Fix For Poor Killing Floor Performance On Catalyst 11.10

UPDATE: 11.11 has fixed both Killing Floor and Red Orchestra. This fix is not needed anymore.

Looks like Catalyst 11.10 has extremely high gpu usage in Killing Floor, so it struggles to maintain a solid framerate when there’s any action on screen.

No problem, put 11.9′s atiumdag.dll into your ‘\steamapps\common\killingfloor\System‘ folder.

The original Red Orchestra is in the same situation.

Fix For Poor Crossfire Performance In Borderlands After Catalyst 11.7

After installing AMD Catalyst 11.8 drivers, I noticed Borderlands was not performing properly on my 4870×2. 11.9 or 11.10p do not appear to have fixed it.

No problem, just drop 11.7′s atiumdag.dll into the ‘Borderlands\Binaries‘ folder. Simple problem, simple solution.

Getting Crossfire Back In Serious Sam HD After 11.8 CAP 3 (not a fully working solution)

UPDATE 2: Now that you can set custom profiles in CCC, you might be able to force GRID’s profile for Serious Sam HD. (I don’t have Sam installed right now.)

UPDATE: It seems radeonpro is NOT applying itself, so I guess the only options are to stay on an older CAP, find a CAP switcher, get a faster single GPU card, use a crack (which would disable achievements and multiplayer), somehow trick steam into loading renamed .exes (could an NTFS junction work?), or have Croteam make us a copy of the game exe that’s named as GRID.exe, since attempting that yourself just closes the renamed .exe and launches SamHD.exe.

The latest CAP disables crossfire in the Serious Sam HD games due to crashes happening near water. This should be a game issue that also affects SLI. I assume The Second Encounter will act the same as my testing of The First Encounter.

But if you don’t mind the possible crashing and want to get your framerate back to where it was before, just force the Race Driver GRID profile in radeonpro.

Unlocking BRINK’s Famerate In Singleplayer

You may have noticed how awful Brink feels and looks in motion when playing the campaign or challenge modes, totally different from what your framerate counter displays. Here is how to get around that nonsense. The main idea is 1-you will run a local dedicated server, 2-you set what campaign or challenge to load, 3-you connect to it.

First, install the dedicated server in the tools section of Steam. While that’s downloading, go to the launch options of Brink in your games list and add ‘+set win_allowMultipleInstances 1‘ so that Brink’s executable can run more than once at the same time. (Otherwise you wind up having to launch the game first, then alt-tab to launch the server second.)

Once installed, check the ‘\Steam\steamapps\common\brink dedicated server‘ folder and you should see example .bat files. Edit an existing one, or copy into a new file, adjusting the server name and ports as you want them. Everytime you want to launch the server, just run the .bat file. Push the quit button or type in ‘quit’ in the console for the server to shutdown.

Now it’s time to tell the server what campaign and maps to load. Instead of memorizing server console commands or map names, I would make a .cfg file for every map of each campaign so that it’s very simple to quickly start playing on the mission that you left off in your campaign. Every .cfg file will look like this:

si_rules sdGameRulesCampaign
applyServerConfig Standard
campaign set campaign_#TEAMNAME#
si_playMode 1
si_onlineMode 2
si_needpass 1
g_password #YOURPASSWORD#
si_maxRank 4
si_botDifficulty #NUMBER#
net_serverAllowHijacking 0
spawnServer mp/#MAPNAME#.entities

Replace #TEXT# as necessary. You can have spaces in your password, quotes don’t seem to be needed (eg: ‘g_password hello world‘). Change the campaign team name to ‘resistance‘ or ‘security‘. To play the Agents of Change DLC maps, add ‘_dlc1‘ to the end of the campaign line (eg: ‘campaign set campaign_security_dlc1‘).

Bot Difficulty: any: -1, easy: 0, normal: 1, hard: 2

Resistance map names (in order of campaign): aqarium, seetow, terminal, resort, ccity, refuel, shipyard, reactor

Security map names (in order of campaign): aqarium, terminal, ccity, sectow, shipyard, reactor, resort, refuel

Agents of Change DLC map names (in order): lab, founders

Challenges: enable server hijacking then selecting a challenge as 2 player and public should join your server, or any other for that matter (source)

OR I think I managed to make a .cfg that works:

si_rules sdGameRulesChallenge
applyServerConfig ChallengesCoop#NUMBER#
campaign set campaign_challenges
si_playMode 1
si_onlineMode 2
si_needpass 1
g_password #YOURPASSWORD#
si_maxRank 4
net_serverAllowHijacking 0
spawnServer sp/challenge_#NUMBER#.entities

Set your coop player amount to a number between 2 and 4 (eg. ‘applyServerConfig ChallengesCoop2‘ for a 2-player game). Change your password just like a campaign server, and then change the challenge map number to the challenge you want: Be More Objective: 06, Parkour This: 05, Escort Duty: 01, Tower Defense: 03 (eg. to have a Parkour This challenge, the last line would be ‘spawnServer sp/challenge_05.entities‘)

So once you make your .cfg files (or use mine), place them in the ‘\Steam\steamapps\common\brink dedicated server\base‘ folder. Launch your server with your .bat file from earlier and type ‘exec security3‘ if you want to play the 3rd mission of the security campaign and your .cfg file for that mission is named security3.cfg. Then launch the game and go to Freeplay, search for LAN servers, and you should see your local server ready for you to join. If your router’s ports are open, you can have your friends join your server as well. There is a handy script to open and close the ports via UPnP, so that you don’t need to bother opening your router admin settings as long as UPnP is enabled.

