GeForce FX 5500 & TSE

#1 All of the FX cards are budget cards, thus low quailty and also why they cost around $50-$80. Even a Ti 4600 128MB has better preformence then a FX 5600 128MB.

#2 Yep...FX cards blow with TSE.

#3 I had a fx5200 and ran my tse build in debug mode at about 10-15 fps. Not great but not horrible either. Thye are in fact budget cards and actually have a problem with TSE. I bought an ATI 256MB radeon 9600 xt and it is great. the card was about $150 and was worth every peny. I got a couple of free games with it too.

#4 @Robert
I guess, ATI cards from the same range are better? The demos I was running were compiled in Release... It seems that it's a shader bottleneck, not card's memory.

@Karl
Will it help to reduce amount of shaders to run demo with better fps?

#5 No it shouldnt have much to do with the memory. I have heard somewhere that they were having a problem with the FX series graphics cards running crappy on TSE. Maybe they will fix it, maybe they wont. I just bought a new card anyways. I was totally unable to play the F.E.A.R. demo with my FX 5200 but i can run that demo on medium settings with shadows enabled and it plays at around 30 fps. My ATI card is around the same range as the FX cards. Maybe a little better im not sure. It works well with 50-60 fps in debug and 100+ FPS in release! It must be a shader bottleneck. I would assume droping down the shaders could increase your performance, but then again what would be the point of TSE?

#6 While the FX series isnt very good as noted above, there are ALOT of people running them and playing shader intensive apps without much problems. I ran a 5200FX for a while and it gave pretty good performance on everything but TSE.

I therefore think you cant say "oh its just a cheaper card", because it meets the spec for TSE's requirements and runs other apps with similar shader requirements fairly well. And if you plan to release a game knowing that it cant run on a popular card, even if the shader requirements are met, good luck. Id like to see GG's response to this. If its a good one, Ill purchase TSE right then and there, as this hardware support is whats holding me back.

BTW, GG rocks.

#7 @Robert
You are right, but, imho, I think that TSE should have a mechanism to fall back for non-shader cards. In that case the game software will be compile-ones-run-everywhere :), just swap materials. Look at OGRE engine ;).
GG guys are good, indeed, but they may use some new ideas :) The use of that new MaterialManager will open new niches in the market, I'm sure

@Ian
That's my concern too... FX cards are not that bad - nVidia demos run excellent on FX cards even with shaders... And the big deal is that FX cards are so popular, so we will lose customers... :( That's it. I hope TSE will be fixed in this matter.

#8 I am deving on TSE with a FX 5600 Ultra card. It definitely is a downer that TSE doesnt work well with this series of cards. I get a ok results...20-30 fps. But I should be getting much better with 256 megs of video ram. I would have to imagine this would be something GG would fix.

#9 Just a quick aside, as is almost always the case, the problem isn't with TSE or even necessarily the cards (hardware) themselves, but with the drivers. Search around for various driver sets (try to get from manufacturer, NOT the "windows approved" drivers for sure), and try several generations. The "latest video drivers" is almost always not the ones to get with cards that are having problems.

#10 I have a 128MB Fx 5500... and it worls pretty good :\

#11 Your not running the debug mode tse exe are ya?

Is this the fps.starter port demo or a licensed TSE EA?

#12 Is it a bug or because the card just sucks. I have a 256MB FX5500 and it works fine for me.

#13 Www.omegadrivers.net
I use them and love them, i donno about you guys.

#14 @Stephen
I tried several driver versions from nVidia :(
And all the nVidia demos with shaders show 50-100fps...

@Randy
All the exe file are in Release.

@Andrew
@Joseph
What is the driver version you use?

@Chris
Omega drivers are just repackaged nVidia old drivers that are claimed "stable". I tried 3 versions of them (1.6693 and down). They just helped me to reduce CPU usage in TSE car demo, but the TSE's fps was the same... All the nVidia demos still worked fine around 100fps with lots of shaders (1.1-1.4), even with more complex geometry then the race car model.

@All
Let's just find out whether it's a driver or something else, guys. We cannot make customer get frustrated trying to install bazilion driver versions ;)

@GG guys
I'm not trying to piss you off ;) I'm just making a point and helping you to solve problems.

#15 @Randy, I'm running a licensed version of TSE.

#16 Just some more data if it helps anyone:

Ive run TSE demos (all 3) on a 5500fx 256MB and 5200fx 128MB since my last post with similarly concerning results on both (7-12FPS). If its the drivers, then this isnt problem solved...we cant tell customers to scour the net for drivers haha. I tried a few different driver versions from different sources with no difference in results.
Any further suggestions fro the GG posse would be sweet.

Rock on and good luck.

#17 If its of any use. We had similar pblems with Aerial Antics on some cards and was told that some 5x and 6x nvidia cards with the latest drivers won't run it. It's not done in torque, but apparently its a DX thing and we have to make user all our textures are actually square. Not just power of 2. We tried changing them to square and it runs perfect on those machines now.

#18 I've not tried TSE but over the weekend I installed Battlefield 2 and tried it with my GeforceFX 5900. The performance was horrible even on low settings (with fairly recent drivers). However after installing the latest drivers (whatever were available on saturday) I'm now getting very playable performance even with a fair bit of the eye candy turned up.

Ian: Any customer that buys a new graphics card for the use with the latest games really needs to expect (or be told to expect) to have to download the latest drivers for thier card if they wish to play the latest games. Or, accept that if they don't have the technical ability to do so, that they find someone who does, or bring the pc in for someone to do it for them.

#19 Obviously.

Thats not the case however. We're told to NOT use the latest drivers, and scour the net to find 3rd part or old drivers and try them. Read closer.

#20 @Ian and just as obviously, you as a game publisher (once your game is complete) can select a subset of cards and card-driver combinations that your product supports, and make this information known directly to your customers.