Zygfryd wrote:I'd just like to note, that I have a 7600GS (Asus Top Silent model with 550/950 clocks instead of the standard 400/800) and I can't enable all the effects. I can enable everything besides "realtime world lights" which causes framerate drops below 30fps in 1024x768 without AA.
(Linux x86, SDL binary)

Do the nvidia drivers support that card already? I have a 6600gt and can run nexuiz FINE! For example i can run Nexuiz 2.1 map runningman with 'ultra.cfg' setting and get 30-80 fps. Using the normal (startup) config i get 100-250fps. Of cource that is alone in the map and for online play i use the lowest possible settings but your Card should be able to run Nexuiz WAY better then 30fps..
Do other games work? Does glxinfo | grep -i direct say 'direct rendering: yes' ?

Also, what do you get on glxgears? The 7600GS should beat a 6600GT which will give around 8000.

Yes, direct rendering is enabled. I have ~7500fps in glxgears, but it's a lousy benchmark. I got the 7600GS exactly because it was better than 6600GT in reviews, so I'm a bit confused here.
I've benchmarked the game with all effects enabled on the q1dm6 campaign level. Spectating before it starts gives framerates from 30 to 70, but in actual gameplay it falls to 20 very often. (again 1024x768x32, no AA, best textures).
Xorg 7.0, driver version 8762, nvidia-settings quality control set to 'high quality' (though it still cannot keep 30fps in all places with 'high performance' instead).
Are you saying there might be something wrong with my setup or my card? I started thinking that Nexuiz's effects are simply so demanding.

PS. Still Nexuiz 2.0, but I haven't seen performance improvements in the changelog.

glxgears is actually a very good benchmark. That's because it only needs OpenGL 1.2 and hence should be comparable across most hardware from the last decade and also (as intended) software renderers. It also has little dependence on CPU, memory and HDD thus giving a good graphical benchmark. Things like 3DMark aren't actually very good benchmarks because they depend upon far too many factors which means you get losers disabling the minorest of Windows features just so that they get 1 point higher and they think that gives them a bigger penis despite them having no understanding of statistical significance.

What are the specs of your computer? Nexuiz is also restricted by things other than graphics card. As you have overclocked your card, did you try Nexuiz with the card at stock settings? If you get exactly the same results, it proves that Nexuiz is not graphics card limited on your computer, in which case you should look at other things.

Ed wrote:glxgears is actually a very good benchmark. That's because it only needs OpenGL 1.2 and hence should be comparable across most hardware from the last decade and also (as intended) software renderers. It also has little dependence on CPU, memory and HDD thus giving a good graphical benchmark. Things like 3DMark aren't actually very good benchmarks because they depend upon far too many factors which means you get losers disabling the minorest of Windows features just so that they get 1 point higher and they think that gives them a bigger penis despite them having no understanding of statistical significance.

What are the specs of your computer? Nexuiz is also restricted by things other than graphics card. As you have overclocked your card, did you try Nexuiz with the card at stock settings? If you get exactly the same results, it proves that Nexuiz is not graphics card limited on your computer, in which case you should look at other things.

Glxgears seems very CPU-bound because it saturates one of my cores (with 50% user and 50% system time on that core).
My computer is a month old. It has a Core2Duo 2.13GHz, 2GB RAM, two fast drives. I haven't changed the clocks on the graphics card, they should be at 550/950 set by the manufacturer, but I don't know the actual speeds because nvclock doesn't support the card.

PS. I meant no AF, not AA, in my earlier posts. But there's no AA either.

Zygfryd wrote:Glxgears seems very CPU-bound because it saturates one of my cores (with 50% user and 50% system time on that core).

That would be the root of your problem then, not a problem with glxgears. Despite having enormous processor power, you will be CPU bound in Nexuiz too. The stock speeds for a 7600GS are 400/800MHz, downclock it and you'll get nearly identical FPS. Whatever it is, it's a porblem with processor usage, not the graphics card itself.

In defense of the widely abused "glxgears" app, I'll try to sum up what it does and does not measure.

glxgears tests the following things:

How fast glFlush() is (implicitely called by glXSwapBuffers()). Swapping buffers several thousand times a second isn't really a useful benchmark parameter, real applications do rather a lot more rendering between swaps.

