High res textures and AGP aperture

eden · Jul 28, 2004

Following the DOOM III annoucement about video card memory requirements for each graphics quality setting, I was wondering, will we then see an advantage to higher AGP aperture settings?

Or will letting the card just swap RAM on its own be just fine, should we select higher quality settings using memory requirements beyond our card's amount?

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rumcooler · Jul 28, 2004

Maybe that might be some info in the Doom 3 tweak guide. They also mentioned being able to use eax as well,but if the cpu is doing the sound how will that work?

TheGreatGrapeApe · Jul 28, 2004

That's what I'm looking forward to.

If any game would stress a system this will be the game. I can't wait to see someone look into this extensively.

rumcooler, Eax is to be added LATER. iD and Creative inked/announced the deal yesterday or the day before IIRC. There will be a later release of Doom (or a patch I assume) that supports EAX.

Found the link. I thought Xbit was where I read it, but it was the InQ of course;
<A HREF="http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=17445" target="_new">http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=17445</A>

- You need a licence to buy a gun, but they'll sell anyone a stamp (or internet account) ! - RED GREEN GA to SK :evil:

Edited by TheGreatGrapeApe on 07/28/04 01:16 AM.

eden · Jul 28, 2004

EAX, such an old technology, finally to be included in DOOM III LOL, how ironic!

Kinda like how they got around to eventually add in multiplayer support.

First to new technology, last to previous technology!

But it would definitely be nice to have some sound enhancement technologies in there.

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PukePile · Jul 28, 2004

Sorry im a n00b. Whats EAX?

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eden · Jul 28, 2004

You never used any Sound Blaster Live or later?!

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evulboo · Jul 28, 2004

EAX ADVANCED HD™ is primarily all about games and is the new generation of EAX. EAX ADVANCED HD™ essentially adds sophisticated effects to otherwise flat and unrealistic sounds to mirror their real life properties

If u do things right.... People won't be sure you've done anything at all......

Ned_Flanders · Jul 28, 2004

google it you lazy crap!

Blow Dry my ass and call me Eden!

sweatlaserxp · Jul 28, 2004

I'm sure the original sound engine for Doom produces excellent fidelity and atmosphere; the reason why they did this was that it makes the program that much easier to port over to other platforms, OSX, Linux, etc., because you don't have to deal with re-writing your sound code for another API. IMO it was a really smart move. They said that the challenge was getting it to work in sync with the visuals, because the sound engine runs on a separate thread from the 3D engine. Hopefully they will also provide 3Dc support in a future patch as well.

eden · Jul 29, 2004

Dude, unless you pasted that, you can't be kidding me that you're adding trademark symbols for copyright infringement fears?!

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eden · Jul 29, 2004

EAX is just extending the effects you can do to sound in games. I believe it means Enhanced Audio Extensions.

EAX 2 or HD should be the one used in Audigys and does an even better job.

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xeenrecoil · Jul 29, 2004

Speaking of settings, ID has confirmed that the release version of Doom3 will have a max FPS of 60, im not sure i understand why, isnt there noticable frame loss at 60FPS, i know they say the average human cant see past 30, but we sure can see lag at 30 FPS, or atleast i can, lag is much less noticable at 60 but is still perceptable, so im wondering whats going on with them locking the framerate at 60 max, when in previous games like Quake3 framerates were set at 90FPS max by default. Are they saying if you have sufficient graphics horsepower then a solid 60FPS is all you will ever need? For some reason i disagree with that, dunno why...

sweatlaserxp · Jul 29, 2004

Because people used to be able to cheat because there were certain jumps that you could only make when there was a certain FPS rate. The FPS is only capped during gaming, during timedemos the framerate is unlimited, as you can see in the <A HREF="http://www2.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NjQyLDI=" target="_new">HardOCP</A> benchmarks.

eden · Jul 29, 2004

Ask yourself this, is most of your gameplay in DOOM III going to have 60FPS solid?

As has been said too, it's only in the game, not timedemos.

GrapeApe would also add the argument that since this is more of a crawler than a fast shooter, the 60FPS cap will be more than sufficient really.

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TheGreatGrapeApe · Jul 29, 2004

Well 60fps should be fine (especially if it's max 60 and min pretty much 45+), there may be issues with people with monitor issues, but it should do just fine for everyone else.

I would say it is a little slower paced than nultiplayer, but that is the question, will it impact multiplayer, being capped at 60fps, it will certainly level the playing field to some extent.

I wouldn't say it;s quite as much creeper as Splinter Cell since really there will be alot of jerky surprise firing wildly stuff, whereas Splinter cell is slow deliberate and rarely do things jump out at you. I'd say D3 falls somewhere in between Splinter Cell and Ut2K4/Q3, let's say half for the sake of arbitrary guessing.

- You need a licence to buy a gun, but they'll sell anyone a stamp (or internet account) ! - RED GREEN GA to SK :evil:

eden · Jul 30, 2004

I don't think it will impact multiplayer, unless the run is the same one as in DOOM II, as in, insanely fast running! Then I'd agree it might not be enough.

Do you believe when a card can do over 60FPS, it is perhaps wasting some rendering resources? I was wondering what if it used the information rendered beyond 60FPS worth of it, and stored it in a cache so it can fetch precalculated elements that might be recurrent and non random (random as in looking at certain angles, movement in different directions each time in the same place). Or maybe that kind of thing isn't happening in games? (I am reminded of CPU's prefetching)

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NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNEdited by Eden on 07/29/04 05:07 PM.

