The DesertFox

Hey it´s quite natural for BFC to say it isn´t flawed. However it isn´t necessary for them to admit that, because everybody with eyes at the right place can make up their own minds basing on how the game performs right now. Really a waste of time to further bother with the shortcomings of the engine. Either they fix it into something remotely working or people will move on, shrug and don´t bother anymore. Fact is that in its current state this engine is far from something I would invest time into. FWIW

Doesn´t matter which number the patch has, 1.04, 1.04m or 1.17 as long as you get the core problems solved: Pathfinding LOS/LOF Adjusting Arty Breaching ATI/NVIDIA performance everything will be fine and the forum will certainly calm down and switch to more pleasant topics once this stuff is squashed. cheers

They better be. Damn hard to convince people they are a feature rather than a ...uhmmm...bug? @Steve: good to have some definitive statement about your patching policy. Maybe there is some light at the end of the tunnel. We´ll see how 1.04 and whatever follows brings your engine into the long awaited shape to shine. cheers

There might be one or two reasons why it must be selling like brickstones. I´ve already seen it here for 12,95 EUR while other shops still take 42 EUR.

although it´s clearly OT here are my results of the WIC benchmark: (1600x1200, very high setting: Average 23, Min 13, Max 44) compare this to CMSFs Allah´s Fist 8 FPS in v1.02 and 4 FPS in v1.03 in best/best settings. VISTA Ultimate 64bit (1600x1200) ASUS P5B Deluxe Wifi MoBo Core2Duo E6600 @ 3.33 Ghz 4.0GB Ram (DDR2 PC 6400) Nvidia 8800GTS (640MB Vram) Forceware 163.69 WHQL cheers

You will need a 7950gx2 or better 2 of them configured as quad-SLI. These sandwich cards can handle this stunt. Everything else can´t. I´m pretty sure you wont find a single Geforce 8800 user who can get this performance in Allah´s fist at best settings. cheers

I think from a consumer point of view this is completely irrelevant. If I pay money for something, I want it to function properly. This is the main responsibility of the guys who produced the product I bought. If the game developer blames everything in the world for his partly non-funktioning product instead of producing a working patch, this leaves a very bad taste to the customer and certainly word of mouth will spread this around. Especially if this developer aims this not properly functioning engine to be his core-engine for upcoming future products I see a few problems creeping up on the horizon in the not so distant future. Do you plan to completely rely your future product functionality on a company which either doesn´t care about your problems or simply is ignoring them, because they seem to have taken the stance that THEY set the market standard ? cheers Helge P.S.: Don´t get me wrong, I found the compromise to play with balanced settings quite acceptable for me personally, but this can´t be the final solution for your engine.

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I did that and included the notion that my 8800 GTS (640MB) scores half of the FPS (8-9FPS) that my 7950GT (512MB) scores (15-17FPS) under identical settings both at 16x12 in Vista32 and Vista64. Maybe this is helping to gain some momentum to the matter in question. cheers

Steve, thanks for your answer. Things are getting a little bit clearer now. Yep, that´s how business works. However the problem remains and I guess the question we are all interested to hear the answer to is: what do you plan to do for your affected customers if the "worst case" scenario happens and, assuming Nvidias drivers are the culprit, Nvidia decides to ignore you ? cheers

A question out of pure curiosity, which might help to better understand this tech stuff.... How do you think other existing OpenGL applications circumvent this central problem? I mean CMSF is not the only OpenGL app on this planet that handles large amounts of texture data. Some fail and are affected by this Nvidia memory leak bug, and other apps function perfectly well and are capable to toss around data perfectly. What are the differences between those that fail and those that succeed ? Any ideas ? cheers

Steve, you certainly are aware of the importance of this special point for your future products which use the CMSF engine, are you? I mean with more and more customers in the next 2 or so years switching to family members of the 8800s and follow up products or the newer ATIs you are in absolute need to get your product up to speed on this hardware, this way or the other. If you don´t do that, you end up unnecessarily restricting your future customer base to users with aged hardware. cheers Helge

I really hope BF.C will manage to get Nvidia convinced that CMSFs obvious inability to use state of the art hardware is due to forceware driver issues. This certainly will be the easy way for BF.C to go. I however have my doubts that this approach will result in a solution, because you need to IDENTIFY the exact reason the driver fails to work with your product. The 8800 memory problem obviously is unrelated to this general problem, because shuffling around 100megs of data is hardly a problem for a card with 640megs of VRAM and the epidemiology of all the OpenGL games working with forceware drivers will make it especially hard to construct a convincing argument against Nvidia without having any hard data. There are no hard data which proove that the forceware drivers are the problem with CMSF, right ? Go ahead and find some! However from a customers point of view all this fuzz might tell you a lot and you certainly can learn some lessons from it: Never, ever buy the cat in the bag when it comes to an advertised software product.

I missread your post, and thought ALT-tabbing also improved your FPS, thats why I edited it after realising my fault. I guess I need to spend more time on my reading skills

Good to hear of the CPU multithreading progress cheers

Yep, the problem at hand is unrelated to driver issues. I think finding out why CMSFs special OpenGL doesn´t use hardware and falls into software rendering seems more fruitfull to solve the problems.

