G400 and Half-Life performance

[Micko]

Last night I made little testing after reading Sharky's G400 article. There were some low Half-Life Blowout test results so I decided to do little testing. Results were unexpected.
BTW, Sharky got 21.4 FPS with G400 MAX, compared to 39FPS of TNT2 ultra :-(

Test system: Celeron 464A(103x4.5), 128Mb RAM, Abit BH6, aztech A3D-PCI sound card, G200 SD 8Mb, Quontum and Seagate 6,4Gb hard drives, Voodoo2...was that all???

Blowout and G200 (not O'C)
800x600 - 24.9
1024x748 - 20.1

Blowout and G200 (OC'd with mxset)
1024x748 - 23.0

Oh mama! My OC'd G200 scores more than G400 MAX on P3-500MHz! And there were only few fps between 800x600 and 1024x748 resolution. But I can tell, 1024x748 was choppy(compared to 800x600). So this little Half-Life benchmark must be lying or what?

My conclusion,
G200/G400 triangle setup engine may not be 100% so that must be the reason why it scores worse than TNT2, which uses it's triangle setup 100%.
It would be nice to see test like Blowout on direct3d game, for examble on Shogo or Alien versus Predator. Would results be different?

Micko,

[R0M]

It has nothing to do with triangle setup, it's all in the drivers and we already found the problem

Thanks,

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"The opinions or comments expressed by me do not necessary reflect those of Matrox Graphics Inc."

[Tn]

Wow, R0m are you like somone sent from Matrox to seek redemption? I have never seen you here before, maybe because I'm not good at remembering names, but you seem to be helping people left and right all of a sudden.

Cheers,
Tn

[Kruzin]

Damn, Tn...you livin' under a rock or something?

r0m's been around here forever. He's our Matrox Gaming Guru (developer releations).

Maybe he's been a little quieter than usual for the last few weeks, but he's always been around, tossing in a post here and there.

[Tn]

I must be living in a cave but the pretty led and warmth of the computer is all the friend I need. Well I probably have seen you before but can't remember. I've only been on here for a couple months so maybe r0m started to slow down when I started speeding up.

[Genom]

Hey R0M, if you guiys found the HL problem, when might we be seeing that fixed? I havent played TFC since I put in the G400 cause of the low performance and/or crashes and I am starting to get the jones for some HL

[PhilS]

Hi all,

OK. So what is it that stops Half-Life performing well on a G400 system? Quake, Quake 2, Quake 3 Demo 1.06, Descent 3, MechWarrior 3 etc. all run perfectly except Half-Life.

I used to get a better frame rate with my 2 VooDoo 2's.

Thanks.

Phil.

[Kruzin]

gl_texsort "1"

[troop]

ROM

When will we see the drivers which , as you say , fix the problems with Half-Life multiplayer ?

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In Harm's Way

[Tom]

Kruzin,
Hello! That gl_texsort "1" added to the
command line REALLY woke up the OpenGL performance in Half-Life on my G400MAX.
Thanks for the great tip!

P.S..what does it do exactly to cause such
a dramatic increase in speed without any
loss to the image quality?

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MatroxG400MAX, AsusP2B-L(rev.1010), Celeron266(SL2QG@400MHz), 128MB PC100 SDRAM, QuantumFireball(ST)6.4, ADI MicroScanG66(19"), MonsterSoundMX200, PioneerDVD103-S(6x,32x), MotorolaCyberSURFR(cable), Windows98(4.10.1998+SP1)

[Frank]

That is 'magic'. I was very pleased with my gl performance, and at 1280 res, but that improved the lighting quality as dramatically as the rendering speed.
Its a bit like the highest texture autoexec.cfg I d/l for Quake2. It lit(?) up all the colours and made everything much clearer!
Thanks,
Frank.

[Kruzin]

That command does a couple things...

It disables Multi-texturings and it enabled "gl_overbright" to work. If you had gl_overbrigt in your autoexec, it wasn't really doing anything without the gl_texsort...

[PhilS]

Hi all,

Well I'm glad some other people have had success with gl_texsort "1" as it didn't do anything for me.

I'll give a little more details on my system

PII 300MHz (not overclocked)
LinkSys LENPCI2 NIC
SoundBlaster AWE64 Gold
128Mb PC-100 RAM
ABit BX6
Matrox G400 32Mb Dual-Head
2 IBM Hard disk drives
LS-120 FDD
Goldstar CD-ROM
Philips CD-RW


Software is latest version of HL (inc. TFC), Windows 95 R2.

Has anyone got any bright ideas why this seems to go down to less than 20fps for no reason at all?

Thanks in advance.

Phil.

[Kruzin]

I have one idea
"PII 300MHz (not overclocked)"

That's not much processor to be driving a G400. Voodoo cards are not nearly as processor dependant as the G400 (which doesn't start to really perform till 400+MHz). HL is a processor intense game, not leaving much left over for the G400 with a p2-300...

[Dude]

Ok-
How the heck do you benchmark half-life??? If I remember right, they just have a option to display realtime FPS. Is that all???