Hard Light Productions Forums
General FreeSpace => FreeSpace Discussion => Topic started by: The E on December 25, 2017, 12:00:09 pm
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So, for christmas, I got a nice little upgrade for my PC. I got myself a Samsung ultrawide screen (a C34F791, to be exact) and a GTX 1070 to make pixels appear.
Then I discovered how easy it is to use the GeForce driver to record video, and so I made a few vids rendering a couple cutscenes from WIH and others.
But then I thought, a) that's boring, and b) I haven't actually played FS2 in ages, so I might just as well get back into it. And to motivate me, I'm gonna record me doing it and upload it all to the youtubes.
Here's Mission 1, then:
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Ooooh, so many pixels! And that glow off the engines!
And the god rays!
pretttyyyyy...
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I'm not sure what FOV you're running but it looks like it's over 100. Now that's great for visibility but if you want to get rid of those edge distortions like planets becoming completely egg-shaped you should probably bring that down to around 80. With how FSO does FOV that should be -fov 0.5 with a 21:9 monitor.
And if you want the HUD to look less smeary once Youtube is done ruining processing your video you should set the HUD to white or very light blue.
Of course you could also not do any of those and keep rocking that default green with a FOV that really gives you a gameplay advantage(and emphasises the extra width of the screen).
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You're a keyboard flyer, aren't you?
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I'm not sure what FOV you're running but it looks like it's over 100. Now that's great for visibility but if you want to get rid of those edge distortions like planets becoming completely egg-shaped you should probably bring that down to around 80. With how FSO does FOV that should be -fov 0.5 with a 21:9 monitor.
And if you want the HUD to look less smeary once Youtube is done ruining processing your video you should set the HUD to white or very light blue.
Of course you could also not do any of those and keep rocking that default green with a FOV that really gives you a gameplay advantage(and emphasises the extra width of the screen).
Good suggestions, thank you. I'll look into them and switch if I like it.
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You're a keyboard flyer, aren't you?
Joystick, actually. But I haven't really used that stick for FS much; this is a learning experience in that regard as well.
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You're a keyboard flyer, aren't you?
Joystick, actually. But I haven't really used that stick for FS much; this is a learning experience in that regard as well.
Your movements appeared linear and without smooth changes in speed. That led me to believe that you were controlling direction with keys, which leave few variations in directional movement, and since a key is just on or off, you can't really so subtle increases or decreases in movement.
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@The_E: By "driver recording" do you mean you used NVIDIA Shadowplay (via GeForce Experience)? Or did you use a different program (e.g. OBS) using NVENC?
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Shadowplay.
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Shadowplay is really good, much better than OBS studio in terms of quality and performance impact. It's also really easy to set up. A very convincing argument to switch to Nvidia.
AMD has its ReLive which is comparable for anything but OpenGL since AMD sometimes like to pretend that OGL is a made up communist plot and refuse to detect it. Their driver can't even force Vsync, AA, or AF on OGL let alone record gameplay.
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Oh no :( I was planning a switch to AMD just for Eyefinity not requiring matched displays (NVIDIA Surround does, which sucks w/ 21:9 center, flanked by two 16:9). I'm surprised - I thought AMD had amazing OpenGL/Vulkan support :wtf: I'll do some research on this. I suppose if I upgrade to an i7 the OBS performance hit won't matter as much anyway...
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AMD does have very good Vulkan support. However, its OpenGL support has, for a long time, been lagging behind NVidia's.
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[AMD] OpenGL support has, for a long time, been lagging behind NVidia's.
In what way? Just curious (am looking for examples right now)
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"Lagging behind" is putting it very lightly. "Has been absolute crap" would be more accurate.
For specifics, the driver can't hook onto OGL apps most of the time and even when it does it usually can't force driver settings. The built-in recording and screenshot features won't work with OGL. This also means no hardware monitoring which makes benchmarking harder and you'll have to use a 3rd party app.
And your framerates will be MUCH worse(we're talking 15%-40% worse, often resulting in unplayable framerates) than a comparable Nvidia card or comparably demanding DirectX game. Though overall there are very few OpenGL games out there that are also very demanding. So even with the absolutely horrible driver you can still brute force something like FSO.
This is coming from someone who has owned AMD cards for the past ~7 years and I still own one.
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A simple example is shadows in FSO. Even a card as recent as an RX480 has trouble achieving good framerates at particularly busy scenes (Icarus, for example).
Now, granted, FSO isn't exactly super-optimized, but it's not like we're doing anything particularly weird when setting up our frames and issuing them to the driver. Especially since we cleaned up the interface to use OGL core instead of OGL compatibility, we should be able to run better on AMD, but we very clearly are not.
Take a look at this:
This is Icarus on a GTX 1070 at 3440x1440. The framerate stays at or close to 100 FPS at all times (except when a frame is late because a new asset had to be loaded in).
Now compare to this: This is the same cutscene (albeit with an experimental build with autogenerated lensflares, please ignore those), running at 1920x1080 on an RX 480. Its framerate flucuates wildly; dipping far below 30 frames per second.
Now, granted, the 1070 is a much more powerful card. But even that power differential can't explain the performance differential seen here. Since the 480 is an otherwise very capable card and definitely no slouch when it comes to DX12 or Vulkan-based games, I think we can safely blame AMD's implementation of OpenGL for the performance issues the cards have.
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3440 x 1440 is a 2.3 times greater resolution than 1080p. The 1070 doesn't have 2.3 times the power of a 480.
In DooM's Vulkan Benchmarks the 480 posts 81.2 at 2560 x 1440 Vulkan and 66.9 in OpenGL while the 1070 posts 101.1 on OpenGL and 102.2 on Vulkan.
The 480 loses over 20% of its framerate and that's with Id's engine team who are really good at optimization. In FSO the fps loss is much greater than that, especially if shadows are enabled. With them off any relatively powerful card should be able to just brute force a stable 60.
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The Windows OpenGL drivers of AMD have a pretty high CPU overhead compared to the Nvidia drivers. Since rendering the shadows requires a second pass over the scene enabling them has a very high FPS impact on AMD. Nvidia also uses a second thread for actually performing the rendering operations which is not done by the AMD drivers which increases the CPU time spent in the driver code on the main thread even more. In fact, the Windows drivers are so bad that some times the open source Linux driver is twice as fast as the Windows drivers (on Linux I can maintain 60 FPS in the Icarus cutscene while it drops below 30 FPS on Windows with an RX480).