Improving framerate + new graphic drivers

[Flies]

 

[ShadowBox]

Hey Flies:
   Just a little info for you.
   All of the Nvidia drivers for the Mac are made by Apple with a little help from some Nvidia programers. And under Mac OS X, they are released with the OS updates. The last major update to the Geforce 4 Ti drivers was when Apple released Mac OS X 10.2.4. Apple also tweaked the Nvidia drivers a little for the Mac OS X 10.2.6 update, but this was mainly for better performance out of the Geforce MX cards under UT2K3.
   As for the Radeon cards, Apple releases the drivers for all of the OEM cards, ie 7500, 9000, & 9700, through software update. The only drivers you can get from Ati's site are for the retail cards, 8500 & 7000.

   With regards to framerates in GhR, I get between 5-65 depending on the map. GhR maps are generally 30-65 while DS maps are 5-35. This is with a Radeon 7500 32mb on a 933MHz G4.
   I myself have been trying to find a way to get more framerates out of GhR, and have tried the demo on several different towers, both singles and duals, as well as several graphics cards, r7500, gf4 mx, r9000, & gf4 ti. And unfortunately haven't found any real advantage to anyone of them. The difference in framerates being only about 15fps on average from the slowest to the fastest combination.

   My thoughts are varied as to why the Mac gets such a deminished performance from games. It could be the way the games are developed. It could be poor driver performance. Or it could be because of several bottle necks within the hardware.

   While I'm sorry that this doesn't really help you figure out how exactly to get the most fps out of GhR, I hope it does help figure out a few things. For me the best settings that I've found for game play are:
res: 1024x768x32
z-buffer: 16bit
shadows: off for most everthing
detail: high for all
This is the best I can find. Lowering the settings doesn't increase my fps, and the only negative effect is to go higher on the res.

l8r
ShadowBox

[[TRIBE]Meatwagon]

hey flies. nice hosting by the way. any way ive been in the same delemia as you . i have a rage 128, and tried to update to a radeon 9000 card. but to my asstonishment i have the only monitor(apple studio display 17" CRT W/ ADC) that isnt compati=able w/ that card. the only one. go figure. well the one thing that i found out is that GR and DS even though they were ported for mac they werent designed for us so they run slower. thats why when you play Island thunder or any other mods that have been converted for mac but not ported for us the run  really slow, like 5fps. uuhhh. i downloaded frostbite and have that problem as well. until they start developing game souly for mac we'll lose out. well that my undrstanding of it.

[*DAMN Mauti]

Guys of course the Mac doesn't achieve high framerates because Ghost Recon as well as R6 and RS are CPU bound games. It doesn't matter much what graphic card you use it is the CPU power that limits our FPS.

A 3.06GHz fast P4 beats the G4 by far. With our bottleneck of a only 167Mhz fast FrontSideBus it is ridiculous. The normal P4 has 400Mhz to make full use of DDR and the new released P4 with 3.06 Ghz has even a 800Mhz fast FSB. They get 126fps in GhR. Few weeks ago I posted an article with different framerates in the main news from 8.2.2003. Click here for the PC article

There you can see that a 1Ghz G4 is only comparable to a 1400 AMD Athlon with a  GForce 2 and if we have luck with a GForce 4. And the current PC are twice that fast. So you don't have to wonder. The reason why Island Thunder runs so slow is because the AI has improved much and takes up a lot of cpu power. If you play the same maps in adversial mp you will notice that your fps are twice that fast.

Frostbite runs better than IT imo and I can play most maps in adversial mp extremly well on my old imac 400.

Hope that helps to explain that the current Macs are two year old PCs! Only the coming 970IBM with a 900Mhz fast CPU will give GhR framerates from above 100.

Bye,

Mauti

[Jeb]

That was my tip
http://208.45.96.61/hosted/mp/article.php?story=20030313144633734
I have a 466mhz G4, 768megs of ram, and a Geforce3.
And ghr doesn't run that badly (1024x768 with everything on low)
Basicaly its always good thinking to have a large amount of ram, all your applications turned off.
I remember in RS if you only kept active mods inside the mods folder, it would run faster than if you had a few hundred mods in there. I dunno if this is confirmed in GhR, but its good thinking.

[Saberian 3000]

Actually flies, it's funny that you made this post.  I have gone through the same thing earlier trying to improve the framrate of the game.  I have a Dual 867 DDR with 640 megs of ram and could only get 30 to 60 fps.  It it quite interesting when I have a 2ghz p4 next to me with the same graphics card in it that my mac has and it get's like 80-120 fps.  After messing around with Ghost Recon on the PC and Mac I have come to realise that ghost recon was really designed for the PC and when Aspyr ported it for the Mac they didnt really give two shits about making it comparable to the PC speeds.  So I put the problem on Aspyr myself.  Originally I tried doing the same thing.  Going to Nividia site which says go to the Mac site.  Then the Mac site says absolutely nothing on it.  Almost like no one has ever really complained about it before.  Then I wrote to Aspyr about it as well going on my conclusion that it was a bad porting job and well, they havnen't wrote back since.  I do understand now that Mac does update the drivers for the card thru the Apple updates but still to no avail.  Either way, i agree, there has to be something that can improve framrates for the game.  But hopefully someone with enough software knowledge will find an awnser for us in the near future.  
     Thanks for writing this site.  You have hit a point I have been trying to figure out for a while as well.  And thanks to |MP| website, they helped the framrate slightly as well with the USE EAX issue as well.  One more step closer but not quite to the goal. =)  

[*DAMN Mauti]

Saberian you don't understand that this has nothing to do with Aspyr it is Apple and its G4 itself. The Ghost Recon engine is CPU bound and the current G4s are slow no matter what you are doing.

