Poor OpenGL perf on ATi/AMD cards

[Bikerdude]

I'm currently trying to troubleshoot a FPS drop in my wip and ive hit a bit of dead end -

• The DC in that location is hitting 2500 which while high isnt that bad and all VP's have been checked and are working correctly.
  
• All the surfaces that have more than 1 light touching it have been split.
  
• All entities that are applicable have had thier shadows turned off.
  
• My GFX card is a Radeon R9-290, so I shouldn't be seeing any FPS drop but I'm wondering if its the age old case of amd drivers have shite OpenGL support..??
  

So in an effort to uncover some other ways of bug testing I thought I would list to the tools I have used thus far -

• r_showprimitives 1 - shows a draw call counts, vanilla D3 max was 1500, TDM average is 2000-3000
  
• r_showlightcount 1 - shows how many lights are hitting a particular surface, as follows -
  

red = 0

green = 1

blue = 2

cyan = 3

pink = 4

white = 5+

• r_showtris 2 - this shows all the tris in a given scene(same as r_showtris 1), but crucially show's tris that are hidden from the player view but that are still being rendered.
  
• r_showshadows 1 - this shows where shadows are being cast by objects in a scene - but I dont find the in-game indicator that user friendly.
  
• r_showOverDraw 2 - shows how much is drawn that the viewer never sees. Good for scenes with lots of alpha-test materials or post-processing
  

1 = geometry overdraw

2 = light interaction overdraw

3 = geometry and light interaction overdraw

 

What other console command's are there that might explain what & Commandss killing the FPS in certain locations? I will update this Op with any new info we come up with.

[nbohr1more]

Try

 

r_showOverDraw 2

 

Overdraw

 

(Shows how much is drawn that the viewer never sees. Good for scenes with lots of alpha-test materials or post-processing.)

r_showOverDraw ... 1 = geometry overdraw, 2 = light interaction overdraw, 3 = geometry and light interaction overdraw

 

http://wiki.thedarkm...tial_Must-Knows

 

Lots of transparent surfaces and decals can stall the renderer and prevent some culling.

Edited September 10, 2014 by nbohr1more

[Bikerdude]

r_showOverDraw 1 - causes the game window to go back, including the main menu and the console!

r_showOverDraw 2 - causes a CTD

r_showOverDraw 3 - causes the game window to go back, including the main menu and the console!

 

Regarding "r_showInteractions 1" what are considered the max figures for this..?

[nbohr1more]

Do these work on a smaller map? If not, the command is probably broken now.

[Bikerdude]

The command is broken as it will make TDM CTD before a map is even loaded. Which is a shame as I would like to have seen what was being overdrawn and where.

 

@Grayman, any idea what could have broken this command or should i just file a bug tracker..?

[nbohr1more]

Open a bug tracker, I think SteveL was looking at overdraw fixes so he might already have a lead on this.

[grayman]

It requires textures/common/overdraw.tga, and that's missing.

 

I don't see it in Doom3 either.

 

Edit: The code looks like it doesn't care if the image is missing, though, as long as the material (textures/common/overdrawtest) exists, and it does.

 

It's done in the renderer, which I'm not familiar with.

[SteveL]

No idea re the overdraw problem sorry. That's back-end renderer stuff.

 

Biker, if you want me to run your slow spot through the profiler to find out what's eating the cycles, send me what I need to rep it. I might not find anything, but that tactic led to some cool discoveries in NHAT cathedral, and a fix that could help lots of maps with performance hiccups. That was a lucky outcome, but no harm trying again.

[nbohr1more]

Gonna try testing a placeholder material with _white or _grey image this evening. Two of the modes might be working (or partially working) based on the above...

[Bikerdude]

@Nbohr, 3846

@Steve, will do mister.

[Bikerdude]

I thought I would do another test, as I still have my old GTX480. And suprise suprise, or maybe no suprise there is no FPS drop on the nvidia card on an old 314.xx driver. So WTF would be causing the FPS drop on the AMD card that 2x generations newer..? is it even fixable or is it yet again the legacy of crap OpenGL support.

