[GameGPU] Wolfenstein: The Old Blood

[Silverforce11]

I was wondering why some users post comments regarding ATI/AMD lacking OpenGL performance, because I specifically remember many OpenGL games where AMD ran faster than NV.

So thanks @RS, I thought my memories were failing me, but its not true.

As I said at the top of the thread, OpenGL is the only explanation why NV has a poor showing because in neutral games, NV is very competitive on DX9-11.

 

[RussianSensation]

^ It's because the old memes/themes continue and when they are posted, unless someone provides a rebuttal, they are accepted as gospel. It's true that AMD cards had a major issue with RAGE but that was due to Mega Texture implementation; and it doesn't at all mean that they sucked in all OpenGL games. This is like when Tom's Hardware made a comment that GCN is terrible for DX9 at launch and everyone ran with it but if you check 10-20 DX9 games tested by GameGPU, 7970GE outperforms 680 in 90%+ of them.

The more NV gains market share, the more hate there will be towards AMD because the most hardcore NV loyalists will no longer hide their biases since they will feel 'protected' by 80%+ of PC gamers with NV cards. If you notice when AMD had 40-50% market share, people on online forums kept their biases a lot more in check. Now, TechReport, TPU, HardOCP is full of green supporters and AMD haters. It was never like this during HD4000-6000 series. We are at a point where gamers blame AMD for poor performance in GW titles and for not being able to run PhysX well. lol

 

[Tapoer]

Yes, since a long time ago when AMD said they will start working harder on a better OpenGL drivers, that OpenGL performance have improved, this on windows, in linux it might still not match Nvidia. Also the only problem with AMD's openGL drivers might be that is not 100% compatible with all OpenGL extensions, while Nvidia have no problems.

Performance of AMD's APU compared with GT 640:

 

[AtenRa]

ID's Tech 5 engine, is it OpenGL? I can't recall if they are still on that API.

hmmm, those NVIDIA drivers are horrible. It is why i will never buy an NVIDIA GPU again.





/sarcasm

 

[zlatan]

The ID Tech 5 is a D3D11 engine now with some OGL3.x interoperability.

SLI/CF is a complex problem with ID Tech 5. The main renderer is not really compatible with AFR. There is a chance to build a solution, but it won't give good scaling or good frame pacing.

 

[zlatan]

OGL is actually dead in it's actual form. Don't expect AAA games on it.
OGL now has some serious issues with the IHV shader compliers. You can now write a code with incorrect syntax and the NVidia complier will eat it. This is bad for a standard, so the whole OGL ecosystem is just killed.
SPIR-V is the best hope from now. It can be implemented on OpenGL, but I don't know if they implement it or not.

 

[Silverforce11]

@zlatan

whats your take on Vulkan, would it take off on PC or is the similarity to DX12 going to mean its pointless for big game engines to support it?

Edit: or rather, because of the similarities and the advantage of Vulkan being the new OpenGL for mobiles (OpenGLES & Metal), means it will likely be supported by game engines as a way to promote cross-compatible development?

 

[Tapoer]

@zlatan

whats your take on Vulkan, would it take off on PC or is the similarity to DX12 going to mean its pointless for big game engines to support it?

From what I read on the beyond3d forums, developers that commented on there are very enthusiastic about Vulcan.
But I would like to know about zlatan opinion too.

 

[psolord]

Ooh ooh a benchmark thread. My kind of thing!

So I did a very lengthy benchmark in the docks chapter, on 970, and 570.

Vid links with spicy wallpapers.

Wolfenstein Old Blood 1920X1080 Ultra(-) GTX 970 @1.5Ghz CORE i5-2500K @4.8Ghz - 57 fps

Wolfenstein Old Blood 1920X1080 High++ GTX 570 @850Mhz Q9550 @4GHz - 54fps


What the settings mean:

Ultra (-) is the Ultra preset with Antialiasing reduced to 4X instead of 8X.

High++ is the High preset BUT with
Dynaminc Object Shadow Quality increased to high from medium
Character Shadow Quality increased to high from medium
Screen-Space Reflections increased to high from disabled

 

[Arachnotronic]

Very sad that SLI/CF don't seem to work.

 

[psolord]

I don't think so... People are having trouble getting MSI Afterbruner's OSD to show info, and it is probably due to the program not being compatible with OpenGL.

I'm surprised finding out what API the game uses is this hard...

Edit - And I don't think Vulkan will get much screen-time on Windows, probably stick to SteamOS.

It is OGL. I am showing RTSS OSD on all my above vids and they all reported OGL.

 

[psolord]

Did they use MSAA 8x or something?

I already finished the game on my Titan X - was a locked 60 at MSAA 2x, everything else maxed at 3440x1440. Didn't seem like it was demanding at all

Glad it was not demanding on a Titan X!

Still, you are very right my friend.

MSAA is the single heaviest setting in this game.

To illustrate this I made the following two vids, for anyone that might be interested.


