Serious Sam 3 with AMD graphics card

[mibo]

Hi gamers.

I would like to get some comments from people playing this game with an AMD graphics card.
What GPU, what driver are you using? What problems do you encounter? Do you know if AMD and Croteam are working on getting the bugs fixed?

I started playing that game over a year ago on a HD5850 card with the Catalyst drivers that were available at that time. This did not work well, and even though I liked the game, I stopped playing it after the "Under the Iron Cloud" level. Some texture flickering really did annoy me.
Now, I have an 7950 graphics card and with Catalyst 14.3beta it looks much better and plays smoothly for a while. But there are still major problems.
When I come to a "new" area of the game (example: entering a building) the game freezes for a second or two. In some occasions it even froze my whole computer (I had to reboot). These short freezes are also noticeable in the lead video sequence.
There are corrupted graphics in the "The Silent Riddler" level when I'm using the torch. In some areas everything is fine, in others I see only rotated textures - those corruptions stop when I leave the crypt.

I have activated the Serious Sam 3 beta program in Steam to get the newest fixes from Croteam and use the latest Catalyst driver (14.3beta).

Cheers,
mibo

PS: Please, no posts with the word Nvidia in it. I'm not interested in those.

PPS: When I let the game automatically detect the best settings for my machine, it sets GPU to LOW - which looks ugly. I play the game in HIGH settings 1920x1080 resolution.

[Filiprino]

Well, you should try Aidivn cards, they've got much better OpenGL support.
Or, you could try the open source radeon drivers which likely won't show so many glitches but the frame rate will be subpar.

[Grogan]

I play Serious Sam 3 with a Radeon HD5870 card, currently using the Gallium radeon driver in the kernel (currently 3.14.0-rc8) and Mesa 10.2.x

It's not great performance, but this is a game that ran like absolute shit for me with fglrx and the open source stack was an improvement. Note that libtxc (open implementation of S3TC texture compression) is needed for most commercial games. This one won't complain if you don't have it, but there will be improper rendering of textures and there will be artifacts.

If you do various benchmarks, fglrx usually scores better, but in actual real world usage most of my games seem better. Whether that means a game will now run instead of crashing, or motion is smoother and less glitchy, I'd prefer that sort of improvement to higher measured framerates.

In my opinion radeon and friends are better for desktop usage than fglrx as well, now.

Anyway, Serious Sam 3 is pretty good with radeon (and seems to get better after a few minutes of playing it when textures and shit are properly cached etc.). I can move around and blast enemies pretty well now.

[Grogan]

Anal edit policy here, 5 minute time limit.

Anyway, I neglected to say that I run it at 1920x1080 with CPU speed set to "Ultra", GPU speed set to Ultra but Memory usage set to Medium (I just have a 1 Gb graphics card and thought that might help with that texture caching thing I mentioned). I had to go and check because I couldn't remember the settings.

Maybe I should dial back those "Ultras" now, I had forgotten I still had those settings. The reason I put those to Ultra was that with fglrx it made absolutely no difference what quality settings I used. I could turn them way down and make it look like shit, but still have the same performance problems and glitches. I'll bet now it would make a difference to turn them down to "High" or something. (Duh!)

[mibo]

Grogan, thank you very much for that insight.
Good to know, you can play it on ULTRA with the radeon driver.
This also means, that the problems I see come rather from Catalyst than from the game.

My distro (OpenSuse 13.1 64bit) is still on kernel 3.11 and I didn't had time to check how much work it would be to get the latest kernel/mesa/radeon/glamour/whatever running...
(hmm, I just checked the OpenSuse release cycle - 13.2 will just arrive in November :-(

The second thing that speaks against the radeon driver is that I use OpenCL (darktable and NeatImage) for photo editing...

[Grogan]

Yep, it was a lesson for me not to blame the games. In a previous thread some time ago, someone set me straight about Left4Dead 2... I was saying what a crappy port it was, and they told me it was fglrx that was the problem. I kept that in mind, and sure enough when I finally ditched fglrx, that was the first game I tried and it was near perfect performance, with smooth motion. Ironically, that was with Mesa 9.2.x but it has degraded slightly with Mesa 10.2. (Nothing like with fglrx though, I mean brief stuttering in a few places, particularly when just spawning into a new level with the characters talking and stuff. Nothing to complain about.)

[Gps4l]

AMD phenom II X4 HD 5750 catalyst drivers.

First time I played this game on linux is was very frustrating.

But after a driver update ( more then a year ago now ) it suddenly worked about the same as it does on windows 7

[Pontostroy]

RadeonSI + hd 7790
Same textures has artifacts, but performance is good.

[Gps4l]

AMD phenom II X4 HD 5750 catalyst drivers.

First time I played this game on linux is was very frustrating.

But after a driver update ( more then a year ago now ) it suddenly worked about the same as it does on windows 7

Res 1680 x 1050 vid set medium (auto config of the game )

[Grogan]

But after a driver update ( more then a year ago now ) it suddenly worked about the same as it does on windows 7

The very best fglrx result for me was with "Catalyst 13.11 Beta V9.4". The next and any newer Betas (including 14.2 which was the last one I tried, when I decided that fglrx was intolerable bullshit) were increasingly bad on my hardware (HD 5870) with Linux 3.12.x and 3.13.x. For all games, not just this.

I have a better experience with radeon though. (again, I don't look at framerates which are in most cases better with fglrx, for example those Unigine benchmarks get higher framerates with fglrx)

Serious Sam 3 has never been "as good as in windows" for me. It's been a long time since I've played it in Windows, but I don't recall any performance issues there.