Sekra

I know all about these problems in CMSF. But still even though the performance is average with WiC it should be better with this kind of hardware imo. Even though WiC and CMSF are lightyears apart in every aspect both should be running better on my rig imo. What I'm trying to say here is that battlefront is not the only one doing less than expected performance like some of you are trying to say.

Wow... I still cant understand how ignorant some of you can be. If you still think the 8xxx series cards are perfect and run just fine you really know how to pick the data you brain processes. For christ sake Nvidia themselves have admitted that the cards are having problems specially with texture management! And STILL some of you persist that the problem lies with CMSF code. Jesus, how hardheaded can you get?

Its not about if its satisfactory or not its about the fact that no matter what settings similar in CMSF I change the average fps is from 26-29 no matter what. Only when I start changing the detail levels like in CM: SF I start getting improvements in fps. Sound familiar? And yes I'm using XP too. And yes the fps is definitely much better than in CMSF but it most definitely is not what it's supposed to be when I run the benchmark. I would expect CMSF to run at the rates that WiC runs now and WiC should be running double what it is running now as I stated above. So we come to the fact that these issues are not just in CMSF. This is just for you guys who still havent figured out that nvidia ****ed up and BFC most likely can do nothing about it until nvidia fixes these issues.

I remember someone posting that they will go play world in conflict now that they're pissed enough for BFC that they didnt fix a problem which should be fixed by a certain unnamed gfx chip manufacturer. Well aaanyhoww.. Since I like to play a lot of games I decided to give this game a go since that particular user had stated it "runs perfectly" on his rig with this gfx card that uses the newest hardware from this unnamed vendor. Well.. As usual straight after I fire up a new game I head in the options menu to see what I can poke around with there and I noticed this benchmark button there. Of course I straight away went and checked how my system would do on this game.. Running the benchmark with the settings that installation had decided I got less than optimal results in my opinion where as my fps was in average about 27 and around 8 at its lowest. So naturally the first thing I do in a situation like this is I lower the resolution first. I changed it from 1280x1024 to 1024x768. Surely this will have a huge impact on fps I thought.. How wrong I was.. To my surprise I got the exact same results. In matter of fact running the game with just about any settings changed the fps at around 3 FPS at max. So as you can see that game is running at FPS that CM: SF should be running at and the scale in that game is much smaller compared to CM: SF. Sure it has a lot of cool sparkling effects but I cant see why it doesnt run at around 50 FPS average at minimum. So I think it would be safe to say that you're not alone here BFC. Even when using OpenGL. I should propably add my computer specs to my signature now.....

The chronicles of riddick bug is in no way related to CM: SF performance I can tell you that..

Correct. The 8xxx appears to have been a progression of the 76xx card technology, so there seems to be the same issue of some OK and some not OK. We have a tester with a 7600 who has problems with framerates, so we've got that covered too. Dirtweasle, Yes, like any API there are different versions. Some are more backwards compatible than others. DirectX has traditionally had difficulty with backwards compatibility, but OpenGL is quite good. IIRC CM:SF is looking for OpenGL 2.0, but will work with OpenGL 1.0. Thanks for finding that list. Again, I don't think it will mean much, but one never knows. Wolf66, Not at all. I said we haven't found the problem and therefore haven't come up with a solution. However, everybody should see a speed improvement from v1.04, even the people worst affected by whatever this problem is. It's just that if you're getting 10fps now you might get 15fps with v1.04. Substantial improvement, but if you should be getting 35fps+ for that particular scenario then 15fps is obviously not enough. Cpl Steiner, Two different games, two different requirements having to do with a completely different issue (single vs multi-processors). So what's your point? BTW, CM:SF v1.04 should be plenty happy with AMD with or without the Optimizer. Steve </font>

One thing you guys should remember that it is a know fact that the drivers are buggy when related to the texture memory management and I'm 99% sure that is the main reason for low fps on my 8800GTS 640mb. It looks more like hardware that isnt functioning like its supposed to and thats a bit hard to fix. One of the main reasons I did start poking around with all that OpenGL stuff in the first place was to find out if the problems were in the game or the drivers. And I'm convinced that its the drivers that are causing 99% of the problems.

