cvearl

Black Friday is coming. Wonder how that will shake down. Reference R9 290's for $400 are on Newegg.com now and selling and getting 5 egg reviews. So what the hell nVidia. That 780 needs to be $449 or less now. Common now. LOL I bet as soon as we see factory overclocked Windforce X3 and CUII variants of the 290 on shelves for $429, the 780 will have to drop to match or it will not be worth it. The brands better hurry with their spins on this 290 before all the ruckus settles. This just blows my mind how fast this slide in value came. Enthusiast price point from $650 drops to $400 in a few months just blows my hair back. No one saw this coming. C.

TH2G? Why not use Eyefinity? Just curious. BTW - I have turned off cars on the roads and dropped water to 2xLow and I have not seen a single spike yet in all scenarios. Pretty happy. C.

Maybe completely irrelevant to your comments but I just remembered a past experience. When I upgraded to a 7970 my computer got louder and initially I thought it was the 7970. On closer inspection it turned out it was my PSU. Card was driving more power than my cheap PSU could deal with and it got very hot. The noise was actually the PSU's own fan. The PSU was rated high enough but was made of poor components. Upgraded and it got somewhat quieter. The way I got to the bottom of it was I use the fan monitor in CCC.after testing full load on the card I would end the game or demo that I was using and the computer would still be loud and I would check CCC fan percentage it would be about 35 percent normally be very quiet 35 percent. It was my PSU all along. C. In quiet mode without the headphones how is it? C.

Thanks for the warning to stay away from that brand. I only trust Asus, HIS, sapphire and gigabyte. unless I'm going to put a water block on it I stay away from the reference design cooler no matter which generation.

Roger that. Waterblock = no worries. Default Cooler is a tick loud. Not as loud as say.... GTX480 but you can hear it. I would run it in Quiet mode till you get that waterblock installed. Charles. I just want P3D to get V2.0 out ASAP! If my 7970 GHZ rocks DX11 FSX without issues, I will keep this card (all other games at Ultra settings locked at 60 is fine by me) and get me a new i7 Haswell setup. Charles.

Why not wait for the aftermarket boards? Better coolers. C. It's a rebranded 7790 just so you know. Why so expensive there? Should be $140 US. http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/R7_260X/ You might be happier in an R9 270X. About 30% more powerful. Charles.

I would definitely not have bought the first batch of reference design 290 series cards either. If I was forced to upgrade this very moment from my HD 7970 Ghz card I would go directly to GTX780. But I cannot bring myself to spend $500 on a card and a GTX770 is just a sideways move. But to each their own in terms of value considerations. I am waiting for the board partners to see how the reviews of the Gigabyte and ASUS 290 goes. $400 I can handle. You will absolutely love the 780 I think. Your 7950 is basically a GTX660ti, and compared to that, it will be a monster! Tell us! 8xS + 4xSGSS transparency AA in cloudy overcast weather on 3 27" screens in a payware plane over some great autogen. How does that play for you?! My next big move will be to multiscreen I think. 3 27" screens either off of a 290 or a 780. Charles.

Great news. A few questions if I may. Water maxed? What about Cloud Density slider? What about AA level. 4? 8? Do you use Supersample in CCC? Charles.

Yes. A few others reported the same. Fully uninstall and reboot first. Then install this set. Although if you are not in a russh, there is nothing wrong with 13.4. They were a great driver! So unless oyu need to play Battlefield 4 or some other game that benefits from the driver 13.11, why bother? Even wait till the official WHQL 13.11 arrives and it is no longer BETA. But if you do want to flip to 13.11 right now and are not afraid to be a BETA tester.... http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/GPU57RemoveOldGraphicsDrivers.aspx Switching drivers is a simple task when done right and if it blows up, there are more serious issues going on somewhere in your system. Usually related to .NET 4.5 system corruption or whatever. Charles.

Did you uninstall the previous driver first? Don't just update. Remove and install a new one. http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/GPU57RemoveOldGraphicsDrivers.aspx Tech Tip - After the full uninstall completes, and you are asked to reboot, say no. THEN go into device manager and locate the ATI card driver under display and right click and hit uninstall with the option to delete the driver files say yes. NOW reboot once the screen goes to generic driver. Now once back at the desktop you can install the driver package of your choice. If you get truly stuck, like Need-To-Know said... Go to the mfg site and the largest AMD Fan site and ask there... AMD - http://forums.amd.com/game/categories.cfm?catid=454&entercat=y AMD Fan Site (similar to nvnews) - http://www.rage3d.com/ Charles.

Please follow this procedure to first uninstall the previous driver before installing the new one... http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/GPU57RemoveOldGraphicsDrivers.aspx Charles.

Let us know how 3 27's go for you on whatever you end up with. C.

Interesting.

If your looking for the DX10 fix... There is not one. If you have the DX10 fixer and are flying with that mod, get NVidia. We cannot find the source of the Spikes and Texture corruptions. If you leave water at 2xLow, then you are ok. But from time to time, on longer flights like over 2 hours, you will get them. You can get away with Clouds set to High density and water 2xLow in DX10 I think. Good luck. I'm waiting for DX11 before I make a choice for my 2014 video card. Charles.

