nVidia and 2D

[Mike Boeh]

The game I am working on is 2D, all software....
I am seeing horrible performance with geforce cards, roughly 3-4 times slower than ATI... Is there still a bug in nvidia drivers that hurts 2D performance? And if there is, are there any work-a-rounds? I have tried the obvious stuff, but had no luck :(

[lakibuk]

There has to be some driver problems with nvidia. My 2D game got a strange slowdown after i installed a new version of the drivers. Since then i tried to install the lastest drivers (yesterday was my last update) but the slowdown is still there. My game pauses after i change from one screen to another, like going from menu to the game. That's where the whole screen graphics is drawn again,should be really fast on new graphic cards. I am using directx7.

[Scorpio]

There was an earlier thread talking about overlapping windows and needing to add a call to Sleep() to get around a performance bug in the driver.

We actually had a few customers run into performance problems recently with both Flip Words and Puzzle Express. They were all running full-screen but I made a new build of the games that had a call to "Sleep(0);" in the main update function...kind of as a longshot (our customers are not very technical so it's hard to get detailed info out of them).

To my surprise, it solved their slowdown problems and didn't seem to affect performance at all. Might be worth a try if you're not doing it already.
-Scorpio

[Mike Boeh]

There was an earlier thread talking about overlapping windows and needing to add a call to Sleep() to get around a performance bug in the driver.

We actually had a few customers run into performance problems recently with both Flip Words and Puzzle Express. They were all running full-screen but I made a new build of the games that had a call to "Sleep(0);" in the main update function...kind of as a longshot (our customers are not very technical so it's hard to get detailed info out of them).

To my surprise, it solved their slowdown problems and didn't seem to affect performance at all. Might be worth a try if you're not doing it already.
-Scorpio
Unfortunately, this appears to be a different problem... I have also encountered the Sleep thing you are talking about, and a Sleep(0) did fix it... But this problem is specific to nvidia...

[Lerc]

One problem I have found that I am assuming to be driver related is palette changing. It seems to take about 100ms. Consequently palette fades go particularly badly.

Actually, now that I think about it A second problem I had may have the same root cause.

Page flipping was horribly slow if you tried to flip more then the display refresh. for instance if I tried flipping whenever the new frame was ready and it was drawing 100fps. If the display mode was at 60Hz there would be a massive delay (up to a second).

It is possible there is something wrong with it's ability to check for the retrace and it decides to wait in those two examples and misses them repeatedly.

I have a geForce 2 and a Radeon 9000 and both problems only affect the geForce machine.

[Gilzu]

The game I am working on is 2D, all software....
I am seeing horrible performance with geforce cards, roughly 3-4 times slower than ATI... Is there still a bug in nvidia drivers that hurts 2D performance? And if there is, are there any work-a-rounds? I have tried the obvious stuff, but had no luck :(


DirectX? OpenGL? ver. number? have you tried disabling a parts of your main loop to eliminate other bugs?

I had numerous myterius slow-downs/blitting/hanging bugs from text-blitting, time-taking or other non related functions which all appeared only on the latest(!) nvidia series.

anyway, let us know if you figured out a way around.

[Mike Boeh]

DirectX? OpenGL? ver. number? have you tried disabling a parts of your main loop to eliminate other bugs?

I had numerous myterius slow-downs/blitting/hanging bugs from text-blitting, time-taking or other non related functions which all appeared only on the latest(!) nvidia series.

anyway, let us know if you figured out a way around.
If it's software 2D, using DirectX.... And of course I did all that stuff :)

[Wayward]

A similar issue was reported on the Blitz forums, caused by an nVidia driver bug (possibly with DX 7) which nVidia have promised to fix in their next release.

Find more details here (http://www.blitzbasic.com/Community/posts.php?topic=19648).

[Gilzu]

If it's software 2D, using DirectX...

sure, but DX version?

[Gilzu]

A similar issue was reported on the Blitz forums, caused by an nVidia driver bug (possibly with DX 7) which nVidia have promised to fix in their next release.

Find more details here (http://www.blitzbasic.com/Community/posts.php?topic=19648).

ROFL!

I had the same bug months ago, only with Direct3D8 (my own written engine) & RADEON 9800 :)

[Jack Norton]

Yes I had that problem also with my game USM that was written in Blitz.
That was very crap, I could do nothing to fix it :) and lot of people I knew had Geforce... another reason to use OpenGL IMHO.

[Jack Norton]

Hehe the biggest compatibility problem for OpenGL seems to be windows XP ;)

[Mike Boeh]

I was able to solve the problem by manually locking the surface, and then blitting to the surface using my own routines....

[Kai Backman]

OffTopic: I had a problem on high end ATI FireGL cards where points that fell behind the viewplane, and thus were candidates for hardware culling, blew up all over the screen and caused a massive slowdown to under 0.1FPS. I had to manually cull the pointset before sending them off to the card .. :)

[GBGames]

I've found issues with my main Linux system and the GeForce 2 GTS card that I was using. I haven't checked if nvidia has released anything more recent than the drivers I am currently running, but ever since I did update to them, I had to add an environment variable to run certain applications properly (a work around I found using Google). Most notably, Frozen Bubbles, a 2D game, wouldn't run at all, with an error message that made it sound like it was a problem with the code and not the graphics drivers.

I believe it also affected games like Orbz as well as Quake 3, which are 3D games.

I will definitely check for newer drivers when I get a chance to go home this week.