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ATI Catalyst 8.8 vs 8.7: OpenGL Performance Drop

@ 2008/08/25

Global Performance Drop: 18%. OpenGL performance tumbled by around 26% in dynamic branching (soft shadows), around 23% in vertex processing (surface deformer) and around 4% in Lightsmark 2008. Only FurMark takes advantage of Catalyst 8.8 with a little 4% of performance boost. FurMark makes an intensive use of texture fetching and blending (ROPs) and maybe ATI has improved something in this part of Catalyst. But as said hereafter, Expreview has noticed a performance drop with a Radeon HD 4850 and FurMark. I don’t have such a radeon and then I can’t confirm this last result but FurMark score is somewhat weird…

Raise your hand if you are running OpenGL games? What? No one ?....

Comment from Kougar @ 2008/08/26

Remember how changing the name would affect memory performance scores for Futuremark Vantage? Could be the same thing, different, more optimized compiler is used instead?

Would be unlikely that ATI Profiles would hinder performance that much when supposed to do the opposite...

Comment from jmke @ 2008/08/26

well... this is weird; don't know what to make of this:

by renaming the .exe name they boost the performance of Furmark and ET:QW; although in their 8.8 vs 8.7 comparo there was no difference; so only at low resolutions this might have an impact? a negligible impact at best...

Comment from Kougar @ 2008/08/26

Quake 3 system requirements:

Quote:

3D graphics accelerator with full OpenGL support, Pentium II 233 MHz or AMD 350 MHz K6-2 processor or Athlon processor, 64 MB RAM, 8 MB video card

Released in 1999... almost 10 years old.

Comment from jmke @ 2008/08/25

Quake 3 timedemo, custom timedemo
320x240 all low detail: 342fps
1600x1200 all high detail: 342fps

it plays back a 20min demo in less than a minute...

Core 2 E8400 - 9800 GTX

Comment from Kougar @ 2008/08/25

I do not have Q3.

This shouldn't be a surprise almost all OpenGL games are 2-8 years old. GPU drivers will optimize for most current games only, usually at the expense of dropping performance for older games. And as Jmke said, older games play so fast on current hardware it doesn't matter anymore.

Is why am not surprised that Quake Wars doesn't see a performance hit. It is the only current/new OpenGL "game" that I know of.

Comment from jmke @ 2008/08/25

aha! confusing to say the least. Doom 3/Quake 4 requires a GFX card which meets DX8 standards, even better DX9 standards...

Quote:

A disadvantage of id Tech 4 was that it needed a high-end graphics processing unit (GPU), which was at least DirectX 8.0 compliant with fully programmable vertex and pixel shaders, such as the Nvidia GeForce 3 or ATI Radeon 8500, with at least 64 MB of VRAM. By E3 2002, the recommended GPU was the Radeon 9700 with 128 VRAM; while its DirectX 9.0 features are not necessary to render the game, its advanced architecture, 256-bit memory bus, and efficiency were needed to run Doom 3 at high detail and playable speed.

Doom 3 uses DirectX for sound processing it seems

Quote:

Doom 3 uses DirectX components such as DirectSound, DirectInput for relevant functions so the user needs to have the latest DirectX version.

However it uses 100% OpenGL for 3D rendering, instead of Direct3D - the DirectX graphics renderer.
http://journal.pcvsconsole.com/?thread=41

Sound/Input: DX
3D engine: OpenGL

we're getting somewhere. Sorry for the mix-up JAMF, you were right!

also found this:

Quote:

. It was demonstrated for the first time at the WWDC 2007 by John Carmack on an eight-core Apple Macintosh computer; however, the demo only used a single core and a single-threaded OpenGL implementation running on a 512 MB 7000 class Quadro video card
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tech_5

ok so recent game running OpenGL is Quake 4 / ET:QW...

no performance drop going from 8.7 > 8.8 in ET:QW ... ?
anybody care to do a timedemo run in Quake 3 ?

Comment from Kougar @ 2008/08/25

Quote:

Originally Posted by jmke

btw Q4/Doom don't run on OpenGL

Yes they do. Both are OpenGL games. Link There are more links.

Comment from jmke @ 2008/08/25

nothing sarcastic about the post or the question; no current big-title games are developed with OpenGL. The only people this driver performance loss would mean a lot to is 3D apps which rely on OpenGL, they should stick to older CAT versions.

my post was not meant to offend

edit: Q4/Doom do run on OpenGL

(sorry JAMF you were right!)

Comment from JAMF @ 2008/08/25

Geewhiz, and there I was, thinking the question was "Raise your hand if you are running OpenGL games?" Oh, it's my mistake, realy.

And if a game can run in OpenGL, I'll list them as running OpenGL on my system. If a game is to run cross platform, OpenGL is still the way to go.

If you want to ask retorical (sarcastic) questions, please be more specific.

Comment from jmke @ 2008/08/25

welcome to the forums

, thank you for your post!

The earlier games you mention there in the first section are old games which run at ridicilous frame rates already, so instead of 240fps you'd get 200FPS

UT2003 and newer use DirectX also , except on PS3 where UT3 is OpenGL... but that's not PC platform anymore

Serious Sam also has D3D mode

DirectX is dominating the 3D platform, ID Software, its main supporter since Quake 1 (with it's custom OpenGL 3D acceleration for 3DFX and other OpenGL cards) stopped using it after Quake 3. There's little future for OpenGL games on the PC platform, the feature list of DX10 (10.1 11) is vast and if implemented correctly will provide the same performance as DX9 with more eye candy. Currently some developers are over eager to add DX10 fluff making the game run slower with DX10, but on paper DX10 cuts the amount of layers between game >> VGA card, increasing performance.

Quote:

...and I'm pretty sure there are more still being played.

yes there are still plenty of OpenGL games out there being played. But the current HD 4000 and previous HD 3000 ATI generation is fast enough to provide splendid frame rates in all these games, even with a 18% hit in performance. But that comparison is based on synthetic benchmarks, if there's anything we've learned from that is that they hardly every completely reflect actual gameplay performance

Comment from JAMF @ 2008/08/25

/me raises hand.

1946 or any of the other IL2 based games
America's Army
Cellestia.. oh wait, it's a simulation of our universe.
DeusEx
Homeworld
Homeworld Cataclysm
Homeworld2
Jedi Knight II : Jedi Outcast
Medal of Honor
Quake IV (and previous versions)
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic

I'm sure people still play these too:
Doom III
Hitman - Codename 47
Hitman 2 - Silent Assassin
Second Life
Serious Sam
Sin
Soldier Of Fortune II : Double Helix (and previous)
Star Trek: Voyager - Elite Force
U.T. 2003

...and I'm pretty sure there are more still being played.

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