With the announcement of Saints Row 4 and with SR3 on Steam sale, I decided to fire it back up again because I really love this game INSPITE of its technical shortcomings and I'm happy to report that, somewhere along the line, AMD actually optimized SR3 (I assume that it was AMD because THQ would have announced it if they had patched it). In my usual framerate test areas, I can state that my framerate is roughly 50-100% higher than my previous reports from months/year ago.
First, my specs:
Core i5 750 @ 3.2 GHz
Radeon 7970 @ 1125 MHz core, 1575 MHz mem
4 GB DDR3-1600 RAM
Running the game on Ultra settings at 2048x1152 screen res. Framerate measurements are from FRAPS. I'm also using the 13.3 beta 2 drivers from AMD's website.
For testing areas, I have selected places that I could consistently get to and describe to people for replication while also having the worst framerate. Obviously, there are areas of the game where my framerate skyrockets to 60-120 but we're interested in where the problems are. At Shaundi's Ex's Crib while looking toward the city skyline (ie. turn left when you leave the crib entrance and run to the intersection), I used to get roughly 30'ish fps just looking at the buildings in the distance. I'm now up to 50'ish fps. If you take a VTOL from the Saints HQ, put it into flight mode, and fly straight ahead between the two skyscrapers, I used to get 20-30 fps during this sequence. I now get about 40-50 fps in there. At the airport, driving an Attrazione (fastest car without glitching) with nitro along the runways, I used to dip down into the 30's. I now only dip into the 40's but mostly maintain 50+ fps.
Overall, the game runs smooth as butter now on my rig and it feels AMAZING! Crusing down random streets is mostly 50-60 fps now. This is how the game should have shipped! Time to play through it again!
Given that Saints Row 4 appears to be using the same engine, I can safely state that it will probably run decently.
Anyone else care to test this out?
