26 réponses à ce sujet

[OldTimeRadio]

EDIT:  Thanks for the help, everyone!  I'm good for NVidia, would love some more ATI folks' data!    

 

All you have to do is be in a basic area with water and have shinywater on.  Like this.  But you don't have to be by a big body of water or anything.  As long as you can see any amount of water on your screen, you're good.  It also doesn't matter if the shinywater looks good or if it's borked.

 

Then hit the tilde (~) to bring up the console, type in fps and hit enter.  It'll spit back a number.  Without moving the camera, maybe type it a few times to get an idea what the range is.  Or you could use the command trace fps, which'll print a live fps count in the lower left hand corner of your screen.

 

Doesn't matter what your resolution is or anything else.  

 

I just want to know what that FPS number you get is.  Don't worry about the number being super precise, but if (for instance) it's 28-29, say 28-29 instead of 30.

 

Thanks!

 

Edit: I'm guessing that it's never going to come back higher than 30.  I'd like to see how accurate that guess is.

[Thayan]

I created a small 4x4 rural area that was completely water except for an island/grass tile in the middle. FPS ranged from 82 up to 98. So average of about 90, I guess.

 

The trace fps number flew by too quickly for me to really make any use of that command.

[OldTimeRadio]

Thanks!  You were getting 90FPS with shiny water on?  What kind of video card do you have in your machine, if you don't mind me asking?

[Thayan]

Yes, shiny water is on. This is on my work laptop right now (shhh - don't tell anyone). It's a Lenovo W350 which I've had for a little over 3 years now. The Device Manager is showing two Display Adapters - Intel HD Graphics 4000, and another listed as NVIDIA Quadro K1000M. To be honest I'm not sure which one its using.

 

If this result isn't quite what you were expecting I can play around with some video settings as I don't have everything pegged to 'Best' in NWN. It's a slow day here at the moment...

[AndrueD]

I make tropcal 8x8medium area with stream then use the camera that load with module.

 

These are 5 number I get wen not move camera at same place where module load and type fps pretty fast between tests:

17.4, 59.7, 40.0, 56.3, 57.4

 

I am thinking Thayan have better card than what in my box.

 

I only have CEP 2.3 install, no other hak or shader. 

My vcard nvidia nvs 315 on Win7 pro. Chip 3.4Ghz 64-bit AMD on HP Compaq Pro

 

Hope this help u. Good luck!

 

edit:  almost forget... I never turn shiny water off since I load game on this box.  U want fps with turned off also?

oh, also I think Thayan uses nvidia cuz i have radeon also as integrate grphx but card always override integrate unless you change setting

[OldTimeRadio]

@Thayan - This is a great surprise, actually!  If this is really doing shinywater, those are pretty awesome results.  No need to play around with video settings, as long as it's really displaying shinywater.  NWN should be running like a dream for you all across the board, right?  I am mostly testing on an AMD K53TA-BBR6 (with a Radeon) and I'm topping out at 18-24 FPS nomatter how little shinywater is showing.  I've looked at the low-level OpenGL calls going to the card during shinywater and it's not doing enough work justify eating up 40fps (my card usually runs at 60fps), so I'm trying to understand why it always seems to drop that low.  I'd also love to know if you get similar performance from your home machine.

 

@AndrueD - Perfect.  So it sounds like you're getting about 50-ish FPS when you can see shinywater on your screen too, yes?

[AndrueD]

Yah, OTR.  I am thinking maybe first number low cuz not enough time after module load.

[AndrueD]

Other thing I wonder is what DirectX version we use.  Not sure how I check this but remember read old tech topics and makes difference sometime.

 

edit: just figure out how to find.  Mine is DirectX 11

[Thayan]

Here is a screenshot at 92 FPS if that helps. That is shiny water....I think....?

 

Unfortunately, I seldom play NWN on my work machine, although I do use it for working in the toolset. But I'll have to take it home sometime and try out a module or two since it *seems* to be 'good'. I'll try again later today from my home machine and let you know what that shows up as.

