8.10 hotfix Drivers cheat on FC2

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wolf2009

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jan 23, 2008
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Just found this over at this site . They found that with 8.10 hotfix drivers, textures were missing in FC2 . Perfromance increased with this so called "FC 2 optimized driver", but the performance increase comes from missing textures .


pretty interesting stuff, i'll be waiting for 8.11 now .
 
It looks more like the game is rendering those stones as being buried in the mud (for instance, the top of one stone is shown poking out of the mud). Besides, one instance in one screenshot hardly serves as proof. The author is an idiot or lazy for not conducting more tests before posting conclusions.
 
even without that hotfix ati card is as fast as gtx 280 in high res hotfix only adds 2 fps to avg
 
They found that with 8.10 hotfix drivers, textures were missing in FC2
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Sure looks like it.

the performance increase comes from missing textures .
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Not necessarily. The performance increase might still come from other optimizations and the missing rocks might just be a side-effect caused by some bug. Still, it's bad PR for AMD.
 
JimmiG said:
Not necessarily. The performance increase might still come from other optimizations and the missing rocks might just be a side-effect caused by some bug. Still, it's bad PR for AMD.
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ya but you never know what you might miss, imagine missing enemy textures and having to deal with invisible goons
 
I've noticed this with corpses and dropped weapons. I'd drop a merc, and every once in a while I'd notice the shadow of his corpse but no visible corpse. Walk over to him, and if I look at it at just the right angle, I can begin to see a part of his body. It's wierd, looks submerged, but floating at the same time. Same thing with weapons, I can see all the flashing weapons on the ground, but when I walk around and look at them, they're flashing alright, but the weapon itself is invisible. I don't think it's a "cheat," looks like an innocent glitch.
 
wolf2009 said:
ya but you never know what you might miss, imagine missing enemy textures and having to deal with invisible goons
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Yeah driver bugs can be annoying, but I'm pretty sure 8.11 will fix those issues without degrading performance. Until then you can either use the normal 8.10's which still provide good performance, or use the even faster Hotfix drivers and live with the display errors.
 
So am I supposed to believe that just because the latest ATI drivers don't work properly with Farcry 2 in regard to texturing that ATI must be cheating on their drivers to get better performance scores?

Are you serious?
 
So this guy's entire theory is based on these rocks alone?
Conspiracy theory fail.
 
OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG what are we to do now!?!?!?! OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG
 
YeuEmMaiMai said:
OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG what are we to do now!?!?!?! OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG
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It's quite simple really: you must throw your 48xx cards out of the window pronto.
 
Simmonz said:
It's quite simple really: you must throw your 48xx cards out of the window pronto.
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or just install the drivers, and know if you see something strange , that the drivers are at fault, not the game, and wait for it to be fixed
 
Yeah, I saw some missing textures on some dead guys, too.

How many games have you seen wierd shit and NPCs walking through walls, etc.

It's a video game, I just take it in stride as a game glitch and move on.

BFD.:eek:
(Chicken Little bullshit)

Oh yeah..........my son's 8800GT SLi set-up has the same occassional "floating dead guys"..........as for rocks........I really haven't spent the time to look at them that critically on either computer.

BTW, the game is fun, isn't that what it's all about.;)
 
The fact of the matter is that AMD had had little if any early looks at this game since it is TWIMTBP. NVIDIA GPUs SHOULD WORK FLAWLESSLY. In this matter I simply give AMD a bit more room for getting it right. This however is no Quake/Quack.

Got word from AMD while I was typing this....."supposed to have an update to the hotfix tomorrow." We will see.
 
Kyle is correct.
The "other" guys brought it to our attention via websites over the weekend so we had an engineer come in to debug. He found a bug in his code, got a fix together for us, and now we are getting it packed and prepared for a hotfix update. 12 business hour turnaround!
Plan on going live today or tomorrow.

Thanks for the thorough testing guys.
 
Another update discussing this rock thing with the AMD driver team working on this. I brought this thread to his attention to make sure AMD is even aware of this. (Which I am sure they were, but you never know unless you ask.)

Yeah. I am aware. We had a guy fix it over the weekend and I am getting it in the hotfix driver I referenced below. Should be live today or tomorrow.

Legitimate bug.
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So there you go. Straight from the horse's mouth.

EDIT: Hehe, I see that Cat Maker chimed in himself above.
 
CATALYST MAKER said:
Kyle is correct.
The "other" guys brought it to our attention via websites over the weekend so we had an engineer come in to debug. He found a bug in his code, got a fix together for us, and now we are getting it packed and prepared for a hotfix update. 12 business hour turnaround!
Plan on going live today or tomorrow.