However Flies I found out how to increase the fps between 5 -  15frames. Defrag your harddisk. The best thing would be a 2 - 3Gybte large Ghost Recon only partition then GR loads the textures much faster and you have a more stable framerate(I noticed this when I reinstalled GR after my HD crash on an empty partition. General the best of the best solution would be if you have more than 1Gybte RAM to create a RAM harddisk and move the complete Ghost Recon folder on it and play it from there.  

Bye,

Mauti

[c| Lin.pc]

I once noticed a big difference while not running finder and Grh at the same resolution. .. so make sure that you run finder/GrH in the same resolution. ..

//Lin
(AMD 2600 GeForce 4200 128MB with a gig of RAM)

[Jeb]

I dunno about that one lin, I run GHR at 1024x768 and i ran my monitor at the same resolution untill i got my nice new monitor. Now i run the finder at 2048x*** and play GHR at 1024x768 and there isn't much of a difference. Also, when you load GHR it switches into a lower resolution for the interface, i can't remember if its 800x or 640 then switches back for the in game stuff.

And a side not about that EAX thing, it seems very effective when your in a huge match with 30+ people and nades, guns and  other noises are going off around you.
 If you guys are true FPS sluts like i am, turn everything to low and hope for the best.
btw, i'll try your tip in a few mins mauti and see how it helps
update, playing off a partition does seem to speed things up quite a bit, but you gotta defrag the partition to see any good results. Diskwarrior 3 is out for osX, its well worth having.

[Mr. Lothario]

     Jeb told me of his excellent results loading GhR onto a dedicated partition, so I tried it. For me, it seems as though it made things slower. I'll try it on some different hosts and see what happens, but so far, I was noticing significant amounts of FPS lag--that is, situations such as the one I encountered earlier tonight while playing in Night Battle: I was swinging my view around, scanning for enemies, getting about 22-25 FPS (which is pretty normal for me), then when I would see someone, my FPS would instantly drop to around 5. This happened three times in a row, and was very frustrating. I suspect the problem may be because the partition I installed GhR on is on a hard drive that is quite slow. So, the point is, if you're going to try the dedicated-partition trick, make sure the partition is on a good, fast drive, or it probably won't help.

[Jeb]

i should also point out that doing a "fix permissions" repair with Disk Utility speeds things up even more. You should do that once a month normaly, or even more often on your gaming partition.

[T. Collins]

...you gotta defrag the partition to see any good results. Diskwarrior 3 is out for osX, its well worth having.

I thought that DW 3 wouldn't include Disk Optimizer Plus nor any other disk defraggin' or optimizin' utility.

[mainmanman]

Actually mauti. the 3.06 ghz PC doesnt beat the G4. Look at the apple website for more details. And the game ghr doesnt depend on mhz speed 100% or 80% more like 60%

[*DAMN Mauti]

Do you really think Apple would admit that a PC is currently faster then a Mac!? Well look at the posted benchmarks in the february main news there you will see that Ghost Recon mostly depends on the CPU and not graphic cards.

Bye,

Mauti
ps.: Flies do you get framerates over 60 if you use a sniper gun zoomed in looking at the floor!? Or goes it over 60 then!?

[*DAMN Mauti]

Technically it wouldn't be something unusual if a game is limited to 60frames. When Raven Shield first came out for PC it was also limited but due a small text file modification this limit could be removed.

I ask if the counter stays still at 60 at your Mac if you are looking at the floor because even my imac gets up to 55fps if I look at the floor inside a building zoomed in. So there you should get much more than 60fps.

Bye,

Mauti

[[[EUR]] HoloGram]

Mauti you are not right! The limit still exists in RvS but its a matter of Driver and Driver options.

When U find out how to disable Vsync for your monitor for the game! U will get more FPS , for PCs it is the same!

Vsync syncronizeses the vertical 60 Hz of your Monitor with your game, that is is why U have 60 FPS at max. B/c all games normaly run with 60 Hz.

the other way would be to force the game to run with higher Hz for example 85 Hz then this will improve your FPS to 85 FPS at max.

For PC It would be easy to do so , b/c options in the drivers are implemented but for Mac it didnt find a way yet!  

Flies is right! When he thinks that the 60 FPS barrier is a driver Problem.

And Mauti you are right that the game needs more CPU power then grafics power - although my ATI 7000 brought a boost to GhR.
But this does not explain the barrier.

But may be some OS X freak can now find out how to change this! after I posted the reason!

[*DAMN Mauti]

Yes and no, because when the R63 demo was released it was limited to 60fps but you didn't have to change driver settings to work around this problem. You simply could change the limit in a R63 setting file as far as I know but I don't have a PC(was posted on several R63 websites) but you are right that it also has to do with drivers but I think in this case it is up to the game because games like Quake3 and UT2003 achieve fps over 60 without problems so even Mac driver are capable of framerates beyond 60fps. Well may the count the fps differently(horizontal - vertical), who knows.

Bye,

Mauti

[[[EUR]] HoloGram]

Q3 dont use Vsync thats all! thats why it reaches more FPS form the start!

[STuRM]

Flies,

          I have taken a screenshot showing 61 fps as per your challenge and emailed it to you.  I WIN THE PINT!!!!!!!!   HEHE LOL.


                         +MOD+STuRM    

[Jeb]

Vsync or not who really cares about seeing higher than 60fps
i do pretty damn well with a 20-30fps average, and i know many other good players who average in the 10-20fps.