Please stop b*tching!

[niffwan]

I've was wondering if it would be possible to use ram as processer cache. Using 16-32 meg of ram or more at ddr400 for level 1 and/or just level 2 cache. Sort of like p2s. Probably seems like a good idea until it's put into practice. Oh well.

grafixmonkey. let us know how it goes.

[DreamEndless]

Originally posted by grafixmonkey
hmmm, ramdisk swapfile? I should tell that to a friend of mine, he bought a gig of ram for games too and he's been sitting at his computer, not playing games, but trying to force windows to remove every ounce of swapfile and load everything into RAM. He's basically trying to tell the system "you can't have a swapfile! Ram is all you've got!"

He's spent at least two days trying to get this to happen. Hey, whatever's fun I guess... He'd probably jump all over a ramdisk for his remaining 40MB that's in VM.

Dont think I am missing something here... Can't you just dissable virtual memory?
That seems to do the trick for me...

[Cal]

Originally posted by Wavewash
DX:IW uses shadow volumes for it's shadow method. What does this all mean? It means that shadow volumes for high poly models are fillrate hogs. This puts a large strain on the processor. For every shadow casting model you have to find all silhouette edges of the model. This is a pretty intensive operation.

Yes, all well and good if it made sense - anyone here remember a game from 2001 called 'Severance - Blade of Darkness' (maybe called Blade in US)? Real-time shadows, my friends, running on PC's with a clock speed of just 500Mhz, graphics cards of just 64MB. It looked amazing then and still does now. Don't believe the hype - all new games could just as easily have real-time shadows instead of those baked-in lightmaps so common now.

No, something else is wrong with DE:IW. It wasn't made properly. It's broken.

Well, MY only complaint is that it doesn't let me play it. At all. Disc security is screwed...

[Pooeypants]

Originally posted by Cal
Yes, all well and good if it made sense - anyone here remember a game from 2001 called 'Severance - Blade of Darkness' (maybe called Blade in US)? Real-time shadows, my friends, running on PC's with a clock speed of just 500Mhz, graphics cards of just 64MB. It looked amazing then and still does now. Don't believe the hype - all new games could just as easily have real-time shadows instead of those baked-in lightmaps so common now.

No, something else is wrong with DE:IW. It wasn't made properly. It's broken.

Isn't that a contradiction? If it wasn't coded properly...how can it be broken?

labrie... the computer your using has nothing to do with the problems beiong posted on this board. the specs needed/reccomended to run this game are printed clear as crystal on the back of the box. if eidos wanted everyone to have an ati9600 better or equivalent than thats what they would say. eidos claims that a geforce 3 can run this game just fine. However, even those with high end ATI 9800 cards are reporting problems of white specks. please do not run your mouth off... eidos dropped the ball on this one. plain and simple.

[Cal]

Originally posted by Pooeypants
Isn't that a contradiction? If it wasn't coded properly...how can it be broken?

Thanks for your help, too. It was either coded badly or it is broken.

[grafixmonkey]

I think it's pretty offensive to call it "broken!"

You should call it "special" so you don't hurt feelings!

[Orumph]

Yeah,, turn page file off. Unless you don't have enough CPU and Ram.

*

IT'S BROKEN. You could say, DX2 rides the short bus.

Speaking of hurt feelings.....

[EDIT]
funny stuff, but I don't want to offend the offendable.

[grafixmonkey]

My friend was unable to turn page file off at all in windows 2000. Most he could do was reduce it to 2 megs, and if he did that as soon as a program loaded it would pop up a note saying "page file size is being increased." and bring it back up to default size.

I think the NT-based versions of windows can't turn it off. I haven't tried it myself, I consider the page file to be something that's probably necessary - I use too many large programs to turn it off, and my pc barely ever reads the HDD while I'm using it anyway.

[Orumph]

It's been too long for me to comment on 2000 or NT.
I have my 3Ghz CPU 1G Ram box with no Page File at all.

I even tried DX2 with a 5G page file and it didn't help. Ran exactly the same as no page file.

All other games and programs run fine with no page file. But I have the CPU and Ram to cover it with plenty left over.

[grafixmonkey]

I have my 3Ghz CPU 1G Ram box with no Page File at all.

Your hardware is irrelevant as to whether or not eliminating the page file is possible. I would be curious to know what OS you run though. (I'm going to assume windows XP?)

Almost all programs will load what they need into memory when you start them, especially games because programmers know how long it takes a system to read from a disk compared to memory. So for 99% of apps/games/anything it won't make a lick of difference whether you have a pagefile or not, if you have a decent amount of RAM. Honestly I don't know what my friend was smoking when he was trying to eliminate his page file entirely, he really should know better, he went through the Computer Engineering curriculum with me at the U of I.

