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ATI Radeon 6870

Hello

Am thinking of getting an ATI Radeon 6870 based card. Currently have a 5770 (1Gb) and am reasonably pleased with the 'raw' graphics performance.

Have been very unimpressed with the stability of the drivers over the first 6 months of last year. These last few months it has improved a fair bit. Though there still a raft of 'minor' glitches (some in Microstation, some in other packages, some in Windows 7 generally) that I feel really should have been smoothed out by now. Generally haven't faired any better with Nvidia cards ...... so would expect the 6870 to give me the same 'minor' glitches that I'm getting now (as normally they use the same drivers)

Though the 6870 is quite new in comparison to the 5770. Anybody had any experience of this card? Were there any major issues/problems?

 

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A couple of weeks later .....

Have now got an ATI 6870 which seems to be generally working. There are a couple of graphics display gitches (perspective gets stuck or skewed now and again) but they already existed and seem to be fundamental issues with ATI drivers/Mcrostation/Direct X 9.

Somewhat disappointingly, there is now noticeable increase in graphics performance. The Microstation benchmarks are almost exactly the same as with the 5770 (though the shadows test in much improved in raw figures) and visibly there is not real difference.

I'm guessing this is mainly down to the drivers as all the reviews I read claimed this was a significant jump up from the 5770. They were reasonably independent/objective I think. I guess the drivers are mainly geared towards games rather than CAD apps.

I guess that's just my hard cheese. Maybe things will improve with newer drivers.

So I guess it's OK to get this card, but if you're only upgrading from a 5700/5800 series then it's probably best not to bother.

Are there any plans to introduce Direct X 10/11 with Microstation? Not heard anything about this. Though quite a big deal was made about moving to Direct X when XM came out. There were some welcome and noticeable graphics performance increases at first. Then a few gradual ones but since things seem to have levelled out. There are still a few glitches here and there as well (which have been going on since XM ... 3 years ago!)

It's seems a shame that Microstation would appear to not be using the full power of the cards

 

Parents
  • I'm not sure how Direct X works into Bentley's future plans but I do know we struggled with graphics issues when we first moved to XM.  Files that worked well with V8 became sluggish to the point that many graphics cards needed to be upgraded to function properly.  The same files moved into SS1 (on the older PCs) worked great.

    Maybe the Direct X version or the implementation of it was wacked in XM - I don't know.  I do know that everything runs great in V8i products - couldn't be happier.

Reply
  • I'm not sure how Direct X works into Bentley's future plans but I do know we struggled with graphics issues when we first moved to XM.  Files that worked well with V8 became sluggish to the point that many graphics cards needed to be upgraded to function properly.  The same files moved into SS1 (on the older PCs) worked great.

    Maybe the Direct X version or the implementation of it was wacked in XM - I don't know.  I do know that everything runs great in V8i products - couldn't be happier.

Children
  • Hello,

    I have some problems, too. I have a Radeon 5850 with latest drivers and the latest DirectX 11. I need some refernces attached to my drawing, then the view looks like this (reference levels are not on in view):

    without the references it looks fine:

    The references are .dgn now, but I think in original they were from AutoCAD. I don't know exactly, this is just the planning. They are about 4 - 10MB filesize.

    It is not fine to work. Any new hints will be very appreciated.

    Greetings Marian

    Edit: I have found a solution for my Radeon. Look into the Catalyst Control Center:

    This made it for me. Hope for other people too.

    Greetings Marian