OpenGL perf. on AMD/ATi gpu's: WIP fix.

[motorsep]

Getting back on topic, it's definitely an issue with the driver. And the reason that makes me think that is my test case with my own engine done over the weekend. I asked someone with GeForce 560 GTX to test the same case, and his RB/GPU/fps timers values were lower than mine. So the question is how is it older Nvidia outperforms newer Nvidia GPU ? Easy - he was using older driver. So I downgraded my driver to exactly the same version as the test guy was using and bam!, GPU timer went down from 21.7ms to 12.7ms (which is still higher than it was on 560GTX test case, which was ~8ms).

Edited January 12, 2015 by motorsep

[MirceaKitsune]

I'm part of the minority who plays games on Linux using the free video drivers (MESA / Gallium / AMD BARTS). My video cart is an ATI Radeon 6870, which is a few years old but still very good.

 

I didn't enable FPS display in-game, to measure exactly how much I get. Certainly I don't have 60 FPS all the time, and I suspect I rarely get so much at all... which is understandable considering the expenses of dynamic lighting. At the same time however, I cannot complain, and can say I get the performance I was looking for and expected.

 

On my laptop things are different though (Mobility Radeon 5470). FPS is very low... I'd estimate somewhere between 10 and 30 at best. It's just enough to make TDM playable in reasonable conditions I guess.

[lowenz]

Maybe it's interesting to tell you: the good old 2001 IDTech3-based Return to Castle Wolfenstein on today AMD GPUs+Catalyst Suite is really performance UNwise until.....you change "r_primitives" from "0" to "2". The performance suddenly resurrects. Totally.

 

Maybe the problem with IDTech4/TDM is similar.....

Edited January 22, 2015 by lowenz

[Bikerdude]

The r_primitives command is a diagnostic tool used to show draw call count, and I dont think anyone on the tdm team has ever used "r_primitives 2"

[New Horizon]

Does it even exist in idtech4? I couldn't find it when I looked last night.

[Bikerdude]

ah sorry, I was thinking of "r_showprimitives"

[motorsep]

Maybe it's interesting to tell you: the good old 2001 IDTech3-based Return to Castle Wolfenstein on today AMD GPUs+Catalyst Suite is really performance UNwise until.....you change "r_primitives" from "0" to "2". The performance suddenly resurrects. Totally.

 

Maybe the problem with IDTech4/TDM is similar.....

 

That's interesting. It would be a good idea to check the engine and see what r_primitives does in W:ET (gotta be the same engine as RTCW).

[SteveL]

@Biker: Why not ask your contact if he'll share the details of the problem they found? Perhaps we can do something about it ourselves. Presumably there's something about the way we use openGL that doesn't gel with their current driver. It would be good to know what, and he might be glad if you ask, if other priorities have overtaken our fix. They clearly would like us to get better performance and/or not be making unfavourable comparisons between their flagship card and old nvidia cards, else they wouldn't have engaged this far.

[Bikerdude]

will forward on the above info to him.

[motorsep]

I am 99.99% certain AMD doesn't care for older hardware, PC and OpenGL. I tried my best getting in touch with them, but they don't give a sh#t. Hell, iD Software / Bethesda could not convince them to fix the drivers. Needless to say small obscure developers have less power of persuasion than AAA companies.

[Bikerdude]

We will see.

[San]

They don't even care about new hardware at all.
Their drives support is just some joke.

But, the problem seems to be somewhere else:

linux open source drivers (more than up to date) seems to have same issues.

coincidence?

[motorsep]

The core issue that AMD blindly adheres to OpenGL specs, disregarding the fact that doing things per specs doesn't always yields optimal performance. Nvidia understands it, and thus accommodates for non-compliant solutions for games. AMD refuses to do so, and thus we have crappy performance or crashes in OpenGL.

 

Sometimes I feel that it would be better having DX11/12 render in addition to OGL, specifically to avoid drama on Windows with AMD and Intel (Intel at least has decent OGL drivers on Windows).

[motorsep]

So, AMD got in touch with me. Supposedly assigned an engineer to look into the issues. And then reassigned him to more important project, saying basically "unfortunately you are out of luck".

 

This is plain clear show case of what goes on in AMD - short on staff, priority is in consoles and AAA projects.

 

The only option for us in particular is buying AMD GPU, fixing crashes, and officially supporting only R9 line.

[Bikerdude]

The only option for us in particular is buying AMD GPU, fixing crashes, and officially supporting only R9 line.

I am still waiting to hear back.

[HMart]

So, AMD got in touch with me. Supposedly assigned an engineer to look into the issues. And then reassigned him to more important project, saying basically "unfortunately you are out of luck".

 

This is plain clear show case of what goes on in AMD - short on staff, priority is in consoles and AAA projects.

 

The only option for us in particular is buying AMD GPU, fixing crashes, and officially supporting only R9 line.

 

So you are developing only on a NVIDIA card? Is like a web developer only making webpages on Chrome. But you are right AMD is still bad at OpenGL support.

 

But just curious did you read this?

 

http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/182343-why-we-cant-have-nice-things-valve-programmer-discusses-wretched-state-of-opengl

 

This part really resonates with what you said, but i'm unsure of what vendor is he talking about.

