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SB Pro PE performance with various grahics cards


Ssnake

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Hey Fellas,

I did a search but couldn't find the ATI MOBILITY RADEON X200M graphics card discussed anywhere.

Think it'll work for SB PRO PE? For example in a laptop such as this?

http://www.walmart.com/catalog/product.do?product_id=5192501

I haven't been keeping up with the latest changes in graphics. Thanks.

-- AF '94 Player

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I think it'll work, but don't expect wonders. Anything with "200" in the series name by ATi represents the low end of their products. I tend to rather buy last season's top performer than this season's "El Cheapo" variant, even if they cost the same.

But that's just me, your mileage may vary.

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  • 2 weeks later...
Does anyone own a GeForce 8800 and what kind of FPS can do you get?

I just put a new system with a 8800GTX together. I played around in SBPE to see what difference it makes, (too bad we don’t have a “time demo” for measuring system performance like the old ID titles.)

Using the “Prep defense (Leo 2A5)” scenario as a benchmark; starting in the woods and moving to the first vehicle emplacement off the left branch of the road, (1384,1674), the F8 view runs mid 50’s to 60 FPS @1280x1024x16 on my E6700/PC6400/8800GTX. In comparison, my old 3.4 Northwood/PC3200/6800Ultra runs high 20’s to low 40’s for the same route. Both systems were using the default details settings, no virus or firewall running at the time of the test.

I played the “Fulda Gap v7 BundesPE” scenario, and in the thick of it, (the main attack in through the river valley), my FPS were in the 40’s with the new system.

Of course, with so many components changed in this upgrade, it would be hard to determine exactly what portion of the increase is attributable to the 8800 alone. Perhaps someone upgrading a newer system with just a video card could be more informative.

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Ok let me be more specific, I like the forest maps, and I typically design missions with lots of AI, Blue and red forces. I'm a going to build a desktop prob with a 2.66 AMD 5000+ 64 X2 cpu, nvidia 7950 GT 512, and a gig of 667mhz ram, should that be sufficient?

It sounds similar to my system: http://www.steelbeasts.com/sbforums/showpost.php?p=127093&postcount=155

If you like building maps like Fulda, then you should get frame-rates in the 40-50 like I have been. In this sim that feel pretty smooth. I only notice them at all if I'm panning in the F8 view. From the gunner's position, where I spend most of my time, I can't tell if it's 40 or maxed out a 62.5 FPS.

(And if you are building maps like Fulda, please post them.)

If that's not a good comparison, specific the name of a map that’s similar to what you’re thinking of and I'll run it and tell you what I get. (Or hopefully, someone with the same hardware as your planned system will beat me to it.)

P.S. I'm sleeving my PSU right now, so I may take a day or two get back to you with my report.

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  • 3 months later...
I have a Geforce 8800 GTX 768Mb and I'd like to know if this card will run the program OK. I had to wait for a patch before I could run Falcon 4. I've ordered the sim and I'm eagerly awaiting delivery.

Boomer, if it is of any help to you, I know that RogueSnake has been running SB on an 8800GTS without any issue apart from a vastly improved framerate hehe.

So I think you will be just fine.. my new comp contains an 8800GTX which should with any luck be going live tomorrow or Friday. When I get some results I will give you a firm reply to this one. ;)

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Screen resolution is 1280x960, AA is 2x, AF is 4x, VSync on, mipmap detail set to performance. I usually use the "Flank Attack, autumn" scenario as my bench mark and take measurements as the scenario begins in the F8 view with the Leopard where the scenario starts. With all sliders to zero I get about 35-38 fps. With the "General" slider at 100 and the other two at 50 I get around 20 fps. With all sliders at 100 I get about 13 fps.

I realize that the cpu is limiting things a bit in this large scenario, hence the 35-38 with sliders at zero. But it would be nice to run SB with everything cranked up all the way. Thanks for any advice you can give me.

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Hi

I run SBPro Pe with a 8800gts 640mb card and a conroe E6600 on a samsung LCD monitor. I tried your graphic settings on that benchmark scenario of yours.

All sliders 0 gives fps pretty much maxed out at 59-60. (my monitor sync and vsync will put a cap at 59-60. Anyway, even with the Crt monitor I used before I think the game fps is capped at 62 (?))

Sliders to default gives fps 48-58 and in TIS 38-55

All slider as at max gives 21-26 fps and in TIS 17-25

All sliders max except ground cover (at 10) gives 44-55

All sliders max and ground cover to 50 gives 34-40 and TIS 28-38.

The 8800gts is a powerfull card, that is if you can feed it. Without enough cpu power it wouldn't perform at its best, so perhaps a 8600 is right for your 3.4 cpu. A bit of warning concerning the Nvidia graphics drivers though, they have been less then potimal for the 8000 series of cards. Some features still don't work with the latset drivers.

Also consider low resolution, low AA nad AF settings wasted on the 8800 gts and gtx cards. They were built to handle plenty AA and AF at high resolutions, so you could get away with a cheaper card at the same settings. But when you crank upp resolution and quality settings one sees the power in action.

