Friday 25 October 2013

Friday In Study

Small Blog Day

Nothing supreme to report today. Spent most of Friday studying NSIGHT and it's various profiling capabilities. It has the very cool feature of being able to remote debug, allowing for a true reading of performance on the application. The downside is that I installed the NVIDIA card in my development machine, so now I need to buy another card to install into the target machine for true profiling. No small inconvenience except that with the time constraints any remote debugging will have to be conducted after the beta release. In the meantime I am sure the 'local debugging' mode will be revealing and should vastly improve the performance of my GPU antics.

Signing Off

As we're in the final gallop to the beta, I will probably make a special weekend blog to reveal more of my discoveries. We have already determined that 90% of the slow-down is due to 'rendering stuff' which means NSIGHT has a vital role to play in identifying those areas that need the most attention.  Until then, please continue providing the performance shots as they are a great indiicator to me how low I should be setting the graphics card bar. Right now it looks like a shade over the Intel HD3000 benchmark, which is painfully low and requires me to change my views on what constitutes a mid-range card ;)

20 comments:

  1. In the mean time I will like to say something important to say.

    I know your making it easier to use the game but I like to see the graphic and sound setting with detailed slider or buttons as possible. Sme thing like:

    Graphics low-medium-high-ultra
    Shadows low-medium-high-ultra
    Directx 7-8-9-11
    Tessellation off-on
    Character models low-med-high-ultra
    Textures low-med-high-ultra
    vsynx off-on
    render distance (slider) 1-100
    lighting low-med-high-ultra
    physics ( how destructible is the environment) off-low-med-high-ultra
    ragdolls (how many ragdolls are permited) (slider) off-infinite
    Dead bodies (How long the body will last or the amount is permited in the level) (slider) off- infinite

    Sound:

    Sfx (slider)
    Music (slider)
    voices (slider)
    ambient sound (slider)

    Subtitles off-voices only-close caption- cutscene only

    We need to have advance settings so we can test our limits. I'm surprise that few games use direcx 7. Having that makes my pc runs better. Please take this consideration.

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    1. It will be DirectX 9, nothing else. There is no choice. As such, there will be no tessellation. Also, the environment will not, at least to begin with, be destructible.

      I totally 100% agree that Reloaded should have an options menu with settings like those (except the ones I said as not happening). Having said that, though, bear in mind that it's actually far more difficult than you'd think to add those kinds of settings.

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    2. I've been asking for an option menu for years... :(

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  2. I have the Nvidia GTX 760 and I would consider it a good high-range benchmark. On that I can run pretty much everything at the highest settings with very good FPS (Counter-Strike: Global Offensive at 150-300 FPS with everything at highest settings, BF:Bad Company 2 at highest without performance drops etc).

    Your GTX 650 Ti is definitely a good mid-range benchmark. It should be able to play modern games on mid-settings with fine performance.

    Intel HD 3000 is very dependent on the what CPU processor it uses since it's not a dedicated GPU card but the CPU itself, it can be anything from being able to run modern games at 30 fps with low-mid settings, to modern games @ 800x600 resolution with low settings at 10-30 or even less FPS.

    Also, I agree with Daniel. Even some "off" settings in there such as on shadows or Anti-Aliasing etc.

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    Replies
    1. Mid settings? Try high/max. It really isn't a mid-range card.

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    2. The HD 3000 largely being referred to is mine, 2.3ghz Dual Core, (Quad Thread) with 2GB Ram (16GB System Ram), which does result in a painful framerate - but can run modern games (Mafia II at mid settings. 1440 x 800 monitor) at a decent frame-rate.
      Obviously though as you say HD 3000's will vary with CPU, though its rare for them to have 2GB RAM (You need 16GB System RAM).

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    3. I agree with Huknar. My card is a GTS250. It runs modern games on low-mid settings. It's low-end. My brother's card is a GTX470 and it does modern games at mid-high settings and great performance. THAT is a mid-range card. Your GTX650, Lee, is definitely high-end.

