It’s really interesting to me, because it reminds me of tricks devs used to pull in the pre-3D era to create certain optical illusions of effects that weren’t really there, such as the first skyboxes and pre-rendered backgrounds. I’ve never seen that before in a game, and I really hope other developers learn that technique and use it in the future (and if you know of another game out there that uses it, let me know). It’s a texture placed over the window that alters itself based on where you’re looking. The shops in the game don’t actually have geometry inside of them, nor do they even have an inside. It gives an incredibly uncanny sense of a 3D space. It looks to me like a dynamic texture that repositions itself based on the player’s perspective. It clearly wasn’t a 3D space inside the shop, but it wasn’t a static 2D texture, either. I literally stood in front of a shop window for 5 minutes trying to figure out what the hell I was looking at. In fact, a good example of that is Saints Row 2… So, explain to me why a 5-year-old game runs worse at lower settings on my system than a sub-2-year-old game at max settings? It’s all in the optimization, and Volition did a fantastic job this time around.Īnother thing The Third does that blew my mind was how they created realistic shop windows. Most games I have to drop to at least 4x, usually 2x, and that’s with no ambient occlusion. It’s one of the few games I can play with 8xAA AND ambient occlusion at 30+ fps.
First off, the PC version is incredibly well-optimized. There are a couple of really impressive technical things Volition did with SR3 that I wish more games did. So, yes, The Third is amazing, blah, blah, but that’s not what I’m here to talk about today.
All of my complaints I had during SR2 magically vanished in 3 (they even learned how to make decent run cycles!). SR3 is everything SR2 wished it could be. You’ll be blown off your seat and into the next room, I guarantee (unless you happen to live in a one-room structure of some kind, in which case I can’t guarantee you’ll be blown into another room). I’m sure most of you have already played it and know this, but something that makes it even more amazing that you may not have tried is playing it immediately after beating Saints Row 2. Naturally, there are always kinks to iron out and the company says it's aware of at least three more issues with the latest beta drivers: Crossfire used with Overdrive can result in secondary GPUs running at 99%, enabling Crossfire can cause the secondary GPU's PCIe bus speed to be reported as x1, and apparently BioShock Infinite's new DLC doesn't play nice with frame pacing, so you'll probably want to disable that for the time being.I finally started playing Saints Row: The Third, and let me start by saying it is absolutely phenomenal.
AMD doesn't provide specific numbers, but Radeon owners can also expect better performance out RIPD on single GPUs, Minimum and Castlevania: Lords of Shadow on multiple GPUs and Final Fantasy XIV on both types of graphics configurations.Ĭatalyst 13.8 beta 2 (release notes): Desktop | Mobile | LinuxĪdditionally, AMD has solved corruption and image quality issues in Doom 3 BFG Edition, Far Cry 3 and Van Helsing, particularly when playing the latter two with anti-aliasing enabled in the CCC.
Today's update also improves performance in many titles, not least of which is a 25% boost when playing Saints Row IV on ultra at 1080p and a 9% gain in Splinter Cell: Blacklist when it's running on ultra at 2560x1600. The feature should be enabled globally by default but you can configure it on a per-application basis in the Catalyst Control Center.
Frame pacing was introduced with the previous beta build to help ensure frames are displayed smoothly.
Following up on the Catalyst 13.8 beta driver released earlier this month, AMD has released a second revision with scattered tweaks, including new frame pacing support for World of Warcraft, Sniper Elite, Watch Dogs and Tomb Raider when playing on a Crossfire setup.