I don't know if I'm just lucky or something? I have had two separate ATI based machines that I've used for my simulator and between the two of them, 4 different models of cards. This is over the last few years. I have two other ATI based machines that we use in the house one is my wife and one is my sons. I have two buddies that I built their simulators for them with ATI video cards. They are all seven thousand or 6000 series cards. I have changed the drivers at least once on all of these machines in the last couple of years and never had a single problem. On my personal machine I go forwards and backwards on driver versions all the time for testing purposes on other products. Id even put nvidia cards into my computer and taking them out and got back to ATI on more than one occasion on this very same build that I use every night and never have a problem. If I include my daughters and my wifes laptops I actually have 7 computers all running ATI video cards that I help with and I never experienced any of these kinds of issues. This is by no means meant to be smug but it makes me wonder if sometimes there's larger issues going on in somebody's computer when these things don't work properly. a bad card? A corrupt file somewhere? I don't know. Although I have to stay up front that all of these cases are single screen situations. I have no experience in multi screen with ATI cards at this time. C.

maybe so far as FSX is concerned. Outside of the flight simulator no more or less than my Nvidia cards. At least for the last few years anyhow knock on wood. And to be honest driver 13.9 was the first time FSX ever broke for me. Bioshock infinity, Crysis 3, far cry 3, Skyrim all worxked friggin awesome on my 7970 so far across every driver I've had.

13.9 will never work in DX9 with FSX. 13.11 v9.2 works. http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/latest-catalyst-windows-beta.aspx If you have Windows 7 that is your driver. Uninstall 13.4 first! Completely via Catalyst Install Manager. Do the Express Remove All AMD software and reboot. Then install the new driver. http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/GPU57RemoveOldGraphicsDrivers.aspx Charles.

Ya. From plane to plane. Setting to setting. Location to location. You can get all kinds of results. That's what sliders are for in the settings. Charles.

Yes. It is the Ugly truth. I have a 7970 (now called R9 280X) and I get 26-30 fps at KSEA in the JS41 in all weather. It's roughly what my buddy gets with his GTX680 which is now called a GTX770. Charles.

Except that Gigabyte is calling it the Ghz Edition LOL. Lord knows we need even more versions of the same card. My local shop has no less than 15 different 780's already. We need more! Haha. But we all know nVidia floods the market with variants galore which I always found annoying. EVGA models number in the dozens (56) of card models. It's silly. EVGA is nVidia's closest partner. Look at this nonsense... Just select EVGA. http://www.memoryexpress.com/Category/VideoCards You walk in that store and there is a whole wall of EVGA. It takes up more shelf than all the other brands of video cards and motherboards combined. Talk about blocking everyone else out. Charles.

OK I pushed it and forced the spikes but I am guessing nVidia users would get spikes doing this. Flew all over the Seattle area in ORBX PNW and had my stuff cranked. Everything full right except water was 2x Med and Autogen was Very Dense. Traffic was defaulted to FSX HIGH slider setting. I loaded the carenado C337 and some really horrible weather. Raining and a thick layer of overcast. Few from KSEA and circled downtown marvelling that I was locked at 30. Spun around and headed for Tacoma KTIW and it was magical. Just as I was getting there and lining up for landing I was hit suddenly with Spikes everywhere. So there is a limit. So there has been an improvement with the driver but maxed out it will still spill it's drink. No matter what, it will be about pulling settings to an acceptable level. Edit... Can't max out as much as I can with DX9+BP=0 Meh... DX10 still not perfect with this driver. Can't handle ORBX Lights in thick weather. Insta spikes still unless I dial back. Going to stick with DX9 with this driver and wait for P3D v 2.0 and see what that does. Not losing anything. It was a fun experiment. Shame as it is sooooo smooth and can fly maxed out everything. Charles.

I am starting to think you are right. Just flew Fly Tampa 1.5 TNCM to TFFJ to TNCM in the A2A 172 with a big cloud layer and water set to Medium and wow wow wow. 30 locked at all times. No one spike. Not even a flash of anything. I am still gun shy but this is awesome. I really hope they fixed it and I am not fluking out with some wierd setting somewhere. C.

Was 13.8 WHQL? I completely missed it. C.

I'm confused... Why so many entries in your CFG for the video card? Mine looks like this only... [DISPLAY.Device.AMD Radeon HD 7900 Series.0.0] AntiAlias=1 Mode=1920x1080x32 Anisotropic=1

I let Steve's fixer put whatever it wants in. The AA line 4 or 8. I have never took them out. Also.... I NEVER mix and match CCC versions with different drivers. Every single time I blow a driver out of my system (Catalyst Install Manager/Express Uninstall All Software) and reboot, I Express Install ALL complete entire package contents of the next driver. If the Catalyst Driver Team wants this CCC with this DRIVER than I go with it unless some document advises to do otherwise. I did not do any long term water at MAX test. Only 15 minutes and only flying over rivers. To be honest, because I fly real weather with OPUS which adds multiple cloud layers and I like to use 8xSSAA (8xAA in the fixer and SS in the driver via RadeonPro), I drop water to 2xLow anyway. I might try my next full-fat flight with water at Medium. I do like cloud reflections. But it really has been a standard practice in all guides to stick to 2xLow as each level above that adds another shader pass. I try to save GPU GO GO juice for the clouds to be honest. Everything we crank up adds one more job for the whole thing and I want smoooth sailing. 3 flights with reasonable settings and no spikes so far. Happy days. Driver is pure 13.11 Beta 9 version 2. PS - I also fly in DX9 and it's been rock solid as well. But when I am in DX9 I put BP=0 in. Very similar to DX10 smoothness. Charles.