I have HD4870 and recently i had memory leaks beacuse of lights from fired rockets/grenades and nails. System memory grew very fast (a few MB each shot).
Everyone who has the same issue can install 9.12 Hotfix Drivers:
http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/ATICatalyst912Hotfix.aspx
They fixed memory leak with it.

Browsing the web i found something very bad for ATI users:
http://forums.amd.com/game/messageview.cfm?catid=279&threadid=108194&STARTPAGE=1&FTVAR_FORUMVIEWTMP=Linear
It says ATI doesnt use video memory in opengl mode.

I checked it on 2 computers with similar hardware and identical ezq configs.
I stared client and went to dm3. I ckecked task manager and this is what i got for ezquake-gl.exe:

ATI HD4870:
system memory = 240MB

NVIDIA 7600GS
system memory = 10MB

I think it really means that ATI in opengl mode doesnt use video memory and all goes to system memory. Maybe there is somebody who can clear this up if its not right.

there is, ask Carmack

anyway, nice findings.

And who was it that said that I should stop telling people, not to buy ATI for qw?

Nice research, Tom! Weird that ATI isn't aware of this though if windows task manager can show the cards performance as so. Should also explain why some ATI users experience sluggish QW performance over time, even though it seems fine at the time you start playing. Only solution I've found to stable QW performance on my ATI card, is to disable as much as possible from the GL features.

dunno what You mean by over time...did You mean after playing QW a couple of hours straight ? well, I have HD4890 and a 9.12 hotfix. didn't notice any performance drops at all (had a few 5-6hrs sessions of QW gameplay). tho, I have to say, I did set the maxfps to 231, from 462 which I had on GF 9600GT.

8GB of memory in my PC, might help as well :]

I have a HD4870 and never had any issues with QW with any driver revisions on either XP or Windows 7
I don't think a blanket statement like "ATI IS BAD FOR QW" is correct or useful.

How about "ATI cards made in the last 3 years are bad for qw relative to every other card on the market since 2003". Maybe the rest of your pc can make up for the shortfalls of your card, but ATI and NVidia are night and day when it comes to opengl performance (although it seems to be entirely a driver issue).


Turn on dynamic lighting and watch your framerate plummet. Maybe "plummetting" for you is 600fps instead of 3,000, but it's still a hell of a lot worse than everything else.

The newest ati drivers 10.1 cause the same memory leak like before 9.12 Hotfix... gg
I'm back to 9.12 hotfix.

Thx tom for this. I have HD4870 also and Catalyst 9.12. I have been wondering about extremely high system memory usage and inconsistent fps.

I'm already looking around to find 2nd hand GTX285.....the HD5850 is still unavailable, and if it is, its for 250+E which is ridiculous.....gonna sel HD4890 for 100E....

The hotfix seems to have helped me. Had a bunch of crashes lately, specially when alt+tab'ing. Yesterday when ez-quake crashed during a fusion prac, ezquake-gl.exe was using a smashing 1,33GB (crashed during map-change) of memory, now it rarely peaks over 10 000KB and I havent experienced any crashes since.

So is the best (so far) install 9.12 catalyst, and then install 9.12 hotfix?

or do you install 10.1 catalyst , and then install 9.12 hotfix?

currently im on HD4870 w/ 9.12 + 9.12 hotfix... and still opengl sucks.

Doubt ATI is ever gonna be awesome on OpenGL, and the best advice is probably to disable as much as possible of what you can live with from the gl rendering options. But yeah, other than that stay away from 10.1 from now, and stick to 9.12 hotfix.

I randomly checked task manager and noticed my ezquake-gl.exe was using ~800MB of ram. Then wen't back to qw for 2 minutes, again back to task manager and ram usage had grown to well over 1,1GB. ~300MB in 2 minutes, sick

Also I'm having the same difficulties as Rikoll, qw crashes often in map change, or directly after gameclock exceeds 20:00. Sometimes even mid-game. Although this is occurring ONLY with Vista, not with Win7. Sadly, i'm forced back to Vista, since my Windows 7 RC evaluation time expired (shuts itself down every 2 hours). ;(

Yeah its really weird. Seems like gl-applications on ATI-cards kind of builds up mem usage that regular RAM can't handle or don't know to clear properly, so after a time of QW'ing it just crashes because too much of the system memory is used up. A crash seems to be more probable to happen when the game load is even more heavy (during map changes, end of games, after alt+tab'ing) than usual. Think disabling autorecording / loging / screenshoting at the end of games could help somewhat for end-game crashes. For the other stuff, I'm not sure. Maybe running the game at as low resolution as possible would help abit? I'm forced to running it at 1680x1050 anyways due to my card can't handle 120hz on other resolutions than the screens native.

I'm also interested in a program that monitors and logs CPU, GPU and MEM usage, and shows which programs are using what of the resources. Then trending these values, and watch what happened at the time ezquake started feeling sluggish or even crash could be interesting. Anyone knows of a program that could do such a thing? A GPU stress test of some sort of OpenGL rendering could also be of interest.

edit: also I think Vista is using abit more system memory overall, which could explain why you got problems with it in Vista and not Win7. Me with only 2GB of RAM, neither of them sounds really tempting compared to XP

@purplehaze: nope. just install 9.12 hotfix. these are the full drivers 9.12 which contain the hotfix on top of that.

