G200 PD 5.21 = Half-Life problems

[Phil]

OK OK OK

The HL D3D driver is an OpenGL wrapper - just trust me I know this is a fact.

As for performance - I have three different bootable partitions - each one gives different FPS on this machine (same OS - often different driver releases but at the moment the same) and I get wildly different benchmarks from them all in different conditions. I know that Kruzin is damned good at optimizing Quake engine based games and has helped many many many readers in the past - ok - your results aren't as good as his yet...shame... but that doesn't make him wrong does it?

So...

1) Accept it's a wrapper even though you stated he was wrong on that earlier (it's very very similar code to the code you'll find in the Heretic II wrapper. That wrapper, and, who knows.. maybe this had a little help from the Matrox developers)

2) Ask Kruzin for help to increase your FPS rather than turning this into a bloody argument - ok - he started with a *sigh* - but as that suggests... He's been here before!



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Phil

[Joel]

Kruzin is right, the D3D support is a D3D/OpenGL wrapper. That is one of the reason that when in OpenGL mode you will see things that you don't in D3D. When I was finally able to get HL playing in OpenGL better than D3D using the configuration information that Kruzin has posted I knew I would not go back to D3D mode. IMO looks and plays better. So it is possible to have OpenGL running faster than D3D if things are set up right. BTW I have an AMD K6/2-400.

Joel

[Nuno]

I am with Kruzin and Joel.
In my system (celeron 450, G400@150/200) Half-Life:
- OpenGl looks better than D3D
- The text is blurry in D3D, it´s sharp in OpenGl. I think it´s bilinear filtered in D3D, that´s why it´s blurry.
- OpenGL is FASTER than D3D in my system (thanks to Kruzin, he gave the gl_texsort hint)
- D3D is implemented in Half-Life via a wrapper. Even if it was not common-knowedgle by know, if it uses the quake2 engine, the whole engine would have to be re-written to do D3D. Not very wise.

[ALBPM]

I'll take Kruzin's side on this issue as well. My G400 Max kicks ASS in opengl, I wouldn't even think about using D3D in Half-Life. I have also heard from other reliable sources that HL uses a D3D Wrapper.

I even use Kruzin's graphics config for Q2. I've modified a few of his settings so they work great for my G400 or my Obsidian2 X-24.

Paul

[Maggi]

Hi Guys,

it looks like everything is said already

Kruzin's 100% correct ...

HL's D3D is based on an OGL to D3D wrapper, hence there's theoretically no chance to get better performance in D3D.

Maybe the lack of certain functions in D3D might speed it a bit more than OGL, but exactly that is the reason why evreybody should have a look into his/her config files.

When you set up both API's identically, you'll see that:

1 - OGL is way superior in image quality
2 - OGL is faster
3 - you don't want to use D3D any more


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CU,
Maggi
________________________
Asus P2B-DS @ 103MHz FSB
2x P3-450 @ 464MHz
512MB CAS2 SDRAM
Millenium G400 32MB DH

[Snake-Eyes]

Hello everyone.

I agree with the you all that D3D is a wrapper with Half-Life too. But Maggi, at the moment, there is no basis for stating that theoretically the unwrappered game would run faster in OpenGL than the wrapper runs in D3D. This is entirely dependent on the quality/performance of a given piece of hardware's D3D and OpenGL drivers. And, as well all know, right now both the G200 and G400 series have much better optimized D3D drivers than they have OpenGL drivers. So, depending on HOW much faster the card is able to perform a certain operation using the D3D API than it can do the same op in OpenGL, and depending on the amount of overhead used by a wrapper to go between the game engine the the "wrapped" API, the game could run faster in either of the two. Everything depends on how well optimized the drivers for the two APIs are.

With the current state of Matrox' OpenGL ICD, it wouldn't surprise me too much to see that some are able to get the D3D HL to run faster, taking into consideration differences in hardware and preferred settings in the game.

I will give you this- if (and hopefully, when) Matrox finally gets their ICD as well optimized as their D3D, the native OpenGL should always run faster than the D3D wrapped version of Half-Life.

Also, Kruzin, keep in mind that not all of us got a speed increase from the latest OpenGL drivers, or even necessarily stayed the same. I've benched my card using Q2 and Q3 with both the old 5.13 and the new 5.21 drivers, and I actually lost performance. And, yes, I did read, and tried to implement, the reg key to disable the V-Sync for 5.21. That made absolutely no difference in the FPS score in either game for the new drivers.

System Basics, in case you're still wondering (or haven't picked them from another post):
P3-450@558
G400Max (default clock)
256MB PC100 Ram
SbLive!Value (latest drivers)
Abit BE6 motherboard
Win98SE

Using this system, without changing anything but the drivers (and using the reg hacks to make sure V-Sync is disabled), I get ~15.1 FPS with everything on or high in Q3demo1, new drivers. I got ~23.7 with the 5.13 drivers. Makes me wonder if those "fixes" for P3's that these drivers implemented involve disabling any SSE optimizations that might have been in the previous drivers.

Later, and have fun fraggin'.

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Ace

[This message has been edited by Ace (edited 09-10-1999).]

[Haig]

Hi guys,

Look at http://www.matrox.com/mga/drivers/pa...os/patches.htm

You will see that we do use a D3D wrapper.

Haig