Horizons AMD Radeon HD 5650 switchable GPU - graphic issues solved - no more spikes and glitches

When Horizons came out, the Radeon HD 5650 in my Envy 14 misbehaved i.e. porcupine planets and moons etc. HP stopped their support for this laptop years ago, and the latest drivers offered by AMD caused the BSOD.

After some intense Google'ing I came across Leshcatlabs - they bundle the intel integrated graphics driver with the latest AMD driver and provide a tool to tweak/repair the install.

Catalyst UnifL – Catalyst Unified Leshcat Drivers
Among other projects, leshcatlabs.net is developing so called Catalyst UnifL Driver, Catalyst Unified Leshcat Drivers.
Those drivers are based on latest AMD + Intel Drivers and aimed to support laptops powered with:
  • AMD 3xxx/4xxx/5xxx/6xxx/7xxx/8xxx/Rxxx Series
  • Intel HD/HD2000/HD2500/HD3000/HD4000/Iris/Haswell/Broadwell CPU Embedded Graphics

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By working trough their manual and after some headache - 2 days later the Omega driver & CCC finally worked. The 15.11 version wasn't working and resulted in a non recognized 5600 family card that was disabled by Win 7. However, after installing the Omega driver, I ran Intel's driver update tool, upgrading to v.15 intel's integrated driver. As a result the desktop worked smooth again.

Fired up ED-H
1st, no more spike, texture deformations, etc. Settings to medium and planetary ones to low.

FPS, on the Radeon HD 5650
  • Normal space ~45 fps
  • SC ~35-50 fps, depends how far away from a surface
  • planetary approach ~25-35
  • on surface ~23

I'm pleased so far.

Hope this helps.
 
When Horizons came out, the Radeon HD 5650 in my Envy 14 misbehaved i.e. porcupine planets and moons etc. HP stopped their support for this laptop years ago, and the latest drivers offered by AMD caused the BSOD.

After some intense Google'ing I came across Leshcatlabs - they bundle the intel integrated graphics driver with the latest AMD driver and provide a tool to tweak/repair the install.



By working trough their manual and after some headache - 2 days later the Omega driver & CCC finally worked. The 15.11 version wasn't working and resulted in a non recognized 5600 family card that was disabled by Win 7. However, after installing the Omega driver, I ran Intel's driver update tool, upgrading to v.15 intel's integrated driver. As a result the desktop worked smooth again.

Fired up ED-H
1st, no more spike, texture deformations, etc. Settings to medium and planetary ones to low.

FPS, on the Radeon HD 5650
  • Normal space ~45 fps
  • SC ~35-50 fps, depends how far away from a surface
  • planetary approach ~25-35
  • on surface ~23

I'm pleased so far.

Hope this helps.

Great! I'd be interested to know what graphic options you have. I could probably lower all my settings and have similar framerate than what you report but the game wouldn't look so good, so that's why I'm asking.
 
Great! I'd be interested to know what graphic options you have. I could probably lower all my settings and have similar framerate than what you report but the game wouldn't look so good, so that's why I'm asking.
Will post a screenshot later, but in general is low to mid, some stuff on high (textures, since it makes no difference to the FPS), no AA, shadows low, exclusion off, GUI animations off, 1360 x 768, ... planetary stuff all low. Limited FPS. The GPU has access to 4GB memory (according to windows 7). I turned aero off, seems to add 3-5 fps.
.
Some examples:
Planetary approach towards a potato shaped planet. Not brilliant but no spikes anymore i.e. playable.
Col 70 Sector IH-E b15-0 (20151220-203033).pngCol 70 Sector IH-E b15-0 (20151220-203043).png
Impressive what Frontier is able to squeeze out of the old hardware. i5 580m CPU runs at 70% or so.
View attachment 88990Col 70 Sector IH-E b15-0 (20151220-205312).pngCol 70 Sector IH-E b15-0 (20151220-203956).png
ps: in case why ppl wonder why I don't get a new laptop/Pc - as long as this works for me I can put some $$$ aside towards a new almighty rig.
 
