Minimu requirements for 2.5 should be increased:

- 1 Ghz Pentium III or AMD Athlon
- Geforce2 Video card
- 512 MB of ram

These specs do not make game playable.

Actually i think they can even be lowered with the new eeePC rendering mode r_showsurfaces 3

esteel wrote:Actually i think they can even be lowered with the new eeePC rendering mode r_showsurfaces 3

Well shouldnt ya really post specs for when it can run without tooling around with commands?

On pretty low settings it will run on my universitys PCs, which have only a god awful onboard graphics card. 30 fps... sort of. If I lowered textures/terrain more it would probably go that bit faster.

I used that smiley for a reason. But i think the minimum requirements are still ok with the 'low' presets.

It's not ok even with (ok, it's old, but very new in comparison to geforce2) geforce go 7400 with even lower settings than low. Framerate falling below 20 when there are several players shooting rockets and splashing crylink and spamming hagar does not make it playable. I can test with geforcefx 5700, but I doubt anything will change.

BTW, r_showsurfaces is undocumented and even this does not help with integrated gpu when there are lots of players on the screen.

Alien wrote:BTW, r_showsurfaces is undocumented and even this does not help with integrated gpu when there are lots of players on the screen.

Sure it does, r_showsurfaces 3 and timedemo demo1.dem = min/26 avg/57 max/95 with my config on a intel gma 950/2ghz core2duo.
u dont see whats what, but thats beside the point

It does not help for mine gma 900 though. And I don't consider jumps from 95 to 26 to be playable.

Chatting with others on irc i often found that people disable TOO MUCH when trying to tweak their options, including settings that actually speed up rendering!!! Thus i'm quite a bit alarmed when people claim to disable more then 'low' settings as they might have done bad things. Hell even i did when i was new to Nexuiz and the DarkPlaces engine..
If you really want to tweak things, start without a config, go to low settings, run a "timedemo demos/demo1" or "timedemo demos/bench1" (new in 2.5) and see how fast it is. Everything you change a setting run that timedemo again and compare the values to see if you are really doing something 'good'

For example, you can make texture quality even lower ("lowest"), which speeds rendering a lot.

Sorry but its been more then 10 years since hardware was bad enough that lowering texture quality REALLY helped!!!! Sure on some cards it can help a bit (usually if the graphics memory is shared or lower/around 128mb) but on all others cards the texture quality should just NOT matter even the slightest bit!
Can people please get over this myth? Texture quality does shit for you FPS unless you have a really really low end graphic card!
Esp as setting gl_picmip of 2 already cuts the texture size in half or maybe even less! (Which is already the DEFAULT and also by default only affects the player/gun models so that 128mb graphic cards should run okish on most maps)

Geforce2 was released 9 years ago. Does anyone try to play with this card? I doubt so.

Then why do you even suggest such a setting? It just does not help with more or less current hardware. Also i edited/correct my above post a bit to make it even clearer why it does not help!

It does help. It does with older hardware as mine geforce5 or newer integrated hardware (gma900, gma950). This is not the question, whether lowest texture quality helps on latest and greatest with more >128Mb ram, but that current nexuiz does not work properly (can keep stable 30fps in most of included maps) on geforce2 cards. Better/nicer effects require more powerful hardware than it's listed.

Yeah, just as i said, it can help on low level/integrated hardware and even mentioned the corner cases. I just think its bad to generally say it helps because it clearly does not, but only for limited hardware.

Yet, it's not directly related to topic, which was meant to say that minimum requirements should be upped with 2.5. As I said, I get huge framedrops even in relatively new 7600.

Or we could make a thread where people would post their timedemo performance with low settings and gpu/cpu available. Then we would know with which hardware game is still playable.

esteel wrote:Sorry but its been more then 10 years since hardware was bad enough that lowering texture quality REALLY helped!!!! Sure on some cards it can help a bit (usually if the graphics memory is shared or lower/around 128mb) but on all others cards the texture quality should just NOT matter even the slightest bit!
Can people please get over this myth? Texture quality does shit for you FPS unless you have a really really low end graphic card!
Esp as setting gl_picmip of 2 already cuts the texture size in half or maybe even less! (Which is already the DEFAULT and also by default only affects the player/gun models so that 128mb graphic cards should run okish on most maps)

I can confirm that this myth does not concern my card (Sapphire Radeon 9600 AGP 256MB 128bit) - no matter if I set texture quality to lowest or good I get no frames better/worse in bencharks. The same is with geometry detail, bpp (16/32), VBO (tried all settings), texture compression, flashblend aproximation instead of no dynamic lightning, coronas.
Now I've tweaked many settings in 2.5 (tried almost all of them which correspond to graphics) and now it's playable on many maps with textures (r_showsurfaces 0). I've installed Nexuiz 2.5 from getdeb packages and I see it's performance is better than in beta builds. I see that few players on screen drop many frames down - for example 3 visible players at once cut the framerate to half the framerate than without them, so that could be why 'r_showsurfaces 3' brings me so much performance boost. Do you have some settings to show players like this but let the wall/floor/... textures and other efects enabled? My benchmark in bench1 is now: 14/40/100 with 'r_showsurfaces 0' and 32/61/121 with 'r_showsurfaces 3' both results on 800x600x32 with the latest Kubuntu Jaunty 9.04 and open source 'radeon' driver @ P4 3GHz, 1GB RAM.
Now I've set 'cl_maxfps 60' @ 60Hz LCD DVI monitor to play and avoid so big framerate changes.
And one more thing - how could I disable those ammo shells? I'd like to check if this is dropping the framerate, too.

xeros wrote:And one more thing - how could I disable those ammo shells? I'd like to check if this is dropping the framerate, too.

cl_casings 0

I've an ati 9600 128MB AGP that gives me low fps when there are at least 3-4 players playing, particularly on wide maps.
I've made some test with a short demo on mentalspace.

these are the results:

Code: Select all

http://file2.ws/mentalspace2 1523 frames (46 seconds)


  seconds      fps     min/avg/max


lowprofile (clickin "low" button)
59.1330000 25.7555003  20 27 55


lowest means all things off, minimum resolution (640x480) @ 16bits

lowest+vbo0+NoOpenGL
102.2920000 14.8887499  11 17 56

lowest+vbo0+NoDepthfirst+GLSLcolorctrl
56.6220000 26.8976723  20 28 61

lowest+vbo0+NoDepthfirst+4xmultisapling
57.0120000 26.7136743  21 28 60

lowest+vbo0+NoDepthfirst
54.8110000 27.7863932  21 29 61

lowest+vbo0+gl_finish0
64.6470000 23.5587112  18 26 68

lowest+vbo0
65.6760000 23.1895974  18 25 64

lowest+vbo0+lightmaps
54.9290000 27.7267017  23 29 66

lowest+vbo0+cl_casing0
51.7510000 29.4293830  23 31 77

lowest+vbo0+cl_casings0+r_showsurfaces3
49.2180000 30.9439636  25 33 79

lowest+vbo0+cl_casings1+r_showsurfaces3
50.3870000 30.2260504  23 32 79

lowest+vbo3
54.8750000 27.7539863  23 29 65

lowest+vbo3+cl_casings0
51.2880000 29.6950554  24 32 76

lowest+vbo3+cl_casings0+r_showsurfaces3
48.1510000 31.6296650  25 34 78