Tileing to speed 3D up ?

[Galvin]

Matrox isn't that much better, I still see artifacts with their ICD in win2K. And their ICD isn't exactly all that fast either.

I don't see ATI or Matrox having a problem, by the time whistler comes out both ATI and Matrox drivers will have matured quite a bit.

G400 was cool in it's time but it's aged and slow for today's games. Like I said until I get the card and try it out I can't make a strong argument for ATI.

[Indiana]

Originally posted by Galvin:
Matrox isn't that much better, I still see artifacts with their ICD in win2K. And their ICD isn't exactly all that fast either.

Nice said! The performance of Matrox' Win2k ICD is terrible. I get equal to worse results on my current Duron1026 than what I've got with the old Beta ICD on my Athlon600. While the old Beta ICD scales quite nice with the faster CPU, the newest ICD just gives low results on the gigahertz CPU (can't test it anymore with the old Athlon)

[Nuno]

Indiana:

I don´t know for you, but 5.20 finally brought Opengl performance on par with winME 6.xx drivers. Quake2 & 3 perform roughly the same (at least at the resolutions I care) in winME and win2k).

And if you consider that when the G400 was released, the driver revision was 5.13 (for win9x), there´s still some place for improvement in win2k...

[Pace]

Ok Galvin! I've never used the Win2K ICD (not that I can remember anyway)

Paul.

[Greebe]

Galvin,

And their ICD isn't exactly all that fast either.

No ICD can compensate for what is lacking in raw horse power in hardware.

[Indiana]

Nuno: look at http://forums.murc.ws/ubb/Forum5/HTML/009839.html
You'll have to scroll down quite a bit, there you can see some tests (Tirtanium) with the newest Win2k ICD against the 98SE one, against the old beta one. While the old beta scales quite well with the faster CPU, the newest ICD just performs bad. Also Win2k performance is even slower than in 98SE.

With Q-III I'm getting comparable speed in 2k as in 98SE, but then in 1024x768x32 QIII is heavily fillrate-limited on the G400. I got ~30fps even with my old Celi300a@450 (although with the faster old ICD and TGL), with my Duron1026 I get the same values as with an Athlon600: 33-34 fps.

It's an often made mistake to think QIII = OGL performance/compatibility. While QIII certailny uses OGL it's predictive value for other OGL apps is not that big.
Expecially nearly all of those nice OGL "scene"-demos run bad (slow / visual glitches / crashes) on the G400, MAME32 OGL won't run, then add most of the OGL screenblankers to this list.

[impact]

<a href="http://firingsquad.gamers.com/hardware/dreamcasthw/page4.asp">What is Tile Rendering and how it works</a>

[GinoCyber]

Indiana - "apparently works in Win2k with different res on the Geronimo boards."

Why wouldn't it work? Jeronimo Pro has 4 accelerators on it while the Jeronimo 2000 has 2 accelerators on it.

Ciao

[Nuno]

Yes, but you have to notice that almost every OGL game out there is based upon Q2/Q3 engine. It´s natural that every manufacturer tunes the drivers for quake. Theoretically, those Tirtanium results are interesting and denote that more tuning is necessary to the ICD. But them again people don´t play tirtanium, right?

With Q-III I'm getting comparable speed in 2k as in 98SE, but then in 1024x768x32 QIII is heavily fillrate-limited on the G400. I got ~30fps even with my old Celi300a@450 (although with the faster old ICD and TGL), with my Duron1026 I get the same values as with an Athlon600: 33-34 fps.

I´m not quite folowing you there. You state that Q3 at 1024x768x32 is fillrate limited and you wonder why you don´t get more fps with a duron 1Ghz than you did with a celery 450?

[Indiana]

No, I meant that I run Q-III (if I run it at all) most often in 1024x768x32-bilinear and that this probably is the reason for the G400 being as fast in Win2k as in Win98SE with Q-III here.

I'll have to test Q-III in 800x600x16 on Win2k against win98SE sometime...

What bothers me the most is that the newer OGL ICDs seems to get slower the more bugs Matrox fixes - and that I still can't run all those OGL scene-demos. To be honest I've already given up downloading them 'cause none the last four would work correct or even near to "fast enough" on the G400.

And hey, I'm not demanding that much for calling something "fast enough" (I'm also using an old C= A4000, and it IS fast enough.... )