How good the driver is at throttling the command submission rate - try dragging windows around while glxgears is running, if it's choppy the driver isn't doing a good job of throttling back the submission rate to a sane value. Note that this means high values can be a bad thing...

How fast glClear() is. This is really the only thing that translates well into actual performance in games such as Nexuiz, and even then it's only about 10-20% of the rendering time for a frame. You need to maximize the window to get any useful values here.

glxgears does NOT test the following, which tend to be deciding factors for performance in many apps, Nexuiz included:

Fill rate, which is the limiting factor for many games. The time spent drawing the gears is dwarfed by the frame buffer clear and command submission overhead.

CPU/GPU bus transfer speed. The gears are stored in a display list which is usually uploaded by the driver to graphics card memory, so the size of the rendering commands sent by the CPU for a frame is ridiculously small.

How fast the driver/hardware handles state changes such as changing textures, lighting parameters etc. This is often a bottleneck in actual applications.

CPU performance. In glxgears the CPU just spends all it's time submitting lots of tiny command buffers to the GPU, and waiting (often with a CPU-hogging spinlock) for those commands to complete. Real apps submit up to several megabytes per buffer (including a fair amount of processing to build these buffers), not the around 1kB glxgears does, and naturally do so a lot less often than glxgears.

To sum it up: glxgears performance doesn't really tell you anything about how real apps will perform. Benchmarking those real apps doing real things will.

PS: Sorry about the long somewhat off-topic post...

Hmm your fps problems are very strange.. Could you try those options and see if they help? Just open the console (ingame with ` the key left of 1 or shift-escape does also work) and type the bold text? You can use the number mentioned as default to switch back to the default
gl_finish 1 (default 0)
gl_lockarrays 0 (default 1)
gl_combine 0 (default 1)
Does one or a combination of those help? However IF so this points to some faulty drivers or or other faulty stuff..

My FX 5700 LE works very fine. All OpenGL 2.0 effects are off, but textures at high, and af at 16x. Usually 50-150 fps. Good for online play.

Think this list needs updating. The Geforce 8 will theoretically be a lot quicker but I'd like to see some Nexuiz benchmarks some time. The Geforce 7300 is not on this list either. There will be a lot of range with these cards as the 7300GT is quite different from the GS and then the LE is someway behind the standard 7300. Anyone got any of these cards for comment?

I think it may also be a good idea to periodically list cards that people can recommend to buy, many of those cards no longer are available or are old top end cards that offer poor value for money.

Here's what I'd recommend at the moment, descending in price on different interfaces:

PCI-E:
8800
7950GT
7900GS
7600
7300

AGP:
Gainward 7800GS+ (7900GT on AGP)
7600GT
7600GS
7300GT
6200
5200

PCI:
FX5200/5500
MX4000

Yes, it's only NVIDIA cards and no, not every card they have ever made is in there but only some that are worth buying. Yes, you could buy a 6800 Ultra but you'd struggle to find one new (eBay doesn't count as being generally available for sale, an item is a one off) and you'd pay more for it than a 7900GS which would beat it. I have included some cheaper cards that aren't that highly recommended for performance but at the price point, it's the best you'd get.

Gigabyte Geforce 7300 GS PCI-E - on most maps, in 800x600 all effects on (either bloom or HDR) all fine. With bloom it's much faster then HDR. I haven't run a banchmark yet, but I'll do one in the near future if needed.

From what you say the 7300GS is sufficient for playing Nexuiz on fairly high settings. That's important as it means that there is a budget card which people can get the effects that Nexuiz deserves to be played with. I'd think it's worth putting in the 'decent' category.

Time for another update here? Most of the cards people would consider getting now aren't in that list.

I'm not sure if there's any serious need for an update atm. Everything from Geforce 7300GT up provides you enough power to play at a reasonalbe framerate, and if you want to play at ultimate settings, you'll have to choose some model from the 8800 series.

All the current ATIs seem to still cause various problems but are strong enogh for reasonable framerates as well, however depending on the OS and provided that they have a native RAM >64MB.

oddly enough I have an 8800 GT, Most maps I get in the 200-300 FPS range with ultra.cfg, but on custom maps like distonic or batcula I'll get a horrible framerate in the 30s. I have to switch to normal.cfg in this case. It could be the linux driver for nvidia is not performing too well. A lot of maps aren't very good with dynamic lighting on too, so that could be a factor.

