Maaajor performance problems with TSE

#1 BTW- all the shaders and effects look great in the TSE demos. Everything appears to work, shader wise. Something is just whacking up the framerate somewhere.

#2 The GeForce FX 5700 has had some really frustrating performance issues in both TGE and TSE for quite a few people unfortunately. I've stood next to two computers of roughly equal "strength", and watched both the TGE and TSE demos run outstandingly on one, and very poorly on another.

The only real suggestion I have is to try to actually rollback to previous generations of drivers. For this card specifically, the "latest" almost never appears to be "the greatest".

You also may want to try to get OEM drivers instead of Microsoft drivers--they tend to work better in general (but not always).

#3 Should remove the nvidia drivers and install what drivers came on the CD w/ the gfx card?

ITts kind of suprising because I've not had any problems to speak of with with any other games or 3d applications, including Truespace (directx heavy) and XSI (opengl heavy)

#4 Well I would suggest looking at some of the drivers on http://downloads.guru3d.com/. They have both Nvidia beta drivers, and older driver versions. You can try a few of the different drivers, until you find the sweet spot.

Just because Truespace and XSI work fine doesn't really mean that much. I don't be believe they use shaders at all. I do know for a fact that the FX series of Nvidia cards were very fast at fixed function, but extremely show at shaders. That's why I replaced my 5900 Ultra with a 6800 GT.

Well good luck Alex.

#5 Alex, have you tried changing the priority for the tse process to High (assuming you're using win xp)? i had the same problem with my 5600, and this sort of fixed it... still slow, but usable.

#6 Alternatively, you should note that the FX series performs much better on version 1.1 shaders than on 2.0 and above.

#7 I had a system with an FX5900 which, otherwise, had almost identical specs. My experience with a system of this level of power suggests that the lag you're getting in a high shader activity rendering environment is entirely normal. The FX5900 is just powerful enough to, say, run HL2 with everything maxed and get 15-50 FPS (depending on the scene and physics complexity), so it wouldn't seem unlikely that an even more modern engine (TSE) would give it trouble. TSE is also not nearly to the stages where performance optimizations are critical on the design end, I'd think. Your card will probably work much better on a finished, optimized copy of TSE than it does on the current EA release.

#8 @stephen, Installed an older version of nvidia drivers had no effect, except a stern warning from TSE saying I had better install a newer version of gfx drivers.

@hadoken, I tried changing the TSE.exe process to realtime priority. That increased it by only by about 1 fps.

OK it is, after all, only a $100 "low-end" gfx card. But does it suck this badly? I don't think so:

http://www.beyond3d.com/reviews/galaxy/5700le/
In all these demos, some shader-intensive, the FX 5700 LE never got less than 20 fps. Some it got 80-100 fps.

I still think something is deficient with TSE. Yes I know it's an "early adopter" release right now. But there is a lot of hype too. Is the advertised "robust rendering fallback system" not implemented yet?

@henry, I don't want to be in an environment where I'm getting a jerky 9 fps and I can't find the cursor half the time because of the lag. If it was a smooth 9 fps and mouse didn't dissapear I could totally live with that.

Is there a command I can issue in the TSE console to turn off realtime shaders, and see if that is really what is causing this slowdown? Not only is the framerate slow, but also every ~1 second or so the screen freezes and it skips a few frames. It's just weird.

#9 I have a 'low-end' gfx card: ati radeon 9200 and the TSE demos work flawlessly ,

i'm only running

~1Ghz AMD processor
384 mb ram
win xp sp2
ati radeon 9200

with a bunch of applications open (visual basic 6.0, visual c++ .net, AIM, ICQ, etcetc..) and it still runs fast in windowed mode.

#10 @thomas. OK that's good to know. I guess I got particularly unlucky. I would suspect my FX 5700 is a lemon and I would get rid of it. *except* that TGE runs perfectly at high fps on this FX 5700. And I like this gfx card.

#11 I can almost guarantee you its something else in your system besides the gfx card.
I have a geforce 6600 GT installed and I get a terrible performance hit when the orc starts dancing in the full TSE Demo (not the dojo one) if I leave the texture settings in graphics settings at Auto or Force High, but it runs fine when the texture settings are set to force low, but there is still a hit at that point.

My guess is that I am still running SDRAM on my main board, though I also feel this processor isn't fully pulling its weight due to the motherboard or something else in the overall system. Just means its time to upgrade.

