UT4: T&L or CPU

G

Gambler FEX online

Newcomer
PowerColor 9600 pro EZ (400/400)
texture/mip-map lowest
physics lowest
lod lowest
world detail lowest
640x480 no AA/AF

ut2004 demo assault/convoy
nforce2 barton 2100MHz: 45 FPS
nforce2 barton 2200MHz: 46 FPS


Its small but seem to be CPU, does this game use any T&L on the 3d card? Or vertex shaders for the characters animations (e.g. ass slap hehe)


 
Gambler FEX online said:
PowerColor 9600 pro EZ (400/400)
texture/mip-map lowest
physics lowest
lod lowest
world detail lowest
640x480 no AA/AF

ut2004 demo assault/convoy
nforce2 barton 2100MHz: 45 FPS
nforce2 barton 2200MHz: 46 FPS


Its small but seem to be CPU, does this game use any T&L on the 3d card? Or vertex shaders for the characters animations (e.g. ass slap hehe)


I dont think you can make any real judgement on a 1 fps difference. I mean you could run a bench twice on the same machine and come up with a 1 frame difference.
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
 
Gambler FEX online said:
PowerColor 9600 pro EZ (400/400)
texture/mip-map lowest
physics lowest
lod lowest
world detail lowest
640x480 no AA/AF

ut2004 demo assault/convoy
nforce2 barton 2100MHz: 45 FPS
nforce2 barton 2200MHz: 46 FPS


Its small but seem to be CPU, does this game use any T&L on the 3d card? Or vertex shaders for the characters animations (e.g. ass slap hehe)
Click to expand...
A change in FPS with CPU speed doesn't imply anything about whether the game uses HWTL, HW vertex shaders or software vertex processing. Other things take CPU power too, such as audio processing, physics computations, etc.

Without looking at the game, I'd guess it's using vertex shaders as I am pretty certain UT2003 did.
 
No vertex shaders in UT2003/4. FFP all the way ;-) We did make use of DX8 API features like vertex streams and declarations for those titles though.

-- Daniel, Epic Games Inc.
 
Those screenshots have got to be like garlic to vampires for some high-end card owners here. :eek:

Do you think T&L is the limiting factor in that shot? I'd imagine the CPU is doing other things that could account for that slight a framerate increase. The video card should certainly be twiddling one of its four thumbs at that res, no? 45fps seems pretty low for that Quake-colored hallway.
 
No vertex shaders in UT2003/4. FFP all the way We did make use of DX8 API features like vertex streams and declarations for those titles though.
Click to expand...

FFP stands for Fixed Function Pipeline but i dont understand, sorry. Isn't the T&L "helping" my CPU or is it just too big map for the CPU?

It's slower if I turn up "World detail:"


World Detail high: 36fps
-nosound: 51fps
barton at 1080MHz: 25fps
 
vogel said:
No vertex shaders in UT2003/4. FFP all the way ;-) We did make use of DX8 API features like vertex streams and declarations for those titles though.

-- Daniel, Epic Games Inc.
Click to expand...
Did (do) UT2003/4 use pixel shaders? I remember someone saying that it could use up to PS1.4, but I'm not sure A. if it does or B. the extent of the usage. And, is there any difference between UT2003 and UT2004 with regards to pixel shader usage?

(And hey, maybe I should come visit sometime. Wonder how far Raleigh is from Asheville.)
 
Gambler FEX online said:
FFP stands for Fixed Function Pipeline but i dont understand, sorry. Isn't the T&L "helping" my CPU or is it just too big map for the CPU?
Click to expand...

T&L can help the CPU even when skinning is used (a task typically performed using vertex shaders).
The CPU can do the skinning only -> streams up the vertices to the card -> card uses T&L to do the lighting.

I don't really know the details of the U2 engine but I'd be surprised if it doesn't work like that.
 
The Baron said:
vogel said:
No vertex shaders in UT2003/4. FFP all the way ;-) We did make use of DX8 API features like vertex streams and declarations for those titles though.

-- Daniel, Epic Games Inc.
Click to expand...
Did (do) UT2003/4 use pixel shaders? I remember someone saying that it could use up to PS1.4, but I'm not sure A. if it does or B. the extent of the usage. And, is there any difference between UT2003 and UT2004 with regards to pixel shader usage?