Thanks for the thorough testing guys.
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this is awesome!

Who are these "other" guys ?
 
I'd say that they're feeding this all over the place.

That site linked in the first post is owned by an ex-AnandTech moderator. This issue was first brought to light over at AT by an Nvidia Focus Group member a few days ago. (The OP is also an AT member, so I assume that might be where he saw this.)

I have to agree with some of the others, that this is probably not something I would obsess about while playing the game. Back when I was heavily into a TF2 clan and still had an 8800GTS, whenever I played the sniper class, I would crank the graphics quality settings all the way to lowest, to get as high an FPS as possible for that tiny bit of extra edge (and I'm far from the only person in that clan to do it). And here we have a huge ruckus made over virtual rocks and whether they look right or not :rolleyes:.
 
I don't see any textures missing to begin with, the road is just being drawn somewhat over the rocks.

Looks like bug, and that's what it turned out to be.
 
ATI to the rescue..............thank God, wew've been saved!!!:eek:
 
next question is why doesnt my 4870 x2 clock correctly in game? :( it was sad when the clocks read off 750/500 and frames were reduced.haha Anyway good news for new driver.

btw, if anyone knows how to fix the clocks in game i would be very thankful. :)
 
CATALYST MAKER said:
Kyle is correct.
The "other" guys brought it to our attention via websites over the weekend so we had an engineer come in to debug. He found a bug in his code, got a fix together for us, and now we are getting it packed and prepared for a hotfix update. 12 business hour turnaround!
Plan on going live today or tomorrow.

Thanks for the thorough testing guys.
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Thank goodness I was about to jump out of the window and NOT buy Far Cry 2.
 
I dunno Kyle - you and the rest of the community once took ATI to task for their overuse of optimizations in a popular benchmark.

http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTEx

Now really, game optimizations haven't been headline-worthy since Quack3. Now THAT was a craptastic optimization - the whole scene was blurry and washed-out.

If the optimization is so small that I won't notice it in normal game play, then I really don't care. I think a few transparent rocks would qualify.

But from an ethical standpoint, if Farcry2 is going to become "the" benchmark, ATI should correct this so the visual output is virtually identical.

*EDIT* looks like it was just a bug, good job ATI fixing the issue.
 
Well, thank god for the AT forums nvidia focus group members Rollo and his chiwawa NV sidekick keysplayer - they're looking out for ATI and doing some great ATI QC reporting there. Without Derek Wilson's backend support of the two who knows if that stuff would get reported promptly and responsibly? I hope rollo has direct deposit through ATI's parner bank as i'm sure ATI has a debug/partner payment waiting to send to his account for his work.
 
CATALYST MAKER said:
Kyle is correct.
The "other" guys brought it to our attention via websites over the weekend so we had an engineer come in to debug. He found a bug in his code, got a fix together for us, and now we are getting it packed and prepared for a hotfix update. 12 business hour turnaround!
Plan on going live today or tomorrow.

Thanks for the thorough testing guys.
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Sweet.

And color me surprised. :)
 
the only differences i noticed from the 8.10's and 8.10 hotfix drivers were in the hotfix drivers, sometimes dropped weapons were transparent, and the occasional flashing green anomaly that would randomly show up.

no idea what caused that, but when i went back to the regular 8.10's it was all cured.
 
defaultluser said:
I dunno Kyle - you and the rest of the community once took ATI to task for their overuse of optimizations in a popular benchmark.

http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTEx

Now really, game optimizations haven't been headline-worthy since Quack3. Now THAT was a craptastic optimization - the whole scene was blurry and washed-out.

If the optimization is so small that I won't notice it in normal game play, then I really don't care. I think a few transparent rocks would qualify.

But from an ethical standpoint, if Farcry2 is going to become "the" benchmark, ATI should correct this so the visual output is virtually identical.

*EDIT* looks like it was just a bug, good job ATI fixing the issue.
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And we would have taken them to task again if we had any reason to belive it was a "cheat." You may "dunno," but I do know. :)
 
WTS - 4870, barely used...

Kind of glad I forgot about FC2's launch now, by the time payday gets here, AMD will have everything sorted.
 
WhiteZero said:
So this guy's entire theory is based on these rocks alone?
Conspiracy theory fail.
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i am "the guy" and there are *plenty* of other places where this happens .. i can show you many screen shots with these broken drivers - and it is not "just rocks" - Do you want my game saves? i have several others.

