win7 64bit driver is not available.

8.740 is win7/vista............................................. ...

Cat 10.6 preview (8.743)-win7/vista testing:
http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=323247
Btw,we have drivers section for this.:rolleyes:

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by stasio

Cat 10.6 preview (8.743)-win7/vista testing:
http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=323247
Btw,we have drivers section for this.:rolleyes:

---

Read first post, fake.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by damha

Nobody here with a 5870 going to test the 8.740 :(

:'(

---

I think I have a rig on my racks with dual 5870, one with LCS as well, both 980Xs so the CPU wont get in the way. I'll be using vantage, performance differences in vantage GPU score tend to follow averages taken over many games.

Ok, with a stocl 5870 I did notice an increase with Vantage. However, Cat 10.4 and 10.5 provided much lower scores then Cat 10.3a. Cat 10.6 beta is a little faster then 10.3a for me. I also noticed a bump in min and max using Crysis Warhead. That's all I have at the moment.

Let's me be clear. Cat 10.4 and Cat 10.5 are slower for me. I only keep them because of the fast load times ofr BC2. BC2 loadtimes appear to be the same so far.

If this is the 8.740 build that was floating around a while ago, which it appears to be, I tried it out and noticed no measurable performance increase in CoP, Metro or Heaven, but was getting rendering artifacts in Metro. Went back to 10.5.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by damha

Read first post, fake.

---

After reading the thread itself, I doubt it's fake. It's just that it's not signed yet. I.e. it's like the driver came straight from the developer before handing it out to his team of beta-testers. There's a test driver signing tool ngohq provides.


This of course, is just my opinion.


I'll be testing this driver. My rig has so many beta software :ROTF:

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by damha

Users of Crossfire reported

~10fps Crysis bench
~5fps Metro
~3fps AVP
~2000points vantage performance 5970
~3000points vantage GPU score tri-fire

over 10.5 cats.

---

Damn, so much for "no optimisations left for the old arch"! :rofl:

i'm likin 10.6 beta maxed out crysis smooth as silk on 5970

Negligible gain on single 5870 in a stock clocked system.

10-5
http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4063/...a4e57957_b.jpg

10-6
http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4063/...58d1a58f_b.jpg

That's well within the benchmark's run to run variation.

no gain at all...lol

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Eastcoasthandle

I've never seen a deviation of nearly 100 3DMarks between runs. ;)

---

For some reason CPU score went up by quite a lot (comparing to GPU score increase) for the second run.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by zalbard

For some reason CPU score went up by quite a lot (comparing to GPU score increase) for the second run.

---

Yeah, I was going to edit my post to reflect the separate GPU/CPU scores but you already pointed it out. In any case I've never had deviations that high between runs using the same drivers.

Who "still" plays Crysis anyway?! Was decent for SP, yet nothing special in terms of game-play, only graphics... and MP's not even worth mentioning. Unless there's an innovative new feature, monthly driver updates aren't worth mentioning at News section. There is a driver section just for that, yet few people care this days and I see their point.

Different story for Crossfire:

10.5

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4048/...8df56fcb_b.jpg

10.6

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1278/...e7bc83f1_b.jpg

Quote:

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Originally Posted by initialised

Different story for Crossfire:

10.5

pic

10.6

pic

---

Nice, almost an increase of 2k points :)

10% boost almost... not bad...
but 3fps in avp... howd you even notice that... :D

did anybody check what max res and max aa setting is still playable with the old vs the new drivers?
cause thats where driver boosts really make sense... if i can up the aa one notch or min fps going from 10s to 20s... THATS something worth updating the driver for imo...
if i get 3 extra fps at the same res and aa setting... pff... who cares? not even worth the time to download and install... :P

Quote:

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Originally Posted by zalbard

For some reason CPU score went up by quite a lot (comparing to GPU score increase) for the second run.

---

like I said, negligible gains on single card, CPU variation is probably noise.

From the users of XS now, single card only Crysis improvement. Dual CF massive vantage boost and crysis runs smoother.

