NVIDIA driver slowdowns
 

If you've upgraded your video card to a more modern NVIDIA card, you've probably noticed everything (3D games) is quite faster, but on the other hand, Graal is much slower. Apparently the later forceware drivers work pretty crappy with Graal. Using older forceware drivers is the only way to make your Graal run properly at regular speeds. I'm thinking tile drawing performance is some how reduced in later forceware drivers.

Some effects of using newer forceware drivers:
- Pretty slow level changes when fullscreened in higher resolutions
- Overall gameplay is pretty skippy/jerky
- Changing your camera around (focus) will cause the same lag/freeze as changing a level, though how far you changed the camera from your position affects it.

The latest version I've tried that worked fine was version 76.44, dated around April of 2005. I know for sure anything above version 90.## works pretty crappy, but I haven't tested any of the 80.## drivers.

This is not a card-specific problem from my and others' experiences, and some people have a card that is too modern to use old drivers for, so they are stuck with a slow Graal on a fast/faster card they payed $100+ for.

Graal is normal for me, im using one of the latest drivers and have a 7600GT. Then again I upgraded from an ATI Radeon 7500LE so...

Maybe Graal isn't optimized for our cards or something, i dont know XD.

I have this problem aswell, I recently bought an Nvidia GeForce 7600 GS Graphics Card (so I can play 3D games). Works great with all of the 3D games I've played so far. On Graal it doesn't work well at all, my movement is slowed to the point of almost not being able to play. I cannot do any of the things I use to, basically enjoy the game. There's a long pause at level changes and very slowed movement in an area with high population. :mad:

Nvidia 7600 GS, I can play graal very well

What CPU do you who slow down a lot have?

Gerami: Maybe you haven't experienced "normal" gameplay, and "normal" to you means "slow" to anyone that's seen "normal."

If this is the case, you can test by fullscreening in a higher resolution and walking in and out of a house. If your client freezes for about a second when doing this, you probably do have this lag problem. In 1600 x 1200, it likes to freeze for a good 2-3 seconds on level changes.

My CPU is a Pentium 4 "Northwood" at 2.4 GHz.

To the people who have slow downs on Nvidia cards: do you have other programs running? What does graal4console.log display? Have you checked that the graphics driver options are not set too high ? To run Graal without lag you don't need more than 300 Mhz and a pretty old card with good driver, so I would say the driver has a problem. Everyone who is writing to this thread, please check what graphics card do you have and what driver version so that we don't make wrong assumations.
(I also assume that you have Windows XP)
In the office we all use Nvidia cards but we have not experienced such problems.

AMD Athlon XP 3200+ @ 2.2ghz
1GB (512 x 2) Corsair Value Select
Leadtek 7600GT 256MB AGP (Drivers: Forceware 91.47)
Seagate Barracuda 200GB 7200RPM 8mb cache
Windows XP SP2

Switching levels at window mode (1024 x 768) is fine. I even had FRAPS recording my screen and the FPS never really dropped down unless the level was REALLY REALLY crowded.

I just did my moniter's highest (1280 x 1024) and ran around UN and Era and still fine.

AOpen 256MB GeForce 6600 (clocked 350/500) video card
x2 512 (1 GB) DDR PC3200 RAM
XP Pro; SP1

Yes, forgot to mention my OS experiences:

On XP, shutting down programs doesn't help mine at all, nor disabling services. I do have Windows XP. It is pretty strange though, because Graal would not lag on a different OS. Even on Vista with the Vista ForceWare drivers with all the 60+ services enabled, it wouldn't lag at level changes like it does on XP. Both XP SP1 and SP2 perform the same. Linux performed similar to Vista.

I attached my graal4console log, but all you're probably going to get from that is the fact I like to use higher resolutions.

I uploaded two videos to YouTube to show both new and old ForceWare performance. There's quite a speed difference, and both are recorded at my max resolution using Fraps 2.8.1.

- New ForceWare drivers (93.71): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZTBU35c3QU
- Old ForceWare drivers (76.44): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLSSUy0b7Rs

Gerami, could you test the same way as in the video? Maybe even a screen recording? Testing a different way won't give the same results.

- Forceware 91.47 (latest i think) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmOGhd1cdZk

Er I get an unsupported codec error...-_- will fix it if i know how

I just logged on UN, spawned in Spar room. So I press F9 and record. I'm using Fraps 2.6.0. Recorded at 1280 x 1024 (the highest my moniter will go) and fraps was set on 20FPS (graal is limited to 20FPS). No problems for me.

The problem is that when Graal is updating the tiles it needs to access the textures from video ram. That is normally quite fast and doesn't need to be done very often, but we had similar slowdown problems with S3 cards when testing v4 beta. I will check what we can do about it, we have quite a lot of variety of nvidia cards.

Well, know that it's fine on my computer.

Mine works really good with the Geforce 6100

YouTube is saying the video is unavailable. Is it processing?

Darlene: what version drivers? That's an important part.

says something like unvalid codec...i just uploaded it straight from fraps so i dont know.

GeForce 6600 here, works perfect.

Driver version: 8.4.2.1
Date is in March, 2006

Old drivers :P

Yea, I noticed. :)

What processor do you have? I just tried 84.21, and they seem to work about in between. I get the same skipping while moving around in fullscreen 1600 x 1200, and longer than wanted level loads. The ideal level load is when you just walk through a door and keep going as if there's no such thing as a level load. I can get something like that when the Graal window is sized to 50 x 100, but that's impractical to play in.

