Graphics not quite so fluid

Comments

• BBlakhart

  January 2009

  Hi
  Have you tried adjusting the video card setting in the ati driver control panel to enable or disable multithread support?
• Turkeh

  January 2009

  Tribalbob January 2009

  5MBs DDR2 RAM

  There's your problem! :P
  
  Joking aside, the main issue with "jumpiness" is proably the affinity. Or, if you run windowed mode, you're using software rendering which is slower (and thus choppier). The only other cause is likely something with the manner in which T2 handles its graphics rendering or some sillyness therein.
• TTribalbob

  January 2009

  Ahaha, yes, my bad MB = GB >.>
  
  I haven't tried disabling multithreading on my card, no - though I just checked through the advanced view for the CCC and I can't find an option in there.
  
  I'm going to try SeeSaw Pro and see how that works out for me.
• Exigent

  January 2009

  Wouldn't surprise me if it was your video card. I'm not too familar w/ ATI tbh and wont ever be, but I know that my 8600gt works great w/ the game and i'm using Dual Cores without changing the affinity. So it most likely is a video card problem.
• Krash

  January 2009

  You might want to check through for any buffer or mip-map generation related settings and play around with them. I'd also try testing the game in both Direct3D and OpenGL modes (video tab of in-game settings) to see if it only occurs in one or the other.
• BBlakhart

  January 2009

  Didn't sierra patch out d3d support after a certain update?
• TTribalbob

  January 2009

  Well, setting affinity to CPU0 did nothing, but setting it to 1 seems to have solved the issue.
  
  Incidently, I did try OpenGL and it caused the entire game to flicker.
• minutiesabotage

  January 2009

  I also am having this issue, if anyone knows why I'd love to know.
  
  I disabled HT, no change. Everything is maxed out except for terrain texture detail, I have to keep that around halfway. My D3D frame rate is abysmal, so I'm running in OpenGL for now.
• BBlakhart

  January 2009

  My guess is multithreaded support is enabled, and this control may not be exposed in the ccc. I think you'd have to use atitool or some other app to disable it. Conversely, you might try setting the game to run on one cpu via the affinity trick.
  See here:
  http://www.tribesnext.com/forum/index.php?topic=178.0
• minutiesabotage

  January 2009

  I'll try using ATI tool or something, but its a single core processor with HT, so disabling HT removes the need to set the affinity, as the system only sees one CPU.
• minutiesabotage

  January 2009

  So I disabled multithread support in ATI Tray Tools, no difference. It's wierd, I can play with all the Catalyst settings on highest with no issues, just when I turn Terrain Textures up is when it gets jumpy when I make a quick 180. Probably something ATI related. I've learned my lesson.
• BBlakhart

  January 2009

  In this case I would turn ht back on, a p4 without it is worse than a p4 with it.
  And you said you run a 4870x2?
  Can you change or disable the sli or whatever ati calls sli? Crossfire?
  I bet the prob is related to crossfire.
• minutiesabotage

  January 2009 edited January 2009

  Hahaha no, just a single X800XL, it's in my signature. I've found it easier on sites like these to put my setup there so people don't have to look for it.
  
  Anyway that's my setup, and it doesn't look like it's going to be changing anytime soon, only so much money to go around dude.
  
  Either way it's gotta be some glitch in the ATI driver because I used to be able to run games like Far Cry/ Doom 3 on max settings. (I haven't played PC games for a while as you can tell.)
• CChubooka

  January 2009

  Im having the same problem but mine seems to be worse, its so choppy through out the whole game play,its unplayable, i turned down all my ingame setting,videocard settings, tried usung 1 core instead of 2turned off my anti alaising ,nothing seems to work. sometimes i am able to play for about 15 minutes no problem,runs great,then all of a sudden its unplayable.any other ideas?
• BBlakhart

  January 2009

  "Intel Core2Duo 2.6GHz
  5MBs DDR2 RAM
  ATI Radeon 4870x2
  24" widescreen monitor"
  
  My crossfire referrence was to the above from tribalbob. Your 800 should play t2 just fine, dunno why it's having issue. Is there a chance you can try another driver?
• CChubooka

  January 2009

  i read in the forums somewhere that changing the drivers back to an older version might work?
• minutiesabotage

  January 2009

  Yea I couldn't tell which one you meant, since you mentioned both P4 and crossfire.
  
