Graphical Performance & Spring

DemO · Post by **DemO** » 27 Sep 2007, 00:42

I gave myself a laugh when I opened up the memory box to check it out and realised that pretty much the entirety of my PC components have several heatsinks.

8800GTX has huge heatsink
I'm using tuniq tower 120 on CPU (even more huge)
Mainboard has 3 heatsinks connected by heatpipes
Memory has heatsinks on both sides too.

Still, anyone know how to make spring work on an 8x00 series card?
And is there anything I can do for Spring with my Q6600? I vaguely remember reading over something before about playing Spring on dual or quad core CPU's and how changing the priorities or something similar would make it work better.

LordMatt · Post by **LordMatt** » 27 Sep 2007, 00:44

Welcome to the club demo. I use quantum's FPS manager to keep things playable, however that requires using lua, which I know you hate.

MetalSkin · Post by **MetalSkin** » 27 Sep 2007, 01:16

LordMatt wrote:Welcome to the club demo. I use quantum's FPS manager to keep things playable, however that requires using lua, which I know you hate.

What's the deal with the FPS manager? First I've heard of it.

I have the same problem as Demo... duel SLI Inno3D GF 8800GTX running at 2,560 x 1,600 on a quad core system, and my frame rate sucks!

LordMatt · Post by **LordMatt** » 28 Sep 2007, 01:32

Well, I'll make the tweaked version I use available here. This version adds some more graphical settings that can further improve FPS in heavy load situations.

DemO · Post by **DemO** » 28 Sep 2007, 02:59

I'm not even going to try playing Spring again unless I can get at least 50 fps minimum in almost all conditions. Spent years playing games with sub-standard fps counts and now that I finally forked out lots of cash to build a rig that can run everything else at full details with a perfectly reasonable (if not totally excessive) frame rate, I have no intent on going back to low FPS gaming.

Some dev's please post in this thread about any plans/possibilities for increasing performance of 8x00 series cards in Spring, or even to say that it's not going to happen. Don't want to hang onto false hope.

Tobi · Post by **Tobi** » 28 Sep 2007, 10:27

It's not going to happen.

Well, it may happen sometime but currently there are no concrete plans nor does any developer have an 8000 series nvidia card, as far as I know.

So it totally depends on some new random developer popping up who wants to fix Spring for 8000 series nvidia cards.

Just make sure you turn off threaded optimizations in the nvidia driver control panel, it's not going to be any faster then what you get with that soon.

Post by **Auswaschbar** » 28 Sep 2007, 10:43

Um, I have an 8500 and I would really like to help, but I have no clue about OpenGL.

Tobi · Post by **Tobi** » 28 Sep 2007, 10:46

I just noticed you didn't have the 'Spring developer' tag yet. Fixed now

Maybe you could work together with imbaczek, who wants to fix it but has no 8000 series card (not sure how (not) efficient that turns out to be though

)

Post by **jcnossen** » 28 Sep 2007, 10:49

Auswaschbar: Maybe you can start by disabling certain rendering parts to see is causing it?

Post by **Auswaschbar** » 28 Sep 2007, 12:10

Testing conditions:
8500GT PCIe + recent driver (100.14.19)
Core2Duo 4300 (1.8GHz)
1GB DDR2 800MHz

Settings:
Spring svn r4473
1280x1024 fullscreen without AA and UnitIconDistance 155
Script: Air Combat Test
Map: Smoth Heigths V5
Mod: XTA v9.1

min. Details: ~150fps (with bug caused by low unit detail)
max. Details (water=reflective+refractive): ~30fps
max. Details without shadows: ~55fps

Top performance eaters:
Shadows (they doesnt even look good, though)
Water (depending how much water is on the screen and how much units are above it)

I didn't noticed any settings which cause a strange slowdown, but can someone please post a value from a non 8000 card to compare with?

Edit:
Ground decals seem to have also a great impact on performance.
On max settings my framerate drops from 50 to 5 after i fired some nukes . Setting Ground decals to low fixed this performance drop.

Tobi · Post by **Tobi** » 28 Sep 2007, 12:23

Seems reasonably fine compared to my 7600 GT (AMD 3200+ @ 2.0 GHz, 1 GB RAM).

I get 100-120 FPS without shadows, reflective units, LuaUI and 3d trees, and about 40-60 with that enabled (1280x1024, no AA, 24 bit z buffer, basic water )

Post by **Kloot** » 28 Sep 2007, 13:53

I've just ordered an 8800GTS, so I plan to
run some tests as well (albeit in combination
with a single-core CPU). If these slowdowns
are reproducable on that setup, then they
probably don't stem from synchronizing OGL
operations (like the glGet*() calls) when the
driver is multi-threaded, but since Spring
doesn't have too many of those in critical
places AFAICT anyway that's unlikely to be
the real issue.

imbaczek · Post by **imbaczek** » 28 Sep 2007, 14:59

yay! less work for me \o/

Caydr · Post by **Caydr** » 28 Sep 2007, 16:50

I wonder, can we offload pathfinding onto the second core if someone has a multicore computer? It's the single biggest performance eater in most situations. If I remember right, Spring actually does worse on multicore computers than single core... Taking advantage of multicore should be a top priority IMHO, that sort of processor is getting very common and is only going to get moreso.

imbaczek · Post by **imbaczek** » 28 Sep 2007, 16:55

Every dual core processor won't have problems with running spring on a single core, so that's kinda pointless

but yes, it is one of the easiest possible ways of utilizing two cores. Physics is another thing that is easily parallelized.

Caydr · Post by **Caydr** » 28 Sep 2007, 16:57

Yes physics too, those two things should go on their own core whenever possible. They eat up all my efpeeesses.

I understand that Spring wasn't designed for multicore, but just pretending that other CPU isn't there is awfully wasteful. There's got to be some way to split the processing up, even if it takes time.

Post by **Auswaschbar** » 28 Sep 2007, 17:22

I just discovered this picture

AF · Post by AF » 28 Sep 2007, 17:27

kloot, spring performs horrendously under multi threaded optimizations because of glGet calls, so for all intensive purposes synchronous calls do matter as any sane spring user has this option turned off for performance reasons.

And this is not a cpu lag issue. I have an 8800 and I get around 100 fps at min settings with perhaps decals and a few minor options turned on, which then falls to 40fps very quickly, which is comparable to my FX 5200 ultra on the same settings. My cpu doesn't lag at all in this time and I can get those frame rates while at 1-2% cpu usage.

LordMatt · Post by **LordMatt** » 29 Sep 2007, 00:27

Can you guys please test with more than a few units on screen? I can get really high FPS at game start that rapidly degrades as more units are present.

Post by **Auswaschbar** » 29 Sep 2007, 00:51

With some cheating I spammed hundreds of different units, it doesnt impact performance.

The only thing is that after some playing, performance drops because of ground decals. Its very easy to reproduce:
1. set GroundDecals to high
2. notice the normal framerate (~50 for me)
3. fire at least 5 nukes and wait till explosion is gone
4. watch framerate drop to ~5 fps

Spring RTS Engine

Graphical Performance & Spring