jlv wrote:I'm actually pretty bad at diagnosing Windows PC problems. I run Linux as my primary OS and my Windows systems are just used for testing, which means they're all clean installs with no background junk running, so they run the game perfectly. One thing I make sure I do is disable the automatic updates in Windows Update. If Windows Update starts up while you're playing the game will slow to a crawl. The same thing goes for other background processes.
Any idea what could be the reason mxsim's performance dropped noticeably when I upgraded my 3D card from HD4870 with 1Gb GDDR5 to HD6970 with 2Gb GDDR5?
Updated drivers while I did that too, 'cause Rage was getting awfully poor performance without the newest drivers present.
Now I've got good performance in pretty much every other game, except mxsim.
Those who possess strength have also known adversity.
jlv wrote:I'm actually pretty bad at diagnosing Windows PC problems. I run Linux as my primary OS and my Windows systems are just used for testing, which means they're all clean installs with no background junk running, so they run the game perfectly. One thing I make sure I do is disable the automatic updates in Windows Update. If Windows Update starts up while you're playing the game will slow to a crawl. The same thing goes for other background processes.
Any idea what could be the reason mxsim's performance dropped noticeably when I upgraded my 3D card from HD4870 with 1Gb GDDR5 to HD6970 with 2Gb GDDR5?
Updated drivers while I did that too, 'cause Rage was getting awfully poor performance without the newest drivers present.
Now I've got good performance in pretty much every other game, except mxsim.
Huh... Setting the game to hardware/copy solved the lag issue I was having.
Jlv, can you explain to a stupid person like me, what's the actual difference with direct and the copy settings? Does this now mean that I don't have framebuffer objects enabled?
Those who possess strength have also known adversity.
There's also the problem of running out of virtual memory when using hardware/direct and 1024x1024 ground textures.
This didn't happen with the old card/older snapshots. I could play benkeboda with those settings, yes, the texture usage went over the video memory and it lagged like hell but I wasn't getting the error back then.
Those who possess strength have also known adversity.
Shadow wrote:There's also the problem of running out of virtual memory when using hardware/direct and 1024x1024 ground textures.
This didn't happen with the old card/older snapshots. I could play benkeboda with those settings, yes, the texture usage went over the video memory and it lagged like hell but I wasn't getting the error back then.
I am having this same issue. If i run 1024 x 1024 textures it gives me a out of memory error as well. I have all the updates, 1.5 version.
jlv wrote:I'm actually pretty bad at diagnosing Windows PC problems. I run Linux as my primary OS and my Windows systems are just used for testing, which means they're all clean installs with no background junk running, so they run the game perfectly. One thing I make sure I do is disable the automatic updates in Windows Update. If Windows Update starts up while you're playing the game will slow to a crawl. The same thing goes for other background processes.
Any idea what could be the reason mxsim's performance dropped noticeably when I upgraded my 3D card from HD4870 with 1Gb GDDR5 to HD6970 with 2Gb GDDR5?
Updated drivers while I did that too, 'cause Rage was getting awfully poor performance without the newest drivers present.
Now I've got good performance in pretty much every other game, except mxsim. :(
Huh... Setting the game to hardware/copy solved the lag issue I was having.
Jlv, can you explain to a stupid person like me, what's the actual difference with direct and the copy settings? Does this now mean that I don't have framebuffer objects enabled?
"Direct" renders directly into textures using OpenGL framebuffer objects, "Copy" renders into the regular framebuffer first and then copies from there to a texture.
As far as the drivers go, I wouldn't expect much from AMD unless the hardware review sites start benchmarking MX Simulator. Their drivers are made to win those benchmarks and you're lucky if anything else works at all.
Josh Vanderhoof
Sole Proprietor jlv@mxsimulator.com
If you email, put "MX Simulator" in the subject to make sure it gets through my spam filter.
So,now I don't have framebuffer objects enabled? At least I don't notice any difference with 512x512 and 1024x1024 settings, and the texture memory usage stays the same.
Any idea why that older card of mine worked fine with hardware/direct but the newer one doesn't?
Those who possess strength have also known adversity.
That's correct, copy mode doesn't use FBO's. I don't know the internals of their drivers, but I assume one card hits the buggy path and the other doesn't.
Josh Vanderhoof
Sole Proprietor jlv@mxsimulator.com
If you email, put "MX Simulator" in the subject to make sure it gets through my spam filter.
Jlv, do you plan to put a SLI / CF system to run MXS ? I have a SLI 8800gtx on my laptop right know , and my new desktop soon will have a cf 6870... I think it'll be good even if CF is not detected, but it could be cool tu run mxs with the max perf of our SLI/CF
There isn't much I can do about it. SLI systems currently have some bad restrictions of what you can do with generated textures when running in alternate frame rendering mode. Basically, you have to render, use and discard the generated texture all in one frame, otherwise the texture will be on the wrong card for the next frame and it will have to be copied to the other card. So you can do things like post processing effects or shadow buffers, but for something like MX Sim's terrain cache you need the generated textures for multiple frames, so you get stuck copying the textures over to the other card. If the drivers were really clever they'd notice this and render on both cards when rendering into a texture that's used that way, but so far nothing does that.
I was thinking I could try keeping two copies of the terrain texture cache, one that would only be used on odd frames and the other for even frames. That way it would never access a texture that was on the wrong card. (Unless it got out of sync. Then all hell breaks loose...) The only thing is it would be a fair amount of work with no guarantee that it would actually increase performance. And it would probably make the ATI drivers leak memory twice as fast! :P
On top of that, anything you'd put in an SLI configuration can run MX Sim pretty easily on a single GPU anyway. So it's not a high priority right now.
You might find that running in split frame mode will work well too. You won't get the same geometry processing speedups as in AFR mode, but it will double your fill rate without the alternate frame rendering issues.
Josh Vanderhoof
Sole Proprietor jlv@mxsimulator.com
If you email, put "MX Simulator" in the subject to make sure it gets through my spam filter.
im running the same card as sweden. I had some troubles recently but i went back and redownloaded some drivers and got rid of all the new 3D crap that comes with nvidias latest downloads that doesn't do anything for my setup. I'm back to being able to run 20 man gates on JLV's sx tracks with all models and skins. I'm not sure what was causing the issues earlier but i couldn't even run online races with 5 guys at one point.
im running the same card as sweden. I had some troubles recently but i went back and redownloaded some drivers and got rid of all the new 3D crap that comes with nvidias latest downloads that doesn't do anything for my setup. I'm back to being able to run 20 man gates on JLV's sx tracks with all models and skins. I'm not sure what was causing the issues earlier but i couldn't even run online races with 5 guys at one point.
