Are the recent titles CPU limited?

[indio]

Some recent titles I've played seem to be CPU limited. Titles such as KOTOR , Lock-On , NFS:U , and Halo . I've done a little testing and it seems changing resolutions and/or graphics quality settings results in less than 10% difference, even though the graphics workload is increasing 300-500%. Am I going crazy or has anyone else noticed this?

 

[OpenGL guy]

Some recent titles I've played seem to be CPU limited. Titles such as KOTOR , Lock-On , NFS:U , and Halo . I've done a little testing and it seems changing resolutions and/or graphics quality settings results in less than 10% difference, even though the graphics workload is increasing 300-500%. Am I going crazy or has anyone else noticed this?

Could be CPU or could be vertex limited or could be AGP limited... There are many potential bottlenecks and it's tough to say which is the one limiting performance without doing some directed testing.

As far as being CPU limited, remember that games have to do lots of computations for AI, physics, etc. that may be more expensive than doing the graphics rendering itself.

 

[K.I.L.E.R]

The bottleneck is determined by the settings you also run the game at.

Try playing the latest games at 1280x1024 32bpp 6xAA, trilinear filtering + max AF (use 3d profiler or the likes to force trilinear on all texture stages) with maximum in game settings, you will find out that:

a. You will use all your video memory and some textures will be stored in system memory.

b. You will run out of fillrate very fast if the game is heavily reliant on pixel shaders.

b. You will run out of bandwidth (or close to running out of bandwidth) and the game will chug.

Of course, if you run at 640x480 with low IQ settings then your CPU will be the bottleneck.

Settings in between extreme high and extreme low would be hard to tell what the bottleneck is as GL Guy has stated above.

All testing was done on a 128MB R300.

 

[indio]

Well I started off testing Need for Speed Underground with the following setting on a 9700 Pro 2600xp 512 MB ram Windows XP
640x480 no AA no AF
640x480 6xAA 16xAF
1280x1024 no AA no AF
1280x1024 6xAA 16xAF
everything maxed except no motion blur and light glow
they all resulted in between 38 - 42 FPS
Like I said , I noticed similar performance in Halo , Kotor , and Lock-on
Thouhg not so much Lock-on after I did a little more testing (use 6xAA and your done for)
It seems to me that it is starting to be a trend in games that non-graphics features are starting to comsume a large portion of the work load.
I know this is anecdotal evidence at best . I am just curious if anyone else seemed to notice or not notice it.

 

[Doomtrooper]

If you look at a X-box and see a wimpy little Pentium 3 733 can do with a mainboard designed ONLY for games, a OS only for games vs. the PC platform.

Kind of pisses you off with 1GHZ of PC 3200 Ram, 3000 MHZ processor

 

[AlphaWolf]

"If you look at a X-box and see a wimpy little Pentium 3 733 can do with a mainboard designed ONLY for games, a OS only for games vs. the PC platform. "

And what resolution is your xbox doing it at?

Feel free to hook up a tv to your computer and play your games at 640x480 if that's what turns your crank.

 

[KimB]

"If you look at a X-box and see a wimpy little Pentium 3 733 can do with a mainboard designed ONLY for games, a OS only for games vs. the PC platform. "

And what resolution is your xbox doing it at?

CPU speed has nothing to do with resolution.

And yes, the X-Box is able to do a lot more with its Pentium3 733 than a PC could do with the same processor for two main reasons:

1. Closed platform allows for low-level programming and therefore optimal use of resources.
2. Much less OS garbage slowing things down.

 

[Bambers]

well most games are cpu limited on my xp2000+. Enough so most games won't drop in speed until beyond 1280x960 4xAA 16xAF on a 9800pro.

 

[Doomtrooper]

And what resolution is your xbox doing it at?

Feel free to hook up a tv to your computer and play your games at 640x480 if that's what turns your crank.

X-box supports resolutions above 640 x 480...XBOX games are internally rendered at a resolution of 1024 x 768, and supports 16 x 9 HDTVs, which means the game is internally rendered at a resolution of 854 x 480.

Yes most games are 640 x 480, but some do support higher...Halo runs at 480p in HD mode around 700 lines.

Yes I know the limitations of the console
It would be nice to have a OS option boot mode just for games

 

[KimB]

It would be nice to have a OS option boot mode just for games

It would be even nicer is Microsoft just made the OS better for multitasking. I'd rather not bother to reboot just to play a game.

For example, Linux has tended to produce better benchmark scores than Windows when I was using an nVidia card (I haven't compared the Radeon yet...maybe I will before too long...but I'm not hopeful, the drivers are buggy).

 

[Doomtrooper]

The OS is just part of the picture, the board layout on the X-box is designed for high speed data transfer too through Hypertransport.

IMO the PC platform is approaching this with PCI-Xpress, PC gaming has been held back due to the classic old motherboard layout and slow AGP ports.

 

[Dave Glue]

X-box supports resolutions above 640 x 480...XBOX games are internally rendered at a resolution of 1024 x 768,

While the Xbox can output greater than 640*480, less than a handful of games do so for obvious reasons. But this is the first I've ever heard of the Xbox "internally rendering" games at 1024*768 - linkage?

 

[cho]

maybe agp limited too.

 

[KimB]

The OS is just part of the picture, the board layout on the X-box is designed for high speed data transfer too through Hypertransport.

Well, sort of.

A much more significant difference is that graphics memory and main memory are shared, so that there is no transferring of data over an AGP bus. So, I'd say that the X-Box doesn't necessarily move data faster, it's just made to move less data.

The closed architecture also allows for much better usage of the vertex processing power of the NV2A without CPU intervention.

 

[K.I.L.E.R]

Well I started off testing Need for Speed Underground with the following setting on a 9700 Pro 2600xp 512 MB ram Windows XP
640x480 no AA no AF
640x480 6xAA 16xAF
1280x1024 no AA no AF
1280x1024 6xAA 16xAF
everything maxed except no motion blur and light glow
they all resulted in between 38 - 42 FPS
Like I said , I noticed similar performance in Halo , Kotor , and Lock-on
Thouhg not so much Lock-on after I did a little more testing (use 6xAA and your done for)
It seems to me that it is starting to be a trend in games that non-graphics features are starting to comsume a large portion of the work load.
I know this is anecdotal evidence at best . I am just curious if anyone else seemed to notice or not notice it.

WOW! Your system seems to be like my friends. He gets framerate like that under all the new games.

Your performance seems about right for 1280x1024 but at 640x480 I tend to get an average about 48-67fps depending where I am.

I also have an R300.

I have a P4 1.8GHz. I notice under new games my video card settings absolutely KILL my framerate if they are set too high under certain circumstances.

Try DF:BHD and you will notice performance is awesome throughout the game. BUT when you have AF set too high and you are going around a chopper that has dust all over the place your framerate will take a massive dive, you can get back some of the framerate of course by overclocking your core.

Otherwise all the new games I tried run perfect on my system.
Even though I can't stand playing them for more than 5 minutes.