8800GTX in Vista and NFS Carbon

[evolucion8]

Originally posted by: ViRGE

Originally posted by: allies

Originally posted by: BFG10K

Vsync shouldn't have anything to do with minimum frames

Sure it does.

Really? Howso? Please enlighten me.

Also, the point of my post was not complaining about my MAX fps, it was about my MIN fps almach1.

Edit: This happens with both 100.65 and 101.70 (I'm using these now).

Edit 2: I've played at different settings too, and with stuff on low/medium and motion blur off it "only" dips into the teens. Still ridiculous

The quickie description:

* A video card has 2 image buffers, the front buffer and the back buffer.
* Whatever's currently being displayed is from the front buffer, which leaves the back buffer free to be manipulated and drawn to while something else is showing.
* When we're ready to show the next frame, the buffers are flipped so the fresh back becomes the front and the old front is now the back.
* When V-sync is on, this flip is done on every screen refresh, commonly 60hz(60 times per second) on a LCD
* The problem is that by only being able to flip buffers on every screen refresh, the flips may not occur when the back buffer is finished being drawn to
* When the back buffer is ready and waiting to flip, the video card must stop rendering until the flip because it has nothing to draw to
* As a result, this impacts both minimum and maximum frame rates.
* For minimum frame rates, say a frame takes slightly longer than 1/60th of a second to render, we then must wait for the next flip before we can continue rendering. This impacts the minimum frame rate as opposed to when y-sync is off because we've wasted that rendering time.
* Just as an example of a worst-case scenario, I'm going to show you some math with a 50hz refresh rate(since the numbers don't get so funky):

At 50hz, the screen refreshes every 20ms.
Now let's say we need 21ms to render each frame.
After 21ms, we're done, but we missed the screen refresh. We must wait until 40ms to actually show the image.
At 40ms, we show the image and start the next frame.
At 61ms, we're done with the next frame, but again missed the screen refresh, we must wait until 80ms to show it.
Etc, etc.

As it turns out, in that worst case scenario we only render 25 frames in 1 second because we had to wait for the screen refresh to flip the buffer. Had we been allowed to flip the buffer whenever we wanted, we would have been able to render 47 frames in that time period (1000ms/21ms = 47 frames & change). In other words, by enabling v-sync we've cut our graphics performance by 47%.

Granted, this is the worst case scenario and in the best case we can lose virtually no performance, but in practice the results are often in the middle and we're still giving up a significant level of performance. Other than using triple buffering, we need to disable v-sync in order to maximize our performance and keep our video card working all the time.

Great explanation, that's why if someone uses V-Sync, it's recommended to activate Triple Buffering, so instead of having 2 buffers, we have 3. I saw a nice improvement using it on F.E.A.R. when I ran it on my old good X800XT PE. But about the Need for Speed games, I've seen that in most systems, runs pretty equal, may be there's some unoptimized code that bottlenecks something.

 

[graham h]

this game has always had issues with Nvidia cards. There are loads of people with the same issues.
Seems crazy to me that E.A would produce a game to suit ATI when less than 20% of the gaming market actually use ATI cards.

 

[evolucion8]

Originally posted by: graham h
this game has always had issues with Nvidia cards. There are loads of people with the same issues.
Seems crazy to me that E.A would produce a game to suit ATI when less than 20% of the gaming market actually use ATI cards.

What did you say? LOL, you should investigate first before posting such biased comments.

 

[graham h]

I'm not biased at all.
Its a simple fact that Nvidia out sell ATI by 4-1 at least.
Its probably more right now

 

[evolucion8]

Originally posted by: graham h
I'm not biased at all.
Its a simple fact that Nvidia out sell ATI by 4-1 at least.
Its probably more right now

Probably nVidia has a bigger market share than ATi, let me put it like this, Intel has the 50% of the market share, nVidia has the 25% market share, ATi has 20% market share and the rest 5% is for Via, Sis etc. Is not like because ATi hasn't launched a DX10 card, means that people discarded ATi cards to buy nVidia cards. After all, ATi owned the GeForce FX in sales and performance with their Radeon 9X00 series in midrange and high end markets. Then ATi owned again the GeForce 6 series in performance and sales in the high end, in the midrange, nVidia had a solid market with it's 6600GT where the X600 and X700 didn't compete well. Then nVidia launched the 7800 series and gained market share against the X1800 series cause of their late arrival, availability and not so great performance. Then ATi came back with it's X1900 series of cards which outperforms the 7900 series of cards (Except 7950GX2 which is very hard to find since it's launch) and gained the crown of performance and still selling strong today. The 7600 series of cards outsold the X1600 series of cards due to it's poor performance, even though the X1650XT came as a savior, was a bit late on the scene but still selling strong. So is not like ATi is veeeeeeeeeeeeeeery far behind against nVidia in market share or something. Todays most demanded skus today are the X1950PRO, X1950XT, Geforce 7950GT, 7900GS and now the 8800 series of cards. So is not like NVidia out sell ati 4-1 cause the offers from both companies are comparably good, some have it's strong points, others have their weak spots. Money is not on the high end, is on the midrange and low end market. Not all people have 500 bucks to spend on a card. Researching doesn't cost nothing.

 

[mwmorph]

OP, have you checked background processes? It is definitely either

a) a power issue

or

b) a software issue

I had similar issues to yours with NFS:MW and NFS:C. The game would run smoothly except for intermittently in races. I ended up closing all unnecessary processes before running Most Wanted as well as ensuring I had a clean boot(playing NFS:C after coming out of hibernation on my system crashes it after a certain amount of time).

It might not be driver related but rather background processes. Security software or whatever running in the background can easily eat up massive amounts of I/O and Cpu for short periods of time.

Originally posted by: graham h
I'm not biased at all.
Its a simple fact that Nvidia out sell ATI by 4-1 at least.
Its probably more right now

please quote reliable numbers and sources.

 

[allies]

mwmorph - what do you want me to look for in background processes? Right now, with AIM, Firefox, etc opened, I'm at 30% memory usage. When I get out of all of that I'm at ~25%. Which means I still have 3 GB to spare. Also, CPU usage is minimal. I do have a virus scan running, but I don't think it's the problem. Do you run Vista, if so, is it x64? Not really that desperate to get the problem solved, although it would be nice to.