  The game is definitely playable, just I have to turn the terrain textures down to about 75%. With the catalyst settings turned way up, I really only notice the texture difference when flying. I'd be willing to bet it's an ATI specific issue,
  
  Like I said, I've learned my ATI lesson.
• SSlayer1

  January 2009

  minutiesabotage January 2009

  Hahaha no, just a single X800XL, it's in my signature. I've found it easier on sites like these to put my setup there so people don't have to look for it.
  
  Anyway that's my setup, and it doesn't look like it's going to be changing anytime soon, only so much money to go around dude.
  
  Either way it's gotta be some glitch in the ATI driver because I used to be able to run games like Far Cry/ Doom 3 on max settings. (I haven't played PC games for a while as you can tell.)

  
  X800XL may well be at it's limit when attempting to smoothly render high detail terrain, with antialiasing on. Also, I am not 100% certain that the game isn't forcing CPU drawn shadows. The P4 3 Ghz was not far away from when this game came out, and has a crippled floating point performance.
  
  If the hardware is sufficient, then you may have visual tearing or frame rate flux. solution to visual tearing and or fluctuations is to enable Vsynch, and triple bufflering. Not too sure if D3D is going to support these, however.
  
  Try disabling shadows, using open GL with Vsynch on with triple buffering (forced in video card driver, CCC). Use low/no antialiasing, and stay at 1280x1024 rez-ish.
  
  Just a few early steps to toggle, and see if any resolve the issue. from there, you can always try adding in a preferred option, unless that specific add on hurts.
• SSlayer1

  January 2009

  Just noticed the 1920X1080 monitor. If you are running 1080P on that old video card, it's not an ATI issue, it's just time to upgrade. I run forced 8X anisotropy, with 12X AA at max resolution, everything turned up on my rig:
  
  Radeon 4850 Gigabyte 1GB OC edition
  AMDX2 5200+ OC'ed to 2.85 GHz
  8 GB Crucial Ballistix
  Asus M3N series quad crossfire AMD 790 chipset
  
  But, then, I am on the OTHER side of 2003 hardware. I think you simply have a limitation you are running into. Too high resolution, or a combination of just generally cranking everything up is going to reveal a CPU weakness, video processing limit, Vdeo RAM limit, or similar. If the video card isn't able to precache ALL of the highest res textures, then you are running 128/256 megs of memory and or eating it up with antialiasing and /or image resolution.
• minutiesabotage

  January 2009

  I only turned up the Catalyst settings because I had to turn down the terrain texture details. It made absolutely no difference. And that is the only setting that changes anything. I have tried every graphics detail, every resolution. Even if I run at 640x480 it still jerks when I do a quick 180.
  
  The reason I think its an ATI issue is that when I first got the game way back when, I was running a 2.4 Ghz P4 with a 128 MB Nvidia card, and I was able to run everything on high no problem.
• SSlayer1

  January 2009

  It isn't an ATI issue. I would look for other things that have changed. Pentioum 4 Hyperthreading is bad. I would leave it off at all times. The US Army Recruiting command had major issues with bluescreens and performance/compatibility under XP SP 2. The implementation of hyper threading on the Pentium 4 was found to be poorly done. Performance yields were found to be between 8 and 12 percent, mostly in office applications and media encoding.in some memory intensive, and multitasking scenarios, performance dropped by an equal or greater amount, due to data dependencies, higher cache miss rates, and pipeline stalls.
  
  The issues evidenced by P4 HT are expected to be resolved due to ongoing discovery and hugely improved pipelining, as well as massive cache sizes in the I7.
  
  I just go AMD. Fast enough, without resorting to specialty tricks, and task optimizations that may hinder some less used areas.
• minutiesabotage

  January 2009

  I have tried with it both on and off, there's no difference. To be honest I notice no difference in any program with it on. Since it's a texture problem, I'm assuming it's probably the GPU.
  
  One more thing that I forgot, I used to have an X300 128MB card, on the same computer with 512MB of memory. That was back when Tribes was still supported officially. I ran a 1280x1024 monitor back then, with everything on high, without any problems. I'm not saying my setup isn't outdated, but I really don't think that hardware specs are causing the issue.
  
