» Wed Jun 29, 2011 4:47 am
ATI/AMD gfx card users are screwed with the DX11 patch atm. The patch is very nVidia biased but that's not so surprising since the DX11 support was "comissioned" by them so CryTEK made sure it runs well on nV hardware.
ATI/AMD users will have to wait for a new driver/profile/fix from CryTEK themselves.
For now Radeon 6xxx users will have to play with Object on Extreme instead of Ultra since that's the setting that's cutting fps in half.
DX11 is in no way brand biased.
How a game runs on different branded hardware has to do with drivers, architecture, and targeted game features (such as PhysX, however any brand can run PhysX, the ONLY reason AMD/ATI can't is because Nvidia will not allow it. It has nothing to do with hardware). The only other time would be if the game was coded to purposely favor one or the other. Not something you are going to see very often since that would alienate a good half of their customer base.
Nvidia is loosing sales on stand-alone GPU's, they have been for most of this past year, while AMD has seen an impressive increase in sales. The last quoted numbers I recall seeing were from last month. Nvidia posting a 28% sales drop while AMD saw a 15% increase.
Nvidia's money makers have been CUDA and PhysX. The technology behind CUDA is nothing special or specific to Nvidia, it's just their branding on their verison of the technology, it's also something that AMD is starting to implement. CUDA in an of itself has no impact on gaming, CUDA cores and Stream Processors do the same thing, they just go about it differently. AMD remained focused on gaming while Nvidia expanded out to allow other applications that GPU's are better suited for over CPU's. A bandwagon AMD is now jumping on, though they are still behind Nvidia in non-gaming application processing on the GPU.
PhysX is also just a trademark, an engine they purchased from Ageia (I actually still own the last stand-alone PhysX PPU produced by Ageia before Nvidia killed them), and thus is Nvidia's proprietary branded physics engine. PhysX was the first real powerful and dependable Physics engine out there. This is why Nvidia purchased it and had a nice long run on top with it. However the PhysX engine can run on any GPU, the ONLY reason it wont run on an AMD/ATI GPU is because Nvidia has disallowed it. The popularity of PhysX in PC gaming has seen a sharp and massive decline. Most mainstream games either use their own engine for physics, Havoc, or anything else that does not limit it's usage to a single GPU brand.
Anyway.
My single 6970 is performing just as good as it's Nvidia counterpart, full ultra 1080P high-res textures, based on every posted FPS rating I have seen so far, here and elsewhere. I never drop under 30FPS and hover in the mid to high 40's with spikes over 70. There is no brand biased that I can see from a performance standpoint. The only issue I see the OP having is trying to run on ultra on a 6870. The 6870 is a great card, that is not in question, but it is a great "mid-range" card. Under what Crysis 2 will really need to run smoothly on ultra at 1080P.
Reducing Objects to "Extreme" will indeed add FPS to your game no matter what GPU you run. I see about a 10 FPS increase if I set it at Extreme as opposed to Ultra. There is no noticeable visual difference I can see at all between the two settings. However I leave mine set to Ultra since it does not hinder the performance of the game on my system enough to effect the experience. This would be a good setting to adjust for those players who are sitting on the borderline between playable and not.
