GeForce FX 5500 & TSE

#21 FX cards that have a model number less than 5900 are notorious for having problems with shaders.

The card IS 2.0 compliant, but the processing for shaders is some kind of hack, as opposed to cards like the 6600 (and up).

ANY game that uses shaders will have pretty poor performance as a result.

I've got a FX5200 that I trashed for just that reason.

#22 And also keep in mind that you can almost always find a game or demo that "looks fine/fast"...that's because since a particular card claims to be shader compliant/performant, they will tune the drivers to demonstrate this for a very specific set of extensions/shader types...but just because one game or one demo works well, doesn't mean that the card/driver set is a good one for a large set of uses.

#23 @Gary
Mostly we are aiming at casual players who will not pay for full version if the demo version doesnt run on their 1.4+ shader compilant video card...
I think only 0.2% of indie developers here can afford AAA budget game of Battlefield2 level.

I didnt play Battlefield 2 yet, but I read that it works only with nVidia cards and perfomance is good only with 6600+ series. They badly support ATI cards. I can be wrong, though...

@Bryce
Then, how can nVidia shader demos run smoothly even on FX5500 card?

FX5500 card is 2.0+ compilant, so 1.0-1.4+ shaders should, imho, run faster on this one, and it's true: run 1.1 nVidia demo and 2.0 one, you will see the difference.

OGRE demos with 1.4 shader materials run fast as well.

I have an expression then TSE has something specific in it's video pipline, it's a pity I dont have enough time to check it...

#24 @Alexander: I explained the reason behind your question to Bryce in my post. If it is your product, don't you think you are going to make damned sure your demos look awesome? :)

Being 2.0 compliant has absolutely nothing to do with being highly performant on 1.0-1.4 shaders.

#25 Was seeing TSE with the Atlas terrain and reflective water runn 30-40 fps on a Radeon 9000 Mobile on a 2.4 ghz intel pentium 4 laptop with only 512 mb RAM... pretty low end specs for TSE with fairly high fps

#26 I've run TSE Start.fps demo port on a Nvidia 5900, runs fine, good frames ( 40+ ).

#27 @Stephen

> If it is your product, don't you think you are going to make
> damned sure your demos look awesome? :)

You got it, man ;)


> Being 2.0 compliant has absolutely nothing to do with being highly
> performant on 1.0-1.4 shaders.

I didn't mean that :)

I ran an Ogre3D demo with Glow shader 1.4 - 40 ftp (complex obj with 3000 faces)
I ran the TSE Car demo with Glow shader 1.4 - 5 fps (I dunno how many faces in the car scene)
Both DirectX 9, obviously. I assume that all the geometry is in video memory (256Mb).

Then I ran Manager DirectX 9 demo with a Glow shader 1.4 - got 60 fps (simple sphere with 3000 faces)



I'm going to create a simple scene with a 1.4 shader written in HLSL for DirectX 9 and run it it through Ogre3D, TSE and Managed DirectX 9, so the test will be fair.
I'm not going to open a flame which engine is better, I just want to find the reason why TSE runs so slow on FX cards with simple shaders...

#28 The reason TSE runs slow on FX 5500 and 5200 cards is that it detects the highest pixel shader support the card has and then runs on that. Unfortunately these cards are unbelieveable slow on shader model 2.0, so it kills performance. They run fine on SM 1.4 though. I think I've got it on a list somewhere to detect these cards and set the shader support down to 1.4.

#29 @Brian

That's a very good point. I did notice this while running nVidia demos.
But my point was:
1) Car Demo uses 1.4 shaders (correct me if I'm wrong)
2) Dojo Demo uses 2.0 shaders (correct me if I'm wrong)

Both run chunky on FX5500 :(
Ogre3D demos (1.1+ and 1.4+) run smooth...

Just a comment: All the demos do not have too many vertices and textures to fill up 256Mb of video memory...

Brian, I know that TSE Milstone 3 is associated with Texture work... We need a fall back to the lower shaders, or even non-shader materials, man ;)
I may offer my help to GG after the Milestone#3 to implement that feature, if you need.

#30 All the demos will run at 2.0 with FX5x00 cards except for some specific shaders which may be at 1.4. If it's running at 2.0, most of the pixels being drawn will be going through 2.0 shaders. We'll get to it. TSE is still EA.

If it's really bothering you, add/change the following lines in client/prefs.cs:

$pref::Video::forcePixVersion = true;
$pref::Video::forcedPixVersion = 1.4;

#31 @Brian

Thank you a lot for your answer! That's a good tip!