HSR; Major performance improvement in beta drivers for Voodoo5's in GL!!!

[Wingznut]

I hear that if you max your fps, the grapical issues go away.

How do I set a max fps in Q3? And how do I get it to show fps during the benchmark?

 

[MrGrim]

OMFG! I was just about to order a GTS. Oh well, I guess it's gonna have to be V5 then. Isn't it nice when threads like these have no video company fanatics? You can actually get something out of them. All those 3dfx bashers just stfu all of the sudden.

BTW the command to keep your frame rates at a certain level is com_maxfps "XX" where XX is the figure you want. Example com_maxfps "45".

[Edit]The command to show FPS is, "/cg_drawfps 1" I think.[/Edit]

 

[SirFshAlot]

can anyone explain this in "dummie" format?

I just got a V5.
I don't know where to start.
How do you change the "bat file"?

i.e. for Half_life?

I understand how to do the "-32bpp" deal in the shortcut properties.
That's where my understanding of these tweaks go.

Another problem; when I loaded 3dfx tools, it gave me a window with glide drivers for Quake, Half_life, etc. Everytime my pc boots, that window opens. How do you stop that? And what should I do with those drivers? Should they be dragged and dropped to the game files?

Thanks in advance,
Craig

 

[Soccerman]

WOW..

ANAND WE NEED A COMPARISON!

DAMNIT 3dfx hurry up and release these for V3, and officially for V5!

WE NEED MORE hardware sites going through this mess..

 

[madthumbs]

To change the .bat file, just change the quake3.exe to sof.exe, or whatever program you need to open the target game with in the bat file..

*Visual problems are evident with no FSAA, and capping the frame rate at HSR=2, but they are minor. (Quake 3) SoF runs flawless!

Unfortuneatly people will find that HSR uses the CPU, so for CPU intense moments you will find slow down. (Try the foggy level of Q3a) I have also run into pauses in mouse control on some of the faster settings.

 

[madthumbs]

To keep you guys up to date, here is a registry file that you can use to make the HSR settings a part of 3dfx tools, it is found at; 3dxtreme

To further reduce anomolies; turn on VSYNC!

EDIT * Since using the registry key to unlock the option in the 3dfx tools, It has made Quake 3 very unstable with it on. Even when I disabled it in the tools, and used the old bat file, I still got freeze ups, and screen pauses bad.

 

[fs5]

So I guess the gigapixel acquisition paid off for 3dfx huh?
Whats this do for Rampage predictions, better than NV20 or not?

 

[Soccerman]

what will this do for Rampage?

well, it will probably keep it power for power equal, or pretty close, with an NV20. in other words, if both NV20 and Rampage were at the same MPixel/Mtexel rate, they would be pretty close in terms of performance.

HOWEVER, this is only basing things on rumors.. only a few things I can be sure on at this moment:
1) they will include these types of driver enhancements in Rampage drivers
2) Rampage chips will probably be close to, or possibly faster, then an NV15 in terms of raw fillrate and memory bandwidth.

coupling those two things together, you get a single chip rasterizer (rumored to have seperate T&L units) with overall speed GREATER THEN an NV15, and probably better then an NV16.

 

[madthumbs]

These drivers are very complicated to produce, and the architecture for the Rampage is all new. I think the best that we can hope for is improved performance down the road from Rampage, but not when it is released.

 

[Sephiroth_IX]

But now they know the tricks and can implement them much earlier. Plus, I figure that the Rampage will have MUCH more memory bandwidth than the NV20 (as it will be a 2 chip solution with 200mhz DDR, reportedly) and the NV20 will be a one chip with 250mhz DDR. I still think the NV20 will be somewhat bandwidth limited, and 3dfx can really capitalize. I doubt


Either way, Rampage vs NV20 is not the topic at hand.


I think the V5 drivers will get better and better for a while here, which is great for 3dfx card owners.

 

[madthumbs]

Keep in mind, HSR has been possible and working flawlessly in SoF for over a month now (for me anyway). But these are still Beta drivers, and HSR is not officially implemented. The beta drivers are supposed to have a bug with FAKK2. In order to use HSR, you have to do a lot of tweaking to make it playable, that means giving up FSAA among other things for now. If you're holding off on a vid card, I would keep holding because we don't know when or if 3dfx will finalize this. I don't know about you, I do prefer GL, but I play a hell of a lot more D3D games, and we don't see much being done for D3D. This feature does not make the V5 more worth buying "yet".

 

[fs5]

That whole D3D vs OpenGL war that Microsoft had with the whole world about 2 years ago still ticks me off..

OpenGL counterstrike looks so much better than D3D

 

[RoboTECH]

yeah, D3d is as proprietary as glide (heh...) only it's proprietary to M$ O$'s, instead of hardware

i'll agrew ith madthumbs here.

these new benchmarks mean little. teh visual anomalies need to be cleaned up. Until they do, they are a "no-go" by me.

