darkplaces brings geforce 8800gt to its knees

[cowgod]

does anyone else have a top of the line or almost top of the line video card running darkplaces? i just upgraded from a geforce 6600gt to an 8800gt and i would have thought for sure i could finally use r_shadow_realtime_world 1. turns out that still totally kills my video card. just running around through e1m1 i get anywhere from 8fps to 212fps (in a dark corner).

does anyone have optimal settings that will make darkplaces look as good as it can while still giving a great framerate on modern hardware?

here's what i've set explicitly in my config:

gl_triplebuffer "1"
r_novis "1"

// darkplaces
cl_beams_lightatend "1"
cl_decals "1"
cl_particles_blood_alpha "1"
cl_particles_quality "4"
con_textsize "6"
crosshair "5"
gl_texture_anisotropy "16"
m_pitch "-0.022000"
r_bloom "1"
r_bloom_brighten "4"
r_coronas "4"
r_hdr "1"
r_hdr_glowintensity "2"
r_hdr_range "5"
r_lightningbeam_color_green "0.800000"
r_lightningbeam_scroll "10"
r_lightningbeam_thickness "7"
r_shadow_gloss "2"
r_shadow_realtime_world "1"
r_shadow_realtime_world_lightmaps "1"
r_skyscroll1 "-0.500000"
r_skyscroll2 "0.400000"
r_wateralpha "0.6"
scr_conalpha "0.6"
sensitivity "13"
v_gamma "1.250000"
vid_conheight "384"
vid_conwidth "680"
vid_height "1050"
vid_width "1680"
gl_texturecompression "1" // needed for rygel's textures

[Baker]

Although it might not make a difference for you, I find that typing r_glsl 0 in the console makes DarkPlaces much faster for me. But I'm told it is my video card (GeForce 5200FX).

I made a .pk3 that can go into the quake\id1 that turns EVERYTHING off in DarkPlaces and makes it very fast, then you can go in and turn things back on -- instead of the reverse. It enables you to reset all settings to the speedy settings in the pk3 by typing "fastmode" in the console if you make a mistake.

http://www.quakeone.com/index.php?in...le&file_id=201

If you are using something like Rygel's texture pack ... well ... I have difficulty imagining any setup that runs that adequately fast. I believe it uses 1 GB or more of memory for the textures alone.

DarkPlaces is a really nice engine, but it seems like it is very possible to get lost in the ocean of settings available.

[Canadian*Sniper]

Use the rtlight files found in DPMOD. This makes your system do less work figuring out how to use RT Lighting.

[cowgod]

sorry, i forgot to say that i am running dpmod with the rtlight files along with the rygel "high quality" textures pack. i suppose the first thing to try would be to stop using rygel's textures, even though they are so pretty!

[Canadian*Sniper]

Wouldn't custom textures only affect load times for the map? I doubt it's the textures that are causing your fps to lag.

[Dr Labman]

is r_novis 1 really needed?

[Mr.Burns]

...I made a .pk3 that can go into the quake\id1 that turns EVERYTHING off in DarkPlaces and makes it very fast, then you can go in and turn things back on -- instead of the reverse. It enables you to reset all settings to the speedy settings in the pk3 by typing "fastmode" in the console if you make a mistake...

If ever you do this for Qrack or indeed PQ (assuming it does something extra than the selection of Classic Mode in Qrack) then pleeeeease PM me. On some transatlantic servers play can ocassionally be painfully jerky, even on a fairly substantial connection, and the opportunity to select a fastmode would be most welcome to those of us without a Monster of a desktop machine.

Many thanks

Mr.B

[Zop]

Labman is on the money, I bet. Though, it's the option to see items and monsters that are underwater, but keep in mind that you're making DP draw the entire level every frame.

[R00k]

Doesn't DP support hardware occlusion?

How does the SDL version of DP perform on your rig?

[Dr Labman]

Labman is on the money, I bet. Though, it's the option to see items and monsters that are underwater, but keep in mind that you're making DP draw the entire level every frame.

Well I would say that r_novis makes much less difference in darkplaces than in a normal quake renderer i just tested with rt_world_lights on was 86 average fps for timedemo on demo1 and 80 for r_novis 1.

And with rt_world_lights off it was 453 fps for r_novis 0 compaired to 439 with r_novis 1.

This is on a geforce 8800 gt and a core 2 duo E8400.

Compair this to Vr2 engine which goes from 367fps with r_novis 0 to 237 with r_novis 1

[cowgod]

so dr. labman, you have the same video card as me. my processor isn't as good as yours (i'm running an athlon x2 4400+) but should give fairly comparable results.

can you post your darkplaces config?

and are those benchmarks with dpmod?

[cowgod]

Doesn't DP support hardware occlusion?

How does the SDL version of DP perform on your rig?

i've always been curious what darkplaces-sdl.exe was. how is it different than the other executable darkplaces.exe?

[Dr Labman]

so dr. labman, you have the same video card as me. my processor isn't as good as yours (i'm running an athlon x2 4400+) but should give fairly comparable results.

can you post your darkplaces config?

and are those benchmarks with dpmod?

I don't have a specific darkplaces config, thats just all the defaults with screen res 1680x1050 and all rt stuff on as well as bloom but not hdr.

And its not dpmod just plain quake.

[Lardarse]

i've always been curious what darkplaces-sdl.exe was. how is it different than the other executable darkplaces.exe?

The SDL version uses SDL (surprisingly enough) as an interface between the engine and the computer's hardware, whereas the non-SDL version uses OpenGL pretty much directly. If LordHavoc drops by, he can answer the question better.

They are pretty much exactly the same, except that the SDL version has better joystick handling, in case you ever feel like trying to play with a game pad...

[MH]

I suspect the textures myself. They're pretty, but they are incredibly large, meaning that OpenGL ends up doing a lot of funky calculations to scrunch a large texture into a small screen space. If you can try it with another texture pack that is at 2 x or 4 x the original size, you should do a lot better.

Incidentally, a surprising amount of the textures aren't powers of 2; this includes some that are powers of 2 in the original game. Resizing these in the engine will hurt load times worse than they already are.

If you do resize the textures, beware of the normal maps, as you would have to renormalize the texture data to make them valid again. There might be a Photoshop plug-in for this, but it's not something to do in a regular image editor.