Disabling PS2.0 on FX5900 made me happy

[Daneel Olivaw]

I'm currently running my FX5900XT (1 year old) with VS2.0/PS1.4
The visual loss is less than I expected, and the performance gain is tremendous. I realize this brings me pretty much back to my Ti4200 but at least now FarCry is smooth and I still have nice graphics.

Battle out of Hell looks incredible (outside the orphanage for example) even in PS1.4
I've lost a few reflections in painkiller, and some lighting (torches for example) have gone down in quality, but at least now I can have shadows. And in FarCry, no matter the setting before, inside the carrier was unplayable with those metal highlights.

Nvidia, The way it's meant to be played... not so much.
Bah, I'm still happy with the card. So, if newer games run like crap, FX users could think about disabling PS2.0 compliance. See for yourself, not everyone will like that though.

[Pandora's Box]

thats all well and good. but i bet most will say that you shouldnt have to disable ps2.0 on a card that was supposed to have great directx 9 support.

[Daneel Olivaw]

I know. That's been talked about quite a bit. I just wanted to say to FX users, "try it, maybe you'll find it ain't so bad."

Lame shadows and no reflections make a game look less special, but 15fps framerates make a game unplayable.
And I wasn't playing FarCry because of that. Now I am. I can aim and shoot a guy in the carrier without wasting 6 bullets because of lag now.

Good nice Rivatuner. This is mostly intended for guys like the one that posted "ack my 5900 scores 1300 points in 3dmark05" which looked to me like flamebait but, oh well.

[Sazar]

end of the day... if the card is running the games you want it to run adequately... then thats the most important thing :)

congrats and enjoy... :thumbsup:

[Daneel Olivaw]

FarCry, everything at maximum except textures, high (last before max). VS2.0 PS1.4
No AA no AF
MipMap bias -1.0, rivatuner high quality texture filtering
Framerate smooth
recompressed to 85% in ACDsee

[Daneel Olivaw]

.

[FlyingHorse]

How do you disable PS2.0?

[Pandora's Box]

isnt far cry mostly using vs anyway?

[Daneel Olivaw]

>FlyingHorse: In Rivatuner (a software), http://www.guru3d.com
under Directx -> shaders -> pixel shaders -> force 1.4
I kept vertex shaders at 2.0 since the GeforceFX handles them properly.

I also use high quality texture filtering in Rivatuner, and a mip map bias of -1.0, these two combined give (near) perfect quality without using anisotropic filtering, so performance stays up.

And believe me, the few pixel shaders there are in the carrier made the game unplayable. I had to drop settings that I can now keep at maximum. Try it! (though with either your TNT or 6800 it's not really applicable) :)

Till now, it makes a good difference in Painkiller BOOH and FarCry. I haven't tried anything else.

[fivefeet8]

None of those shots you took are using PS2. You'll have to go to the inside areas with lots of pipes to see some PS2 effects.

[Daneel Olivaw]

None of those shots you took are using PS2. You'll have to go to the inside areas with lots of pipes to see some PS2 effects.

Indeed, that's where framerates get unplayable. I know FX cards are crap (relatively speaking). But I want to play, so a slideshow of highlights on pipes is not what I'm looking for.

I wanted to show that the incredible graphics, water, trees, etc, are not affected by this.

now for the pipes (PS1.4)

[Daneel Olivaw]

. I'm not arguing, I'm making a suggestion. Thanks to all those who reply, pointing out that I need to show where we loose in quality was an important idea.

Thank you fivefeet8 :). Do you know of other obvious effects I should check out?

[msxyz]

But isn't far Cry just using PS 1.1 as fallback path for GeForcesFX ?

[Daneel Olivaw]

I'm running patch 1.3 and force VS2.0 and PS1.4 in rivatuner. I see nearly no loss in image quality and my framerates have skyrocketed compared to before (forcing nothing).

Other than that, that's with the same PC setup.