 

Historically, this vendor will do things like internally replace entire shaders for key titles to make them perform better (sometimes much better). Most drivers probably do stuff like this occasionally, but this vendor will stop at nothing for performance. What does this mean to the PC game industry or graphics devs? It means you, as “Joe Graphics Developer”, have little chance of achieving the same technical feats in your title (even if you use the exact same algorithms!) because you don’t have an embedded vendor driver engineer working specifically on your title making sure the driver does exactly the right thing (using low-level optimized shaders) when your specific game or engine is running.[/size]

 

------------------

 

They don't even care about new hardware at all.

Their drives support is just some joke.

 

But, the problem seems to be somewhere else:

linux open source drivers (more than up to date) seems to have same issues.

 

coincidence?

 

That is not true and you are grossly exaggerating, they do care about new hardware and "old" hardware, their official drivers support the new R9 till the HD5000x series, Thats 6 generations of cards, they also have legacy support for older cards, about the drivers their D3D support is good only their OpenGL support sometimes causes problems, and i must say I'm a AMD user ever since the ATI RADEON 9800 PRO and i never add major driver problems, nor i ever needed AMD support for anything, the only time i add some problems in some games, was when i started using a crossfire system, but multi-GPU systems are a problem even for NVIDIA, but even so was nothing that i could not solve by disabling crossfire. AMD drivers is best to let alone, do not mess with the options or force anything through them, like AA or any other effect, for that use RadeonPro, not even use the Overdrive option (overclocking), just leave them be at default and i assure, you will not have major problems, thats what i did.

Edited February 3, 2015 by HMart

[motorsep]

 

So you are developing only on a NVIDIA card? Is like a web developer only making webpages on Chrome. But you are right AMD is still bad at OpenGL support.

 

 

 

No, Nvidia, Intel and AMD R9 (somehow R9 line runs the game as fast as expected, unlike older models).

 

Nvidia btw will be looking into optimizing driver a bit more, but I am sure since Doom 3 BFG and all id Tech 5 based games run just fine on Nvidia, our game will too (since render is from RAGE). It already runs fine on all decent Nvidia models.

 

But from any perspective, better release game that plays on Nvidia + Intel, rather than not release due to issues with AMD.

 

I am pondering the idea of raising funds and hiring someone to re-write renderer for DX11 / 12. This way Linux people can (hopefully) play with OpenGL, and 98% of the rest of us can forget about all these driver issues and enjoy performance on Windows with DX11/12.

[HMart]

I have a R7 did you tested on that? If you want i will do it for you.

 

BTW i did have problems with The Evil within demo, it crashed randomly to desktop, but not one problem with RAGE nor with any other OpenGL game that i have, Penumbra, Amnesia, Doom3 and of course TDM.

[AluminumHaste]

That's almost guaranteed to be Nvidia. They were notorious back in the Quake 3 days and same with the benchmarks with Aquamark to make them run better on their hardware.

Wouldn't surprise me to learn they are still doing it.

[lowenz]

 

That is not true and you are grossly exaggerating, they do care about new hardware and "old" hardware, their official drivers support the new R9 till the HD5000x series, Thats 6 generations of cards, they also have legacy support for older cards, about the drivers their D3D support is good only their OpenGL support sometimes causes problems, and i must say I'm a AMD user ever since the ATI RADEON 9800 PRO and i never add major driver problems, nor i ever needed AMD support for anything, the only time i add some problems in some games, was when i started using a crossfire system, but multi-GPU systems are a problem even for NVIDIA, but even so was nothing that i could not solve by disabling crossfire. AMD drivers is best to let alone, do not mess with the options or force anything through them, like AA or any other effect, for that use RadeonPro, not even use the Overdrive option (overclocking), just leave them be at default and i assure, you will not have major problems, thats what i did.

Good sir! Can you help me with this? (=if you have STALKER CS can you test the in-game DX10 AA function?) http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=396517

 

(pvt, I don't want to spam in this thread)

Edited February 4, 2015 by lowenz

[HMart]

I do have Stalker CS on steam but is not installed and i will not download it just for that test i'm sorry, but one thing i do know, theres a bug on Xray engine that disables the high end features like god rays, soft particles, etc on dx11, even the exclusive features, like the distance based soft shadows and the dynamic smoke on AMD, if you use the dx9 path or the dx10 they work, minus the dx11 features of course, this was something that the developers acknowledged but never fixed, about MSAA never used it, but try using RadeonPro if all fails, you can force MSAA or even the new post processing based AA techniques like MLAA. FXAA or SMAA this last one is what i used for Stalker and it worked wonders even for alpha mapped surfaces.

 

If you need help with RadeonPro just say.

Edited February 5, 2015 by HMart

[San]

How about that? (for ATI users)

Checking portable OpenGL extensions...
X - GL_NV_register_combiners not found
X - GL_ATI_fragment_shader not found
X - GL_ATI_text_fragment_shader not found
X - EXT_depth_bounds_test not found

Can anyone tell me how can i turn on any debugging option?
By the way i need to force_s3tc_enable=true, on native linux and on wine

 

And why TDM does not use MIMD? I own dual core cpu...

Edited February 5, 2015 by San

[nbohr1more]

 

And why TDM does not use MIMD? I own dual core cpu...

 

We are planning on evaluating OpenMP patches in an upcoming build.

Doom 3 was not built for multi-core systems.

[AluminumHaste]

That's mostly true, both Quake 3 and Doom 3 have code for symmetric multi processing but it was so buggy carmack gave up getting it to work.

[San]

Ok, so it's just an info about normal work, not the problem with recognising my hardware... damn.
Is there any way i can help with recognising problem with AMD/ATI? I'm on Aruba.