I wonder why ATI isn't going around claiming a Big Bang, this much improvement in CF is nuts.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by XSAlliN

Who "still" plays Crysis anyway?! Was decent for SP, yet nothing special in terms of game-play, only graphics... and MP's not even worth mentioning. Unless there's an innovative new feature, monthly driver updates aren't worth mentioning at News section. There is a driver section just for that, yet few people care this days and I see their point.

---

http://www.crymod.com/portal.php

wow big change

WTF ATI where did this come from in vantage eeeeek :D

Improvements to crossfire are awesome, its already so awesome that anymore speed boosts are like extra awesome.

2x 5770 are currently performing around 20-33% faster than a single 5870, and more than 100% faster than a single 5770 in some current, games and benchmarks with the latest drivers, if there are even more performance boosts to be had that that is just, well, AWESOME!!!!1111!!!!!

Maybe the 3DMark shaders were no target for optimization, just XFire in general and some games.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by dinos22

wow big change

WTF ATI where did this come from in vantage eeeeek :D

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I saw X1000 point gain on GTX480 SLi with 257.15s. The old anti-CF & SLi arguments are getting so last century!

197.55
http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4038/...07ea7968_o.png

257.15:
http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4064/...7ab2aba3_o.png

Until 2 GPUs are set by software, it's not for me.

And Avivo video converter is not anymore in drivers ( 10.5 ), i want to covert all my video to H264 and don't found something really good.
Power director 8 don't use Ati's GPU to encode in H264, and i have huge number of files to batch. ( Arround 1.8TB )

( Q9550 & 5870 & 8GB DDR2 & 7 in 64bits ).

Is avivo video converter again in driver again in 10.6 ?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by madcho

Until 2 GPUs are set by software, it's not for me.

And Avivo video converter is not anymore in drivers ( 10.5 ), i want to covert all my video to H264 and don't found something really good.
Power director 8 don't use Ati's GPU to encode in H264, and i have huge number of files to batch. ( Arround 1.8TB )

( Q9550 & 5870 & 8GB DDR2 & 7 in 64bits ).

Is avivo video converter again in driver again in 10.6 ?

---

If you have a look at game.amd.com under the download page for Catalyst
Control Center, you will find the Avivo Video Converter at the bottom of the
page, filed under Additional Downlads, as a separate download.

I think its wierd, after one 9months we suddenly see a 10% boost in Crossfire with 5870..? and, that is right after nvidia launched its new driver for fermi (fermi is 1month old..)

Just like overclockers, vendors have backups to mislead their opponents

Or just started to fiddle with nasty optimizations.
Let's get back to the non-rendered objects era...

Let's take a look at the Vantage scores from both AMD & nVIDIA the last few months... they can squeeze 20% more performance out of a single card in Vantage and they got max 5% in total in the hottest games of 2009-2010 ? ;)

I think there would be a lot more performance increases if game devs focused on optimizing their games to perform better via patches than having the ATI/nVidia driver team handle countless game optimizations..

Games are released and rarely have any patch to improve performance, no wonder since most of these games are "port and forget" kind of release..

Of course developer game engine patching will show the biggest gains possible, but they don't do it ( because they don't want to or they just can't, there are several cr*ppy coders out there :D )

Quote:

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Originally Posted by BenchZowner

Or just started to fiddle with nasty optimizations.
Let's get back to the non-rendered objects era...

---

Anything that makes my cards perform better without any loss of visual quality is good news to me thanks.

It's fine for me as well, as long as it's not impacting the image quality at all.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Rebel44

I doubt that many people on this forum still use XP as primary OS and Win7 64bit driver is not available.

---

I'm still on XP x64. No hugely compelling reason to go 7 yet for me, until I build a new rig & GPU. ;)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by bhavv

2x 5770 are currently performing around 20-33% faster than a single 5870, and up to 150% faster than a single 5770 in most current reviews, games and benchmarks with the latest drivers, if there are even more performance boosts to be had that that is just, well, awesome!!!!1111!!!!!

