Spring performance improved for the R350 ATI AGP cards

[monohouse]

recently I have been testing spring on my system for maximum obtainable performance in terms of framerates, I have come up with surprising results, the test system was an athlon-xp-based using agp 4x mode running on winblows xp pre-deleted Lan Edition (the one with explorer.exe still existing (200MB \windows)) sp0, the tests were run strictly on the 16-chip non-softmoddable R350 256MB/256bit original ATI version, all R350 versions are supported in the driver

note that the driver is optimized for OpenGL performance only, the directx driver works but it's probably not the fastest driver, work on that subject will continue, keep in mind please that this is a R350 ONLY driver, it may work on other video cards but I cannot guarantee maximum obtainable performance, for that reason all non R350 support was removed from the driver's installation recognition as I cannot verify that maximum performance can be achieved, it could actually be worse on other cards, im not even sure that all the other R350's that are still in the INF are getting the maximum performance (I don't have all the hardware that there is), so you may need to verify that.

this driver while been optimized for maximum spring performance, will very likely improve performance for many other OpenGL games, however, performance does degrade in older opengl games such as quake3 by approximaly up to 15 fps at 1600x1200 resolution from 123 fps to around 105 fps, for this specific case and all quake3-based games, all you need to do is rename the atioglxx.dll and atioglx1.dll to something else in the system32 directory and insert an older opengl driver, for example version 4.12 or 3.10, is not possible to have best performance for all games on all hardware using only one driver, that is why the results as shown here vary so much, but at least I hope I have contributed something to the owners of the R350, maybe some of you that know what they are doing can even make it work for the R3XX (by copying the dll/sys after installation).

this driver is my usual driver - only 7 files are "installed", this isn't like the "lite editions" this is the ultimate lite edition, this will be one of the selectable drivers for the Deleted Lan Edition(tm), along with all the other drivers already in my drivers section if anyone manages to benefit from these drivers let me know so maybe I could release a RV360 version later (hopefully), if you need a registry-transparent INF let me know and I will update, omega variation is included.

[smoth]

paragraphs.

[jcnossen]

The only thing you could have been doing without the actual driver sources, is just moving around files, which probably just causes instability at some point.

[monohouse]

does not, not for me at least, it was tested.

and btw, "probably" doesn't work for me until it is proven, it's that same "probably" that reduces you performance when you assume they "fixed" everything with the "new" driver version and as long as they say "improved performance" you believe them, just like you believed them when they didn't say that they optimized 3dmark scores, you "probably" also believed them when they didn't say when they "optimized performance" in quake3 with the radeon 8500, those are just the things that someone did find out, how many do you think are there that no one did ?

so no thanks, no "probably" and no believing in companies, which, of corse only care for money nothing else, if they cared for you, they wouldn't be cheating on you with "funny" results would they ?, btw you should know that - you're running a GPL project :)