Yeah that's odd, should be something like twice the GPU performance.

A lot of people are talking about DX9 problems with later AMD GPU though and the general recommendation is to try https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk which implements DX9 in Vulkan, but I am not sure if this GPU is beefy enough in Vulkan for it to help.

I'll try it, will see.
In meantime I will also try same game in Windows 11 (machine is dual boot) if the same problem occur.
I wonder if it shall matter that R7 id PCiex x8 card and HD8490 is x16.

smoke86 wrote on 2023-11-21, 21:23:

I just got an AMD R7 240 (1GB DDR3)

Is your HD8490 also DDR3?

Are you sure its an R7 and not R5? Wikipedia says the 1GB model is the 64-bit R5 only: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_gra … deon_200_series

If your HD 8490 is the GDDR5 version, it has twice the memory bandwidth of an R5 240, which could explain the performance difference.

bakemono wrote on 2023-11-22, 18:10:

smoke86 wrote on 2023-11-21, 21:23:

I just got an AMD R7 240 (1GB DDR3)

Is your HD8490 also DDR3?

Yes, but HD8490 has 64bit bus

Munx wrote on 2023-11-22, 18:20:

Are you sure its an R7 and not R5? Wikipedia says the 1GB model is the 64-bit R5 only: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_gra … deon_200_series
If your HD 8490 is the GDDR5 version, it has twice the memory bandwidth of an R5 240, which could explain the performance difference.

I'm sure, sticker says R7, Windows device manager says R7 and GPU-Z says R7. Wikipedia is sometimes wrong. HD8490 is DDR3.

Could you provide GPU-z window screenshots for both cards ?

What for? There is nothing weird about GPU-Z readings, pretty much what you may expect.
I can confirm however, that under Win11 with DX11 card works flawlessly, which pretty much narrows down a problem to DX9 -> R7 corelation.

EDIT: DXVK makes the game crash at startup.

Maybe try some more D3D 9 games and see how they behave in comparison. And perhaps try to get some much older drivers if you haven't.

You could also try a later STALKER game with D3D 10/10.1/11. I don't remember if there was ever a mod to put Shadow of Chernobyl on a newer iteration of the engine. STALKER games after SoC were actually developed with some ATI/AMD partnership but that was prior to those GCN based cards.

Oh, my bad - it was Stalker COP, not SOC.
It runs bad under WinXP in DX9.
It runs well in Win11 in DX11. Funny part is that it does not work at all under Win11 in DX9 mode.

CoP also has a DX8 shader left over for GeForce FX cards, which is pretty wild when you think about it - from DX8 all the way up to DX11.

Problem was solved by installing Geforce GT730, which runs fine on both systems.

It's a pretty heavy game for either card.

About a year ago I was running it on a i5 4570 / RTX 2080 machine and noticed that D3D9 mode was obviously slowest. I was tweaking grass distance, FOV and anti-aliasing though. I figured they had used some new D3D features with 10/11 and got better utilization (CPU?) or rendering efficiency. I've read the D3D11 mode is actually best avoided because it is a bit buggy.

You could play around with Mantle API games on that R7 240.

swaaye wrote on 2023-11-30, 01:52:

It's a pretty heavy game for either card.

About a year ago I was running it on a i5 4570 / RTX 2080 machine and noticed that D3D9 mode was obviously slowest. I was tweaking grass distance, FOV and anti-aliasing though. I figured they had used some new D3D features with 10/11 and got better utilization (CPU?) or rendering efficiency.

You could play around with Mantle API games on that R7 240.

Off topic:
How is the RTX 2080 for directx 10, 11 and 12 games? I meant the PRE-ray tracing games.

I wanted to choose RTX 2080 for better performance in later games and leave older GTX cards to play with directx 9 games.

Cheers,

pentiumspeed wrote on 2023-11-30, 02:03:

Off topic:
How is the RTX 2080 for directx 10, 11 and 12 games? I meant the PRE-ray tracing games.

I wanted to choose RTX 2080 for better performance in later games and leave older GTX cards to play with directx 9 games.

It's excellent. I've played a few oldies, like Dishonored, Singularity, Supreme Commander, Stalker COP, and Walking Dead Survival Instinct. It has the performance of a 1080 Ti but with the RT extras. I also really like the DLDSR feature of the RTX cards. It's less of a hit than normal DSR and it has additional anti-aliasing that is quite effective. It's great for all those Unreal Engine 3 games with aliasing everywhere and only weak FXAA/MLAA options.

You probably want to have a fairly modern >= 600W PSU.

swaaye wrote on 2023-11-30, 04:34:

pentiumspeed wrote on 2023-11-30, 02:03:

Off topic:
How is the RTX 2080 for directx 10, 11 and 12 games? I meant the PRE-ray tracing games.

I wanted to choose RTX 2080 for better performance in later games and leave older GTX cards to play with directx 9 games.

It's excellent. I've played a few oldies, like Dishonored, Singularity, Supreme Commander, Stalker COP, and Walking Dead Survival Instinct. It has the performance of a 1080 Ti but with the RT extras. I also really like the DLDSR feature of the RTX cards. It's less of a hit than normal DSR and it has additional anti-aliasing that is quite effective. It's great for all those Unreal Engine 3 games with aliasing everywhere and only weak FXAA/MLAA options.

You probably want to have a fairly modern >= 600W PSU.

Thank you so much, since RTX 2080 is reasonable priced for used one.

PSU is not my issue, I know this.

Cheers,