Hardware required for high framerate?

[reece146]

I have a quick question about FPS and hardware required.

I installed vdrift on my dev box at work last night (svn : 1636?). Since I was having some issues with my "old" Mac at home I figured I'd try maxing out everything on my "new honkin' box". It's a Dell with 3 GHz Pentium D, some flavour of ATI Radeon with binary drivers, Gentoo Linux, etc., etc.

With everything in the Display -> Advanced tab set the machine comes to a crawl. Is this normal? Or is it the crappy ATI display card (corp standing offer config - I'd much rather run nvidia).

The OpenGL stuff is working correctly according to glxgears/xdpyinfo. I backed off the display to 800x600 and saw marginal improvements. Also the sky was rendered funny (weird green, red etc. textures).

What exactly do we need as a hardware platform to run vdrift with everything "turned on"?

[Nigo]

What do you mean "to a crawl" ? I manage to keep about 25 fps on my box (Turion 1.6Ghz + NVidia Go7600), which is waaaaay too slow. Disabling reflections improve the framerate a lot. It looks very unoptimized anyway...

[reece146]

What do you mean "to a crawl" ?

I might be able to draw the frames by hand faster kind of crawl.



Maybe .2-.5 sec between frames.

[thelusiv]

I'm going to bet your problem is the video card. How much video memory does it have? Which Radeon is it exactly?

On my Athlon XP 2600+, 512 MB memory, GeForce4 Ti4200 128MB, I can run it at about 20-25 fps with medium reflection quality, medium lighting quality, large textures, medium view distance, fullscreen at 1680x1050 (native res of my monitor). Things are not so fast in Single Race mode.

On my new machine, I can max out all the settings and get about 70 fps in practice mode. It's a Intel Core2Duo E6400 with 2GB memory, and a GeForce7 7600GT 256MB. In Single Race mode with 3 opponents I still get 25 fps.

Things should get a good bit faster once we fix up the collision detection.

[reece146]

The card is a "RAdeon X1300/X1550 Series" with 128MB of memory.

I'm going to poke with it a bit more. FWIW, fgl_fglxgears gets ~335 FPS. Gonna try glxgears once I find it.

If the box wasn't half height I'd bring in a nvidia from home (9800 doing nothing) but I don't have anything that will physically fit... or PCI-X now that I think about it.

[joevenzon]

Your low framerate is because opengl is not using hardware acceleration. I know 355 sounds like a lot, but it isn't -- that's purely CPU-based software opengl emulation. You should be getting scores from glxgears that are in the thousands (I get 6000 on my AMD X2 3800+ and nvidia 7600GT).

[reece146]

Hmm, you are right:

Code:

(EE) AIGLX error: dlsym for __driCreateNewScreen_20050727 failed (/usr/lib64/dri/fglrx_dri.so: undefined symbol: __driCreateNewScreen_20050727)
(EE) AIGLX: reverting to software rendering

This page shows how to enable under Gentoo:

http://gentoo-wiki.com/AIGLX

Currently compiling.

[Nigo]

I don't see what AIGLX have to do with your ATI driver. In my mind you should first look for a ATI driver that works

[thelusiv]

reece146, are you using Beryl/Compiz or something? We've had reports before that this makes VDrift run really slow...

[reece146]

Ok, after follwing the AIGLX red herring way too long (thanks Nigo) I have this working correctly (I think). The GLX info now comes up as ATI specific and no sw rendering mentioned anywhere.

my glxgears output is now a touch over 2600 FPS and fgl_fglgears (the ATI specific FPS counter says ~350 FPS.

Is 2600 FPS decent for glxgears? I don't have a frame of reference.

The game still runs slow... 1.5-2.2 FPS. I am getting a lot of "fglX11AllocateManagedSurface: __FGLTextMgrAllocMem failed!!" errors.

[thelusiv]

glxgears is really not a good way to test graphics, I'm not sure why everyone thinks it is...I mean it's just a screensaver. There are even better screensavers for testing graphics. Just install xscreensaver and go through the gl ones, if more than a couple of them are slow then you have a problem.

This almost sounds like a driver issue. It looks like some kind of texture manager within the fglrx driver is not working correctly.

[reece146]

I've been mucking about with my server/wrkstn in the garage the last few nights (had to install/tune xorg) and have come to the conclusion that the ATI RADEON in my machine at work is a piece of sh!te.

The little wrkstn here is a 2GHz P4 with a NV 6200 and it runs in high res (LCD : 1024x768) with everything turned on pretty much no problem. Anistropic filtering needs to be set to 8x instead of 16x but otherwise it is very playable with FPS ~25-35 depending on track and location. glxgears says 1700fps. Think ATI has written their driver to spoof the easy GL benchmarks?

The original machine that started this thread is a dual Pentium D @ 3GHz with a ATI RADEON (x13xx/X16xx). Very disappointing.

[thelusiv]

I would agree that the work computer's card is probably one of ATI's economy cards, that doesn't have the guts to handle VDrift at this stage...