He had some funny ideas about benchmarks too, insisted that there was no way a benchmark could ever tell anything real about what it was testing, no matter what. Felt absolutely certain that no matter what testing procedure you used, you had no way of predicting anything's performance, even on the same system you tested it on. He claimed that something could boot up differently, and completely change the performance of whatever game/app you had just tested. Pretty crazy.

[Orumph]

Yes I'm running XP.
The best way to run the page file on NT/2000 is on a slave drive. Better performance. I thought you could get rid of the page file on NT and 2000, But don't remember how or if you could actualy. I do remember kicking it around though years ago.

I do believe it does make a difference on how much CPU and Ram you have. maybe not entirely. This is outside my knowledge. But I do know that if you tried setting up a small page file and forced it to use as little as possible it wouldn't be very stable. Again, it's been a long time. I don't remember how.

Generaly it is best to make the page file twice your ram and run it on a slave drive for NT , probably the same for 2000.

[grafixmonkey]

My setup is to boot from a single drive, install apps games and pagefile to a 4-disk RAID-0, and keep my data on a 4-disk RAID-5.

It doesn't make a lick of difference what CPU or RAM you have, to try and turn the pagefile off. The setting will either be there in that version of windows, or not. You just have to have enough ram to hold windows and the apps you plan on running, that's all, and that's subject to which windows you run and what you plan on doing with it. Run windows 3.1, and you only need like 20 megs of ram to go with no pagefile.

Still though, I cannot tell that my computer ever accesses the hard drive with the page file in its normal, default, enabled state. It naturally does when I load a program, but you can't escape that. I've got plenty of stuff open now, and there's no HD access even if I open the start menu and click something obscure like Control Panel. I hear one or two short seeks if I open a control panel item, but it doesn't delay starting up the applet. So I can't figure out any reason to disable the pagefile at all.

Originally posted by Labrie
You DO have to put up with terrible framerates because your card is struggling so much to keep up with the what the game is feeding it and because of this, you physically do NOT have the right to get more frames then your getting, its just not possible.

Wrong... If I can play both the doom3 alpha and HL2 alpha with 30+ consistant FPS with mid/high detail... Then i could play this. Unfortunately, this game is very inefficient. Want a list of other games that run smooth as silk for me?

Originally posted by Labrie It's no doubt that the game runs on a poorly made engine[/B]

Do you even know what engine this game is based on? I won'y dignify myself by making you look more like an ass.

Originally posted by Labrie You run 3dmark01 and get a really nice score like 10000 or so lets just say, which is reasonable because its testing dx8 capabilities which your card excells in. Now you go and test your card using 3dmark03 and you get a score of 800[/B]

3D Mark 2k1 Score: 11304
3D Mark 2k3 Score: 1899

Originally posted by Labrie New games like HL2 and Doom 3 will run the same way because they are completely based on dx9 software. Meaning if you don't have a dx9 video card then chances are you won't be able to run it and if you can run it you might be missing parts of the sky here and there and it will just look like garbage.[/B]

Like I said before, wrong! They run fine for me... Want screenshots?

Originally posted by Labrie which isn't possible because its not out yet[/B]

"News just in HL2 source code was leaked and tens of thousands have it..."- I compiled it, worked just fine for me. Better than DX:IW anyway

Originally posted by Labrie um...is it just me or are you proving yourself wrong by saying that its not an Xbox game? I know its not an xbox game[/B]

No comment.

Originally posted by agent008 i always play in 16 colors, and a 6??x4?? in games[/B]

Is this guy from the 80's?

Originally posted by Labrie Supposively 4x faster in Doom 3 and 7x faster in HL2.[/B]

You have your press releases mixed up, the NV40, not the GF-PCX will run these games with those numbers.... Does 500/1000GDDR3 - 16 Full Rendering Pipelines mean anthing to you?


Face the facts, DX:IW is inefficient in resource usage. Lets see, 90-120FPS in JA, 80-110FPS in TRON 2.0, 80-90FPS in Max Payne2, 60-70FPS in LOTR:ROTK, 80-100FPS in NFSU, 30-40FPS in Spell Force (which is extremely CPU intensive), 60-70FPS in DungeonSiege (another CPU intense), 70-90FPS in Enclave (very GPU [not CPU] intense)... All these games run at least 1024x768x32bpp with details high or maxed out, and sometimes even AA+AF. We will keep complaining until the damn program works properly and efficiently, and for now, it doesnt.