[Daneel Olivaw]

SM 3.0 and SM 2.0x are now enabled by default when graphics settings are set to ‘Very High’. To see performance increases you must have Direct X 9.0c installed.

This is from patch 1.3 change log, HOWEVER, I MOST CERTAINLY WASN'T RUNNING ANYTHING IN 'VERY HIGH' QUALITY before forcing PS1.4
I tried running in 'Very High', high or medium, and I swear, forcing (PS1.4 made 'Very High') smoother than (medium with PS2.0).

I KNOW I'm loosing some effects, but what counts stayed: Heat Haze, reflections, normal mapping etc...

[Daneel Olivaw]

(bump)(bump)(bump)

[FXRunner]

I've just done this and am hugely impressed / very happy with the result - as far as image quality goes: the only way I can honestly tell the difference in Far Cry is the lower framerate when PS2.0 is enabled - I lost a fair bit of performance with the 1.3 patch (was never choppy indoors but became so with 1.3) so am really happy to get it back with this fix. Even in HL2 I'm seeing a great improvement in performance (ie. can use higher AA settings happily) with virtually no loss in image quality - thanks Daneel!!.

Oh, just thought I should add: I was quite surprised when I upgraded from my P4 2.0 / Ti4200 rig to this A64 setup that the only really noticeable improvement to Far Cry was in performance - the image was great with the Ti4200 and so remained pretty much the same but with higher framerate on the new rig (so I was able to turn up in game settings).

I don't know whether this is an indictment of the FX5900 or PS 2.0, or indeed a great rap for the venerable Ti4200.

[rewt]

The Ti4200 was a great card indeed. But even with a 4x2 Pixel Pipeline design (same as the FX 5900 and 5950U btw) it still differs greatly in core and memory clock speeds. Also the Ti4200 is not DX 9.0 compatible. Thus it cannot match the speed or quality of the FX 5900.

[Daneel Olivaw]

The Ti4200 was a great card indeed. But even with a 4x2 Pixel Pipeline design (same as the FX 5900 and 5950U btw) it still differs greatly in core and memory clock speeds. Also the Ti4200 is not DX 9.0 compatible. Thus it cannot match the speed or quality of the FX 5900.

To be honest, to me the 5900 series of cards is like a Ti4600 on steroids with delusions of grandure.

I love the cards, but PS2.0 IS unusable on the FX5900. As soon as more than one PS2.0 shader is used, everything slows to a crawl. VS2.0 runs fine.

The performance improvement from going from a Geforce 4 Ti to a Geforce FX 59xx is perfectly in sync with the increase in clockspeed. The process is 13microns instead of 15, that should account for the higher clock.

AA and AF have been improved though... or rather, the 59xx doesn't do FSAA anymore, maybe the algorithm is different and the core architecture is the same.

I can be proven wrong of course.

I think the 59xx series is exactly the same core architecture as the GF4 ti, on a smaller process, but they jury-rigged a half-assed attempt at PS2 support and changed the AA and AF algorithms.

Again, I love the GF4 ti and the GFFX 5900! I'm just saying what I think.

[Daneel Olivaw]

I've just done this and am hugely impressed / very happy with the result - as far as image quality goes: the only way I can honestly tell the difference in Far Cry is the lower framerate when PS2.0 is enabled - I lost a fair bit of performance with the 1.3 patch (was never choppy indoors but became so with 1.3) so am really happy to get it back with this fix. Even in HL2 I'm seeing a great improvement in performance (ie. can use higher AA settings happily) with virtually no loss in image quality - thanks Daneel!!.
My pleasure.
Some indoor pipes are less shiny.
BTW, I slowed my CPU to 1200MHz, and changed my GFFX5900 to a GFFX 5200 64bit and kept the EXACT same settings (every thing maxed, texture high, PS1.4 VS2.0) 1024x768 no AA no AF, and Far Cry ran fine. One Gig of ram is the most important thing it seems, not CPU speed.