(General specs 1.7ghz AMD (Athlon XP 2100+), Geforce 6600 GT (128MB vram) 512mb system ram windows 2k sp4 + all updates)

Also For what its worth I get terrible performance on NVIdia's tech demos for the 5900 and such series, which is hilarious to me to say the least.

But in your case try forceing the textures to low to start with It might help.

#12 Just for reference, on my pretty high end development platform with a 6800GT card, I get (from memory, I'm not home at the moment) >>150 ish fps on all demos...

#13 It's also worth noting that the main performance bottleneck in TSE has not yet been done in a way that we are satisfied with.

Skinning on meshes is done on the CPU, and is horribly slow. It also uses volitile vertex buffers, instead of doing something slightly better. The reason why skinning is done on the CPU is so it can have an arbitrary number of bones per vertex. I am not up to speed on my skinning knowledge, but last I knew hardware skinning was 4 bones per vert. Maybe it's 8, I don't remember though. This is on the list of things to do, is to optimize skinning. I know it could be done in VS3.0 and that is something we are looking at doing.

#14 @brandon - I just played a couple of the nvidia tech demos for the FX series (Dawn, and Ogre). Playing on my FX 7500 LE it's just beautiful, no glitches, no slowness, just perfect. I don't think anything is wrong with my system... but obviously TSE doesn't like something about my system. I tried setting textures to force low in the TSE demo, and that had no visible effect.

I am now getting 15-25 fps in the TSE feature walkthrough demo! In the Car demo I am getting only 10-15 fps. In the Dojo demo I am still getting ~9 fps. The mouse cursor still has a lot of jerkiness though in all of them.

Ah well, thanks for the feedback everyone. I am sticking to TGE for now. This shader stuff is too bleeding edge for me I think.

#15 Keep in mind that tech demos are hand crafted to show off cards, and are written specifically to show the great things about a card, and not show the parts of a card that don't necessarily impress.

TSE obviously doesn't limit the types of things that it uses on the card, so you are probably just exposing driver implementation issues. Also, commercial/AAA games tend to spend months and months crafting their graphics calls for primary cards expected at release. TSE, being not only early adopter, but also not a specifically targetted game, doesn't include these types of performance tweaks. That would be something that you would do as a developer once your game is in production (or even pre-production if you have a solid and confirmed milestone/release schedule) since at that time you would have an excellent understanding of your target market, and the video cards that are primary for that release time.

#16 Wow... on my lowest of the low end ps2 capable cards (GeForceFX5200) i'm getting between 9 and 12 fps (as indicated by Fraps) , full screen, and 17 when i alt/c and go to the far end of the garage (and look away from the car)...

i would've thought (assumed) that the 5700 and higheer cards would've performed a lot better...

so... i guess (from reading the above) that TSE is not really ready for a released game just yet... if performance considerations being taken as the primary consideration...


--Mike

#17 @Michael:

What in the above post gives you that indication? As I said quite specifically, it is the game developer's responsibility to identify their target market and tweak their design and implementation for that target market. It has nothing to do with TSE itself.

Other engines may have different levels of this tweaking done for you, but at in some cases a very extreme cost in flexibility. Finally, the 5700 is a unique case in many ways--more recent cards perform outstandingly (I've seen 150fps+ on my 6800GT on each of the TSE demos).

#18 Stephen... that was more of a question than a rhetorical statement... as i would be very happy to be able to put out a game before the final milestone... ea licensing permitting that is...

and... regardless of whether my post above was regarded as a statement, or a question, it was based on the above statements made by Pat Wilson...

Quote:It's also worth noting that the main performance bottleneck in TSE has not yet been done in a way that we are satisfied with.

Skinning on meshes is done on the CPU, and is horribly slow. It also uses volitile vertex buffers, instead of doing something slightly better.

this would obviously indicate that TSE might not yet be ready for prime time... or maybe i'm reading this wrong...

your ideas as to whether or not a product could be released to the general public using the current TSE would be of great interest...

--Mike

#19 The problem is that the FX5*** cards run 2.0 shaders reaaaaallly sllloooowww. Try this change to client/prefs.cs to force it down to 1.1, you should get much better performance:

$pref::Video::forcedPixVersion = 1.1;
$pref::Video::forcePixVersion = 1;

#20 Pat's comments only apply to skinned characters and aren't really that bad unless you get a bunch of them on screen at once. The skinning problem is schedule to be fixed in the upcoming Milestone 3.

The (old) terrain is actually the largest bottleneck to TSE in the downloadable demos.