(And hey, maybe I should come visit sometime. Wonder how far Raleigh is from Asheville.)
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According the official statements like this, it does: http://www.ati.com/gitg/gaming/gametitlesU-V.html

AFAIK v1.1 and v1.4 have been used in UT2k3 so I'd be surprised if UT2k4, as the next step in its evolution wouldn't use any of them... :oops:
 
Yeah, I remember hearing that it had PS1.4 support, but I still don't know where the shaders are used.
 
"UT2003 uses PS 1.4 for terrain rendering which allows a shorter pixel shader program than using PS 1.1 though isn't a noticeable performance improvement (FWIW, it's 4 vs 7 instructions). In theory PS 1.4 would allow us to render 5 terrain layers at once though due to state change overhead caused by different triangulation (more, smaller batches) the sweet spot is rendering 3 layers at once which both the PS 1.1 and PS 1.4 codepath are capable of doing.

So, to sum it up, we do use PS 1.4 though it doesn't result in a noticeable performance improvement in normal scenarios. You can actually limit the engine to only use pixel shader version 1.1 if you want to play with that.

-- Daniel, Epic Games Inc."
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I might add I see Sweeny continually talking about how advanced next generation video cards need to be for the next Unreal Engine when his current engines don't even use Pixel Shaders extensively (something that has bee here for over 3 years). :?
 
Doomtrooper said:
I might add I see Sweeny continually talking about how advanced next generation video cards need to be for the next Unreal Engine when his current engines don't even use Pixel Shaders extensively (something that has bee here for over 3 years). :?
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Well the current Unreal engines have hung on to backwards compatability, even working with Voodoo cards and in software only mode. Sweeny's new engine makes a complete break, targeting second and third generation DX9 cards as a minimum, and *requiring* 64 bit processors for the content creation tools.
 
Well I find that hard to believe as 64-bit will be a minority even in two years, as will high end cards. Looking at Epic's track record they certainly don't have experience with pixel shader power, but I bet they have made alot of CPU sales for AMD and Intel.
 
Doomtrooper said:
Well I find that hard to believe as 64-bit will be a minority even in two years, as will high end cards. Looking at Epic's track record they certainly don't have experience with pixel shader power, but I bet they have made alot of CPU sales for AMD and Intel.
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Well that's what Sweeny has been saying for a while. Even now, 64 bit CPUs are coming out of the realm of the workstation and are appearing on high end home and games machines. I don't think it's unlikely that Epic will say that their content creation tools (note: not their games themselves) will require 64bit.

Even now, Epic's content creation tools for UT2K3/4 are unusable on Win98/ME and need to have WinXP, and as they are technically an unsupported extra, I wouldn't be surprised to see them stipulate "64bit only" for their tools by 2006.
 
Doomtrooper said:
Well I find that hard to believe as 64-bit will be a minority even in two years, as will high end cards. Looking at Epic's track record they certainly don't have experience with pixel shader power, but I bet they have made alot of CPU sales for AMD and Intel.
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Well, I'm pretty sure you have more pixel shader experience than the developers of Epic. :rolleyes:
 
Doomtrooper said:
Well I find that hard to believe as 64-bit will be a minority even in two years, as will high end cards. Looking at Epic's track record they certainly don't have experience with pixel shader power, but I bet they have made alot of CPU sales for AMD and Intel.
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By your statement Valve has an even worse track record for pixel shaders. However, what appears in games is not necessarily indicative of programmers' capabilities and experience. Graphics programmer at Epic undoubtably have research projects going on (official or unofficial) where they experiment with and/or learn about the latest graphics features.
 
Hyp-X said:
Well, I'm pretty sure you have more pixel shader experience than the developers of Epic. :rolleyes:
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Funny, I didn't claim I did....I do find it humorous a developer famous for not using advanced features of modern video cards preaching about future hardware. You can read whatever you want into it :rolleyes:
 
Ostsol said:
By your statement Valve has an even worse track record for pixel shaders. However, what appears in games is not necessarily indicative of programmers' capabilities and experience. Graphics programmer at Epic undoubtably have research projects going on (official or unofficial) where they experiment with and/or learn about the latest graphics features.
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Nope, Valve hasn't been preaching about future hardware..my main concern is the obvious bias Epic has with certain IHV's and how powerful of a PC required to play their latest game at decent framerate on a 32 player server.
Epic has dissapointed me, a developer I really respected with the original UT.
 
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