Who knows why? It is possible that ATi could be aggressively optimizing the vertex mesh, which would cause that sort of misplaced collision trouble and could also
cause texture distortions since the texture is being overlaid onto a different mesh than what it as designed for. i didn't explore the "why" .. i just noted it and i did not condemn AMD for it - after all they are BETA drivers with a serious disclaimer.

However, 8-10 Hotfix is buggy .. people should know it - i think people should be happy to know not to use these hotfix drivers - they are definitely missing something :p

And since AMD is *addressing this issue* - i am now extra glad they are now AWARE of it and will fix it for all of us. i am a AMD fan also and i run CF X3 in my own rig
:cool:

. . . and the chugging that one gets with a single 4870/1GB is easily taken care of by a simple console command - simply cap the frame rates to 25 or 30 as is done in UT3 games to smooth its frame rate when it is uneven. Just open the console and type:
gfx_maxfps 25

FC2 runs silky smooth on my GTX280, HD4870x2 and even CF-X3

Here is a follow-up scene in a completely different place with more than rocks:

http://www.alienbabeltech.com/?p=995
 
apoppin said:
i am "the guy"
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Me, I would have been annoyed that Rollo and company got me to waste my precious gaming time doing their dirty work of researching and collating those results :p. It's not like they don't have the PR resources for it. Credibility, on the other hand...

I can't wait to get this game, but it sounds like it might not be such a bad thing that I have a "backlog" of preordered games that just arrived that I need to get through. Hopefully it'll give AMD enough time to fix some of the issues.
 
AmberClad said:
Me, I would have been annoyed that Rollo and company got me to waste my precious gaming time doing their dirty work of researching and collating those results :p. It's not like they don't have the PR resources for it. Credibility, on the other hand...

I can't wait to get this game, but it sounds like it might not be such a bad thing that I have a "backlog" of preordered games that just arrived that I need to get through. Hopefully it'll give AMD enough time to fix some of the issues.
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Why do you call it "dirty work" ?

Fact: i own FC2 and also several GPUs.
Fact; i noted the Hotfix drivers gave me nothing but slightly faster framerates and that they were buggier than Cat 8-10 - even for CF DX10, what they were released for.
Fact: there ARE issues with visible artifacting in certain areas with HotFix 8-10 that are not present in Cat 8-10
Fact: the uneven frame rates a single 4870 experiences can be simply fixed - without any NEED for more performance
Fact: i presented the issues without making any judgment "why"
- i presented the facts and suggested a fix;' what is not to like and how is "credibility" called into issue

FACT: if i find a similar issue with a Nvidia GPU you can be sure i will report on it
;)
 
I wasn't questioning your credibility. That wasn't the implication.

It was pretty clever of them to get regular members to participate and present the findings, instead of having Rollo coming in and telling us that "hey, look what the Nvidia PR department would like you guys to know about AMD". (That particular admission, that his "tip" came from Nvidia itself didn't come until the very last page of that thread, which resulted in the thread lock, it would seem.)

If you had found out those issues by yourself, without Rollo's handiwork, we wouldn't be having this discussion. It's being shilled by PR types that I really dislike...
 
AmberClad said:
I wasn't questioning your credibility. That wasn't the implication.

It was pretty clever of them to get regular members to participate and present the findings, instead of having Rollo coming in and telling us that "hey, look what the Nvidia PR department would like you guys to know about AMD". (That particular admission, that his "tip" came from Nvidia itself didn't come until the very last page of that thread, which resulted in the thread lock, it would seem.)

If you had found out those issues by yourself, without Rollo's handiwork, we wouldn't be having this discussion. It's being shilled by PR types that I really dislike...
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Good lord, the first thing i said in my article was "Nvidia's Focus Group member Rollo" questioned this and we decided to investigate.

i thought it was *reasonable* that this be investigated .. not as a "cheat" or as an optimization - i did not mention anything other than the hotfix boosted performance, as in the release notes .. then i presented the evidence.

Here .. a follow up

http://www.alienbabeltech.com/?p=995

More evidence that some requested that it is more than "rocks"
How about a trash pile?
:D
 
What can I say? My tolerance for minor graphical glitches is higher than my tolerance for marketing shills :p.

After looking at some of the pictures of both the rocks and the trash, I still don't know that it's something that would stand out unless I knew specifically to look for it. Maybe I'd have to see it in-game for it to look more obvious, but just looking at screenshots, it looks like partially buried trash.

To be honest, I'm far more concerned with the reports I've been hearing from users as far as poor performance in this game with HD4870s (not everyone has a freakin' HD4870X3 setup like you :eek:), because that's something that could actually seriously affect my gameplay and ability to kill the baddies.
 
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