NVIDIA* Poor TGE performance, not limited to 1.5
by Shay Arnett · in Torque Game Engine · 10/26/2006 (7:16 am) · 46 replies
I am experiencing horrible performance in all versions/demos I have tried of TGE.
Builds/Demos I have tried all with similar results.
1.4.2 CVS Build
1.5 Demo
1.4 Demo
TLK Demo
Warzone Demo
Game Demo from Ed's Book
Probably some more that I can't think of right now.
My system specs are:
Pentium D 805 @ 2.66ghz (affinity set to 1 core only when the build doesn't do it on its own)
Nvidia 7600gt pci-x16 256meg (have tried 9x.xx, 8x.xx, 7x.xx forceware drivers)
1 gig DDR2
The only info I can find on the forums note problems with Nvidia and their newer drivers, but the posts are a year or more old. The worst part is my card is ~1year old, and the drivers that they say don't have the performance issues in the forums are 2-3 years old, and won't detect or install with my card. I am going to try some more drivers tonight and see what I can find.
My co-worker Has a P4 3.0Ghz with ATI x850xt and is not experiencing the problems on anything he has tried.
For example in the 1.5 Demo, in the second scene flying over the terrain, he hits around 1200fps at times, I max at about 170fps. Other parts of the demo he is in the 200-400 range for the most part only dropping to double digits in a couple of the scenes. I never get over 100fps when anything other than terrain is rendered.
If anyone else out there with similar problems, or with Nvidia cards could post your system specs/drivers and framerates I would appreciate it.
Builds/Demos I have tried all with similar results.
1.4.2 CVS Build
1.5 Demo
1.4 Demo
TLK Demo
Warzone Demo
Game Demo from Ed's Book
Probably some more that I can't think of right now.
My system specs are:
Pentium D 805 @ 2.66ghz (affinity set to 1 core only when the build doesn't do it on its own)
Nvidia 7600gt pci-x16 256meg (have tried 9x.xx, 8x.xx, 7x.xx forceware drivers)
1 gig DDR2
The only info I can find on the forums note problems with Nvidia and their newer drivers, but the posts are a year or more old. The worst part is my card is ~1year old, and the drivers that they say don't have the performance issues in the forums are 2-3 years old, and won't detect or install with my card. I am going to try some more drivers tonight and see what I can find.
My co-worker Has a P4 3.0Ghz with ATI x850xt and is not experiencing the problems on anything he has tried.
For example in the 1.5 Demo, in the second scene flying over the terrain, he hits around 1200fps at times, I max at about 170fps. Other parts of the demo he is in the 200-400 range for the most part only dropping to double digits in a couple of the scenes. I never get over 100fps when anything other than terrain is rendered.
If anyone else out there with similar problems, or with Nvidia cards could post your system specs/drivers and framerates I would appreciate it.
#22
(Generally speaking)
Really bad excuse. If a company can't handle the amount of products they support, then they shouldn't support as many. It's not like people pay for a product to be nice and wait for it to be completed. A company being busy is their problem, not the customers.
With that said, I don't think the performance in TGE is a problem at all - and I agree with Jon apart from the human eye thing. If you got 40 FPS then you apparantly got less resources to spread out (you are soon hitting 30 fps) than if you had 400.
10/27/2006 (8:10 am)
Quote:
GG manages alot with all their different engines, and other projects they're involved in, think about how busy you are with just your own projects.
(Generally speaking)
Really bad excuse. If a company can't handle the amount of products they support, then they shouldn't support as many. It's not like people pay for a product to be nice and wait for it to be completed. A company being busy is their problem, not the customers.
With that said, I don't think the performance in TGE is a problem at all - and I agree with Jon apart from the human eye thing. If you got 40 FPS then you apparantly got less resources to spread out (you are soon hitting 30 fps) than if you had 400.
#23
If it was just the 1.5 demo I would give it some time to be optimized before jumping to any conclusions, but its not just 1.5 for me. What is flashy about the starter.fps demo in a cvs build of 1.4.2? I get the same results there as I do in 1.5, minus a few FPS for the new flashy stuff. As I said in the Original post, any build of torque used in any demo/game performs horribly.
Nvidia has had driver issues in the past that has caused similar effects, AMD DualCore users had a patch that resolved some issues for them, I don't know of an Intel patch for the same thing, and I can't use the old Nvidia drivers that fixed the problem 2 years ago, so I am stuck.
