Poor performance on good rigs (I think)

[bygone]

I am not telling that it is good comparison, I don't know that much to know what's good comparison, all I mean is that this GPU isn't that bad.

[nbohr1more]

Yeah. Most of the original missions ran pretty well on a GeForce 6600gt.

 

There are a couple of things to consider though...

 

There are very few hard limits in TDM so mappers are free to create maps with more polys, longer views, more lights, more AI, etc than most players' systems can handle...

Newer GPU's have trouble with ARB assembly language which is what TDM's shaders are currently written in.

If enough people nag nVidia and ATI about it, perhaps they'll improve their ARB handling for the latest hardware...

 

The lights are most reliant on memory and PCIE bus bandwith, if you don't have at least dual channel memory, PCIE 2.0, and 128-bit GPU memory then your system will struggle.

Many laptops have decent GPUs but lack memory bus specs and especially lack GPU memory lanes ( the typical configuration is still 64-bit). For desktops we typically see 256-bit for upper mid-range hardware

and 384-bit or even 512-bit for highend hardware.

I remember back around the Radeon 9700 launch, that the Beyond3d forums were filled with folks who hoped that GPU manufacturers would stop making 64-bit GPUs and switch to 128bit as the new low end,

alas that never happened because interconnect technologies don't improve as fast as wafer tech. It looks like nvidia's next GPU generation might have the memory on the same wafer as the GPU and with have

thousands of bits of interconnects.

 

Still, there are things that can be done make TDM more friendly to modern GPUs and there are a few Doom 3 projects out there that are continuing to make progress on that front.

Edited August 12, 2014 by nbohr1more

[bygone]

Mine is 128-bit with 28.8 GB/s bandwidth and PCI Express x16 Gen2 (according to nVidia control panel's informations), I see your point tho. Laptops GPUs will never be as good as their desktop counterparts.

Edited August 12, 2014 by bygone

[nbohr1more]

How does Tears of St Lucia perform by the way?