The announcement of the evaluation kit specifically said there is an AMD driver bug that won't be fixed until they release Catalist 8.10. I had some time today and wrote some workarounds, and the engine is running almost the same on my Radeon 3870 as my NVidia test hardware, but there is still one fix I need that AMD told me they would include in 8.10. I'll test on my Radeon X1550 card as well before releasing a patch.
The engine requires an SM 3.0 card, but you're not going to get very good performance with a Radeon X1650. Those have 12 processor pipelines, while the latest cards have 240. That means your card is 20 times slower than the fastest cards on the market.
The samples released, especially the island demo, are designed to push a high-end card when the settings are turned all the way up. The island demo renders something like 1.7 million polys per frame with the settings on high.
The engine requires an SM 3.0 card, but you're not going to get very good performance with a Radeon X1650. Those have 12 processor pipelines, while the latest cards have 240. That means your card is 20 times slower than the fastest cards on the market.
The samples released, especially the island demo, are designed to push a high-end card when the settings are turned all the way up. The island demo renders something like 1.7 million polys per frame with the settings on high.