Just a bug report for PD 5.50

[bigluker]

System Specs;

P2-400/100 bus
96 Megs of SDRAM
G400 MAX Default clock
Power Desk 5.50 w/D7

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Half Life;

OpenGL now screams, it's significantly faster than D3d; but reboot after playing scince beta errors will not allow anything 3d to run after Half Life GL is run.

*should be noted that Turbo GL when properly installed also rocked my nuts

Unreal Tourney;

Direct3D is now awesome. Even with medium skin details FPS never drop below 15, even when all hell breaks loose. These new drivers and 16 bit rendering work for a nice performance boost.

OpenGL is also significantly improved, however playing in OpenGL means that the system will cold reboot all by itself after a few seconds of quitting UT.

*Turbo GL had better performance than the 5.5 OGL drivers, but BAD texture corruption made it rather unsavoury.

Quake 3;

The benchmarks speak for themselves;

Previous Turbo GL/Full ICD
1024x768x32 High Quality; Demo001 - 26.0 fps Demo002 - 25.1 fps
800x600x32 High Quality; Demo001 - 38.8.1 fps Demo002 - untested

*should be noted that Turbo GL had same performance as standard ICD in Q3

Current 5.50 Open GL
1024x768x32 High Quality; Demo001 - 28.8 fps Demo002 - 26.1 fps
800x600x32 High Quality; Demo001 - 42.1 fps Demo002 - 41.2 fps

Oh my god! Why does 800x600 dominate by 50% performance improvement!?!
The choice is yours; image quality at high rez is a lot better...but man it screams at 800x600.

Rogue Spear;

Does it go any faster? I dont know. Looks the same to me. Maybe it's better on some levels.

[added in edit1] Disabling vsync with the help of g400tweak unlocked the engine and now it flies. Rogue Spear is so far the only game i have seen that suffers a big performance hit with vsync enabled. Now it screams with it off.

Viper Racing;

Same story as Rogue Spear.

---------Conclusion;

These beta drivers are very much usable, direct 3d still being the dominant force among render options. However, if the final drivers fix some bugs maybe Q3 will run better at high rez and improve upon it's already apparent advantage over Turbo GL. Half Life would no longer exit with errors. UT would still be a no brainer; D3D all the way.

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this has been a bug report by BigLuker

[This message has been edited by bigluker (edited 21 January 2000).]

[Kruzin]

Thanks for the input. I'll pass a link this thread on to those who need to see it.

Here is what I personally know about it...

HL is not the only OGL app to have problems with the current beta ICD. Pretty much anything using the full ICD will crash on exit. It been reported, reproduced, and is a well known issue (was known before these driver where released, and is a LARGE part of WHY they are still betas). I have found that for now TGL has been the way to go with any game that supports it (except UT).

UT and OGL. Not even worth the trouble. The game is just not written for OGL. Even when selecting OGL in the game options, you will see a warning about it's "experimental" implimentation. Nothing Matrox does will fix the game engine's inadequacies. Like you said...a no brainer

As you noted, the ICD is getting significantly faster. Matrox is incorporating the optimizations from the TurboGL into the full ICD wherever they can. Those optimizations where geared more at lower resolutions, as that is where the early ICD was falling short in performance, and fps counting gamers where hollering for faster 640 and 800 performance. I believe with the increased low res performance in the newer ICDs they will eventually eliminate the need for TurboGL all together. But first they have to get past this crash-on-exit problem.

Rouge Spear and Viper....don't have them on my system, so don't have anything to say about those....

Overall for Joe User, I would still say use 5.30 or 5.41. But if you don't mind the bugs, 5.50 does have it's good points

[This message has been edited by Kruzin (edited 22 January 2000).]