City Of Heroes : ATI Graphics

For : Cedega Engine 5.2.10 / ATi Graphics Card users

by : je.saist


Cedega Install  |  City of Heroes Install  |  Cedega CoH Settings  |  CoH ATi Settings

This guide is a bit different. Like the Open Office default file guide it takes place inside an already running program. The program in this case is NCSoft's City Of Heroes and it is running under Cedega.

Unfortunantly Transgaming has dedicated much of their development resources to Nvidia-GLX, and despite equal performance in native OpenGL games, ATi is far behind Nvidia in terms of Cedega support. Hopefully future versions of the Cedega engine will fix the problems associated with running ATi cards. 
This guide is only for users running the Official ATi Fglrx driver, and has been tested on the following cards:

Radeon 9600  ::  Radeon 9800 SE  ::  Radeon 9800 Pro  ::  Radeon x800 GTO  ::  Radeon x1800 XT  ::  Radeon x1950 GT


1: Alright, getting started. Upon completing the CoH install under Cedega most users are faced with a screen similar to below.  The Loading screen has not removed itself, windows are overlapping, and the screen is a general mess.

If you can, Left Click on Menu then Left Click on Options

As seen below the menu bar has faded into the background and is overlapped by the Options menu.





2: Left Click on the tab for Graphics and Audio

we should see that our graphics quality is set at Recommended.





3: We need to change our graphics quality, so Left Click on the Slider and Drag to the Left





4: Set the slider at performance

Then Left Click on Save and Close





5: We should now have our standard in-game view.





Walk around a bit, some more items may need to be turned off for a good frame rate.






There are some more items that ATi users should probably be aware of.  Because Cedega does not tap into shader power ATi cards have, equally performing cards under Windows or Native OpenGL applications in Linux won't be equal under Cedega. In my own tests an ATi x1950 GT gave about the same performance as a Nvidia 6600 GT.

The result is that more work is passed off onto the processor, which raises the processor and memory requiremets.

So, if you were running Windows and got maybe 60 frames per second on an ATi card, Cedega may net only 15-20 frames with the same detail and resolution settings. Several users of Nvidia cards are adament that the disparity is due to ATi's drivers. I'm not sold on this. Under native OpenGL engines, like Quake4, or on the Unreal 3 engine, ATi and Nvidia cards are about dead equal.  It is my opinion that Cedega alone is responsible for this disparity.  Will it ever be addressed? I could not answer that.


Take me back to the Guides.