Of course SB Pro can bring even this card and cpu down to its knees, but I must say it all looks very good at 1680x 1050 with sliders at default settings, which usally is smooth enough playing!

Cheers Porphyr

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With VSYNC on (which SB seems to turn on, at least on my machine) game frame rate must be an integer multiple of the monitor refresh rate, as the card is only allowed to change the frame when the scanline is reset back to the 0,0 position.

Assuming a 60 Hz monitor refresh rate, you can only have 60 FPS (frame updates each monitor refresh) 30 FPS (frame updates every second monitor refresh) 20 FPS (frame updates every 3rd monitor refresh) 15 FPS (frame updates every 4th monitor refresh) 12 FPS (every 5th) 10 FPS (every 6th) etc etc.

60 FPS is thus "perfect" and 30 FPS is "almost perfect"

My m9700 laptop (dual 7800gs go SLI) gets 30-60 FPS at 1920 X 1200 with the sliders all the way up.

Of course, the downside to the sliders all the way up is that the AI plays with the sliders "all the way down" so ground clutter doesn't block LOS for the AI and it will happily nail you through the grass.

DG

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  • 3 months later...

i use a 7800gs on agp works wonderfully even at 1600 x 1200 in most stiuations, (never below 20 or so even with tons of vehicles in restrictive environment, usually averages high 20s to mid 30s at that resolution, 1024x768 at 4xFSAA runs around 25 (with details at 30/30/30) should run fine for you as well...

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I have the following system:

Pentium core two duo 2GHz, 2Gb DDR 2 RAM, Nividia 8600GT 256Mb. I play at 1440x900 resolution.

I can play at max setting but sometimes the fps bog down to lower 20 even reaching a lowest point of 14 especially when viewing heavily wooded area in wide perspective.

Then there is this setting trouble. After setting everything to max sometimes after playing, the graphics option sliders are lowered a bit without me setting them to lower values like from being set at 100 to 96 instead. Is anyone able to give me insight on this?

I take it that my system is unable to play at max setting? But the fps in most scenarios are fine even relatively high to 50s or even lower 60s. Only when there's plenty smoke belching and with dense forest scenery in wide perspective it would bog to 14 or more. Average I would say about 30+ to lower 40s.

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:drink:

Ouch. Well, you should try to go back to 24 bit after subsequent driver updates. No current graphics card should require a restriction to 16 bit depth resolution.

:clap:

OK, here is the scoop! ....Finally got it!....:drink:

In the NVidea control panel for 8800 Ultra mounted in SLI config there is a chapter called SLI PREFORMANCE MODE (I wish there would be such access panel for my head) with 4 choices:

- Force Split Frame Rendering

- Force Alternate Frame Rendering 1

- Force // // // Rendering 2

- Single - GPU

The trees stand at attention without blinking in all the performance modes except in the "Force Alternate Frame Rendering 2 :gen004:

I haden't tried everything!...Due!...

GHWY

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  • 4 months later...
Any idea how a GeForce 8800GT would work on Pro?

I got the 8800 GT overclocked by eVGA to 650MHz, I think. I set all the sliders to max and ran a few scenarios. Screen resolution was full screen, 1024x768x32.

In one test I was driving around some very complex terrain in a Hummer, no other action going on. Frame rates were around 15, not really bad.

Playing the M2 multi units scenario, frame rates were 15 to 30+ depending on what was going on. At one point the frame rate dropped to 8 momentarily, but I was looking close-up at smoke with lots of terrain around me.

M1 gunnery tutorial D ran at 50+ frames per second.

I wasn't using anti-aliasing, so I don't know what effect that would have. Would be nice if that was controlled in the game. :D

Larry

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The frame rates will depend much on the density of ground cover objects, and I think that a setting of 20 to 40 is "good enough" for my tastes anyway which will certainly boost the frame rate to maximum with such a card. I'd rather have a higher screen resolution (which the 8800 could certainly handle with no performance loss) and give up a bit on the ground clutter. By and large it's nonfunctional eye candy (as long as you don't use the cursed boulders), anyway.

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 1 month later...

Just bought a new nvidia 9600gt (had a ATI X800XT). Put a single M1 on the map so that my CPU wouldn't have to calculate line of sight between units (I've got a pentium 4, 3.4Ghz). Moved all sliders to the right. When looking at a forest with a city behind it with mosques showing above the trees from the F8 view, I get frame rates of 21! Only about 25% better than my x800xt.

With all sliders to the left I get 62.5 fps with the same view (of course the mosques don't show). I am very, very disappointed. I thought I would have frame rates above 50 in a case like this with all sliders to the right.

Is my cpu the bottle neck even though no other units are on the map? And if it was my cpu moving the sliders wouldn't make a difference would it?

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21 sounds pretty decent to me. Your not mentioning all the other settings involved, like screen resolution, AA settings, etc, etc. It also depends on what map your talking about, the density of the buildings on the map, how many buildings are within that field of view, etc.

The CPU you have is old, but I wouldnt bother replacing it to improve the framerates when your minimum is 21. (NTSC television is 23 FPS, I think.)

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I'm just a little disappointed. The 9600GT is suppose to be only slightly slower than the 8800GT.