I will be reformatting tonight anyway, will try some more drivers and hopefully find a combo that will let me work with TGE. While I'm doing that I will fire up my pc that has a 9800 Pro in it and see how it performs.
10/27/2006 (8:20 am)
My problem is not only in the 1.5 demo!If it was just the 1.5 demo I would give it some time to be optimized before jumping to any conclusions, but its not just 1.5 for me. What is flashy about the starter.fps demo in a cvs build of 1.4.2? I get the same results there as I do in 1.5, minus a few FPS for the new flashy stuff. As I said in the Original post, any build of torque used in any demo/game performs horribly.
Nvidia has had driver issues in the past that has caused similar effects, AMD DualCore users had a patch that resolved some issues for them, I don't know of an Intel patch for the same thing, and I can't use the old Nvidia drivers that fixed the problem 2 years ago, so I am stuck.
I will be reformatting tonight anyway, will try some more drivers and hopefully find a combo that will let me work with TGE. While I'm doing that I will fire up my pc that has a 9800 Pro in it and see how it performs.
#24
...which suggests you have a driver problem. You said you didn't want to change drivers, and you obviously have not spent a lot of time to find one. So I'm going to search for you. Brb.
10/27/2006 (8:25 am)
Quote:
As I said in the Original post, any build of torque used in any demo/game performs horribly...
...which suggests you have a driver problem. You said you didn't want to change drivers, and you obviously have not spent a lot of time to find one. So I'm going to search for you. Brb.
#25
2 GB RAM
nVidia 7800 GTX
I get 81 FPS in the same scene as your screen shot. I average about 200-300 FPS, which has been my standard since 1.3. In the game I am developing, baseline with no players about 60FPS, with 64 Players I still get 60 FPS.
**I should note that I have a lot of customized rendering and a heavily recoded/modified version of TGE.
10/27/2006 (8:27 am)
Dual Core AMD 2.2 Ghz2 GB RAM
nVidia 7800 GTX
I get 81 FPS in the same scene as your screen shot. I average about 200-300 FPS, which has been my standard since 1.3. In the game I am developing, baseline with no players about 60FPS, with 64 Players I still get 60 FPS.
**I should note that I have a lot of customized rendering and a heavily recoded/modified version of TGE.
#26
If it was opengl performance in general then I would accept it as a driver problem and work on that, but since I only experience the slowdowns in Torque I am a little skeptical that my reformat tonight is going to help. I am keeping my hopes up though, because I really want 1.5 and arcane-fx :D
10/27/2006 (8:30 am)
I never said I didn't want to change drivers, in fact I said have went through multiple drivers. I have tried drivers in the 7x.xx 8x.xx and 9x.xx range from nvidia, anything before that will not install with my card.If it was opengl performance in general then I would accept it as a driver problem and work on that, but since I only experience the slowdowns in Torque I am a little skeptical that my reformat tonight is going to help. I am keeping my hopes up though, because I really want 1.5 and arcane-fx :D
#27
10/27/2006 (8:31 am)
What drivers are you using Jon? I would like to try them tonight as well.
#28
NGOHQ Custom Drivers
Did you try a fresh installation? Did it help? Have you tried running in Direct3D mode, perhaps? Some report better framerates there.
10/27/2006 (8:32 am)
Have you tried any of these?NGOHQ Custom Drivers
Did you try a fresh installation? Did it help? Have you tried running in Direct3D mode, perhaps? Some report better framerates there.
#29
10/27/2006 (8:33 am)
Version 9.1.4.7
#30
@Jon Thanks, I think those were the original ones I was using, will try them tonight for sure though.
I really hope its just a problem with my pc...
10/27/2006 (8:38 am)
@Stefan framerates in D3D were a few frames lower than opengl, and no I haven't tried those specific modded drivers, although i did try some other ones. All of them installed after full uninstallation and drivercleaner sweep.@Jon Thanks, I think those were the original ones I was using, will try them tonight for sure though.
I really hope its just a problem with my pc...
#31
10/27/2006 (10:21 am)
Guys, he's dual core as I mentioned before. IMO the issue isn't video drivers, but either the known cpu affinity or performance monitoring driver issue from the OEM manufacturer.
#32
10/27/2006 (10:47 am)
Doh, I totally missed that. Sorry.
#33
There haven't been any patches for Intel Dual Cores like there was for the AMD problem... so nothing i can update there.
What else can I try?
Jeez I wish this day would hurry up and end so I could go home and reformat.
[edit]
Will try switching to low-resolution timer as suggested in some forums as well.