 

Is there any one with a mid-to-hi-end amd card who can help with trying to figure out WTF is going on..? It would be a crying shame if AMD users are being artificially hamstrung when trying to play our mod.

[SteveL]

I have an AMD card that was high-end when I got it 3 or so years ago... Looking at dxdiag, HD7800 series, 4GB, if that qualifies. I have the latest catalyst installed.

 

I'd need you to tell me what results to give you back. I know sod all about gfx cards, and if it it's graphics driver dependent, I won't get anything useful out of the profiler either.

[Bikerdude]

Gonna try testing a placeholder material with _white or _grey image this evening.

Ta.

I have an AMD card that was high-end when I got it 3 or so years ago...

Will be interesting to see if you get the FPS drop in the same location etc, dropping you a Pm now..

 

In the meantime I logged a support with AMD directly an on thier user support forum -

 

- http://forums.amd.com/game/messageview.cfm?catid=443&threadid=177854&enterthread=y

[Obsttorte]

Beneath vertex count and interactions also a high amount of different textures used can cause performance issues. There is a console command (testmaterial or so) that allows you to replace all textures with the specified one. This may help evaluating the impact coming from that part.

[AluminumHaste]

I thought I would do another test, as I still have my old GTX480. And suprise suprise, or maybe no suprise there is no FPS drop on the nvidia card on an old 314.xx driver. So WTF would be causing the FPS drop on the AMD card that 2x generations newer..? is it even fixable or is it yet again the legacy of crap OpenGL support.

 

Is there any one with a mid-to-hi-end amd card who can help with trying to figure out WTF is going on..? It would be a crying shame if AMD users are being artificially hamstrung when trying to play our mod.

 

Do you have ULPS turned off for your ATI card?

This power saving mode would cause my mobile 5870 AMD card to clock up and down if the usage was not 100% on the GPU.

I used MSI Afterburner to turn it off.

 

 

[Bikerdude]

Do you have ULPS turned off for your ATI card?

No difference :-(

There is a console command (testmaterial or so) that allows you to replace all textures with the specified one. This may help evaluating the impact coming from that part.

Is there some instructiuons on the wiki for this..?

[AluminumHaste]

Have you tried overclocking the card by just a couple of Mhz?

[Bikerdude]

Have you tried overclocking the card by just a couple of Mhz?

Yup and forcing the card to run at full clock of 1040Mhz, I also tried replacing the Ati openGl .dll files, "atio6axx.dll" & "atioglxx.dll" and also no difference.

[AluminumHaste]

Just do what I did to fix it, use one of these: http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814487007

[Bikerdude]

Heh, I aint spending £380 on a gfx card (thats how much a single 780 Ti costs over here), if can scrape the cash together it will be a plain 780 or if no cash a 770.

 

The bigger issue that makes my heart hurt is this will potentially effect anyone who has a fairly recent ATi card and wants to play our mod Im hopping SteveL doseitn see any slowdowns on his HD7800.

[nbohr1more]

So... there definitely seems to be some kinda functionality in r_showOverDraw...

 

I set the material to map _white and it painted 90% of the screen white save a small rectangle.

I then tried the blend filter with map _fog and it rendered stars from the skybox

 

I was flying blind but I was able to invisibly toggle the console and invoke r_showOverDraw 0 to get

back to the normal render.

[nbohr1more]

hmm r_showShadowCount 2 is supposed to demonstrate shadow overdraw. It paints the screen white

but still renders the console and shows the number of overdrawn shadows (around 100 in "The Outpost")...

[Bikerdude]

On the testing front -

 

Ran TDM on an old nVidia GT-640 and its out-perfs the R9-290, getting max fps almost all of the time and only dropping by 5-10fps when the R9-290 dropped by 35fps in the same locations. Its entirely ridiculous that an old GT-640 is out perfing a cutting edge R9-290.

 

@Springheel, can you move this thread to the tech support section please.