Uh so maybe I should have posted this almost a year ago. Sometime around Catalyst 12.3, the framerate in Battlefield Bad Company 2 and Medal of Honor 2009 took a severe hit. I am not sure if Need for Speed: The Run (the other frostbite engine game) took a hit.
As usual, the fix is simply placing an older driver dll into the game folder if you want to keep a newer set for the rest of the system. You’ll need aticfx32.dll and atidxx32.dll if you play in DirectX 10 (why wouldn’t you be anyway?).
Refer to my instructions on how to extract driver dll files from installers.
UPDATE 2: I even see Medal of Honor flickering on a GTX 570M, so… not AMD’s fault?
UPDATE: Medal of Honor still flickers, even if you force the BC2 profile. At least it doesn’t flicker much, just little blips sometimes.
There is an interesting line in the release notes of the Catalyst 12.2 drivers: “Random flickering is no longer observed when playing Battlefield Bad Company 2 in DirectX 11 mode.”
I will have to do more testing, but those blank screen flickers might be history, even on my 4870×2 in dx10 mode.
UPDATE: 11.4 is out, grab it from AMD. The 2 dlls are exactly the same as the preview dlls dated February 27, so it’s not an issue anymore.
If you dared to install Catalyst 11.3 WHQL over the 11.4 Previews, then you might run into this in Battlefield Bad Company 2. In DirectX 10 or 11 mode, enabling anti-aliasing causes various effects to disappear, mostly transparent ones.
Luckily there’s a simple fix. Just place aticfx32.dll and atidxx32.dll from either 11.2 or 11.4p into the game folder and everything is back to normal.
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.