Edit: when I said ultra.cfg I ment ultimate.cfg

http://www.alientrap.org/nexuiz/index.php?module=info

Low Quality - no realtime lights, no bloom
- 1 Ghz Pentium III or AMD Athlon
- Geforce2 Video card
- 512 MB of ram

There will be a lot of range with these cards as the 7300GT is quite different from the GS and then the LE is someway behind the standard 7300. Anyone got any of these cards for comment?

I know I'm kind of late to post in this topic, but whatever. Currently I am using a 7300 LE, and it runs fairly decently. I run at 1024x768 resolution, I have coronas, deluxe mapping, gloss, dynamic lights and shadows, and Normal Mapping on, as well as 16x AF (which I believe to be very important to have). I am playing with max textures, but I am using texture compression. I could easily do without compression, but I did it because of the loading times. It runs 40-70 fps, depending on the map and what's happening.

My colleague runs a GF 7300GT on a 3GHz P4 Singlecore (WINXP) and gets around 70 - 140 fps at standard settings and 1280x1024, depending on the map.

Here are the settings I use on my ATI PowerColor HD 2600 512MB AGP Card. I had some serious problems with this card when I first tried to use it. After some tweaking though I got it to work pretty good.







I noticed on the mipmapping settings that there is no benefit (except in UT3) cranking it past the second lowest and it's a slight performance hit on your card if you crank it any higher and you really shouldn't set anything up to override your programs settings (doing that actually crashed my card on some games). Also your OpenGL-powered games will run a lot better if you enable triple-buffering.

What is up with these discussions of sorry-ass video cards?
WTF?? Why dont you all just grow up and get one of the 8800 series of NVIDIA video cards. How about get the 9800 series of NVIDIA video cards or the Nvidia GTX 200 series.

I got the Nvidia GeForce 280 GTX super high-end video card.
I make my framerates sky rocket to the next dimension!!!


Xm4n

I would expect you to ask a bum on the street why the hell he doesn't grow up and goes making some money...

Xm4n wrote:What is up with these discussions of sorry-ass video cards?
WTF?? Why dont you all just grow up and get one of the 8800 series of NVIDIA video cards. How about get the 9800 series of NVIDIA video cards or the Nvidia GTX 200 series.

I got the Nvidia GeForce 280 GTX super high-end video card.
I make my framerates sky rocket to the next dimension!!!

Some people have other priorities in life, like families. Not everyone is 14 and spends all of the money from their paper round on their computer.

He's from Texas. He doesn't know any better.

Xeno The Blind wrote:He's from Texas. He doesn't know any better.

Trouble is this kind of attitude is far more widespread than just a bit of Mexico that fell off. It's far too common in gaming related forums worldwide.

There are no top of the line graphics cards I want to buy. There haven't been for many years. Why? They're all horrid. Big, noisy, power guzzley, hot and within 6 months it's going to be out of date so you'll have to buy another so that you can maintain your status as a village idiot.

I'll stick with my quiet, compact, energy efficient system instead thanks.

For discerning, grown up computer users, the sight of a forum signature boasting multiple systems with absolute top end components and retarded 1TW PSU's, cold cathodes and sense vacuum cooling is a sign that the proceding posting was that of a twat.

Xm4n wrote:What is up with these discussions of sorry-ass video cards?
WTF?? Why dont you all just grow up and get one of the 8800 series of NVIDIA video cards. How about get the 9800 series of NVIDIA video cards or the Nvidia GTX 200 series.

I got the Nvidia GeForce 280 GTX super high-end video card.
I make my framerates sky rocket to the next dimension!!!


Xm4n

Not all of us have a lot of money to buy decent hardware. Up until last year I had a rig with these specs that I was playing UT99 on:

Windows ME
Intel Pentium III 450MHz
256 DIMM RAM
ATI Rage Pro Turbo AGP 4MB
8 (single digit) GB HDD by Maxtor
JUNK ATX by Chaintech that still had ISA sockets!
Hercules Muse XL Game Surround 4.0 Sound Card
Sweat-stained PS/2 Toshiba Keyboard that didn't have any ticking time bombs on it
No-Name Ball Mouse

My UT ran at an average of 17 FPS on a low res with the software renderer after I tweaked the ini. I became one of the best siege players out there (got a little piece of ass-kissery to prove it) and joined [SwS] shortly after.