---

wtf?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by zalbard

wtf?

---

They've super optomized crossfire?

:ROTF:

My cards pull 24-25k at stock in 3DMark06 depending on my CPU speed. I love em. :yepp:

20k GPU score in Vantage.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by zalbard

wtf?

---

Meaning that I completely fail at reading benchmark graphs :rofl:

:am:

I were confused by the poor performance of a single 5870 in between 1 and 2 5770s, and it looked like 5770 = 100%, 5870 = 125%, 2x 5770 = 150% just by looking at the bar sizes.

Its more like 5770 x2 = 100%, 5770 = 48-50%, 5870 = 80%, if that makes sense :D.

Heres what I were looking at:

http://img88.imageshack.us/img88/931...830review1.jpg

And thats with older drivers.

http://img717.imageshack.us/img717/5741/screen015d.jpg

My first benchmark with these 10.6 beta.
I7-960 at 4200 with HT on and Ati cards at 950/1300.
2000 gpu score +
Very nice

i gained 3000 vantage points with these 10.6 compared to 10.5 .
BUT , i get graphic corruptions in DX11 alien versus predator benchmark now .. anyone else that has this ?

edit : also graphic corruptions in heaven benchmark ..
edit : graphic corruptions also in Dirt2
this is definately a BETA driver ^^

Any news on 10.6 effecting BC2? and benefits for running 5850's in Xfire? or am I just going to have to find out myself?

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by CrimInalA

i gained 3000 vantage points with these 10.6 compared to 10.5 .
BUT , i get graphic corruptions in DX11 alien versus predator benchmark now .. anyone else that has this ?

---

As I said on the first page, was getting corruption in Metro using these, so uninstalled again.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by CrimInalA

i gained 3000 vantage points with these 10.6 compared to 10.5 .
BUT , i get graphic corruptions in DX11 alien versus predator benchmark now .. anyone else that has this ?

edit : also graphic corruptions in heaven benchmark ..
edit : graphic corruptions also in Dirt2
this is definately a BETA driver ^^

---

Ouch! Sounds like the drivers use some parts on the GPU in a way, that they might hit the limits of proper functioning.

Could someone measure the power consumption with old and new drivers or point to already existing results?

both my cards are running stock .

if i bump the voltage on my first card to 1.3 (from 1.125) the graphic corruptions are gone ..
Does anyone else have this ? or is this just my card .

CrimInalA: You have been here a lot longer than me! Are you really posting this in this thread??

if you have visual corruptions and adding voltage helps then..... your card just needs the voltage, it could be bad cooling, but that is very unlikely!

Quote:

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CrimInalA: You have been here a lot longer than me! Are you really posting this in this thread??

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this thread is about 10.6 beta drivers right ?
I didn't have this with 10.5 !

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by bhavv

Improvements to crossfire are awesome, its already so awesome that anymore speed boosts are like extra awesome.

2x 5770 are currently performing around 20-33% faster than a single 5870, and more than 100% faster than a single 5770 in some current, games and benchmarks with the latest drivers, if there are even more performance boosts to be had that that is just, well, AWESOME!!!!1111!!!!!

---

No they don't last time I checked 5770 CF and 5850 were on par for both price and performance. Post some screen shots or it didn't happen.

I tried the Beta 10.6 yesterday and I also increased my Vantage core by 3,000 points to P40855.

http://service.futuremark.com/compare?3dmv=2261941

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by CrimInalA

i gained 3000 vantage points with these 10.6 compared to 10.5 .
BUT , i get graphic corruptions in DX11 alien versus predator benchmark now .. anyone else that has this ?

edit : also graphic corruptions in heaven benchmark ..
edit : graphic corruptions also in Dirt2
this is definately a BETA driver ^^

---

No, I tried Dirt 2 and didn't notice any IQ issues. I no longer use heaven as I really don't see the point of it after it was exposed. So I really don't find any merit to that benchmark any longer. BC2 load times and IQ look fine. I'll look into AvP.