Level load times in 1600 x 1200:
66.00: 0.2 second
76.44: 0.5 second
78.03: 1 second
84.21: 1 second
90.##+: 2.5 seconds

Gerami, you should compress the video in something like Windows' Movie Maker, as uncompressed Fraps videos can easily go over the 100 MB limit within seconds. YouTube probably won't add codecs that don't compress because of this, and to stop everyone from wondering why it takes a day to upload the video.

Magadal, what driver and CPU?

AMD Athlon (tm) 64
3400+

Seems like everybody (so far) without the slowdowns has an AMD. Everyone I know that has these problems has an Intel processor. The closest AMD processor I have to test with is at someone else's house.

Link me to these old drivers please. I'll test with them and say if I'm experiencing a slow down.

I wouldn't have anything but an AMD. I had a pentium4, and didn't like it at all. It was significantly slower in every area then an AMD

I must be in for a treat for Christmas, then. Or, hopefully, anyway.

You can download pretty much all of NVIDIA's old drivers from www.guru3d.com. You'll find them in the [downloads -> ForceWare (32 bit)] section.

I tried the old drivers but they're not compatible with my GFX card or something, because not only did it install and NOT detect my GFX card, but I couldn't even find it in the add/remove programs. Installing 93.97 (my other drivers were 91.47 i think) and will see how it works.

Well, I sorta said that in the first post about newer cards. If you could get a modified nv4_disp.inf file with your card in it, it will work. People make modified .inf files for the drivers that don't originally support all cards, so everyone can try the driver. Unfortunately, the older drivers probably don't have an updated .inf file for the newer cards - or at least I can't find any.

Which old driver version do you think would work on my 7600GT AGP? That way I could test this tommorow. :)

The oldest driver you'll find for your card that works is probably too new. I've looked around the 80.## drivers, and there's no entries for your card, so the lowest you can go is not much further than what you already have, probably.

Shame. I'll try to get my fraps codec problem fixed and post some videos of different resolutions and such to help the cause. But I think I may know what you're talking about, it takes about .7 seconds to load a level for me as well when I think it should be faster. I tested on Delteria where the NPC server was crashed and 0 players were on (remember npc server was down so no images either!) and it still took the same amount of time.

The problem is fraps is not recording in any particular codec, use virtualdub to convert the large fraps video into an avi and then upload to youtube.

Thanks.

Here it is at 1280 x 1024 (91.47 I believe): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOmuGXQpXpA

(dont think it's working again -_-)

Worked fine :P Glad to see you got it.

that isn't even it, i think i used the wrong compression -.- what do you recommend i use for virtual dub?

Weird, I don't see the outside world on your video. At first I thought it was a huge load time.

Yeah, Fraps outputs video as uncompressed. I sometimes mistake decompressors as a codec when I see it in a codec list, so my mistake if I said anything about a Fraps codec (I'm pretty sure I did).

I recommend using DivX as a codec in VirtualDub. I'd leave the bitrate as default within the DivX configuration, mostly because YouTube doesn't convert the videos to very high quality anyway. If you recorded audio, you'll probably want to disable audio encoding within VirtualDub, unless the audio is something you want in there, in which you'd want to compress as well.

Ok I'll try the DivX compression in VirtualDub. The compression thing messed up the video.

This should work now:

1280 x 1024: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AS29mOFNkow

Note to everyone: Fraps will still make your load times SLIGHTLY HIGHER. So keep that in mind :|

Spyder i looked at your "old driver" video and it's almost identical to mine and I was using 91.47. :P

It worked fine this time. Hey, Fraps doesn't make my load times on Graal any noticeably different, but that's likely because I set it to record at half resolution. The results you see in my videos are exactly what I see - if I were to record with a real life camera, it'd be no different.

Yeah, you're definitely having the level loading problem too. With ForceWare 66.00, my load times are actually shorter (about twice) than yours, but if I use the same drivers, I get around twice as long. I can only imagine if you could use old drivers.

I read on some Linux forums that the oldest NVIDIA cards give the fastest 2D speed; maybe (probably) because they had older drivers with it? Strange, though, using older ForceWare benefits in the game, but doesn't in regular Windows' tasks (scrolling in windows like Firefox or Explorer mostly). Ah, right, because the game is using the video card, and Windows isn't.

Do you have another (but older) NVIDIA card around you could test with the newer and older (ForceWare 70 and below) drivers? Actually, everyone with the 6 series cards that's had their say here is capable of both testing the older drivers, and making a screen recording of it. Whether they'd know how might be a different story, though.

Ah. Ok I have it too. Stefan, help us. :(

Haha Graal still runs ok on my old Pentium II 350mhz, 128mb RAM with a slightly newer GeForce 2 MX card in it.

About a year ago, I was running around an overworld with someone, and I noticed he was pulling away from (outrunning) me. I asked him, "new computer?" "No, this is my first computer ever, from like 10+ years ago."

That's about when I knew something was wrong. Not only was my processor 10+ times faster (numerically) than his, but so was everything else. That's something I wouldn't accept, so I tried:

- video overclocking (result: no performance gain)
- video underclocking (result: no performance loss)
- running with no services (sysinternals' site has an article of how to do this) with about 3 processes running (result: no performance gain)
- disabling video hardware accelerations gave INSTANT level changes--so fast that the only limit was how fast I could run back and forth between them. Using no hardware acceleration wasn't ideal, because as soon as you see a light in the level, you're moving 75-90% slower.
- old video drivers, since the newest ones are almost always bug fixes and more bulk that I have no use for.

I was surprised the drivers gave different performance, because I always thought Graal used the processor for drawing everything but the lights; and lights never slowed me down, so I always thought the video card wasn't the problem.