  I think it's something I'm gonna have to live with, it doesn't really hinder the experience too much, and no one seems to know what the issue is.
• BBlakhart

  January 2009

  You might also try going into clientprefs and setting the terraintexturecachesize int to 4096
• minutiesabotage

  January 2009

  I assume it's like any other game, you find the file, open as a txt, and change whatever value?
  
  It was at 220, I tried 4096 (max?) and no change.
• BBlakhart

  January 2009

  Yeah, you can use notepad, don't use wordpad as it changes stuff that shouldn't be changed. I use TribalIDE for editing tribes stuff, great app. My guess is cache coherency is your issue, but am not certain.
• SSlayer1

  January 2009

  I'm banking that forcing textures to be preloaded will fix this. It really sounds like texture loading delay, or some basic overall configuration issue, like having the hard disk and video card sharing resources. Windows does this seemingly randomly, as I had 2 identical hardware machines, one of which was exhibiting a "notchy" but otherwise solid frame rate. Ended up being sound and video sharing resources. moved the sound card.
  
  You'll have to check and write down a lot of resource allocations (or copy/paste), but you may discover some interesting information. Windows will not necessarily see these issues as actual conflicts, as it will virtualize the interrupts, etc, but the effects are still there. A program called PCI latency config can also help. usually, it is used to adjust PCI latency downward on video cards, to prevent bus monopolization. With PCI-E, I am pretty sure that only the non PCI-E devices are affected, however.
  
  There a lot of tweaks for WinXP systems, and tuning that could simply be "off" in your current used version. Identical hardware seldom performs identical in XP, unless the software and OS are exactly identical....
• BBlakhart

  January 2009 edited January 2009

  Yeah, pci latency can have an affect on gameplay, but will mostly affect sound and hard drive from what I have seen. Pcie being a different bus from pci. Since drive access takes the most cpu time, all due to the cpu waiting on the drive and sata/pata/scsi and pci subsystem, I cater to the drive as far as pci latency goes. Setting pci latency to 96 usualy maxes out drive transfers, and sets limits on the sound card, wich in creative's case is quite a bus hog. When the pci timer is set to 32, there is barely any data transferred in any case since it takes like 24 cycles (oops not bits but clock cycles) right off the top just for pci bus "overhead", so at least set it to 64. 96 is better, more won't help much at all, I'm afraid. Benchmark the system at various pci latency settings and see how it affects drive performance.
  
  As to the video problem, try running the game in 16bit color and see if that helps. But the terrain detail slider shouldn't really have much of an effect on a properly configured system and game. It may be drivers, it may be something else. Also, when the map loads, look around in all directions as the game hasn't loaded all the terrain textures into cache untill you call for it by looking in that direction.
• minutiesabotage

  January 2009

  It seems like that is exactly the issue. The frame rate is silky until i start looking around quickly while up in the air. Then it gets jerky. If I'm in observer mode and keep looking around the same spot, it smooths out in a second or two. Problem is that during game play you are never looking from the same spot more than a split second.
  
  EDIT: I've noticed that the bases in the map Sanctuary kill my frame rates. The game is smooth until I look at one of the bases while flying.
• BBlakhart

  January 2009 edited January 2009

  That structure-related lag is an example of where the map maker didn't use containers well. Think containers is the word, anyway. This also happens when you look at the flag area in kata (lol kata) at certain angles, especialy if players are in frustrum. Frustrum is a fancy word that means "in view". Anyway, what is happening is the insides of the structures that we can't see are being drawn and lighted by the video card as if we could see them since the card is being told to do so. In my case the building insides that I can't see are being lighted and rendered into video memory at 16x anisotropic filtering and 4x antialiasing set to supersampling, Normaly I get near 300fps in the map (when tested without vsynch as I run vsynch), but when I get to the aformentioned laggy structures I get 45fps if i'm lucky. It sux. This lack of consideration in certain aspects of mapping regarding client fps is something that bites a lot of mappers. Add 60+ players to the server and you can see the delimma.
• minutiesabotage

  January 2009

  Yea the structure thing happens even if I turn everything down to the minimum.
  
  Is there a way to force precache of the textures?