The game did not necessarily freeze at 50%.. I had one scenario where it took quite a few minutes to load and I thought the game had froze too but luckily I was watching the news from tv at the same time so I didnt react and after a while the game loaded the scenario.

I get around 4-5 FPS in Allah's Fist when viewing the whole battlefield at Better/Better settings. Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 & (Asus) Gf 8800GTS 640mb. Smaller scenarios usually run better but sometimes they can stutter a bit too. Changing the settings to Balanced/Balanced gives a mostly playable FPS 95% of the time so I use that.

This is not the thread for any workarounds. There are n^x threads about those so lets keep all workarounds on those threads please.

Those two posts are actually mine

I think all you having problems with the 8xxx series and 7xxx series should go to nvidia webpage and do a bugreport on the issue with CM: SF. This might (I'm not saying it will) bring Nvidia more aware of the problem and possibly we could get a fix for the OpenGL driver too (since as far as I understood the new 163.67 only fixes this for DirectX 9). Here is a link to where you can submit a bugreport: http://www.nvidia.com/object/vistaqualityassurance.html I know it says Vista driver but the problem is universal both in Vista and XP. When submitting the bug tell them its "the memory management bug", happens in both XP and Vista and that CM: SF uses OpenGL. At least they might take a look at the game and see the problem. And please be proper, being a jerk won't help at all.

Give Charles a crash course in DirectX? Seriously though, I think most game developers choose to use DirectX because then they aren't responsible for hardware issues. Microsoft and nVidia have to sort it out. </font>

In my opinion a good thing for all us end-users to do is go to the nvidia website and post a bug about their drivers. When they get 1 bugreport from Charles they propably ignore that to the bottom of the to-CHECK list. But if they get 100 bugreports from us end-users they might consider taking a quicker and closer look on the issue. Just don't start spamming their bugreport system or they might do the opposite. We must make nvidia know that there are many of us who are having this problem and ignoring it would be bad for business. Here is a link to a page from where you can report a bug: http://www.nvidia.com/object/vistaqualityassurance.html I know its for "Vista driver" but hey, the problem is in vista too! Just make sure you include that you have the same problem if you're running XP too. [ September 13, 2007, 04:48 AM: Message edited by: Hotti ]

I myself would go for Nvidia 8xxx series since even though there are issues with the drivers I think the 8xxx series kicks a bit more punch than the ATI cards do. And driver issues are usually solved with time. But we mustn't forget that ATI too has driver issues.

Yes I know the maths were overly simplified and not accuarte (tried to make that point by saying that not every tile uses a different texture). Another interesting idea just occured. Could it be possible to make a HUGE map with the minimum amount of textures as possible? And also making a tiny map with as insane amount of textures as possible? and maybe some variations in between. These would definitely help us determine if the main reason we are getting poor FPS is because of the textures. Darn, I was supposed to be back in school 5 minutes ago gotta run! "I would hate you if I wouldn't love you...."

Oh I just remembered one thing. About all those extensive tests I was running a while back there was one thing. All those graphs I did and all the different data I was able to get using the instrumented driver from nvidia ONE thing was reported to NOT function. And that was the VRAM usage statistics. And if I remember correct this "feature" of not being able to monitor the VRAM usage was reported on all the cards we are having trouble with now. So even the tools provided by the manufacturer of the core of these cards seems to be affected by the problems with memory management. How can you expect BF.C NOT to be affected by it? I believe that this memory management issue is the single biggest reason for most of us having problems with the 8xxx series cards and maybe even with the high-end 7xxx series cards too. Unless nvidia fixes this (which apparently is not ceratain at all!!) there is nothing we or BF.C can do about this. If you understand the way API's work even a little this simple pipeline shows how the thing goes. CM: SF communicates with -> OpenGL API OpenGL API communicates with -> Nvidia (OpenGL)Drivers Nvidia (OpenGL) Drivers communicate with -> Nvidia Hardware And as the problem seems to be in the last part of the "pipeline" only Nvidia can fix this.

