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Frame rate discussion


Bluewings

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  • 2 weeks later...
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Just finished building a new system. Intel Pentium 4 clocked at 3.2 Ghz running on an Intel mobo. 1 Gig of OCZ memory at 667 Mhz. Installed a Egeforce 6800 GS in the PCI express slot. Put everything in an Antec Sonata II case for a super quiet system. With everything maxed out I still get frame rates between 30 and 40 fps. Needless to say I,m extremely pleased

wow! 3.2 is fricken fast.

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PCI-Express doesn't offer a speed increase per se. All that is being sped up is the transfer of video data from main memory to video memory - and back. AGP didn't offer this fast backchannel. The prime benefit of this is just for video editing and, yeah, in theory you also get a faster transfer of geometry data for a level/scene/scenario. But that is usually limited by the data transfer rates of the harddisks, so for all practical matters you can forget that.

The only reason why PCI-Express cards are faster than most AGP cards is that the latest generations of graphics chips simply aren't manufactured for AGP any longer. The industry has decided to abandon the AGP, so you can still use it for a while, but sooner or later it's going to be replaced by PCI-X.

So, it only makes sense to switch to PCI-X right now if you have a really slow AGP card and you want something faster than GeForce 6800 or Radeon X850.

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Found this for $139...SAPPHIRE 100158 Radeon X1600PRO 512MB GDDR2 AGP 4X/8X Video Card - OEM

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814102679

This looks like the same card for $299

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=7634713&productCategoryId=cat01151&type=product&tab=1&id=1130987912328

Any thoughts on these cards? Does anybody have one?

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GF 7800 should be out for AGP too this spring

It is already out - they call it the 7800 GS 256mb. Generally around £200, but I have seen the PNY version selling for £170. You can also get some ready overclocked versions from XFX or BFG. This is the fastest and last AGP card that will be manufactured so grab one while you can if you don't want to upgrade to PCI-X. I'm getting one ASAP.

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The point that is quite sad IMO, is that I did bought a laptop last year, one of the main reasons was SB PPE. The "nearly best" was ATI Radeon Mobility 9700, and I see that I will barely be able to run the sim at medium detail with a poor resolution (800x600 is a poor resolution, as I run most games at least at 1024x768).

I, too, have a notebook with a Radeon mobility 9700 to show Steel Beasts Pro to prospective customers (and for occasional LAN tests at friends' places), and I'm satisfied with the performance. The catch is, everybody has slightly different expectations about what is considered "acceptable". I think that SB Pro PE runs adequately well at XGA resolution here, although this still is kinda sad since the notebook has a 1450x1024 display, so one would actually want to use its native resolution - but that's just the way it is.

I also think that it is a question of mission design. Some scenario designers do not accept this, but it's standard practice with every game to tailor the level to the desired performance. If today's graphics cards don't handle overdraw scenes well, we need to adapt, and either pick maps or predefine battle positions where the player doesn't have to scan into flat plains filled with millions of trees. That's the killer scene. There are so many triangles overlapping each other that all graphics cards can be bogged down.

A performance conscious scenario designer will therefore place the player in regions where deep forests are combined with hills that break the LOS to all the other trees behind the foreground, thus allowing the engine to cut off the calculations at that point and perform better.

Other games simply don't ship with maps that contain many trees - like BoF, for example. Neither the Half-life 2 nor the Doom 3 engine would perform better under the circumstances under which we have to operate. It is therefore imperative that scenario design helps a bit to keep performance high. Fortunately, SB Pro is not an egoshooter, so lower frame rates are not necessarily a killer.

Mmm, I have an HP notebook which uses the ATI Mobility 9000. Would I be correct in assuming that all the 9*** series would be similarly compatible with my notebook providing me the ability to upgrade to the 9800 at least? I'm also assuming that jumping straight from the 9000 to the x800 would be impossible.

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Mmm, I have an HP notebook which uses the ATI Mobility 9000. Would I be correct in assuming that all the 9*** series would be similarly compatible with my notebook providing me the ability to upgrade to the 9800 at least? I'm also assuming that jumping straight from the 9000 to the x800 would be impossible.

Most likely you're out of luck - but ultimately this is a question that only your HP dealer can answer. You should contact him to find out if your notebook's graphics chip can be upgraded at all, and to which extent. It's not just a matter of whether the chip is soldered or plugged, but also of thermal management.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Hmm, interesting.

My first PC specs I posted were correct, but it turns out that there was a glitch in the motherboard that borked my video cards. So now (free of charge thanks to the company) I am running an AMD Athlon 64 3400, 1GB DDR-400 Ram, and 2 Geforce 7900 GT 256mbs.