TheGreatGrapeApe · Jul 30, 2004

I'm not really sure if it does benifit from the cap, what you are describing would be the opposite of a wait state, and I'm not sure how it would deal with that, would it free up resources to make the min. not be as prominent? I would think only for a brief faction of a second since that benifit would be expended very VERY quickly I would thinking. Caching it wouldn't be as effective IMO, just because of the frequencies we are talking about. There is prefetching, but I doubt the fps cap would impact it much.

- You need a licence to buy a gun, but they'll sell anyone a stamp (or internet account) ! - RED GREEN GA to SK :evil:

GeneticWeapon · Jul 30, 2004

Following the DOOM III annoucement about video card memory requirements for each graphics quality setting, I was wondering, will we then see an advantage to higher AGP aperture settings?

Yes.
The texture size is going to be huge(even with textures compressed to DXT5), and just like in the Ruby demo, increasing agp aperature size, I'm predicting, will have a large effect on in-game framerates.

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eden · Jul 30, 2004

Which makes me wonder whether [H] tried to increase it for lower end cards to see the difference or not. Must've been at 64MB for the test GF4 MX 440.

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TheGreatGrapeApe · Jul 30, 2004

Didn't they mention it in [H]'s recent hardware guide that in order to run UltraHigh with the GF6800U they recommend large system memory, which would lead me to believe that likely there's alot of memory resource sharing going across back and forth.

Just a thouhgt. And yes I too am pretty certain D3 will expose features we've consistently said aren't a big concern.

I'd like to see detailed tests of agp speed 4vs8x , aperture size, memory size (at equal and slower speeds/even 64/128/256bit with more/less memory[the irony would be an FX5600-256mb beating and FX5700U-128mb or somethings strange like that, or R9600SE-256 beating and R9600-128), and even PCIe vs AGP.

I think this game will provide a whole new level of stresses we really only considered an issue for 'theoretical' benchmarking apps.

Can't wait to bench the crap out of it. Just wish I had a weekend to play with before heading out east.

- You need a licence to buy a gun, but they'll sell anyone a stamp (or internet account) ! - RED GREEN GA to SK :evil:

eden · Jul 30, 2004

Didn't they mention it in [H]'s recent hardware guide that in order to run UltraHigh with the GF6800U they recommend large system memory, which would lead me to believe that likely there's alot of memory resource sharing going across back and forth.

But this also makes me wonder whether modern cards don't already use the RAM memory without AGP Aperture amount specification or limits from it. In other words, I wonder if AGP Aperture isn't useless because when the game requests more memory than available on the card, it will likely fetch from system RAM?

[the irony would be an FX5600-256mb beating and FX5700U-128mb or somethings strange like that, or R9600SE-256 beating and R9600-128),

Didn't you notice how some cards behaved amazingly well with 256MB vs 128MB versions in the tests?
Take the <A HREF="http://www2.hardocp.com/image.html?image=MTA5MDc4NzE0M1RPNjJBTU9FV1hfN184X2wuZ2lm" target="_new">9800XT</A> vs the <A HREF="http://www2.hardocp.com/image.html?image=MTA5MDc4NzE0M1RPNjJBTU9FV1hfN185X2wuZ2lm" target="_new">9800PRO</A> where the minimum FPS under same settings is DRAMATICALLY different. Let's not lie to ourselves, the 9800XT really isn't such a big upgrade over the 9800PRO. This shows very well the 256MB memory makes a whole difference when it becomes intensive, leading to the minimum FPS. (you can downclock the XT to PRO levels and I bet it'd still be three times more performing in minimum frame rates for DOOM III)It also makes me wonder if we haven't been benching 256MB cards the wrong way, as in, testing average FPS when we should test them in minimum FPS situations, for other games? (remember the 9800XT tests done with ultra high resolutions and IQ enhancements?) Might be where ATi came up with their dramatic performance boost results in the PR benchmarks.

we've consistently said aren't a big concern.

The return of the controversial Fast Writes?

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TheGreatGrapeApe · Jul 30, 2004

Not sure about the first one. AGP Ap-size is still iffy until extensively investigated.

While I noticed the gaps, the differences wouldn't be as dramatic IMO as the FX5700U/5600 (5600 suck alot), and the SE would be severely bandwidth limited with 64bit versus 128bit memory. While the Pro and XT are similar and different, the above would be the shocking thing. An FX5600-256 which is a joke in everything else, beating an FX5700U in D3 would be one heck of a surprise to me. I agree about minimum FPS, to me that was always a concern, even looking back at LARS old R9800-256 review seeing the differences and when they occured was somewhat revealing. And really most of us are looking for good min FPS, and couldn't care less if the rest of the time it is 300fps, if for 2 seconds every minute it drops down to 4fps.

And truely the XT does have much faster memory speeds, and the single dip of the R9800Pro when compared side-by-side is really exagerated compared to the rest of the drops.

The other thing to rememeber is that the cores like the FX5600 really don't have anywhere near the same processing strength as these cards so how much of an impact is that?

Truely I'd prefer to see and evenly clocked R9800XT/PRO side by side. Then I'd be able to rule out the speed differences, because for all we know it may be a core benifit.

and...., Never Turn FW on! Kill it, KILL IT!

- You need a licence to buy a gun, but they'll sell anyone a stamp (or internet account) ! - RED GREEN GA to SK :evil:

High res textures and AGP aperture

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