Calm down guys! Although I've had my doubts about if the problem would actually be in the game code but in the last 2 days I've been convinced that the problem really lies in the Nvidia drivers. IF you would take the time to read (and understand) the release notes of the new driver it states that they have done some fixes to the memory managing of "GeForce 8 series GPUs running DirectX 9 applications in single-GPU and NVIDIA SLI configurations." They are only mentioning DirectX 9. Making tweaks on the directx driver does not help opengl programs since they are two completely different things! Another thing is the article in The Inquirerer. It states that the 8xxx series cards have trouble with memory management: The reason why ALT-TABbin helps for a few seconds is because it FORCES the texture memory to empty. When you load back the game the bug starts again the memory fills up very quickly. So you think other games should be influenced by this too? Lets do some quick math: CMSF Mapsize: 4km x 4km Tile size (if I understood right): 8m x 8m Here we get a tilecount of 500 * 500 in a huge map. That would come to 250 000 tiles in the map and that would equial 250 000 textures in tiles only. If you use settings better than "Improved" it uses 2 textures per tile. That brings us to 500 000 textured tiles in the map only in the landscape. Then you add trees, rocks, grass, units etc etc it would require a MASSIVE amount of textures to be loaded (of course not EVERY tile uses a different texture but still) in to your gfx card memory and if the memory management is screwed up as the case seems to be comparing CMSF to any other OPENGL game is pointless since I haven't seen any other game that would use this amount of textures at one time. What we need is for nvidia to update the OPENGL driver too! What we need to do is start filling a bugreport to nvidia about running CM: SF on the gf8xxx series and make sure you include that it uses OpenGL. [ September 13, 2007, 12:42 AM: Message edited by: Hotti ]

Dirtweasle: just get OpenGL Extension Viewer from http://www.realtech-vr.com/glview/ and you can run different tests. There is also a nvidia driver tweak utility from guru3d.com (nvHardPage) which you can force a card to emulate a different OpenGL version.

Dirtweasle: I think Steve mentioned in the thread I started that the initial problem I found was not the main cause of the very low FPS but rather just a very minor glitch in someplace else and fixing it did very little to nothing on the FPS in the end. If I can guess it right it was just that the icons above units got reverted to software rendering and nothing else so that would have a very minor effect on the overall FPS. And to the person asking about making a DirectX version of CM: SF this topic has been briefly visited a few times in other discussions and the main differences in OpenGL vs. DirectX is that OpenGL is free and I believe using DirectX commercially requires some sort of license from M$. And also when you look "under the hood" Charles would basically have to rewrite the whole graphics engine for DirectX which would be a huge task to do unless you want to wait for another 4 years with no updates to the current version of the game. Also it would be like talking chinese vs. japanese. While to us it might sound very similar but to a person who talks either language the other is jibberish.

From Nvidia 163.67 release notes: No mention about OpenGL performance here... Also while I do understand you are a relatively small group of people but I believe that CM: SF is still a quite popular game. Still no mention about problems with CM: SF in the release notes. If you look at the release notes you can see a number of issues with different games. Would be nice if you could (if you haven't allready) contact Nvidia about the problems you are having with the game so it would be listed there too. There is a specific sections in the release notes about problems that are driver related and are not driver related. [ September 12, 2007, 07:45 AM: Message edited by: Hotti ]

I also tried the new drivers yesterday and no special improvement in framerates even with alt-tabbing. And about the software rendering "bug" I found I believe it was just some very minor side issue which Charles has allready fixed in 1.04. What intrigues me is that IF there infact is a hardware defect in some G80's texture handling which cannot be resolved with drivers wouldn't that mean that the manufacturer of the card has to replace or fix it with a working version with no cost to the consumer?

I'd suggest charles registering in at opengl.org forums and asking help there I just managed to produce some odd looking effect with tampering enough with the drivers that the landscape wont disappear anymore when scrolling high enough.. So I can scroll all the way as up as you can go, look straight down and see the whole battlefield. I took a video of that all but now I need to find out how to convert that bugger to much smaller since its taken with fraps and it takes a whole lotta discspace unpacked. but I'm too tired to do that today.. later this week. what I'm seeing in that video might hint something related to textures.

btw I was just wondering, is the 8800 card in charles rig overclocked? what speeds is the card and card memory using?

Nope, allready tried that.. Its set on multi-display even though I have just one display..