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HimalayanJake
Guest
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| Personal review on Morrowind, CPU, andGeForce... |
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 I have been debating getting the GEFORCE Ti 4600 to replace my GEFORCE 3. I went to Tweaker, Tom's Hardware, and Nvidia, ATI, and several other spots to find out what "pixel shading, FSAA, and vertex shading" were really going to do to improve Morrowind image quality. I played with every setting and resolution.
Here are my conclusions (I have kept it as untechincal as possible):
Upgrading a low end CPU will give more bang for the buck than a GEFORCE 4. The Net Immerse library was concieved prior to GEFORCE 3 and was updated to take some advantage of features in GEFORCE programmability. According to Nvidia developer presentations, it seems that programmers have not been utilizing GEFORCE GPU graphics managment fully for various reasons. I suspsect that this is why Morrowind does not seems as fast as it should be. It is very CPU intensive for various reasons besides graphics but also for graphics. I have read on this forum that AGP acces to system memory is not used, but only video memory is used. This is not quite true. It depends on how the game developer programmed memory utilization. One point to note is that graphics punched through system RAM (as opposed to Video RAM) take a major bandwidth hit. Although I can not yet tell you how they implemented their graphics programming calls (e.g. video vs system RAM) I believe a few key factors are involved in the performance hit. Some valuable graphics management features of Nvidia are nor being used.
Another point to remember is that each cell is "real-time" and working all at once. The exterior cells and much bigger than the interior cells and have environmental factors to calculate for. All this means more CPU power please!!! Think of an exterior cell as a chunk of the "real world" all being processsed at once. It may be that processing is not just for the cell your in but adjacent cells you might enter. I created a ring that gave me 500 athletics and acrobatics just so I could tour the island. Without them my "FPS" was 12 to 25 outside / 9 to 19 in town. With them my FPS averaged 25 to 35 for both. I think that because I was moving so faster very little "time" was passing to AI may have skipped alot and had less to processor because I was moving fast and time wasn't.
There is a lot more than graphics going on and I think some portion of the graphics workload is being done on the processor. GeForce4 will allow better graphics "enhancements" to run the same as the GeForce 3 without the enhancements, but the game won't be faster because it is VERY CPU dependant. If your going to upgrade and you have to choose, a system over with perfomance over Intel 1.8GHz will give better value than running out for the GeForce4. This providing you have a GeForce 256 or above. |
Sun May 12, 2002 6:46 am |
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HimalayanJake
Guest
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| GeForce 3 or GeForce 4....which for Morrowind. |
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 sorry for the poor grammar above...it's 02:40am here and I am hitting the sack after this post.
I have analysed the data and marketing material concerning GeForce 3 and 4 in my decision whether I should go for it or wait for GeForce 5 around December.
Here's my summation in non-technical terms:
1. GF4 is just a faster/tweaked version of GF3. I mean this figuratively not literally. GF4 does not introduce any new technology that GF3 can not handle.
2. GF4 has more raw power than GF3 and dual Vertex Shader pipeline which is very important because this is what pushes the pictures through. The Xbox has the dual Vertex shaders with the GF3 power and it will make it perform better than the GF3 PC version.
3. The pixel shader in GF4 handles Texture compression better. This means nicer sun, clouds, and smoke (for example). Pixel shading gives the illusion of depth/surface to textures it is applied to.
4. GF4 allows you to run FSAA turned on at Quincunx and achieve the same performance as GF3 without FSAA. FSAA "fuzzies" the edge on a diagonal line so that it does not appear as a staircase. It kind smoothes things out. The problem with poorly implemented FSAA (e.g. Quincunx) is that it makes the entire image not quite as defined/sharp.
Ihope this helps in deciding.... |
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Sun May 12, 2002 7:08 am |
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HimalayanJake
Guest
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| I promise this will be my last post then I'll the sack... |
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 The following is PURE CONJECTURE on my part based on my game programming industry experience and technical background and countless configuration tests with my ATI 7200 and my GF3 on Morrowind...
1. Morrowind with GF4 will not perform significantly better and the extra detail over the GF3 will be neglible. I think some of the indexing for Vertex is being done on the processor instead of the GPU.
2. With the GF4 you should be able to turn on FSAA and see no performance hit, but FSAA in Morrowind is not that significant. You can hardly see an image improvement. I found running at 1152x864 gave better image quality and no performance hit. I believe the reason is that the performance hit is not the actual rendering to screen but the processing to decide what to render and what's going on. If you are going to run the FSAA, I would recommend a setting of 1280x960 because achieve its miracle by rendering to a MUCH higher resolution (2 to 6 times depending on what you choose) then scaling it down for output.
3. I don't find any really performance hit with GF3 and Pixel Shading ON. I think the they only implemented it for the water because everything else looks the same with it ON ro OFF. The character textures do not look any better.
4. Morrowind was programmed over a long period of time, and when that happens you can't just dump in the lastest technology tweaks because it looks cool. The image won't get much better with time, unless they completely re-write the graphic optimizations which were designed in atleast a year and a half ago when GF3 was still topgun. I think that alot of graphics pre-processing is done through the CPU because this was the established method 18-24months ago. Technology may change, but programmers do not usually change stream in the middle of a development project because it introduces new problems which costs money to work around.
5. The shadows would process faster under GF4, but I don't care. Until GF5 (with its fuzzy shadows) comes along, I won't turn them on because the detract from the immersion. They need to be dispersed. Hey look like hand puppets on the ground. It may not even happen that the GF5 can correct this problem because a programmer usually has to instruct the system and GPU on how to handle the shadow and the Nvidia code is not even determined yet so how could the programmer tell the system to "fuzz" the shadow if no instruction exists yet.
The GeForce5 will introduce new technology, but it will probably not improve the image quality of Morrowind.
That's all I have to say about that.... |
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Sun May 12, 2002 7:38 am |
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HimalayanJake
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| CORRECTION OF PREVIOUS POST.... |
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... I found running at 1152x864 (on a 19" monitor) gave better image quality and no performance hit.
... If you are going to run the FSAA, I would recommend a setting of 1280x960 OR LOWER because FSAA achieve its miracle by rendering to a MUCH higher resolution (2 times or more depending on what you choose) then scaling it down for output.
... which were designed atleast a year and a half ago when GF3 was still topgun. I think that alot of graphics pre-processing is done through the CPU because this was the established method 18-24months ago. Technology may change, but programmers do not usually change stream in the middle of a development project because it introduces new problems which costs money to work around.
... They look like hand puppets on the ground.
sorry for the mistakes................. |
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Sun May 12, 2002 7:53 am |
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HimalayanJake
Guest
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 If you have questions, disagree with what I have stated, or can expand on my points then I would really like to read them here.
A great deal can be done with Morrowind as it is and my intention is to determine if it is possible for us (the users) to implement fundemental changes to the game which were omitted because of time and budgets at Bethesda.
For example:
climbing, riding, damage status feedback from opponents (voice, graphics, or status bar), NPC that have life patterns, renting a room for longer than one day at an inn (publican house), people that sleep at night (real opportunity to be a burglar/acrobat), backpacks and belts for storage/encumbrance (maybe a volume and weight stat for all items), instead of just carrying everthing magically, banks to buy-sell-borrow for homes and other stuff (letters of credit), ships you can board and sail, a random quest generator, etc............
..one can always hope |
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Sun May 12, 2002 8:21 am |
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beefcake122
Village Dweller
Joined: 07 May 2002
Posts: 10
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Well, I hate to burst your bubble, but I have a ASUS/8200/GF3 and a VisionTek Ti4600, and the speed difference between these two in Morrowind would be very difficult to achieve with just a CPU upgrade. The Ti4600 fps in Morrowind is much higher, although the graphics and pixal shader effects are the same.
Scott |
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Sun May 12, 2002 11:51 am |
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HimalayanJake
Guest
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quote:
Originally posted by beefcake122
Well, I hate to burst your bubble, but I have a ASUS/8200/GF3 and a VisionTek Ti4600, and the speed difference between these two in Morrowind would be very difficult to achieve with just a CPU upgrade. The Ti4600 fps in Morrowind is much higher, although the graphics and pixal shader effects are the same.
Scott
Hey if you have proof that a $350US video card upgrade is going to increase FPS performance by 31% on an 866MHz ASUS CUSL2 system with 512MB PC133 RAM and W98SE then I would be very VERY happy to have my bubble burst. It would mean that Morrowind was optimized to use the dual Vertex shaders which would increase screen refresh.
You shouldn't see a difference between image quality if both cards are set to the same FSAA and Pixel shading ON but the GF4 Ti4600 should run faster which is what I said. My point was that FSAA turned on didn't appear to improve image quality in Morrowind and is where GF4 would gain the most.
What I am geting from what your saying is that GF4 purchased first would give the most benefit to performance increase in Morrowind. What I said was only if your system was already at Intel 1.8MHz (or AMD equivalent). Boosting my RAM from 384MB to 512MB DID improve performance which weighed into my opinion above. Overclocking GF3 and Motherboard did not.
Thanks for the feedback. Please describe your system. I would appreciate it because I only have $650US to spend on an upgrade which is purely for Morrowind and NeverWinterNight and I have to choose which will give the best bang for the buck.  |
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Sun May 12, 2002 4:18 pm |
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Startech
Village Dweller
Joined: 09 May 2002
Posts: 3
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HimalayanJake,
I have a question... I have an AMD XP 1800+, MSI K7T Turbo2 MB, GeForce3 TI 200, 768 DRAM, 80 gig HDD.
Okay, my question is why would MW run the highest FPS in 1600x1200 with FSAA turned off. The lower my res settings, the lower my FPS
Seems to me...this alone lends credit to all you have said above. Thanks btw for the great info. I am going to wait for the G5
My MAIN"gaming" in on Nascar 2002, (although, I'm wondering about that now, )
and this is were I want the highest FPS. I get about 37 FPS without AA, and increase as high as 80 with lower res. in this sim.
I get about 17-25 outside with towns taking the bigest hits in MW. I get 20-60 inside.
All this with view 1/3 and AI 1/3. I've had ONE crash to desktop when I hit cancel when I was selling an item way to expensive for the vendor.
One crash, I feel lucky compared to the horrows I've read here.  |
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Sun May 12, 2002 5:04 pm |
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HimalayanJake
Guest
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quote:
Originally posted by Startech
HimalayanJake,
...why would MW run the highest FPS in 1600x1200 with FSAA turned off. The lower my res settings, the lower my FPS...
...All this with view 1/3 and AI 1/3...
I have VIEW set to FULL and AI to NEAR (all the way left) for best performance, Shadows OFF, and Pixel Shading ON. The AI seems only to effect the actors movement refresh speed so they move smoothly. Since they don't really do much this doesn't really concern me. One of things I like in Gothic that I enjoyed was how people walked and talked to each other and this formed a background ambiance. There were also a lot more people milling about. Even in Daggerfall. I am not complaining about Morrowind quality it just misses that hustle and bustle atmosphere that made the urban areas so enjoyable and different from the countryside.
As I have said many times, I don't think FPS is a true representation of 'frames per second'. If it were, at 8 FPS you could actually watch your screen repaint the image from the buffer and a little higher it would look like the first movies of the late 1800s. I think it is a gauge of total computer system performance equated to how many theorectical frames are being created. Therefore you can only measure it against itself not other benchmark FPS. The best way to determine performance and quality is look at the screens in different modes and activities and determine if you enjoy the experience. |
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Sun May 12, 2002 5:51 pm |
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Startech
Village Dweller
Joined: 09 May 2002
Posts: 3
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I do have FPS turned off most times...and only turned them on when I discovered that it seemed to run smooter the higher the res. FSAA doesn't seem to slow it down...BUT, my mouse works on one fps, lol. Don't know why that is either. 1600x1200, you don't need FSAA anyway.
I guess my question is still....why does it run smoother the higher I go with my res? |
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Sun May 12, 2002 6:19 pm |
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Lordr31z
Captain of the Guard
Joined: 11 May 2002
Posts: 190
Location: United States of America |
Im not an expert but i gave up on geforce cards and got an ati 8500..Much better performance in all my games with fsaa and far less crashing problems.  |
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Sun May 12, 2002 6:32 pm |
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HimalayanJake
Guest
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 Are you waiting for the GeForce5 to take advantage of its planned new technologies and enhancements:
1. Create primitives (basic shapes) inside the GPU.
2. New texture buffer indexing standard to handle 8 or more textures simultaneously and have assembler level texture and lighting control. Replacing trilinear texture sampling.
3. Improved processor/memory bandwitdh for fill rate and quad vertex engines.
4. Lossless image detail while using FSAA.
5. Implementation of displacement maps such as sub-division surfaces for flexible Level of Detail (LOD).
6. GeForce hardware shadow maps (fuzzy shadows like real life).
7. Greater colour precision for multi-pass rendering.
You will be waiting a while. Even if all these enhancements are implemented in the GeForce5800 and DirectX9.2 it will be atleast 18 to 24 months before they become game release considerations. A game is progamming implementation designed ATLEAST 12 months before the game is released. Therefore the latest GeForce technology enhancements will not benefit you for atleast one year after if comes out because the software programmers must code it in and therefore they need to know what the command codes are and to tell the software to examine your system to see if they should use them.
Morrowind will get its best image quality and performance from the GeForce Ti 4600 with a 2Ghz or above Intel (or AMD equivalent) system that has 512MB or above RAM. Hopefully Bethesda will do some optimizations in the first patch to improve overall performance.
-Cheers |
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Sun May 12, 2002 6:37 pm |
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HimalayanJake
Guest
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ATI builds excellent and STABLE cards but they are not the bleeding edge of technology and their software drivers tend to lag behind Nvidia in performance boosts. I have an ATI Radeon All in Wonder 64MB DDR 7200 on one PC and my GeForce3 on the other PC beside it. They both ran Morrowind concurrently so I could look for differences in image quality. I can't compare speed becasue the ATI is on a P3 450 that I have overclocked.
For all my general consumer friends I recommend ATI. The quality and stability is the best (excluding tweaked ATI drivers). ATI is king of the laptops (and office systems) and GeForce is king of the PC Games systems.
It all comes down to opinion in the end. The fact is that Nvidia has been more successful at getting game developers to optimize for their cards.
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Sun May 12, 2002 6:48 pm |
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JD
Guest
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Geforce3 supports pixel shaders 1.0, 1.1
Geforce4 supports pixel shaders 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3
I think both support the same vertex shader version. |
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Sun May 12, 2002 7:11 pm |
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HimalayanJake
Guest
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quote:
Originally posted by JD
Geforce3 supports pixel shaders 1.0, 1.1
Geforce4 supports pixel shaders 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3
I think both support the same vertex shader version.
You are correct although I doubt Morrowind support v1.2 or v1.3 as these were instruction sets added recently. |
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Sun May 12, 2002 7:37 pm |
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