[msxyz]

I've reinstalled Far Cry + patch 1.3, set everything to max and here's the log:

****** D3D9 CryRender Stats ******
Driver description: NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700 Ultra
Full stats: HAL (pure hw vp): NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700 Ultra
Hardware acceleration: Yes
Full scene AA: Enabled: 2x Samples (0 Quality)
Projective EMBM: Enabled
Detail textures: Enabled
Z Buffer Locking: Enabled
Multitexturing: Supported (8 textures)
Use bumpmapping : Enabled (DOT3)
Use paletted textures : Disabled
Current Resolution: 1024x768x32 Full Screen
Maximum Resolution: 1024x768
Maximum Texture size: 4096x4096 (Max Aspect: 4096)
Texture filtering type: TRILINEAR
HDR Rendering: Disabled
MRT Rendering: Disabled
Occlusion queries: Supported
Geometry instancing: Not supported
NormalMaps compression: V8U8
Gamma control: Hardware
Vertex Shaders version 2.0
Pixel Shaders version 2.0
Use Hardware Shaders for NV3x GPU
Pixel shaders usage: PS1.1 only
Vertex shaders usage: VS1.1 only

So Far Cry still uses PS 1.1 for NV3x hardware, even with patch 1.3 and setting everything to "high quality". I then forced PS 1.4 through Rivatuner menu, restarted Far Cry and looked again at the log:

****** D3D9 CryRender Stats ******
Driver description: NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700 Ultra
Full stats: HAL (pure hw vp): NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700 Ultra
Hardware acceleration: Yes
Full scene AA: Enabled: 2x Samples (0 Quality)
Projective EMBM: Enabled
Detail textures: Enabled
Z Buffer Locking: Enabled
Multitexturing: Supported (8 textures)
Use bumpmapping : Enabled (DOT3)
Use paletted textures : Disabled
Current Resolution: 1024x768x32 Full Screen
Maximum Resolution: 1024x768
Maximum Texture size: 4096x4096 (Max Aspect: 4096)
Texture filtering type: TRILINEAR
HDR Rendering: Disabled
MRT Rendering: Disabled
Occlusion queries: Supported
Geometry instancing: Not supported
NormalMaps compression: V8U8
Gamma control: Hardware
Vertex Shaders version 2.0
Pixel Shaders version 1.4
Use Hardware Shaders for NV2x GPU
Pixel shaders usage: Replace PS.2.0 to PS.1.1
Vertex shaders usage: Replace VS.2.0 to VS.1.1

Forcing PS 1.4 shaders actually tricks Far Cry into thinking it's dealing with a NV2x GPU: the engine automatically adjusts itself to use less shaders (The difference is visible in levels like "Carrier") resulting in an overall higher performance.

I couldn't run Far Cry using 3DAnalyze for comparisons tests because it does not seem to start through this utility (I'm using version 2.34)

[rewt]

FX 5900 is more like a jacked up Ti 4800 with DirectX 9 support. FX also have the ability to do full trilinear filtering in hardware/software.

PS2.0 runs absolutely fine on my system at resolutions of 1024 x 768 with some AA and AF. So I would have to disagree that it is totally unusable.

[Daneel Olivaw]

FX 5900 is more like a jacked up Ti 4800 with DirectX 9 support. FX also have the ability to do full trilinear filtering in hardware/software.

PS2.0 runs absolutely fine on my system at resolutions of 1024 x 768 with some AA and AF. So I would have to disagree that it is totally unusable.

You're telling me that inside the carrier, for example, your framerates are fluid and confortable?

[nVidiaGuru]

with the right drivers and a bit of overclocking/tweaking my FX is very capable of running todays games. I can run CS:S at 1280x1024 2x 8x (forced fp16) high settings in dx9 and avg depending on map 40-60fps. With farcry i can run 1280x1024 2xaf and avg ~40fps. While faster would be nicer as it always is the frames i get are still acceptable for me