Here is a screenie of UT2004 Beta demo at 1024x768 with all the settings maxed out... As you can see I have a pretty decent framerate for my GFTi4200 :P

If anyone wants proof, I can provide a screenie of my Doom3 framerate... As a matter of fact, I think I will :P

I have to install the 41.09Dets, thats the only way to get the game to work.

[DreamEndless]

The problem with your argument that all the games you list are very simple to render in comparison to IW. Not one of them use any advanced features such as pixel shaders and none have the same fill-rate requirements.

Another thing you are not taking into account is consistency of FPS and quality of render. That snap of UT2K4 you posted is a good example. The demo only runs at HALF detail compared to the full game and the snap you posted has very little on screen. Added to that the raptor looks like its made out of lego and you don't seem to have any AA running and its not looking so good for you now.

To give a comparison, in a situation like that (with basically nothing on screen), I would get in excess of 100fps, with 2xAA and the picture would be crystal clear.

I understand that this game performs poorly and a lot of this is down to shoddy programming. However a lot is to do with peoples understanding of what is actually being rendered and also their own personal thresholds for what looks 'good'

Okay then, Unreal2 @ 1280x960 with all the detail settings maxed out with 4xS AA and 4xAF... My framerate is decent enough considering my GPU isnt really all that great with FSAA and AF.



Does that help?

Edit: Whoops, forgot the img tags...

I guess, it was 1280x1024... My bad

I'll post another pic of UT2004 with 2xAA and 4xAF... And I'm in the process of c0pying the D00M III files right now...

Oh, here is a list of screenshot I made with d00m III...

http://dyncorp.no-ip.com/d3_screenies/

This points you to a list of TGA image files...

I will be posting a video clip as well if anyone is interested in a teaser

I went beyond the original statement... Instead I made 3 videos of the 3 maps that were on the e3 demo, including the infamous bathroom scene lol. Only thing that sucked is FRAPS cut my framerate down (half) but its pretty smooth for the most part. They will be encoded in XviD format btw.

~*Cheers*~

Okay, I made 3 seperate video as stated before.. They are encoded using XviD with a 2048 bitrate. The sound is crappy...

Heres what you get:

Complete walkthrough of the 3 levels in the E3 demo.

Level 1 - 2:35 - 22.6 MB (23,701,504 bytes)
Level 2 - 6:18 - 62.4 MB (65,511,424 bytes)
Level 3 - 5:26 - 55.4 MB (58,177,536 bytes) - this one has the digusting bathroom scene lol

Post here (or PM me via AIM/Yahoo/MSN) if you want them. If I get enough reuqests I will post them for download via FTP or HTTP on a temporary basis, then the files will be deleted permanently.

[Darkhound_5678]

He is right. I dont plan to upgrade my Graphics card before Doom 3 / Half Life 2 come out, only my CPU. That means I'll have an XP3000, 1Gb DDR333 and an FX5700 Ultra 128Mb when they appear. I'm planning to play it on this at 1024x768+ with medium details, and I reckon it'll be possible, because the engines on these games are/will be properly optimised.

Originally posted by DreamEndless
I understand that this game performs poorly and a lot of this is down to shoddy programming. However a lot is to do with peoples understanding of what is actually being rendered and also their own personal thresholds for what looks 'good'

Lets just say, there are a lot of unnecessary elements taken into the process of the rendering engine... I bet, with good coding skills, this game could look fantastic on many systems. I am familiar with this game engine, and it does very nicely on all of the other games its based upon, even those with about the same capabilities and complexities as DX:IW (which is only 2). Unfortunately, this is not the case... There is no efficient coding in this EXE and we all know this.

I have never seen so much complaining and whining about one game in my life! The really sad thing is that it is justified... Take a look at some of these peoples rigs on these forums. A good number of them far exceed system requirements, yet performs like they were running the thing with a Voodoo! Why? Inefficient programming! Ion/Eidos made their money, and thats all that matters.. We the few hundred consumers that are registered on this forum are insiginifact considering the amount of demand and the end-result. IMHO, I really hope they can prove me wrong with a nice product patch that will significantly improve the programs efficiency. Nevertheless, I am not too optimistic about that ever happening. I have seen many games do down the toilet b/c of this.

I have a policy on games like this one... I will not say what it is, and most developers aren't too fond of people that share the common policy I uphold.

Any well known RE team I have in common with is the common NFO statement... "If you enjoy this game, buy it! We did!" Read this statement carefully. That is all.