Edit:
Just played around in AvP and found no IQ issues.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by initialised

No they don't last time I checked 5770 CF and 5850 were on par for both price and performance. Post some screen shots or it didn't happen.

---

Post 53.

1 5850 is far behind 2x 5770s IMHO.

Yeah, I was gonna say...two 5770's are right behind the 5870 and way above the 5850.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by BeepBeep2

Yeah, I was gonna say...two 5770's are right behind the 5870 and way above the 5850.

---

Was in vantage with Phenom 2 X6 @ 3.5GHz on a 770 board so the 4x on the second slot must have kept it down.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by BeepBeep2

Yeah, I was gonna say...two 5770's are right behind the 5870 and way above the 5850.

---

In vantage yes, but not in most games it seems.

Games in which Crossfire works as well as it can see a double performance gain from 2 5770s over a single one, but for some wierd reason the 5870 isnt performing at the same speed, even though its technically the same as having the same power as 2x 5770 but on a single chip.

Crossfire has been optimised so well now in a lot of modern games that the gains from having 2 cards can be higher than having a single card with double the specs.

The only issue I have is that forcing AA through the CCC doesnt work in a lot of games. I have enough power to comfortably run most games I play with 12x Edge Detect AA, but the CCC setting doesnt override the in game setting at all, and most games only let you select 4 or 8x MSAA as the maximum (virtually no difference between 4x and 8x MSAA, I want either 4x SSAA or 12x Edge Detect in everything I play).

If ATI could ever sort that out, it would be brilliant.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by bhavv

The only issue I have is that forcing AA through the CCC doesnt work in a lot of games... If ATI could ever sort that out, it would be brilliant.

---

I get that with my 4870x2, but only in DX10/11 games.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by SoulsCollective

As I said on the first page, was getting corruption in Metro using these, so uninstalled again.

---

check your temperatures.

I'm RMA-ing one of my cards . the artifacting goes away when i put 1.3V on the core at stock speeds . so something is fishy with the card , not the drivers .

(or maybe 10.6 just stresses the card a lot more in CF than it did in 10.5, and the card can not cope with it)

Hello

Bench H2O
http://img243.imageshack.us/img243/9198/49035.th.jpg

Quote:

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Originally Posted by marcolecorse

Hello

Bench H2O
http://img243.imageshack.us/img243/9198/49035.th.jpg

---

You CPU on water for this run???? Custom chiller? How about you temps?
I think you need update you Vantage to 1.02 and post you fabolous score on hwbot.
Looks like you will have #2 spot with this score in 5970 CrossfireX rating.

No Chilleur

rad 480 TFC Feser en push/pull

Quote:

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Originally Posted by marcolecorse

No Chilleur

rad 480 TFC Feser en push/pull

---

Did you use one 480 rad for CPU/GPU in single loop?


http://img413.imageshack.us/img413/5...uat9511.th.png

This is my best run with one 5970 so far....
On stock air and with new beta drivers. With older drivers it takes 999/1200 GPU clock for 30.1k score....

Cpu

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by marcolecorse

Cpu

---

Wow! Nice setup. And another 480 for GPU loop?

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by marcolecorse

Hello

Bench H2O
http://img243.imageshack.us/img243/9198/49035.th.jpg

---

Hello :D

Nice result.

when does this go live?

These BSOD my system on restart :(

Quote:

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Originally Posted by STEvil

check your temperatures.

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On air with directed airflow. Temps under 75 at load, VRM is fine.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by {SAS}TB

These BSOD my system on restart :(

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me2 lol then i reloaded n fine now

:( nope it BSODs on every redraft unless I boot into safe mode :|

I have a pair of 4890's and just went from the Cat 10.5's to the 10.6's on Win7 64.

Not changing anything else, my 3DMARK 06 went down a negligible amount.