Rikoll, yeah Vista does use a lot of memory and it sucks in many different ways. Thank god i have 4GB or ram.

@rikoll: win7 is waaaay more resource friendly than Vista. in fact I dare to say it is as good or better than XP. Win7 allocates amount of memory depending on the amount of it available in the system. It does NOT grab as much as it can, regardless the available amount . they install Win7 on netbooks after all, and all of them come with 1GB of memory.....

I can't believe this shit. I have an old computer to which I just switched back to but with a fairly new gpu, hd4850. I can't get a steady framerate of even 240fps now. I'm running the hotfix now, based on the comments here. Don't see any mem leaking at least.

Some findings so far:
- D3D wrapper framerates are about the same even if the settings aren't correct (qqska said it should be about half?)
- all particles and lighting effects make huge dents in my fps, going to full eyecandy, I can get as low as 60fps firing sng
- removing all particle effects, dynamic lighting and powerupglow + fastest setting seems to get me a pretty solid 308 fps
- with my basic config, GPU usage never goes over 60%, with full eyecandy I could reach 100% at times

- from what I can tell, almost no video memory was used in qw (judging from ati tray tools logging)
-- when I start qw, it seems to take a chunk of about 8MB and it doesn't change no matter how much I play or change maps in qw
-- I must admit that I don't know how much video memory qw is even supposed to use with qrp textures, just seems low
-- for this I also used qrp textures and it took a relatively long time to load maps (again pointing towards ram usage)
-- in contrast when I watched through the 3dmark05 demo, logging showed that I had used up to 248MB

- my monitor is ViewSonic FuhZion 68, doesn't seem to make any difference whether I'm running at 60hz or 120hz

The load will be around 200 megabytes using QRP textures, depending on the resolution, double/triple buffering and AA-mode.


Sounds more like compressing the textures using opengl texture compression than loading them textures. If opengl texture compression is disabled, the map will load immediately with QRP textures, otherwise it will take some time.

Opengl texture compression is actually broken on ezQuake 2.0 and 2.0.1, some nightly has the fix though.

Haha, testing today with an nvidia 9600gt. The message is quite clear:

=============== ati -- nvidia
timedemo dm3 tdm 250 -- 500+
timerefr dm3 hbrid 1600 - 2400
steady 308 w/ old conf NO ---- YES
eyecandy lowest fps 60 ---- 150

oh, and 3dmark05 scores, not a big surprise, pretty much the same 3d score for both (can't remember exact for ati)

well... i just bought a GTX 260 216SP to replace my HD4870 for this reason exactly...

so if anyone wants a perfectly good 5 month old HD4870 1GB...its for sale

I get 750+ fps stable on my config, with a ATI 4890. I agree that Nvidia scores way better with Quake but if you set it up correctly it aint that bad :/

Murdocs cfg is good for ati cards, indeed. But I kinda miss having rocket glows, huge powerups glow etc since it gives a slight advantage having them on. If I turn them on now, my fps just goes to shit so need basically all GL features turned off, at least things connected with lighting rendering.

I think I use 6.13 drivers and they work fine. Also if you have a dual core AMD chip then you'll need to install the optimizer or it'll always be rubbish:
http://www.amd.com/us-en/assets/content_type/utilities/AMD_Dual-Core_Optimizer_113.zip

Just got my GTX 260 card now, and ran some quick tests just for amusement. My old card was an ATI HD3850. Bought it used for about 100$.

/timedemo rikoll.mvd on ATI HD3850 (without r_dynamic):

1. 471 fps
2. 410 fps
3. 414 fps

/timedemo rikoll.mvd on GTX 260 (without r_dynamic)

1. 816 fps
2. 813 fps
3. 831 fps

/timedemo rikoll.mvd on GTX 260 (WITH r_dynamic

1. 689 fps
2. 687 fps
3. 699 fps

I didn't even bother to check ATI with r_dynamic 1. The result would have been far below 200.

Now, with that said, the GTX 260 is another class of card than HD3850, so this quick test is abit unfair towards the ATI card. However an avarage score of almost twice the FPS on the GTX, is still quite extreme. With r_dynamic on, the result is AT LEAST 3 times better than the ATI would have done. If you want a cheap and nice upgrade to your QW smoothness, a swap from ATI to NVIDIA can be highly recommended :-). And yes, I had the "working" ATI drivers with the hotfix and all that shit.

PS. Not meant to be scientific in any way. Just thought this silly little test of mine could be of interest to some.

rikoll, can you send me the demo / cfg so i can try with my graphiccard 4780HD ?

Yeah, a HD4870 (which I also have) is very comparable to a GTX260 in terms of benchmarks (not Quakeworld, of course). I think it's been well-established that NVIDIA cards perform significantly better than ATI cards with most (all?) current Quakeworld clients.

Now, whether that is because...

(1) the OpenGL implementation in ATI's drivers is poor in general
(2) it's just the (arguably outdated) parts of OpenGL that most Quakeworld clients use that haven't been optimized in ATI's drivers
(3) it's something else entirely

... is hard to say. That may not even matter to you. If you just care about getting the best performance in Quakeworld, get a NVIDIA card.

Oh my... So ATI is no good for QW? Who would have guessed?

Would have been nice if someone had said something about that earlier.

Also see #3

There's a d3d version of various engines around (including mh's d3dquake) which supports direct3d. would be nice to compare the two before saying its *just* ati's opengl support.