The 21 fps reading was taken from the following view, with the slider from the graphics card control panel moved all the way to "performance" and the screen resolution at 1280 X 1024.

I know that the fps reading depends at times on the cpu speed, but I was under the impression (apparently incorrect) that for a given unchanging scene, with only one unit on the map, that any change in the fps count as the terrain sliders are moved right or left, would depend 100% on the quality of the graphics card.

I thought this 9600GT would at least double my frame rate up to the maximum at all times over my x800xt. Not even close. I've read many great reviews about this card.

Would someone with knowledge of how SBpe works please explain the above findings for me? Is it the fact that my cpu is too slow? Did I get a bad card? Is SBpe more dependant on the cpu for fps than the graphics card? Thanks

SS_09_08_10.jpg.e49c158b4f54a0d4fd373711

SS_09_08_10.jpg.e49c158b4f54a0d4fd373711

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It would depend a lot on the scenery. In the worst case you have many triangles overlapping each other. The scene rendering must render from the rear to the front in order to determine which triangle blocks the view to some other, which means that up to 90% of all triangle calculations go to the bin. This is the worst case of inefficient rendering situations. The graphics chip is treating water in these situations. On top of it you force it with all sliders to the right that it does all this inefficiency with high precision out to the maximum range. Finally, it's the total number of entities in such a scene (every building, bushel of grass, or trees and bushes, are entities). Chances are that the sheer number of grass bushels will already bring the scene to a crawl since the number of them can be truly HIGH.

In short, putting all sliders to the right will only slow you down without significantly improving the rendering quality. With the ground clutter slider at 50% you will still have a nice-looking scene while enjoying high frame rates, I'm sure.

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  • 2 months later...

Got my pro PE running this weekend.

My system is 3 ghz dual core; 8800 GTS 512 mb; 4 gig ram; vista

Originally started in windowed mode.

Initial runs had settings at General: 35 Ground: 25 Ground Cover: 10. Everything looked fine, good frame rates, but then I jumped into a humvee to let loose with the BMG and frame rates dropped to 4 to 6. Took several seconds to recover. Eventually the game crashed.

I restarted and ran it in full screen at the largest resolution it shows (1680x1050x32) and I had the resolution values as above. I had one occasion in a short scenario where the frame rates dropped into the 20s but never did I see extreme unplayable frame rates. I even popped smoke, etc to try and work it in.

The scenario (Desert Ambush) has lots of rocks, no real trees and a small town. There is a helo in some variants (random units) and when a helo showed up, seems the frame rates took a hit.

Is it better from a performance perspective, to run in windowed mode or full screen mode? Which is better?

What are some other settings (either in the game or the video card) that affects performance?

I've got the latest Nvidea drivers, things seem to be ok there.

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I don't think that I have obvious advice for you. You're right that the 8800 shouldn't have problems with any scenario in SB Pro PE (at least not with ground clutter settings below 30) and I don't have an explanation for the frame rate drop when switching to the cal .50; maybe there was a completely unrelated event on your computer (virus scan?) that occurred accidentally at the same time?

Even with all anti aliasing settings and whatnot SB pro should perform reasonably well on an 8800. Even my 7800 GTX can do 1920x1200 resolutions (maybe not with highest antialiasing settings, so I prefer windows of maybe 1400 x 900 size or so and 4x FSAA which is a nice compromise between high resolution, good image quality, and high frame rates).

Don't worry about the "beta" label, though. We called a regular update "beta" simply because we couldn't invest much time into internal testing. But I think it's about as stable as the official release version.

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Ok, running 2.370, tried various machine / game settings.

I set the parameters for the video card to performance instead of quality. This seems to shut off alot of AA and other smoothing features. Also set vista to not have transparancy.

Running in windowed mode, I still saw noticable slowdown of the game, many times dipping to the teens in fairly unchallenging situations. It was still playable but you noticed the difference.

Running the same settings in full screen 1680x1050x32, same gpu scenarios, I get vastly different results. Frame rates rarely dip out of the 50s. Even popping smoke, looking through arty / trees / etc everything was smooth.

With the card values set to performance, in both modes I saw some screen re-write where you could see the screen not quite catching up with movement. Mostly saw this while rapidly scanning. Frame rates didn't dip then, though.

I have not had a lock up in several sessions, either. Perhaps a fluke? Who knows.

Anyone else experience the game running faster in full screen mode? Is that to be expected?

Other than I really suck after taking a year + off, it seems to be running well.

System specs: Vista Ultimate no sp1; 3.0 ghz; dual core; 8800 GTS 512 gpu; 4 gb ram.

SB: 2.370; full and windowed mode as mentioned above.

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  • 6 months later...

I have just received my 9800GT card and fired up SB immediately, convinced that it would outrun my old 7800 card by horselenghts... Graphics settings were adjusted to max and resolution to 1600 x 1200 32bpp!!!

Initially it did outrun the 7800, framrates at 55-60 at the start of the scenario but when watching arty/smoke/woods it went down to 4-8 fps :(... Not playable.

I will tune my graphics settings to performance for SB and return with the figures.

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