Wolfenstein Old Blood settings impact on performance (GTX 970)

 

[n0x1ous]

Common knowledge that the new order IS openGL and hence so is this. Every release on idtech 5 has been open gl. Surprised there is this much confusion on this. ALSO, SLI and Xfire have NEVER been supported in idtech 5 and never will be. do not expect a patch from either vender for it as the engine does not support it.

 

[Arachnotronic]

Common knowledge that the new order IS openGL and hence so is this. Every release on idtech 5 has been open gl. Surprised there is this much confusion on this. ALSO, SLI and Xfire have NEVER been supported in idtech 5 and never will be. do not expect a patch from either vender for it as the engine does not support it.

I don't get why MachineGames had to use Id Tech 5 other than "NIH" syndrome on ZeniMax's/id's part. This game would have been better on UE3 (I assume UE3 doesn't have issues with SLI/xFire).

At any rate I loved Wolfenstein The Old Blood. Reminded me a lot of RtCW, which is one of my favorite games of all time.

 

[hawtdawg]

Also moving forward, with the high similarity of (OpenGL)Vulkan & DX12, what's the point of using Vulkan for desktops?

cross platform Linux/Mac/Windows I would think

 

[zlatan]

@zlatan

whats your take on Vulkan, would it take off on PC or is the similarity to DX12 going to mean its pointless for big game engines to support it?

Edit: or rather, because of the similarities and the advantage of Vulkan being the new OpenGL for mobiles (OpenGLES & Metal), means it will likely be supported by game engines as a way to promote cross-compatible development?

Vulkan is awesome. I like the way how Khronos connect OpenCL into it. SPIR-V is a smart solution for programibility issues.

There is a huge chance that many engine will support Vulkan. If the engine structure is "low-level friendly", than supporting one or two extra explicit API is really cheap. Our engine will have several backends: GCM, GNM, D3D12mono, D3D12, Vulkan, Metal and Mantle. We probably won't activate every backend on a PC IP, but the option to do it will be there. From here I would probably want to spend more time on Vulkan, just because I can target SPIR-V directly with our own shading language. The OpenCL C++ and SYCL support in the future is also a killer feature. The current shading languages are very limited without templates. And all the preprocessor hacking is killing me. I would like to see a C++11 lambda based solution for this problem.

 

[ThatBuzzkiller]

While AMD drivers did have issues in RAGE, a lot of OpenGL games run as fast or even better on AMD cards when comparing competing generations.

AMD has good OpenGL drivers for a very long time, in fact since HD5870 and 5770 days:

*snip*

^ All of these are OpenGL games.

The only thing that's hard to explain is how TPU is getting such horrible performance in Wolfenstein on AMD cars but GameGPU doesn't show this at all.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_r9_290&num=1

More often than not, AMD was getting it's drivers handed by Nvidia when it came to OpenGL support ...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=civ_beyondearth_linux&num=1

Up above is further humiliation on AMD's part in Civilization: Beyond Earth when they were a victor against the GTX 980 when using Mantle ...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=metro-redux-22gpus&num=1

It gets even worse when you look at Metro Redux ...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ue4-linux-amd-nvidia&num=1

Nvidia was killing AMD when it also came to the UE4 tests too and the drivers were sooo bugged on GCN that they couldn't run the tests LOL ...

AMD's OpenGL drivers are FAR from comparable to Nvidia's ...

 

[Hitman928]

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_r9_290&num=1

More often than not, AMD was getting it's drivers handed by Nvidia when it came to OpenGL support ...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=civ_beyondearth_linux&num=1

Up above is further humiliation on AMD's part in Civilization: Beyond Earth when they were a victor against the GTX 980 when using Mantle ...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=metro-redux-22gpus&num=1

It gets even worse when you look at Metro Redux ...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ue4-linux-amd-nvidia&num=1

Nvidia was killing AMD when it also came to the UE4 tests too and the drivers were sooo bugged on GCN that they couldn't run the tests LOL ...

AMD's OpenGL drivers are FAR from comparable to Nvidia's ...

You're conflating OpenGL support/performance and Linux support/performance. AMD Linux drivers have historically been lackluster, this is well known though they've been improving lately. That doesn't mean AMD OpenGL support in Windows is the same. For many years now AMD has had great OpenGL support and performance in Windows, many times outperforming Nvidia as RS has shown.

 

[ThatBuzzkiller]

You're conflating OpenGL support/performance and Linux support/performance. AMD Linux drivers have historically been lackluster, this is well known though they've been improving lately. That doesn't mean AMD OpenGL support in Windows is the same. For many years now AMD has had great OpenGL support and performance in Windows, many times outperforming Nvidia as RS has shown.

No I'm not ...

If RS is allowed to show games that make use of an older version of OpenGL then I'm allowed to show the performance of where OpenGL software support is most predominant on ...