[Gruftlord]

For me what really hogs performance are too many polygons in conjunction with environment shadows. Certain CEP models or Project Facelift do that on large areas. FPS drops to around 20, while i can usually maintain 120 in many areas. Though to be honest, NWN's performance is all over the place. Horrible dips when creatures (horses) and PCs load, as well as massive viewing direction dependent fps. There's everything to be had between 20 and 120. Never saw a diference with or without shiny water, either. GTX765m

[OldTimeRadio]

@AndrueD - Well, the DirectX might have something to do with something, but from everything I can see, NWN's graphical performance really has the most to do with OpenGL.  Because NWN uses OpenGL.  This aspect of it has, unfortunately, always caused problems or at least complications.  What happened is when Bioware was making NWN, they were working very closely with NVidia.  And so when it came to how they chose to draw things on the screen, they used the "NVidia way".  So when people ran NWN on ATI machines, performance wasn't typically up to snuff.  So Bioware sort of redid things and tried to make both work decently.  But this situation got even more complicated because ATI doesn't really do that great a job with OpenGL, on their end, either.  Fast forward years and years later, to today, and when it comes to shinywater (and not, say, run-of-the-mill graphics stuff that NWN does, and which both NVidia and ATI do fine), it's a real toss-up what's going to happen on a given machine.  I have two computers to test ideas out on but getting feedback from the community about how NWN is actually playing with a given setting (in this case with shinywater) is super informative.  If NWN used DirectX for drawing things on the screen, all this mess would be so much simpler.

 

@Thayan - Perfect!  Yep!  Thanks for going the extra mile with the screenshot.  That's exactly what you should be seeing and if that's coming in at anything over 40FPS, especially, that's telling me a lot about why NWN might be behaving poorly under some conditions.  BTW, if you're into this sort of thing, I'm assuming that the big difference between your card and mine is probably in the drivers and what the cards actually support versus what has to be done on the CPU.  That any "modern" card is getting the kind of performance you are says some good things about how much support (at least in your specific card & drivers, but also NVidia) some of the funkier/clunkier graphics functions of NWN still have on modern pc's.
 
@Gruftlord - Yep, the shadows system in NWN is really accurate (for shadows in a 3D game) and also really "expensive".  Raw polygons don't seem to be don't seem to be, though.  The big dip when loading horses and PC's can mostly be attributed to uncompiled models and, because NWN draws basically everything you're looking at (whether it's behind something or not), anytime you're not using the default camera angle (i.e. console command "unlockcamera 0"), you're going to get slowdown ranging from "unfortunate" to "unplayable".  BTW, what kind of FPS are you getting with shiny water on in an area, generally? Or do you not notice any kind of hit, at all?

[Tarot Redhand]

GTX 750Ti

Area identical to Thayan's

 

Shiny water off -> 236 fps

Shiny Water on -> between 88 & 112 fps.

 

TR

[Gruftlord]

I'll check later and let you know about the shiny fps.
Currently i have to play with shiny water disabled, due to using stereoscopic vision and the two not getting along nicely.

There's,a funny thing though. Nvidia's stereoscopic version is only running in dx9+ so in order to get it working, the stereo community had to write a openGL to dx9 wrapper.
Not sure if that also kicks in in 2D, but might it be worth a shot? If you want to fiddle with it, it can be found here:
http://3dsurroundgam...isionGames.html

[meaglyn]

"If NWN used DirectX for drawing things on the screen, all this mess would be so much simpler."

 

Not so much for us Linux client users

[OldTimeRadio]

@Gruftlord - Interesting.  I'd looked at wrappers before and seen this one but I'm not sure how much it relies on specific NVidia commands.  There are a few other general wrappers out there, but they don't tend to work I think because NWN creates and destroys OpenGL "contexts" (read: "workspaces") and I suspect that confuses them.

 

@meaglyn - Indeed.

[T0r0]

Wouldn't v-synch be a factor in this ?

