running games while running ati tool

If i run games while running ati tool will the games take preference over ati tool, because the settings are kinda weird in ati tool..... How does AF rank? bilinear then trilinear than AFx2, x4, x8 etc? im kinda confuses sorry for my newbish ness


Also my FPS hovers around 30 no matter what game i play... do i have some settings screwed up?

 

That is because you have vsync enabled. Check your video card's control panel and make sure it is off, and also check the in-game options. Basically what vsync does is cap your framerate at your monitor's refresh rate so you don't get image tearing/distortion. Leaving it off means better performance.

 

i had it on because i was getting CRAZY amounts of tearing in F.E.A.R. now i just downloaded far cry i know its older but i'm getting NO lag what so ever. F.E.A.R. would drop down to about 9 fps and go back up and hover around 30. I had the native rez (1280x768) AAx2 and AFx4.....

 

If you have Vync on then the frame rate will match your monitors refresh rate, or the closest availble multiple of that refresh rate. So it will either play at 60, 30, 15fps etc.

If FEAR is playing so slow why don't you turn down the video settings a bit?

ATI tool will override in game settings as you are making adjustments directly the the graphics driver. I'm not sure what you mean by AF rank though. Higher Anisotropic Filtering will give you a better quality of textures within games, however this requires a lot of memory bandwidth to use at the higher settings. Read here for some more info on the topic

 

I now have vsync off but i still have the same issue from within F.E.A.R. no AA or AF. My texture filtering is set to bilinar and my rez is down to 1024x768, my fps still doesn't hit much above 30. THats kind of weird considering my gpu is oc'ed and i got a score of 4750 in 3d mark 05....

 

I personally like leaving VSYNC on, especially with multi-threaded apps. They'll run much faster that way, because you aren't wasting CPU cycles redrawing and recalculating for each frame. But in single-threaded apps, really isn't much reason to do so.

 

Turn shadows off, if that don't make it run faster then set texture level to medium.

FEAR is a very demanding game.

 

I wonder if its my GPU slowing it down or the fact that i only have 1 gig of ram. I found some benchmarks of a Mobility x1600 with no AF or AA and it averaged around 45 FPS. Well my ram comes from Tigerdirect today so i guess that will answer my question .


I take it F.E.A.R. is multi-threaded?

 

The only review I can see on the net of the X1600 playing FEAR, they had the game on medium details, shadows off.

 

http://www.hothardware.com/viewarticle.aspx


that is on a Pentium M...


he says soft-shadows are disable but nothing about shadows being disabled.

 

Yeah, thats the same review I saw. Medium Details, soft shadowing off, only 1gb memory on the laptop. Fear isn't a multi threaded application either.

 

so i wonder why my fps would still be way lower? hmm

 

i just tested the demo of the new expansion back holy **** what a difference. Could just be less demanding but with ALL SHADOWS off it was hovering at 60 fps and during fights wouldn't drop below 30. (1024x768 AAx2 AFx4, almost all details at med). Then i turned up AFx8 and turned shadows on and to medium detail and it still didnt drop below 20. before when i was getting really ****ty performance it wouldnt go ABOVE 30 and it would drop down to single digits. I was running the DEMO of the first F.E.A.R. the first time. They could have just worked out the bugs by now....

 

Something is not right with your FEAR then, do you have it patched to the latest version? The expansion pack is the same engine as FEAR, there should not be a reason why that runs faster than your full game. Check your video settings.

 

no it wasn't patched it was the demo..... same video settings