Now, for almost any new game out there, I can turn the graphics all the way up, AA, AF, 1280X1024 (the max my monitor supports), etc and I will not get slowdowns. In fact, the only time I get a slowdown is in COD2, where briefly it goes to 35fps then back up to the 40s-70s.

However, in SBPro, unzoomed gunsight the best I can get is 50. Normally I wouldn't complain, but zoomed in I get no more than 44, and when firing or routinely when traversing, it drops to 20.

Now I'm not trying to knock SB, but for the life of me I can't see how it is more demanding than COD2, IL2 FB+PF, BiA, or any of the other brand new 3D games out there.

Right now I'm running no AA, no AF, 1024 res, and high detail. When I switch to medium detail I get a framerate boost when unzoomed (which again was never a problem), but the same framerate while zoomed in.

Any ideas on what I can do to boost frame rate? Because I am scratching my head at how I can run everything on the market with everything cranked up except SBProPE.

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I suspect that nothing (ground based) on the market has the view range that SB Pro does - 12.5m ground post spacing and zillions of trees and objects.

I am glad to hear the dual card setup works - its not something that was ever tested... Any idea what sort of improvement it gives over one card??

From Al - Re: the frame rate when in the gunsight

The view through the gun sight is magnified, so objects such as trees

don't get small that quickly as they get distant. This causes a

tremendous amount of overdraw (especially when looking into a forest),

which is why the frame rate is typically less.

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Not all games actually profit from an SLI setup. At best, you can hope for a 40% increase in frame rate, and only for a minority of games. Most would gain between 15 and 30%, and some not at all.

However, I concede that a 20 fps rate is poor, and worse than it should be. We have recently seen a surprisingly bad performance on some other machines. CHances are, it all roots in the same fundamental issue. Once that we found out what it is - it could be related to multi-kernel environments - things may improve dramatically.

Right now, I don't have a cure to offer. Please contact Volcano if you would want to participate in some testing.

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 2 weeks later...

I've seen the chart of the video-card performances and now i'm wondering if this game (which really looks amazing to me) would work fluently on my system.

I've got an asus notebook with an amd athlon xp-m 2800+ (2133 mhz) with 512 mb ram. As a video-card there's just an ati mobility radeon 9600.

Does anyone have any experience with a comparable system??

125 bucks is a lot of money and i don't want to spend it for a game which won't run properly on my system!

I don't need graphic gimmics like AA or AF or whatever it is called. I just don't want a stop-motion game afterwards. And what does it look like in 800x600?? I hope it still looks nice (and better than SB1 :-D ) for I don't think being able to play in 1024x768.

So, I would be really thankful if anyone could tell me 'bout this by posting his experiences.

Thanx

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did some testing for ya...

so it is quite apparent that it is limited by the gpu, and a faster cpu does not help much in this case. i hear the 9600 mobility pro can be overclocked quite well, and i will be trying that next...and last resort will be figuring out how to fill my screen with a less than native resolution. you may want to do the same.

it is a shame if you are dependant upon this laptop to decide to buy the sim or not. it is absolutely worth having! no other machine?

Hey, first of all thanx, that you're testing this for me!

And no, there's no other machine. But as I said before, I'm not keen on playing it with all the graphic-gimmicks as AA and AF and whatever it's called. If it ran smoothly with a resolution of 1024x768, I would be pleased....if it doesn't look like an old C64-game in 800x600, that would be fine, too.

It's a shame, that there's no demo to test the performance on your system....to spend 125 euro for a game not knowing if it will run properly is a litlle bit like gambling! And gambling is only fun when I'm gambling with someone else's money!! ;-)

When you're still testing, would you be so nice and post a screenshot in 800x600 with all the AA and AF stuff turned off. I'd really like to see, what it's looking like. Maybe it's not worth the cost and I keep on playing SB1!! :-D

Thanx in advance!!

P.S.: Excuse me for my "bad" english....but it's not my mothertongue and the last night was quite hard!! ;)

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  • 2 weeks later...
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I think your computer will perform just fine at XGA resolution. As you can see, all 9600 chips are rated "green" on page 1, which means "good performance" at 1024x768. I had a computer like this once (now my wife is using it) - it was a barebone to showcase Steel Beasts Pro to prospective customers. This should tell you something - I mean, I tried to make it look as good as possible, and I picked a mid-range card when I could have had a GeForce 6800 or Radeon 9800 at that time (they were brand new back then).

The only reason why I dumped that barebone system is that I found a notebook with similar characteristics - so I can have MS Office and SB Pro on the same single-piece computer and no longer have to drag around a separate monitor.

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