ATI Radeon cards: Tweak your card

[robinhood]

Radeon Tweaking Guide

After spending ages looking at Radeon tweak guides such as this excellent one at http://www.tweakguides.com/ATICAT_1.html I have tweaked my graphics card to perfection. I have struck the fine balance of IQ (image quality) and performance.

First thing you need to do is uninstall the CCC (catalyst control center) and if your drivers are outdated, you mays well uninstall all Radeon drivers and software. Here's how...

First go to add/remove programs and uninstall the CCC and Radeon drivers and reboot. Now get Driver Cleaner Pro, run it and select "multiple cleaning filters" and select every ATI filter in the drop down list and proceed to clean. Reboot then cancel all attempts to install the driver.

Go back into Driver Cleaner and now perform a cab clean to clean your driver.cab file from the backed-up ATI drivers. Mays well perform anyother cleaning options while your at it too. Reboot.

Now get your hands on WinASO Registry Optimizer and go strait into options, hit the "scan options" tab at the end and select "aggressive mode" and untick all boxes except for "save scan options". Then delete all the strings for the 3 ignore tabs. Close options and run a registry scan using all avilable checks then hit fix. Now you mays well go to "Advanced tools" and click "registry defrag" and complete that. Reboot.

Now u need to download the latest display driver. There are many tweaked drivers out there and I've used many (Omedga, NGO, ect) and to be frank they are complete crap both in their claims of higher IQ and higher performance (sure, some are faster, but at the expense of IQ, lol). Get the official driver and tweak it yourself (that's the next bit of this guide). For all Radeon cards, there is just one driver - http://ati.amd.com/support/drivers/xp/radeonx-xp.html - downlaod the Display Driver 11.8MB 6.11 Nov. 15, 2006 Display Driver Only at the bottom so you dont waste time downloding the one with CCC included.

Now without the CCC there is no way to tweak your card so we need a CCC replacment which comes in the form of ATI Tray Tools download (ATT). This is far far better than CCC in everyway. It weighs next to nothing, runs fast, it's easy to navigate and gives you access to far far more options and settings than the newbie CCC does. Install ATI Tray tools and now we begin the tweaking...


Start ATI Tray tools and it will load into your sys tray. See the red icon there? Right click it.

First things first, go to Tweaks - Standard Tweaks and tick "optimize pixel shader code", "geometry instancing" & "fast Z clear enable", all other boxes should NOT be ticked. Now click the "System" tab and enable ONLY the WMV Acceleration option.

Now go to Tweaks again but select Advanced Tweaks and answer yes to the warning and then make it look like mine does...




Now go to Hardware and disable "fast writes" and then reboot when it asks you. Fast writes sounds cool but does not do what it claims and causes system instability. Experiament with it to see if you gain from it off or on.

Now finally go to the Direct 3D section and under the General tab, set anti-aliasing to application controlled and tick adaptive anti-aliasing and choose performance (no noticable difference between performance & quality) mode in the drop down menu. Set anistrophic filtering to 4x or x8 (try 8 first) and then tick performance for it to (like with anti aliasing theres no noticable difference between performance & quality). Now under the Performance section set texture preference and mipmap detail level to high quality and set v sync to ALWAYS OFF. Now click the "Additional" tab and under Tweaks section tick all but "alternate pixel centers". Under "Addidtional" section within the "Additional" tab set Catalyst A.I to high and flip queue size to 3.

Click ok then see if you've gained those extra frames with no IQ loss.

Additional Notes

if you are the lucky few to have a very powerful Radeon card then you can easily go ahead and ramp up the anti-alising and anistrphic filtering to there maximum quality and enjoy the hugely enhanced visuals anti-aliasing gives. You can also untick anistrphic and trillinear filtering optimization to get the max possible anistrphic texture filtering. Also enable line AA option in advanced tweaks.

Alternatively if you struggling with your card the settings to tweak for more performance are again anti-alising, anistrphic filtering.

