ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB

[mtippett]

It's good to see that ATI is giving rather nice performance with Nexuiz in these tests, given that basically all engine development is happening on Nvidia hardware (I do have a Radeon 3850 to serve as driver guinea pig to make sure things at least *work* on ATI, but I'm not involved with engine work).

Hopefully the improvements in the driver are helping change that .

However, the timedemos coming with Nexuiz predate rendering features like mirrors, reflection/refraction in water etc. etc. and there's not one scene showing theses effects, which is in this case lucky for ATI. My 3850 is taking a rather steep hit on e.g. the maps "starship" and "ruiner" with reflections activated and using the Windows GPU PerfStudio I often see the GPU being rather idle (like 30-40% load) and *downclocking* despite the framerate hitting the floor. So there obviously are some situations in which the driver apparently cannot (yet?) make proper use of the hardware resources available.

Are you saying that there is a common bottleneck between Linux and Windows regarding this behaviour? If so, that makes it a lot easier to locate and resolve a problem when it hits the right point in our priority queue.

Can you work with Michael to create a Nexuiz profile that does trigger this path?

Upside of this is that I can force AA and AF on without a noticable speed hit

The 4800 series has the leading AA performance (as indicated by the results against other 4 digit cards). We will see how it stacks up against the GTX200 series when they arrive for Michael.

Regards,

Matthew

[Kano]

When do you add some GTX 260/280 benchmarks? As the 260 is only a tiny bit more expensive. The 9800 GTX however is much cheaper.

[SavageX]

Are you saying that there is a common bottleneck between Linux and Windows regarding this behaviour? If so, that makes it a lot easier to locate and resolve a problem when it hits the right point in our priority queue.

Behaviour for Nexuiz has been wonderfully consistent across platforms with the new Catalyst OpenGL part (you can take that as a compliment). Any performance-issues I saw on Linux were also there on Windows, at least around march/april when I last checked.

Can you work with Michael to create a Nexuiz profile that does trigger this path?

I'll try to record a timedemo demonstrating any problems (most likely a bot match where one can see what a lousy player I actually am).

[mtippett]

I'll try to record a timedemo demonstrating any problems (most likely a bot match where one can see what a lousy player I actually am).

Can't be worse than me... Why do you think I am so into timedemos .

Regards,

Matthew

[SavageX]

Here we go: http://savagex.planetnexuiz.de/demos.zip

Extract into ~/.nexuiz/data and in the Nexuiz console (ESC + SHIFT) a simple "timedemo ruiner" and/or "timedemo starship" will show me battling easy bots (to make me look better).

On High details framerate on my 3850 will drop well within the twenties - anyway, those timedemos are more demanding than the usual demos/demo1 or demos/demo2.

Michael, do you feel like doing a run on the 4870 vs. the Geforce? If the former happens to not beat the latter then I guess we have a rather nice testcase for the ATI driver team - if not then I made much noise about nothing ;-)

[bridgman]

Michael, do you feel like doing a run on the 4870 vs. the Geforce? If the former happens to not beat the latter then I guess we have a rather nice testcase for the ATI driver team - if not then I made much noise about nothing ;-)

Either way this is good. Thanks !!

[SavageX]

Either way this is good. Thanks !!

Oh, you're welcome. Nexuiz has a rather satisfying history of collaborating with GPU vendors: When trying to get information about OpenGL support on XGI Volari cards their response was mostly "so, how many cards do you need for testing?" (too bad they went out of business before any cards arrived - anyway, if there are any Ex-XGI people over at AMD/ATI give them a nice hug for having had a really responsive support) and Nvidia even contributed a patch to make Nexuiz work properly with the GeForce 8. If we're doing stupid things in the renderer impacting on ATI performance it would certainly be cool to fix that (and if the driver happens to have a bottleneck I assume AMD/ATI customers like me would appreciate fixes there as well )

[Melcar]

date 2008-07-04 12:22:01 | enginedate 10:00:06 May 11 2008 | demo ruiner.dem | commandline /home/principe/.nexuiz/nexuiz-linux-x86_64-glx  | result 2673 frames 46.2424362 seconds 57.8040480 fps, one-second fps min/avg/max: 20 72 155 (128 seconds)


date 2008-07-04 12:22:39 | enginedate 10:00:06 May 11 2008 | demo starship.dem | commandline /home/principe/.nexuiz/nexuiz-linux-x86_64-glx  | result 2478 frames 22.6356981 seconds 109.4730983 fps, one-second fps min/avg/max: 36 131 454 (119 seconds)

First one is Ruiner, second one Starship. High details. It's with an overclocked HD3850 though (800/1000).

Nexuiz is one of the few games that runs rather well with ATI cards (no major graphical glitches either); it's even playable on a 9800pro. Others, like Alien Arena, hell, even my older 7900GS runs it better.

[bridgman]

Am I correct that the timedemo sets quality preset but not resolution ? Anyways, at 1680x1050 high on a stock 3870 with stock Phenom (forget the model) I get :

ruiner : 25 85 178

starship : 38 146 465

Running Hardy and whichever fglrx driver ships with Hardy - 8.3 I think.

For some reason the playback seems a lot jumpier at 1024x768 than at 1680x1050. Forgot to write down the values (since jumpy playback should have a lower min frame rate) but will try to get some more info over the weekend.

Also noticed that the numbers seemed to go up a bit each time I ran the timedemo (again need to write down the numbers this time to confirm); I think the lowest fps on ruiner was closer to 20 first time -- in fact all of my initial numbers were lower than Melcar's IIRC.

That is a VERY nicely done game btw.

[Kano]

Funny, you forgot about

grep -e "cpu MHz" -e "model name" /proc/cpuinfo