Rune, I did as per your suggestions, here are the results: Balanced: 22 FPS, ALT TAbbing resulted in 27 FPS Improved: 10 FPS, ALT Tabbing resulted in 16 FPS Better: 5 FPS, ALT Tabbing resulted in 6 FPS Best: 5 FPS, ALT Tabbing resulted in 5 FPS Basically the same as before with the 163.44 drivers. cheers

Sorry no progress here. Done everything as suggested. Same old 9FPS at max settings in Allahs fist on my 8800 . cheers

Also no success here. New Forceware didn´t help with CMSF. ALT-TAB also did nothing to improve the situation, neither did the other stuff that rune posted today (max settings, Allahs fist, 9FPS) BTW: These new 163.67 drivers are really good. I get great performance on the yesterday released QuakeWars-Demo (1600x1200 res, everything set to max), also an OpenGL game, as is yours. The search continues... cheers

Yeah, but it seems unlikely for me to be the problem since other users (rune by example) also have issues with 8800GTX and are using the NVIDIA 680i SLI chipset (ASUS StrikerExtreme). Too bad that you can´t perform that non 8800 test.

Steve, and I have disabled "Threaded optimisation". If I would have set it to "auto" as it is at default, the FPS for the 7950GT would have been half of what you see above. That´s the reason why I also ran an independant OpenGL software test. To make sure that we don´t see driver issue here. As you can see the result of this test is what can be expected. The 8800 performing significantly better than the 7950GT. In theory the 8800 should indeed perform significantly better than a 7950GX2 which is a sandwich of 2 GF-7 cards. And in fact the 8800GTS delivers this performance when it comes to other OpenGL software like Doom3 or Quake4 or the brand new UT3-engine and the reworked Q4-engine as in QuakeWars. Maybe calling John Carmack might get you on track with this strange behaviour of your engine ? As for the MoBo: Dunno, its a plain simple Intel P945 chipset which works on the Vista64 machine (ASUS P5BL2, latest Bios) On the Vista32 machine we have a Intel P965 chipset at work (ASUS P5B Deluxe Wifi, latest Bios) [ September 06, 2007, 12:38 AM: Message edited by: The DesertFox ]

Oh the irony However, I might give it a shot. Just so that I did not missunderstand you: In "improved" or lower settings 1.02 and 1.03 use the same code ? And in 1.03 above "improved" settings new "optimized" code for 8800s is used? Well you see the results of this "optimized" code above don´t you ? You also see that this "new" code has heavy impact on 7950GT performance ? cheers

Hotti, do you have any chance to check if a non 8800 card like Geforce7/6 also falls back into software rendering mode? cheers

To put it mildly: There is still a very long way to go. Unless the LOS/LOF bugs aren´t fixed and the game isn´t WYSIWYG = No Unless the graphic bugs aren´t sorted out = No Unless the abysmal pathfinding isn´t fixed = No Unless the TacAI isn´t improved to an acceptable degree = No Since 1.3 did nothing to fix the issues mentioned above, my conclusive answer is = No

Guys, I did some tests on my two Machines. Materials and Methods: Hardware: 1. Vista32-8800GTS-C2D6600@3,3/2,4/1,8Ghz 2. Vista64-7950GT-C2D6300@2,4/1,8Ghz Software: 1. CMSF 1.2 2. CMSF 1.3 3. FRAPS [http://fraps.softonic.de/] 4. OpenGL FUR Rendering Benchmark [http://downloads.guru3d.com/download.php?det=1717] 5. Forceware 163.44 Environment: NVIDIA: controlcenter set to application control threaded optimisation=off CMSF: Display=1600x1200 VSync=off 3D-Model=Better 3D-Texture=Best AA=on High Priority=on FOW=Elite WEGO mode Allah´s fist loaded as blue player, looking down the map without touching the mouse Results: Vista32-8800GTS-C2D@3,3Ghz -CMSF_1.2 = 9 FPS -CMSF_1.3 = 4 FPS -OpenGL = 1796 Vista32-8800GTS-C2D@2,4Ghz -CMSF_1.2 = 9 FPS -CMSF_1.3 = 4 FPS -OpenGL = 1795 Vista32-8800GTS-C2D@1,8Ghz -CMSF_1.2 = 9 FPS -CMSF_1.3 = 4 FPS -OpenGL = 1793 Vista64-7950GT-C2D@2,4Ghz -CMSF_1.2 = 15 FPS -CMSF_1.3 = 8 FPS -OpenGL = 1158 Vista32-7950GT-C2D@1,8Ghz -CMSF_1.2 = 13 FPS -CMSF_1.3 = 7 FPS -OpenGL = 1064 Summary: The OpenGL Benchmark performs as expected. In case of the 8800GTS no CPU dependency can be seen. In case of the 7950GT performance positively correlates with CPU clock. Differences between 7950GT and 8800GTS are 60-70% due to the higher performance of the 8800GTS hardware. Conclusion: The NVIDIA drivers are working perfectly well with both the 8800GTS and the 7950GT in the tested environment. CMSF performance in patch 1.2 and patch 1.3 is CPU independant on the 8800GTS. In case of the 7950GT CMSF performance positively corellates with CPU clock. FPS differences between patch 1.2 and patch 1.3 are 90-110%, hardware independant and negatively correlate with increasing patch number. FPS differences between 7950GT and 8800GTS range between 40-75% for 1,8Ghz and 66-100% for 2,4Ghz and are consistantly higher for the 7950GT in all situations tested. Final conclusion: In contrast to the OpenGL benchmark, CMSF utilisation of OpenGL negatively corellates with GPU hardware performance. Or in other words, what we all know: THERE IS FRIGGIN WORK TO BE DONE, FIX OR DO SOMEFINK Interesting sideresult which was unexpected: Patch 1.3 significantly decreased FPS to about 50% of patch 1.2 performance. This is consistent and independant of the hardware tested. BFC, If you are trying to increase FPS in your app, please stopp going into the direction you are heading, it seems like you are suffering from some pathfinding issues cheers Helge