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  3. Geforce GTX 680 3GB card.

    http://i42.tinypic.com/24kwenk.png

    Good luck.

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  5. My laptop has an HD4000. I haven't fired it up recently and can't remember the rest of the specs. However, it cannot run FPSC (haven't tried reloaded yet - waiting for either the beta or alpha whichever comes first) very well. The famerate is horrendous and unplayable. This is set at default lighting in setup and with shaders on plus high quality graphics and lighting in the preferences. HD4000 was supposed to be better than the HD3000. At lest I thought. I was disappointed. I'm glad my desktop works very well with FPSC. We;ll see how it does when I get FPSC-R. ;)

    I can get FPSC to work OK in development if I put the lighting to no lighting and grahics to low quality

    I deleted previous so I could add some comments without posting another.

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  6. My main issue with the Intel Chipsets is them being called HD at all... haha, its a marketing thing to make people think they'll be decent - you'd be surprised how many people think they're dedicated chips.

    Its possibly a bit to do with how fpsc / Reloaded works - correct me if I'm wrong, but fpsc (Classic) always seemed to draw everything out - whereas high end games fades down distant textures and manages polygon count at draw distance.

    New systems will run FPSC-R better though, as the standard shipping specs go up all the time. I'd like someone with an AMD APU to test the beta - I'd like to know if they are like Intel HDX000 series, or better. (They're marketed like GPU/CPU combinations, so who knows haha)

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  7. Intel HD 3000/4000 etc is a LOW END card. It´s totally crap. These are integrated chip that uses the computers CPU. Please do NOT set the standard (mid-range) as low as that.
    Anyone enjoy FPS gaming would not settle with a Intel HD 3000/4000. Those kind of graphic solutions is only for office-computers and perhaps strategic-games (not so demanding).

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    Replies
    1. I´ll get my Asus GTX 760 2 GB on monday and will post my results then :)

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    2. To clarify: It was being based on a HD3000 with a lot of memory - not a standard hd3000. It Runs games such as Mafia II and GTAIV on medium settings - personally I wouldn't count those as 'not so demanding strategic games'. Runs them better than my Radeon HD 5670. To be fair I have 16gb system ram, giving the hd 3000 2GB+ allocation, which is probably rare - and I admit they aren't amazing chips - I was going more on benchmark score than perceived value. Possibly caused some confusion though, as the average HD3000 is as you describe. :)

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    3. Lee, I would not be setting the mid-range card as an HD3000, because any benchmarks that compare against it are going to be comparing against the standard version of the crap-chip, and not Jem's decent version. I recommend GTX 400-series as mid-range.

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    4. I wouldn't go as far as decent haha ;) But yeah.. the reason why we're using the passmark tools is to try and get the numbers (scores) of a big range of cards, and then aim for the best framerate on the lowest common number thats achievable. I don't know about everyone else, but I certainly can't really tell a good card by name, not stretching back as far as 2006 anyway!

      If we know the vast majority of users have cards with a score of 1000 thats what gets focused on - me, I'm buying a new computer... again :)

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  8. I have just been testing the Reloaded pre alpha and its really just incredible what Lee has achieved by this stage. I'm going to be upgrading my GPU when the official release comes out as I have a 5 year old card that was only low-medium end back then!

    Its also probably not a good mix that I'm using a 1980x1020 resolution with a cheaper GPU so I tend to get poor performance on any AAA game unless I switch almost everything to low and ramp the resolution down a lot.

    Anyway if anyone is interested to see what I threw together in 1 evening you can check out my tests here:

    http://fpscreator.thegamecreators.com/forum.php#/discussion/67/nomads-reloaded-alpha-test

    Only 5 days to go for the 1st BETA !!

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  9. Am I the only pledger who aint got the reloaded product? Tbh prefer to get a bit more of done stuff.

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    Replies
    1. No, as far as I know only a select few alpha testers have Reloaded. You will receive the beta as soon as it's out (within a few days, I think).

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    2. The Beta is going to be released on the 31 Oct.
      Only 3 days left! :)

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