 

[Hitman928]

I don't understand your reply. I was saying that AMD's OpenGL performance on Linux doesn't mean that they have bad OpenGL performance, just that they have bad Linux support. Their OpenGL performance on Windows has been fine for years. You can't mix the two.

Your response was, no, look how bad their performance on Linux is. . .

 

[ThatBuzzkiller]

I don't understand your reply. I was saying that AMD's OpenGL performance on Linux doesn't mean that they have bad OpenGL performance, just that they have bad Linux support. Their OpenGL performance on Windows has been fine for years. You can't mix the two.

Your response was, no, look how bad their performance on Linux is. . .

OpenGL performance is OpenGL performance, no more and no less ...

Fact is AMD has tons of issues with OpenGL ...

 

[Head1985]

Ooh ooh a benchmark thread. My kind of thing!

So I did a very lengthy benchmark in the docks chapter, on 970,7950,570 and 5850.

Vid links with spicy wallpapers.

Wolfenstein Old Blood 1920X1080 Ultra(-) GTX 970 @1.5Ghz CORE i5-2500K @4.8Ghz - 57 fps

Wolfenstein Old Blood 1920X1080 Ultra(-) 7950 @1.1Ghz CORE i7-860 @4GHz - 31fps

Wolfenstein Old Blood 1920X1080 High++ GTX 570 @850Mhz Q9550 @4GHz - 54fps

Wolfenstein Old Blood 1920X1080 high++ noAA 5850 @950Mhz Q9550 @4GHz - 37fps

What the settings mean:

Ultra (-) is the Ultra preset with Antialiasing reduced to 4X instead of 8X.

High++ is the High preset BUT with
Dynaminc Object Shadow Quality increased to high from medium
Character Shadow Quality increased to high from medium
Screen-Space Reflections increased to high from disabled

High++ NoAA is the above with AA disabled.

Now I have a very important observation to make. There is something wrong with this game and my Radeons. Although I see GameGPU's results showing great performance on the 290, I can assure you that this is not the case with the Tahitis.

I did a run on my 7950, with the exact 570 settings and the game run like crap again. I mean it was like 3-4 fps faster than the Ultra(-) video you see above.

I believe that AMD will have to take a look on their older cards for this game. The previous Wolfenstein game was running great.

This is why i dont trust that russian site.
In your test GTX970 1.5Ghz(+- GTX980 performance) is 83% faster than 1.1GHz 7950(+- 280x performance)
Their test GTX980 only 14% faster than 280x..

 

[monstercameron]

OpenGL performance is OpenGL performance, no more and no less ...

Fact is AMD has tons of issues with OpenGL ...

yeah the opengl implementation on linux is buggy compared to windows.

 

[RussianSensation]

The ID Tech 5 is a D3D11 engine now with some OGL3.x interoperability.

SLI/CF is a complex problem with ID Tech 5. The main renderer is not really compatible with AFR. There is a chance to build a solution, but it won't give good scaling or good frame pacing.

:thumbsup:

I would really love it if you started posting more about the software side of things when it comes to making game engines, GPU optimizations, and so on. While we can get a lot of information regarding the hardware side of the industry from professional, the insight on how AAA games are developed for current consoles vs. PC (i.e, do different teams work on different versions simultaneously or do they make a game on the PC first and port it to PS4/XB1 and start optimizing for consoles) would be very interesting to hear from the developer's side!

AMD's OpenGL drivers are FAR from comparable to Nvidia's ...

Hold on, are you talking about OpenGL performance on Linux? Most of us game on Windows. Linux performance in PC games is crap to begin with. With Windows 10 being a free upgrade from Windows 7/8/8.1, I don't see any reason why we should care about Linux performance in videogames at all.

In fact, I'll take it 1 step further and say that AMD shouldn't spend $1 on optimizing drivers for Linux users. When a firm is so strapped for cash, it's a waste to focus on < 1% of all PC users of which even a smaller fraction actually plays games on Linux.

[/IMG]

But we need to go way deeper to see how many gamers worldwide actually play on Linux:

Steam Hardware Survey
Linux Mint 17.1 Rebecca 64 bit = 0.09% on Steam
Linux 3.10 64 bit = 0.08% on Steam

Trying to prove that OpenGL on AMD cards have poor OpenGL performance for an operating system almost no one uses for gaming is an interesting example I must say. I am not surprised AMD hardly devotes its efforts towards Linux gamers, I wouldn't either.

yeah the opengl implementation on linux is buggy compared to windows.

And 99.83% of Windows PC gamers should care because? Pretty much today if you aren't gaming on Windows, you are getting crap performance and support on all other OSes no matter who you use.

Performance of Nvidia in Blizzard games on Mac OSX is literally HALF of their Windows counterparts with the exact same GPU.

 

[.vodka]

Exactly. What's his point? AMD's linux drivers have always been sub par compared to nV, that's no news. It's not even in the scope of the discussion. It borders on offtopic.

AMD's performance on this game and others, on the other hand, is news. Even better than on other non gameworks titles. Nice surprise.