10/27/2006 (11:13 am)
I manually set the affinity to 1 core if the build i am messing with doesn't do it in source, I said that in the first post. I do the affinity mask change in all the builds that I compile.There haven't been any patches for Intel Dual Cores like there was for the AMD problem... so nothing i can update there.
What else can I try?
Jeez I wish this day would hurry up and end so I could go home and reformat.
[edit]
Will try switching to low-resolution timer as suggested in some forums as well.
#34
It's been discussed in a thread or two elsewhere but I've not had any time to search for it, but I think it does have a small code fix that has been successful for some people.
10/27/2006 (11:23 am)
There are two different issues regarding dual core: the affinity problem that AMD's have, and a patch is available, and then a performance timer issue for both OEM's regarding precision of the performance reports. IIRC, it's the second that is the issue here, and one that has a less obvious/easy fix.It's been discussed in a thread or two elsewhere but I've not had any time to search for it, but I think it does have a small code fix that has been successful for some people.
#35
10/27/2006 (11:31 am)
Yup the second one sounds like the timer fix i was reading about... I will try it out tonight and see if that helps.
#36
10/27/2006 (2:07 pm)
Well.. neither of the changes worked... guess its time to reformat.
#37
Which in turn leads one to wonder what other problems them might be introducing to other programs, such as 3d design apps or who knows what?
And then you have to ask yourself, why would these companies push these processors into the mass markets, when they seem to really only be good at doing 1 or 2 things, and are a terribly bad idea for some of the most common uses of personal computers. Unless you just want to surf the internet, and who needs a dual core for that?
I don't know maybe its just turned out to be a bad choice for what I want it to do, all the reviews were rave... I'd almost rather swap out my cpu for a single core but then I can't help but think of all the other people that invested in dual cores and how many more are sold everyday, most likely to people like me that thought they would have a bad-to-the-bone PC that could handle whatever you throw at it, and know If I can deliver a product to them that not only runs acceptably, but makes use of their hardware and utilizes it properly, I'll be filling a need, and making a sale.
For now, I'm looking at 300 FPS in TSE so if you're looking for high performance stuff that makes use of high level shader cards you might want to consider getting in on the early adopter price if you can.
Thats more than 2 cents but I'm a little PO'd about the whole ordeal, I blame the hardware.
10/27/2006 (2:47 pm)
It really burns me that amd & Intel pushed these dual cores so hard, and now there's issues arising with them, not just in torque, but a quick browsing of the search engines reveals many games are having problems with them.Which in turn leads one to wonder what other problems them might be introducing to other programs, such as 3d design apps or who knows what?
And then you have to ask yourself, why would these companies push these processors into the mass markets, when they seem to really only be good at doing 1 or 2 things, and are a terribly bad idea for some of the most common uses of personal computers. Unless you just want to surf the internet, and who needs a dual core for that?
I don't know maybe its just turned out to be a bad choice for what I want it to do, all the reviews were rave... I'd almost rather swap out my cpu for a single core but then I can't help but think of all the other people that invested in dual cores and how many more are sold everyday, most likely to people like me that thought they would have a bad-to-the-bone PC that could handle whatever you throw at it, and know If I can deliver a product to them that not only runs acceptably, but makes use of their hardware and utilizes it properly, I'll be filling a need, and making a sale.
For now, I'm looking at 300 FPS in TSE so if you're looking for high performance stuff that makes use of high level shader cards you might want to consider getting in on the early adopter price if you can.
Thats more than 2 cents but I'm a little PO'd about the whole ordeal, I blame the hardware.
#39
I made the changes that others have talked about to the timer, no help.
Half a billion different drivers, no help.
Any more ideas?
10/27/2006 (6:38 pm)
Reformat, no help.I made the changes that others have talked about to the timer, no help.
Half a billion different drivers, no help.
Any more ideas?
#40
Just ran my system against another with a ati mobility 9700 radeon and my fps were consistently lower by over 20 frames except in the stain glass window demo.
I think there is a big problem here.
10/29/2006 (4:34 pm)
I'm having the same problem and I have a 7900 gt with 256mb, how are you showing the fps in torque? i used nvtray but it would only show up for opengl and not d3d modes. Durring the demo, the first part gets like 15 fps and then the terrain fly over is around 100 but thats the max it hits.Just ran my system against another with a ati mobility 9700 radeon and my fps were consistently lower by over 20 frames except in the stain glass window demo.
I think there is a big problem here.
Torque Owner Shay Arnett