Spring RTS Engine

I've just finished a very lengthy upgrade for my folks machine (yay, no more crappy ATi 9600)... it has been lots of "fun" thus far- totally hosed my schedule for the week, in fact. I had an adventure involving one dead mobo (please, for the love of God, stay away from the nForce mobos by XFX, I would have, if I'd done more homework) and a watercooler that was designed before quick-release and modular tubing setups (meh, it's a wonderful cooler though, and the work was worth it).

At any rate... we got a 9800GTX+, 2GB DDR2, and an AMD 6000 processor.

With Dynamic Water on... shadows on at 4096... all bells and whistles... I get over 125 FPS. 125 FPS, on something that drags the 7800 into the teens, shadows or not.

And I haven't even optimized this beast yet. Hell, I haven't finished even patching it and updating it. I can run Bioshock with nearly everything on, on the 7800. This thing could probably handle Crysis at high details, with the new widescreen display at native rez. It's retarded.

Argh wrote:I've just finished a very lengthy upgrade for my folks machine (yay, no more crappy ATi 9600)... it has been lots of "fun" thus far- totally hosed my schedule for the week, in fact. I had an adventure involving one dead mobo (please, for the love of God, stay away from the nForce mobos by XFX, I would have, if I'd done more homework) and a watercooler that was designed before quick-release and modular tubing setups (meh, it's a wonderful cooler though, and the work was worth it).

At any rate... we got a 9800GTX+, 2GB DDR2, and an AMD 6000 processor.

With Dynamic Water on... shadows on at 4096... all bells and whistles... I get over 125 FPS. 125 FPS, on something that drags the 7800 into the teens, shadows or not.

And I haven't even optimized this beast yet. Hell, I haven't finished even patching it and updating it. I can run Bioshock with nearly everything on, on the 7800. This thing could probably handle Crysis at high details, with the new widescreen display at native rez. It's retarded.

Well uh, congratulations!

Speaking of which, what do you mean by "we"? ~_^

<laughs> I'm doing all the work- do ya think I won't, er... spend a little quality time with the hardware? I've used the old rig, what I've just replaced, as my "slow benchmark" for quite some time now... it'll be interesting to use it as the "fast as hell" benchmark.

I just got done watching it handle my World Builder demo map with the city, dynamic water, shadows, etc., at higher than 50 FPS. Sheesh. I thought that would be a "nobody has hardware to see this properly" thing for awhile... guess not.

Now I guess I'll just have to finish patching the damn thing and spend an hour with nHancer, if it's even able to tweak this yet... I wouldn't be surprised if I squeeze at least another 50FPS out've this hardware, if not more, at ridiculous quality settings. Only bad spot is that the current Bloom Shader does not work, period- the world won't draw. Oh well.

Argh wrote:please, for the love of God, stay away from the nForce mobos

FTFY

Also, I am curious what resolution you play at to compare it to my HD4850.

why not 4870? wanted to take a break from ati or something more?

nforce mobo sucks and SLI sucks

im getting a geforce 280 in a week or two

IP35 pro mobo ftw (i dont even use my nforce mobo or my spare 8800 gt)

Also, I am curious what resolution you play at to compare it to my HD4850.

The benchmarks reported were at 1680 / 1050, widescreen. I run Spring on the 7800 at 1600 / 1200, so it's higher load on that machine, but who cares, I can see whole navies fighting it out with dynamic water on

on my 7900GTO i get 30-50 FPS depending on the map...at start.

120-550+ here on my 8800 (strongly depends on what's visible and water map or not)

Yeah, such a shame NVIDIA royally fucked themselves with their latest batch of mobo chipsets.

What's wrong with the nforce 7 series?

A match made in heaven, surely!

Isn't the 9800 = 8800? And 280 is the new series?

Nah, the 9800's a different GPU, the 92. Uses less power, among other things. The overclocking crowd over at Tom's Hardware seems to think it can't be pushed quite as far as a 8800GTX, but tbh I've always regarded that as pure e-peen stuff, since nobody wants to run their cards OC'd at max output all of the time anyhow.

This is, by far, the fastest machine I've built. I know a few folks here have better specs, mind ye- this was a relatively cheap upgrade- about $700 in parts.

However, even a cheapie upgrade like this... basically makes all of the performance arguments about Spring irrelevant, short of stuff that's just plain poorly coded, tbh. I'll see how far I have to push it before CPU becomes the limiting factor when I get a chance. I've gotta finish the work I'm doing on World Builder first... it'll provide a good environment to torture-test a few things, though...

Zpock wrote:Isn't the 9800 = 8800? And 280 is the new series?

Well the 9800er series has all that Hybrid Power stuff a lower energy consumption in idle (a bit less under load too bit it's pretty tiny) and also is a little bit faster while also crippled at the same time...

With AA and such the 8800 GTX performs nearly at the same level as the 9800 GTX. The GTX+ is about 10-15% faster than the 8800 GTX. Things change with high resolutions though as the about two years old card still is faster at 1600x1200 with high quality settings just as for resolutions higher than that. So it's ok if you don't plan to play with such quality settings or don't have a monitor with those very high resolutions...

I was just confused that argh was so excited about it and thought he maybe mixed them up and actually had a 280. I mean it's easy now that nvidia suddenly went for the ATI "random numbers" naming style instead of their usual bigger number and more letters = better. Strange now that they could finally have a majestic 5digit number, instead going with a puny 3digit.

Even the GTX280 can barely run crysis at a fair frame rate, what makes you think a 9800GTX+ will

Argh wrote:please, for the love of God, stay away from the nForce mobos

Gigabyte Makes very nice Mobo's using the nforce chipset.

Original quote, in context

please, for the love of God, stay away from the nForce mobos by XFX, I would have, if I'd done more homework