[vikrant]

thanks for detailed guide
i shall sticky it
btw i dont have ati

[robinhood]

oh kewl my first sticky! Hey nVIDIA's peeps need to get RiverTuner to tweak their nVIDIA card. All the basic options from ATI Tray Tools are there so it's quite similar.

[DarK_RTW]

Why is it you recommend turning on AF 4/8x? Is 4x AF on performance faster than Trilinear?

[robinhood]

AF imposes a negligiable performance hit, especially on ATI cards, so why not?

[the Eternal Cocoon]

AF imposes a negligiable performance hit, especially on ATI cards, so why not?

I turned it down to 2x instead of 4x and it gave me just enough performance to make high settings with shader 2 work on a playable level ( 2-4 fps)

[robinhood]

i bet if you turned everything to max except shadows it'll run fine. God knows how long I tried to get good quality/peformance out of the game untill I turned shadows from medium to lowest and now I can run all detail and resolution maxed out and even AA at 2x. You need get over the lack of shadows, too, so it ain't that bad.

I have a Radeon x850 Pro, BTW.

[Edmonton]

To @Robinhood what it means cab clean and where tne cab.file and backed-up ATI drivers.PS. Can I use ATI Tray Tools with CCC?

[robinhood]

No. Get rid of CCC and install the ultra light weight ATT.

[Swe_gamer]

Thanks for the guide!

Sorry for the idiotic questions but; I can´t find fast writes under hardware...

Is this automatically overclocking your computer?

[robinhood]

hardware - SMARTGART? And nope it's nothing to do with overclocking.

[Edmonton]

to @ Robinhood what are those numbers in yellow in red in upper right corner?

[robinhood]

where?

[Legione]

Just curious as to what kind of results people have seen from this tweaking. Is it worth it?

[robinhood]

I've had amazing results. Even Oblivion has smoothed out to a more than playable frame rate at maximum quality including 2x AA.

[Edmonton]

where?

While using ATI Tray Tools in games

[robinhood]

While using ATI Tray Tools in games

ohh those. Thats the OSD (on screen display), it can show you laods of information about your card. Configure it in the ATT OSD section. I set mine to show my frame rate, GPU tempreture and free video memory. I hotkey it to F12.

So cool.

[Ketzerfreund]

Greetings,

This does all work surprisingly well for me and this old Radeon9800Pro of mine; thanks alot for putting this guide together.

Two questions, though:
1.) When choosing the level of anisotropic filtering in the tray tool, will the level chosen in Med2's options be ignored? Or will the lesser of the two be used?

2.) When I tell the tray tool to leave that option to the application, will it emphasize on performance or quality?


-Der Ketzerfreund.

[robinhood]

Greetings,

This does all work surprisingly well for me and this old Radeon9800Pro of mine; thanks alot for putting this guide together.

Two questions, though:
1.) When choosing the level of anisotropic filtering in the tray tool, will the level chosen in Med2's options be ignored? Or will the lesser of the two be used?

2.) When I tell the tray tool to leave that option to the application, will it emphasize on performance or quality?


-Der Ketzerfreund.

oh cool it worked for you! if you set the game to no AA or AF but set ATT to whatever AA or AF level, the game will not apply AA or AF. So much for what ATT says goes:hmmm:

However if you set AA or AF to whatever level in the game, whatever level you have set it in ATT will be applied.

For example say if i set AA to 4x and AF to 8x in the games option menu but in ATT i set AA to 2x and AF to 16x then the game will be forced to use 2x and 16x, respectively.

if you set AA and AF to "application controlled" then that basically means what it says. No AF or AA is applied unless you say so within the application (i.e a game). So yeah it means OFF, basically.

[SPARTAN VI]

Neat guide. Question though, do the new ATT come with ATI's Overdrive feature? The only reason I still use the bulky CCC is because it automatically OC's my X1900XT to what I set it to (XTX speeds) once in 3D mode.

Other users may find that a combination of your method along with ATi Tool will turn up even better results.