Them shadows are a ***** arnt they

September 26th, 2006, 10:18 AM

so i have been playing quake, nfs:mw etc and i have found that if i disable the shadows, i get a tremendous increase in speed.
for ex, i was just playing quake and testing my X1300 512 mb card.
i was playing at high settings and at 800X600. i was getting an average of maybe 28fps (AA was at 2x)
now i pushed my AA to 6x and AF to 16x and same settings. now i got 18-19 fps
and finally,
i increased my res to 1024x768, AA to 4x, AF to 16x, all settings on high AND shadows OFF.
now i got an unbelievable 32fps

how the hell?????
shadows arnt that buggy are they?

S31Kronos · September 26th, 2006, 09:58 PM

Shadows are the biggest impact to graphics. If you think about it, it makes sense. The shadow moves where you move, shadows around objects you see move when you move. When you think about the shadow for just your character, it's like having another character being drawn.

phxz31 · September 27th, 2006, 02:42 AM

Its actually mostly because your video card is the lowest end card ATI sells at the moment. I tested on my system and shadows don't make that much of a difference at all, its HDR that kills my system.

squall_leonhart · September 27th, 2006, 10:36 AM

actually its becoz ATI has no Shadow acceleration engine like Nvidia does,

but NFS:MW shadows suck anyway.

Unixlord · September 27th, 2006, 04:06 PM

Remember that Quake4 is an Nvidia game. You'll get less performance than you deserve on that ATI card. Try HL2 instead that seems to like ATI cards. These game developers should grow up one day.

Treehumper · September 27th, 2006, 10:48 PM

It's because they code the game using one company's hardware or the other. The coding is almost the same thanks to the DirectX or OpenGL API's being supported by all card manufacturers but since they use just one company's card when they make it it's obvious that the game is gonna be a little biased. Not much we can do unless we want to buy the big game companies the other video cards they don't have.

Edit: And often, one particular video card company will provide the production cards either for free or as part of a financial investment into the game... usually the gaming companies will get one OR the other, nVidia OR ATI, very rarely both... Like Blizzard, they get both because both companies see the huge financial gain. If they hear that the other company beat them to the punch on a smaller game they'll skip out and then they'll just optimize their drivers for the game after it's released, but that doesn't ALWAYS do the trick.

Unixlord · September 27th, 2006, 11:20 PM

They should add an "ATI: They way it's not meant to be played" logo after the nvidia one.

Treehumper · September 27th, 2006, 11:39 PM

One good counterexample would be Titan Quest... it runs much better on ATI cards than it ever has on nVidia cards. Perhaps because developer Iron Lore programmed everything on their ATI cards, who knows. That's the point behind an API, though... regardless of how the game is coded it'll run on any hardware thanks to DirectX or OpenGL, but that doesn't mean it'll run as good as it would on the original hardware.

There's not much we can do about developers' selections of video hardware but wait for the optimizing drivers, and even then you might have to find other ways to tweak your system with stuff like Riva Tuner. I've seen people go as far as rewriting the game's base executable in order to run the game better... they did it with my example from above, Titan Quest. Sometimes people just get that desperate...

September 28th, 2006, 06:11 AM

it still doesnt make sense to me that shadows can cut the game speed in half. i'm an animator ad work all the time with shadows. never bothered me

squall_leonhart · September 28th, 2006, 08:51 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Treehumper

One good counterexample would be Titan Quest... it runs much better on ATI cards than it ever has on nVidia cards. Perhaps because developer Iron Lore programmed everything on their ATI cards, who knows. That's the point behind an API, though... regardless of how the game is coded it'll run on any hardware thanks to DirectX or OpenGL, but that doesn't mean it'll run as good as it would on the original hardware.

There's not much we can do about developers' selections of video hardware but wait for the optimizing drivers, and even then you might have to find other ways to tweak your system with stuff like Riva Tuner. I've seen people go as far as rewriting the game's base executable in order to run the game better... they did it with my example from above, Titan Quest. Sometimes people just get that desperate...

nothing to do with it.

its becoz Nvidia are better at Opengl.

i bet if ATI had a better ICD and better shadow acceleration it would outperform nvidia.

i bet if Nvidia had a better Shader x RoP architecture it would thrash ATI