PPSSPP and AMD Legacy drivers...

[Nightquaker]

(03-19-2014 09:07 PM)solarmystic Wrote:  The 11.11a drivers are "praised" on these forums for their rock solid stability in PPSSPP with the 2xxx/3xxx/4xxx cards.

They are not praised for providing the best performance in modern 2013/2014 titles for your card. If you have a "legacy" status card to begin with, you should temper your expectations when running the latest games.

Yes, Thief (2014) runs like utter tripe with these drivers on my system, the game stutters like there's no tomorrow, especially when using the 64bit executable. But then again, performance in that game is rather horribly optimized, even on vastly superior systems considering the engine they're using (Unreal Engine 3).

Dark Souls runs acceptably however. (stable 30-35+ FPS when rendering resolution is set to 1600x900 using DSFIX 2.2 and enabling the Framerate unlocker option. No other frills.). Even then, it's a rather heavily CPU limited title that is threaded poorly, prefers higher CPU clocks to multiple cores (doesn't even max out my dual core Core 2 and lousy 4670 and yet it performs average at best.) and your low clocked AMD tri core CPU wouldn't help.

Saints Row 3 (and 4 by extension) has always had performance issues on AMD cards, especially when combined with lower end CPUs. They were acknowledged by Volition themselves, some of which remain unresolved and unpatched to this day, even after they've promised to resolve them.

You have to make a choice. I decided to stick to 11.11a because as a dedicated tester of PPSSPP, being able to run PPSSPP crash-free and problem-free is more important to me than having the absolute best performance in those titles.

To be honest, Legacy status has nothing to do with performance in modern games. HD4870 was a high-end gaming card when it came out and is still quite a beast to this day. It outperforms modern mid-end and media cards such as 65xx (one I had previously), 66xx and even something like 7750. In fact, it outperforms my previous card, which was HD6570 by more than 100%.
So don't rely "legacy" status on anything, frankly, it's a mere excuse for AMD to stop support for old cards.
The only issue it has with modern games is that it doesn't support DirectX11. Quite a bugger, yes.
Saints Row 3 and 4 is badly optimized for AMD cards, but runs quite well (with latest drivers) on this particular one with acceptable CPU, by the way.
Dark Souls runs on steady 30fps without any drops for me on newest drivers, despite low clocks on Phenom X3.
I run games at 720p, mind you, 'cause I have a 720p monitor and I don't need to run them in 1080p.
But yes, I got your point and I do agree on stability of 11.11 drivers, which I tested myself, but I wanted to ask for a fix 'cause PPSSPP seems to be the only OpenGL application that has issues like this (at least, from my experience).
I sincerely hope that someday, PPSSPP developers will fix the issue with Legacy drivers, so I'll not need to switch between them and performance ones every now and then, especially considering that it's such a pain in the ass sometimes and AMD doesn't even bother to fix their bloody OpenGL (except, possibly, in their 13.6+ Catalyst drivers).
Thank you for your well executed and in-depth response.