First time using OpenGL driver!
BlitzMax Forums/BlitzMax Programming/First time using OpenGL driver!
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| Are you $!@#%^& me? Today was my first time using the ogl drivers with bmax. To my !shock! my frame rates are 20-30% FASTER using ogl compared to the dx7 drivers! I'm getting better 2D sprite performance on my old dev kit using ogl than I ever did under DX8! wow... I've read where Vista is doing some weird things to OpenGL under the hood, is OpenGL still being supported by all the gpu makers today on Vista? I've scanned through some of the forum posts, it looks like 2DMax just performs better under ogl compared to dx7. I guess the logical thing to do for a commercial game is to run a quick render speed test if both drivers are available and pick the fastest one automagically. ;) |
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| the biggest problem, if I remember correctly, is opengl support on pre XP machines is very poor if it exists at all. (if you want to target them) |
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| Results greatly depend on your videocard/drivers... some have better OGL framerates than DX7, but for most it seems to be the other way around. (Hence why BMax defaults to DirectX under windows) |
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| Current problem: Vista GL driver are crap. AMD GL drivers for vista are not much better an cause crashes and serious slow downs (Torque engine experience) beside that, no problem. Even on my Intel GMA 900 which has only xpdm drivers on vista, opengl works without any problem :) And yes, generally OpenGL will perform better than DX7 But there is a usermade DX9 driver module, that in most cases will outperform the OpenGL driver again :) |
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| ahh ok. It was still cool to see those higher frame rates. Does anyone think a pre-render test for a few seconds when the program first runs to see which driver is the fastest is a good idea? Or just let the end user switch drivers from within the game at their descretion. |
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| If it doesn't take any noticeable time to test it then it sounds like a good idea. |
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| I've had no problems with the nvidia GL drivers on vista64. with those, Max's GL driver kills the DX driver on my 8800. of course, your mileage may vary. @xlsior, care to back that up... all the tests that I've seen detailed on these boards show the GL driver always way ahead of the DX7 drivers (in XP at least). also I was pretty sure that even the DX9 driver, while much better than the 7 was bested by the GL driver... but I'm not sure about that so Dreamora's memory could very well be better than mine. |
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| Not sure. I remember some games back in the day that had a 'find optimal settings'option in their menu somewhere, where it would try various graphics modes and effects to see how well they would work. If you don't want a bunch of stuff flashing around on the screen you could even consider just using a bunch of black sprites doing stuff with a simple 'test in progress' text while they do their thing. |
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| Although using the DX9-mod makes some things rendered faster but also crappier on some machines. Like I stated in another post, the DX9-mod makes sprites looking like memorydumps when using the single-surface-TAnim-code out of the forum. Also some transparencythings when grabbing images are looking like garbage dump on my older test-pc with sis-onboard-graphicscard-chip. So if your graphicscard is a bit older you may experience nice fps but garbage with dx9 and single-surface but a nifty increase of fps on newer cards (the single-surface-thingy didn't made that huge increase). And to not be too off-topic here: on nearly all pcs my users possess the OGL-implementation was outrun by the DX9-Mod. The only exceptions are the older onboard-chips, they all had to fall back to dx7 or ogl (garbaged sprites). bye MB |
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| Don't think anyone said above but the DX7 is slower then OpenGL in Bmax because the DX7 code has a LAG FIX (search the forums) to prevernt a horrible render lag problem. This slows down the DX7 framerate considerable but at least things are playable. Without the lag fix the framerate compares withy OpenGL on my PC. |
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| it was slower before the lag fix... |
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| Oh OK, but the lag fix does have a huge impact. To be honest I'd have thought it would have more to do with the video card as in some can do OpenGL better than DX and some can't. |
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