Now you can play Brink the way it’s supposed to be! It may seem complicated, but once all this is set, you just exec the .cfg you want from the server console window, nice and simple.

Source for original .cfg file and discussion: Steam Forums
More information on some of the commands, or using additional ones: BrinkBase.de
You can also type commands in the console window and sometimes the values and what they mean will be displayed (eg. typing ‘si_botDifficulty‘ in the server console).

Improving Unreal Development Kit Crossfire Performance

Simply rename UDK.exe found in the Bin32 folder to AliceMadnessReturns.exe. Make sure to have the latest CAP, and it still works even with my sparkling spots fix, which uses 11.2 dlls.

The Alice profile is almost as fast as other profiles like Crysis 2, but without flickering of the water or other artifacts.

The following screenshots are of a 4870×2.

Improving Hydrophobia: Prophecy Crossfire Performance

Once again, like the Section 8: Prejudice trick, grab RadeonPro (since it’s a steam game) and simply use the Half-Life 2 crossfire profile. Apparently other profiles flicker or do not scale as well.

Credit goes to spyre who noticed this… months ago. I’m not sure why it’s still not in the CAPs or drivers.

Improving Section 8: Prejudice Crossfire Performance

After a fair amount of testing, the Dark Void profile gives the performance boost of the FEAR profile without the flickering.

So what you need to do is grab RadeonPro so you can make a profile for the game. You can’t simply do the exe rename trick, as it has a launcher that blocks you from starting from the game exe directly.

Once inside RadeonPro, push the ‘add a new profile’ button and select S9-Win32-F.exe from the Binaries/Win32 folder of the game. Go to the tweaks tab and click ‘manage custom profiles’, then add Dark Void as ‘ShippingPC-SkyGame.exe‘. Now to fix the launcher issue, go to the launcher tab and select ‘Games for Windows Live’ from the dropdown, then pick the actual launcher exe, which is S9.exe in the root folder of the game.

This should do it until a profile gets built into the drivers. Enjoy!

Divinity 2 Stutter Fix

Apparently, Divinity 2 has some kind of stuttering going on, making things look much worse than the actual framerate. This is not part of the game like the poor choice to lock the main menu at 30fps (which then unlocks once you’re in game, just like Enemy Territory Quake Wars).

Luckily, there’s a simple fix. If you haven’t seen this posted around, what you do is go to the compatibility tab in the properties window of the game’s exe and check on ‘disable desktop composition‘. I don’t think ‘run as administrator’ is needed, but you can check that on in addition to the desktop composition toggle.

No idea how widespread this is, if it’s just for Windows 7/Vista, or if it includes Nvidia cards, or if it’s tied to specific generations or drivers.

Catalyst 10.10 Is Looking Good

The 4870×2 issue is gone, everything seems to work normally. There’s even a boost in FC2 dx10, maybe other dx10 titles have improved as well.

BFBC2 Map Loading Times

UPDATE2: You can just put atidxx32.dll into your game folder if you don’t want to install the whole 10.5HF package. Expand it from the installer or use the one I have posted here. Here’s my test again with 10.5WHQL, then placing the dll into the game’s folder.

10.5 – 29s
10.5 – 26s

HF dll – 10s
HF dll – 11s

HF dll – 12s (vsync)
HF dll – 11s (vsync)

OLD UPDATE: Apparently they aren’t in the WHQL 10.5s, no wonder.

ATI Catalyst 10.5 was supposed to fix the loading times for Battlefield Bad Company 2 when using 4800 series cards. I’m a 4870×2, but I didn’t really notice much difference. Maybe my 3.6ghz Q9550 or crossfire made it less noticeable. Oh well, at least it’s not the horror stories of 1 minute or more. I’ll have to check some single 4870 or 4850 user stories to compare, but here are my own results:

Panama Canal empty map and vsync with D3DOverrider, since the game’s option does not work. I load it once from a fresh start of the game, exit to the main menu, then load once more. The total time is from the fade to black on the server browser to the fade to black on the map loading screen. (This second time is from the first fade until the fps goes really high and hard drive usage relaxes.)

10.4 – 36s (25s)
10.4 – 34s (25s)

10.5 – 36s (25s)
10.5 – 34s (24s)
10.5 – 28s (23s) – Decided to close D3DOverrider so that the fps is unlocked, relaunched the game… seems that took off about ~6-8 seconds on the first time load.

I should have tested without vsync on 10.4, but still it’s just a few seconds difference. I wonder when they finally fix the in-game option if it will be any different.