I currently have a used rig that I added onto and I'm busting my ass to build a better one from the ground up starting with case. This is my current rig:

Ubuntu Ultimate Edition and Windows XP
Intel Pentium 4 HT 3.0GHz (dual-core? it runs and reads like one, I even had to get a multi-core patch for UT99)
2.5 GB DRR1 RAM (scored it off a buddy for like $15 a 512MB stick)
PNY NVidia Geforce 6200 PCI 256 MB (ditched that unstable ATI piece of crap and re-installed my old card)
320 GB Seagate HDD
Diamond 7.1 JUNK Soundcard
Logitech G15 V2 Keyboard and Cyber Snipa PC Gamepad 2
Razer Lachesis Mouse

Ass-Kissery here:
http://i234.photobucket.com/albums/ee82 ... ODLIKE.jpg

^HT is HyperThreading....One physical core and one logical core. Kinda like the new Nehalem core which is 4 physical cores and 4 logical cores O_O

Btw, nice deal you got there for the DDR1 RAM. There are much more expensive than DDR2 RAM >,> which doesn't make sense.

Juppy wrote:^HT is HyperThreading....One physical core and one logical core. Kinda like the new Nehalem core which is 4 physical cores and 4 logical cores O_O

Btw, nice deal you got there for the DDR1 RAM. There are much more expensive than DDR2 RAM >,> which doesn't make sense.

Yeah, DDR1 RAM is so much slower (I think mine is like 266MHz) than DDR2 RAM so it really doesn't make sense for DDR2 to be so much cheaper.

I get very playable framerates with an ATI Radeon HD3650 (Fedora 8, Catalyst 8.7, C2D E6300 CPU). This is a "mainstream" or "mid-range" card that retails for around £40 to £50 in the UK. I was attracted to the relatively low peak power consumption of 41.7W (from this review)

I get ~40fps on large outdoor maps such arhia-v2 and ons-reborn. I run Nexuiz at 1280*1024 with HDR, RT lights with shadows, high quality textures and 4x AF. In most indoor maps the FPS remains at the capped value of 60 except in crowded battles where it can drop to around 30. Only the water reflections really kills the FPS.

Lee_Stricklin wrote:

Juppy wrote:^HT is HyperThreading....One physical core and one logical core. Kinda like the new Nehalem core which is 4 physical cores and 4 logical cores O_O

Btw, nice deal you got there for the DDR1 RAM. There are much more expensive than DDR2 RAM >,> which doesn't make sense.

Yeah, DDR1 RAM is so much slower (I think mine is like 266MHz) than DDR2 RAM so it really doesn't make sense for DDR2 to be so much cheaper.

I think you should really invest on a new motherboard, probably a new processor too since no motherboards I know of in circulation can support a single core and DDR2 RAM. The price of dual cores should drop quite soon when Intel's Core i7 (Nehalem) is released.

I remember paying around 200 bucks for 512 DDR1 RAM -.-. 1GB DDR2 is like 15 bucks now

Well, it seems that I stirred up some responses here. First off, I am not 14, I do have a job and make good money and in the 20's. I have priorities in life. Second off, I am not from TX, just moved here from Maryland. The statement that Ed made about top of the live video cards seems to immature. A top notch video card can put you over the top for some years. not 20 years as it seems like Ed implied. a year to 2 years seems proficient. Hottest FPS games are awesome and having a top notch video card can max out any settings that the FPS game can throw at it. So, for a true gamer/enthusiast, top notch components are a must, if they have the money. And if they dont, they would almost certainly have the motivation for it and find a way to get it. Looks like Ed might be jealous that he does not have the top notch parts (boo hoo) So he is stuck to his current rig. Think he is trying to sound smart and efficient, in which we all know that he is NOT. Stop trying to be fundamentally sound Ed, and I implore you to join us!!! And stop being a twat and sissy and start buying some real components that do justice!!!