[Frush O'Suggill]

GTX 980ti

 

I made a 12x12 area with a small piece of road/docks in the middle to stand on and fog clip of 200. Max fps was 518

[OldTimeRadio]

@T0r0 - It could...but for what I wanted to know I didn't figure it would make a huge difference.  It could have if all the people who responded were VSync'd to 25FPS or something like that.  

 

@Frush - Damn!  This is, agian, with shinywater on, correct?

[Frush O'Suggill]

Yep shiny water on. I tested it again, and the second time the water effect was rendering oddly, as if it was only happening along one axis of the plane, but still anywhere from 480 to 520 fps.

[Gruftlord]

ok, so with the wrapper, but using 2d mode, using PGCC Beta near the river, FPS was somewhere around 150-170, hard to tell. the low dips were usually around 110 (and this just standing still, see what i mean with the odd frame rate spiking?).

with shiny water on, it still looked like FPS was in the 150+ (certainly 130+) region, with the low dips however now sometimes at 30 (you know, that recurring one really slow frame every odd second)

 

edit: with vsync forced on i see literally no difference with shiny water on or off. 120 average, 90 lower dip value from trace fps

 

i don't actually know what you are looking for. i personally never had issues with shiny water, like i read many had (crashing and such). As far as NWN performance goes, there certainly was a dip a few years ago, when driver support for special NWN features was dropped. At some time a few years ago there was a years long ongoing campaign in the Nvidia forums to readd some optimizations for NWN, because the visible cloaks were for some reason suddenly killing performance.

Since a few years now however, i feel that current GPUs are simply brute forcing the game, and running at well enough FPS despite complete lack of any driver optimizations. On my Intel Atom i run at 20 FPS+ with shadows disabled. That's the lowest end you can get today. Its a 6 Watt APU.

[OldTimeRadio]

@Gruftlord -  I don't know how to explain the following except I've seen it a lot on my computer: If you are not VSync'd (and I'm assuming you're not), it's pretty easy to drop go up and down FPS quite a bit...within a certain range.  If you are VSync'd, though, it seems like it's usually a little more accurate when you drop frames that there's something actually snarfing up those frames.  So if I got, say, 150FPS a second and I dropped to 130FPS in an area, I wouldn't assume that (whatever) ate up 20FPS until I actually had a vsync'd system at 60FPS go down to 40FPS.  I hope that makes sense.  That's just my impression.  I can't technically explain why that's the case or what factors would be invovled, if anything.  

[Gruftlord]

well, in the case with vsync, i also force tripple buffering through the driver, vsync with double buffer is horrible.

oh and in case you were wondering: shiny water wouldn't want to turn on on the Atom at all, can't even get the check mark to appear in the menu. so no comparisons on that machine.

[OldTimeRadio]

@Gruftlord - Ah, thanks!  Something interesting about these Atoms (I have a Dell Venue 8 Pro 2GB): They can't do NWN's shinywater but they definitely can (as you probbaly know) do bump-mapping a la NWshader.  NWN asks the gfx card if it support 20-30 specific OpenGL commands and if it can't that option will be disabled.  And to respond to something you said earlier, I also get the vibe that there's some brute-forcing going on.  That's probably not the best term for it, but I guess the right words would be that it's doing a lot of stuff "on the CPU" instead of the GPU.  I can't really see that too clearly with the tools I have but I believe a lot of OpenGL calls (IIRC 70%) that NWN makes have been depreciated for years and years.

[Michael DarkAngel]

One more for you OTR

 

nVidia GTX 750 Ti

 

Shiny Water Enabled

low of 168.2 (right after mod load)

high of 203.9

 

Shiny Water Disabled

low of 283.0

high of 336.0

 

No VSync

 

MDA

[T0r0]

Hmmm, I've always had ati cards so I can't even remember the last time I played with shiny water is but I've had this laptop which has intel graphics hd3000. Until I saw this thread it never even occurred to me to turn it on.. However it seems I can't even tick the checkbox either..

 

Intel® Core™ i5-2410M CPU @ 2.30GHz

Intel® HD Graphics 3000