Got it! Well, I'm a little more ambitious. Most of my settings are on mid and I'm running at 1920 x 1200. I get about 30 fps in space, 16-17 in stations and on planets. My terrain settings are on low, though. I didn't know that texture didn't impact the framerate. Will be going to try cranking it up a bit tonight. By the way, if you like taking screenshots like I do, you know that you can get twice the resolution that you are playing in? You need to play solo and then press Alt while pressing F10 and you'll have a massive PNG at twice your gaming resolution.
 
Ha, that's what the screens resolution is. Thx for the high-res info. Totally forgot about it. These are auto-converted images generated by EDDiscovery.
 
Graphics settings - Here you go.

DisplaySettings.xml
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<DisplayConfig>
<ScreenWidth>1366</ScreenWidth>
<ScreenHeight>768</ScreenHeight>
<VSync>true</VSync>
<FullScreen>1</FullScreen>
<PresentInterval>1</PresentInterval>
<Adapter>0</Adapter>
<Monitor>0</Monitor>
<DX11_RefreshRateNumerator>69300000</DX11_RefreshRateNumerator>
<DX11_RefreshRateDenominator>1162052</DX11_RefreshRateDenominator>
<LimitFrameRate>false</LimitFrameRate>
<MaxFramesPerSecond>30</MaxFramesPerSecond>​
</DisplayConfig>
Settings.xml
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<GraphicsOptions>
<Version>1</Version>
<PresetName>Custom</PresetName>
<StereoscopicMode>0</StereoscopicMode>
<IPDAmount>0.001000</IPDAmount>
<AMDCrashFix>true</AMDCrashFix> <<<<<< No idea if this helps. Totally forgot about this :rolleyes:
<FOV>56.249001</FOV>
<HighResScreenCapAntiAlias>3</HighResScreenCapAntiAlias>
<HighResScreenCapScale>4</HighResScreenCapScale>
<GammaOffset>-0.112336</GammaOffset>
<DisableGuiEffects>true</DisableGuiEffects>
<StereoFocalDistance>25.000000</StereoFocalDistance>
<StencilDump>false</StencilDump>
<ShaderWarming>true</ShaderWarming>​
</GraphicsOptions>
Custom.fxcfg
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<Root PresetName="Custom">
<TextureQualityEx>2</TextureQualityEx>
<TextureQuality>1</TextureQuality>
<LODDistanceScale>0.679765</LODDistanceScale>
<AAMode>0</AAMode>
<ShadowQuality>1</ShadowQuality>
<AOQuality>0</AOQuality>
<BlurEnabled>false</BlurEnabled>
<BloomQuality>0</BloomQuality>
<EnvmapQuality>0</EnvmapQuality>
<MaterialQuality>1</MaterialQuality>
<EnvironmentQuality>1</EnvironmentQuality>
<FXQuality>2</FXQuality>
<HMDPixelsPerDisplayPixel>1.000000</HMDPixelsPerDisplayPixel>
<GalaxyMapQuality>1</GalaxyMapQuality>
<GUIColourQuality>0</GUIColourQuality>
<SSAAMultiplier>1.000000</SSAAMultiplier>
<TerrainQuality>0</TerrainQuality>
<GpuSchedulerMultiplier>0.000000</GpuSchedulerMultiplier>
<SurfaceMaterialQuality>0</SurfaceMaterialQuality>​
</Root>
StartPreset.start
High​
 
I run the game on Radeon HD 8750m 2GB, planets on LOW, when I approach the plane to land on, it's all blurry, no texture at all (like the first picture shared by Pazmino) and then when I get closer, it suddenly pops up. Is it because of my card or is it a game bug? I have the latest drivers from HP, they work better than AMD ones.
 
I run the game on Radeon HD 8750m 2GB, planets on LOW, when I approach the plane to land on, it's all blurry, no texture at all (like the first picture shared by Pazmino) and then when I get closer, it suddenly pops up. Is it because of my card or is it a game bug? I have the latest drivers from HP, they work better than AMD ones.

It's the same here. Seems to be a distance related thingy where the graphics engine applies the high-res surface map. Not sure if drawing distance has any impact on this, i.e. will improve it when set to farther distances.

Here is a link to review on how the individual settings effect the FPS. It's for the last gamma release and the engine saw improvements, but might still be valid.
 
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