However, running the benchmark for Just Cause 2 Dark Tower, I get:

All settings maxed out, SSAO off, 16xAF

Cat 10.5 -- 94.95
4x AA -- 47.35

Cat 10.6 -- 98.89
4x AA -- 53.45

Seems to have a big performance increase :D

10.5 to 10.6 gained 2440 in Vantage, all else the same.. only played just cause with theses, so far flawless gaming... but in Vantage there was some artifacting... :mad:

http://img231.imageshack.us/img231/6...uat9991.th.png

I think not bad at all for stock cooling on GPU and CPU on air:D

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by justin.kerr

10.5 to 10.6 gained 2440 in Vantage, all else the same.. only played just cause with theses, so far flawless gaming... but in Vantage there was some artifacting... :mad:

---

Have you tried running your cards at stock to see if the artifacting goes away? You are running quite a heavy overclock, and it seems these drivers are pushing the cards more than the previous drivers did.

I did some little comparison between 10.4 (same fast as 10.5?) and 10.6 Beta..

Vantage:
10.4
http://i882.photobucket.com/albums/a...g?t=1276605155

10.6 beta
http://i882.photobucket.com/albums/a...g?t=1276605155

Alien versus Predator Benchmark:
10.4
Number of frames: 12265
Average Frame Time: 8.5ms
Average FPS: 117.0

10.6 beta
Number of frames: 12570
Average Frame Time: 8.3ms
Average FPS: 119.8

Good improvement i think!:) These drivers dropped my 5870's overclocking ability by ~10MHz but score is still much better!

I hope to give even better results than they put :D

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Musho

Have you tried running your cards at stock to see if the artifacting goes away? You are running quite a heavy overclock, and it seems these drivers are pushing the cards more than the previous drivers did.

---

just uploaded the new 10.6 and over these Betas, no more artifacting... same GPU score though. upped the GPU's to 1076Mhz on the new divers and no artifacting..

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by justin.kerr

just uploaded the new 10.6 and over these Betas, no more artifacting... same GPU score though. upped the GPU's to 1076Mhz on the new divers and no artifacting..

---

What is you Vantage Extreme score with this?

with 24/7 settings? GPU score 28,5xx.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by justin.kerr

with 24/7 settings? GPU score 28,5xx.

---

Nice! And with all maxed out? I think total score must be close to 30k.....

As i posted on another thread, Crysis saw a 15 fps increase from my old ~60fps average with 10.5 drivers:

Quote:

---

================================================== ============
TimeDemo Play Started , (Total Frames: 2000, Recorded Time: 111.86s)
!TimeDemo Run 0 Finished.
Play Time: 29.61s, Average FPS: 67.54
Min FPS: 56.85 at frame 261, Max FPS: 83.56 at frame 1005
Average Tri/Sec: -19423110, Tri/Frame: -287595
Recorded/Played Tris ratio: -3.19
!TimeDemo Run 1 Finished.
Play Time: 26.76s, Average FPS: 74.74
Min FPS: 55.94 at frame 1954, Max FPS: 97.90 at frame 99
Average Tri/Sec: -20996476, Tri/Frame: -280941
Recorded/Played Tris ratio: -3.26
!TimeDemo Run 2 Finished.
Play Time: 26.68s, Average FPS: 74.95
Min FPS: 54.76 at frame 1974, Max FPS: 97.90 at frame 99
Average Tri/Sec: -21037946, Tri/Frame: -280698
Recorded/Played Tris ratio: -3.27
!TimeDemo Run 3 Finished.
Play Time: 26.63s, Average FPS: 75.10
Min FPS: 54.76 at frame 1974, Max FPS: 97.90 at frame 99
Average Tri/Sec: -21042882, Tri/Frame: -280208
Recorded/Played Tris ratio: -3.27
TimeDemo Play Ended, (4 Runs Performed)
================================================== ============

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This is just mind blowing, i wasn't expecting such increase in performance this moment in time, lol!!

What resolution?

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Kimofil

Nice! And with all maxed out? I think total score must be close to 30k.....

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yes. right at. lol :D

Tri/Frame is less

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by damha

What resolution?

---

1920x1200 FSAA4x, all settings maximum, also max quality in CCC.

Wow. Thats demolishing stock gtx480 sli in crysis. Minfps 55 :shocked: