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Saturday, September 19, 2009

post://1549686946649553205/

PhysX has been added to the PC version of Batman with the v1.1 update. It does not ship with PhysX settings out of the box. Once installed you are provided several options for PhysX - Off, Normal, or High with various card recommendations.

The nVidia drivers allow you to change the PhysX settings - turning optimization on or off as well as the ability to choose which card handles the PhysX acceleration. I had thought offloading PhysX from my 2 x 285GTX2G cards working in SLi to the built-in 980a/780a would make things faster:

However, after applying the v1.1 w/ patch PhysX Batman, Normal PhysX was enabled. I was suddenly getting very low framerates (15fps). I turned on the "Show SLI Indicators" in the 3D settings menu so I could see how hard each of the video cards were working. They were both very low, indicating the cards were not working up to their ability, yet things were still slow. CPU usage hadn't spiked high enough to be a bottleneck and memory was free and clear.

It appeared having the PhysX on the older (and slower) chipset was slowing everything down. To test the theory I turned off PhysX and was getting framerates in the high 50s. It certainly was PhysX related.

I turned PhysX back on, normal setting and in the nVidia control panel I changed the setting to enable PhysX on the 285s instead of the 980a/780a. When I tried it again PhysX was visibily running, fallen leaves moving under your feet accompanied by smooth framerates between 55 to 60fps.

Based on this experience it appears that having PhysX enabled on an older chipsets may actually decrease performance over having PhysX enabled on the same video card(s) doing the graphics processing.

Here is a video of Batman running @ 2560 x 1600, Very High Detail, comparing PhysX - Normal to PhysX - High

Labels: games, games for windows, graphics, hardware, movie, screenshot, SLi

posted @ 19:49

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Video will be updated - it cut me down to 16:9 so most of the leaf effects fell out of frame.

I'm also hoping for higher quality once I install the new codecs.

By Josh, at Saturday, September 19, 2009 8:22:00 PM

Posted link to PhysX forum:
http://forums.slizone.com/index.php?showtopic=33559&st=0

By Josh, at Sunday, September 20, 2009 9:48:00 AM

Thursday, September 10, 2009

post://4541716393206416641/

Windows 7 - Don't Rush It.

That's a cautionary statement, a metaphor, and a realization. I had a LOT of issues with this installation and I'm not even at a point where I can benchmark. 3... maybe 4 installations at this point and I think I've finally got it. I put in another HD so I could avoid RAID issues and I still run into them.

My motherboard has 10 SATA ports 4 on one SATA controller, 6 on nVidia SATA RAID. I avoided trying to bring over the RAID right away, instead having a single HD on the ontroller but not actually in RAID mode and STILL ran into issues. 7 even played with my RAID 1 a bit and broke the mirror after I installed the drivers but I really think that's more nVidia since it was completely dependent on their drivers. If nVidia didn't try and break whatever BIOS RAID existed when they installed their Windows software I might have not been impacted, but instead they gave me a minor heart attack by breaking my mirror. I restored it by killing the secondary RAID mirror and reallocating it via a rebuild to the first but dang if it didn't make me fear for my data in the meanwhile. I've lost too much data, finally learned to go mirror vs striping and this is how I am taunted. Whatever - worked out ok in the end after rebuild.

I finally have my nVidia control panel as I remember it, SLi and all. I can finally do some performance testing, and that's what I'm after.

PhysX off the onboard 780a SLI chip
Enabled SLi for the 2 x 285 2G EVGA cards
clicked apply... and... we have liftoff!

A system rating shows they've gone past the 5.9 max rating and I now get 7.9s on everything except the hard drives. However, Windows 7 is not running off my striping array so it's not really expected I'd get the best performance. It's all awaiting my theory of 2 x 120G SSD drives in Striping. I can't think of anything that could be faster. I don't know what that might drive to game performance but if previous experience is any indication - that's a sure cause to make me drop a hard earned dollar.

Labels: 2009, crash, desktop, RAID, review, SLi, technology, Windows7

posted @ 23:20

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Saturday, February 14, 2009

post://5313472958211376515/

I just downloaded the largest demo ever: 2.9 gigs, and it turns out that's because it also has the full game in it. When you go to install it you are presented with 2 buttons: Install Trial or Install Full Game, naturally I chose Install Full Game where it presented me with a spot to put in a registration code from EA. I didn't have one but I did see that it's $39 at the EA store so you can download the demo and turn it into the full game.

I thought game companies did away with this sort of thing. Isn't it a little too tantalizing to have a carrot dangled in front of a hackers face of being able to download the full game right out the box or are they confident that their downloadable game technology is safe?

In either case it's kinda cool to be able to download the demo, figure out if you like it and then click a button and input a code to get the full thing. Also cool if you know how to crack I suppose. If it's good I might just consider paying them the $39 though, I like to support good ventures and there's a shortage of racing games in the PC world that don't have hokey dialog (now that they've turned NFS into a bad 2Fast movie).

[Buy the Game]
[Download the Demo & See Screenshots]

Labels: consumerism, games, games for windows, graphics, SLi

posted @ 08:16

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Sunday, December 07, 2008

post://6314627219298098290/

Here's the same progression in GTA benchmarks. I didn't have to do much work for this because GTA writes each benchmark to a separate txt file automatically. I pasted into Google Docs and made a graph of it all.

The details are here but this is the graph:

Labels: 3dmark, consumerism, games for windows, hardware, materialism, SLi, technology

posted @ 11:37

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Saturday, December 06, 2008

post://8239767402186441602/

Ok, so after the dust has settled I've completed the Hard Drive externalization (technical prototype) and here are the past couple benchmarks:

2 x New Graphics Card + CPU

New Graphics Card + CPU

New Graphics Card

New Motherboard

Original

Read em and weep.

Labels: 3dmark, consumerism, games for windows, hardware, materialism, SLi, technology

posted @ 22:51

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Friday, December 05, 2008

post://2095755929140285485/

Latest Benchmark	3DMark06 - 11059
2.0 PCI Ex Motherboard	3DMark06 - 10879
1.0 PCI Ex Motherboard w/ 2 8800 GTX	3DMark06 - 10674

Labels: 3dmark, graphics, hardware, SLi

posted @ 04:21

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Tuesday, June 17, 2008

post://4296121579900533304/

I went back today and found some previous 3DMark06 Scores since I was finally able to get my 3DMark06 up and running. I still had my old VISTA x64 install on my extra HD (haven't needed to reformat it for space yet) so I installed everything (didn't work) and then copied over all the OpenAL32.dll to both system32 and syswow64 directories. I removed 3DMark06 and reinstalled from my Crosshair driver CD (w/ professsional SN) but when I went to submit it said a newer version was available. The patch wouldn't install (said 3DMark06 wasn't installed???) so I just copied the 3DMark folder over as well.

All in all I got it to work, but I'm thinking I need to turn the Cancel or Allow back on, this shit didn't happen when I had it ask me to do everything. I still haven't reinstalled SP1. I'll certainly make sure everything's working proper before I do it, but it's ineveitable.... inevietiiable... invevieitiaitiablale!

So it's running and I got a 10,333 base v1.0 - so here are some past 3Dmark scores nVidia 7800 - December 16th, 2006
Asylum GeForce FX 5900 w/ 128mb RAM

I found these doing a picosearch, still works... just re-indexed - give it a try

Labels: 3dmark, games, hardware, nostalgia, SLi

posted @ 19:38

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Sunday, June 15, 2008

post://7579065082664969228/

I picked up another card to do SLi this weekend. I wanted more, I wanted 2560x1600. I priced out what it would cost me to get a 9800GX2 including the trade-in from EVGA and it was going to be like $350+, so I instead spent $170 for another 8800 GTS - which were getting scarce so I moved on it.

I tested using 3D Mark Vantage (for VISTA) as my existing 3D Mark 2006 is not working in VISTAx64 because it says OpenAL32.dll is not present (which it is).
I'd rather use 3DMark 06 as it's a more accurate guage given my past configurations were also based in 2006 but with Creative software not installing for some weird error they can't solve I'm just working with what's working for me.

In any case, you'll see the difference with the score of 1 8800GTS vs 2 in SLi
1 x 8800GTS 640mb
Score: 4383
- CPU: 4228
- GPU: 4437

2 x 8800GTS 640mb in SLi
Score: 6642
- CPU: 4275
- GPU: 8145

I might post another score if I try some overclocking. It's nowhere near the 20,000 score reached by an individual with a QuadCore, 9850GX2, and PhysX card but I figured it out and I'm 118260 out of 155217 total, so that's a decent standing with a 76%.

Labels: consumerism, games, games for windows, hardware, SLi, technology

posted @ 21:43

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