I'm happy that 3dfx looks like they're going to get this together, but I'm one of those "prepare for the worst, expect the best"

Last time I let 3dfx get my hopes up, they cancelled the V5-6000

 

[madthumbs]

Warning * You may want to hold off on the registry addition since it appears to screw up my HSR. See "Edit" above where I posted it.

 

[madthumbs]

A sample of the improvement you could see (actual benches in Quake 3);

HQ - 1024 x 768 - 4x FSAA - No HSR ? 15.2fps

HQ - 1024 x 768 - 4x FSAA - HSR 4 - 61.6fps

Now, my reports of doubling the performance were laughed at, however this is more than triple the performance. HSR will not speed up the cpu, but where frame rate is dependant on the video card is where it shines.

More;

HQ ? 1280 x 1024 ? 2x FSAA - No HSR ? 20.5fps

HQ ? 1280 x 1024 ? 2x FSAA ? HSR 3 ? 80.4fps

(almost 4x performance!)

 

[RoboTECH]

madthumbs, no offense.

I REALLY REALLY hope the HSR drivers make it out of beta form.

as it is, it seems to artificially increase benchmarking performance at the expense of visuals in many cases.

Its like people who post "faster" dpeth precision scores. Artifically inflated benchmarking scores. Not necessarily useable, but looks good.

/me doesn't "count it" if it doesn't look perfect.

but that's just me.

 

[dawheat]

still its a nice step from 3dfx to its users. Releasing these beta drivers with a cool, but slightly buggy advantage satifies 3dfx's hardcore fans(for now) and gives something to look forward to for the rest of their users once they release new reference drivers.

 

[Charon8]

Hi!

If HSR is implemented in the driver, I can't see much problem for other than 3DFX to implement something similirar if it works. It could be need some hard work on the driver coder/developer, but if it can be done, it will done.

I'm not a fan of a particular hardware... I have owned Matrox, 3DFX, ATI & NVidia cards!

Just my 2c. Bye!

 

[ElFenix]

the "faster" depth precision doesn't have any visual anomalies... its still 32 bit in 32 bit color. probably checks once instead of twice or something like that.

 

[RoboTECH]

the "faster" depth precision doesn't have any visual anomalies

you obviously don't play RA3

 

[ElFenix]

no... don't have a v5 either... just spouting official party line... although anything has to be better than having my comp bluescreen whenever a rocket is fired in excessive. and people say nvidia writes good drivers... ha!

 

[madthumbs]

HSR stands for "Hidden Surface Removal" and even if it used "tricks" it can increase performance without messing up. It has proven itself in Soldier of Fortune, and some instances in Quake 3. There is no doubt that it is a major improvement. What it does is remove the video cards task of drawing surfaces that aren't visible. It uses the cpu to do this causing slow down on cpu intensive areas (foggy areas are affected). The glitches seen are from mistakes in calculations, but they can be fixed. In Quake 3 the walls and objects in other rooms are being rendered even when you can't see them. This is what HSR eliminates.

 

[madthumbs]

ElFenix; have you eliminated the possibility of the blue screen being caused by an insufficient power supply, or a weak power hub? 3dfx has their share of driver problems, the last two released caused corrupted textures in Quake 3 and some other games for me. I've also seen a lot of instances where patches were needed to make a game playable.

 

[BFG10K]

Fivespeed5:

OpenGL counterstrike looks so much better than D3D

So? What does that prove? UT runs far better under Direct 3D than it does under OpenGL. Does that mean OpenGL blows? Nope.

You'll find both APIs have very similiar features and performance. It's entirely up to the developers to optimise their game engines for both.

ElFenix:

the "faster" depth precision doesn't have any visual anomalies... its still 32 bit in 32 bit color. probably checks once instead of twice or something like that.

Wrong. To speed things up it drops off bit accuracy from the Z-buffer. Therefore at the fastest setting you'll likely be using 16 bits for the Z-buffer (maybe even less) instead of 24 bits and you will see artifacts at long distances.

 

[RoboTECH]

BFG, it doesn't do that at all.

If you read that somewhere, please provide a link. If you "made that up", please refrain from posting that. I'm 99% sure that is wrong.

It's real easy to see where the flaw in this is.

Play Q3 w/16-bit textures and 16-bit color depth. This is where you'll see the MOST visual anomalies, and you'll still see a significant performance increase. If, as you said, bit accuracy was being dropped, then you'd see MORE weirdness in 32-bit, not less, and you'd see very little performance increase.

BTW, the visual anomalies generated by "fastest" depth precision are related to geometry.

ElFenix: "anything has to be better than having my comp bluescreen whenever a rocket is fired in excessive. and people say nvidia writes good drivers... ha! "

d'oh!!!