Rated: 80% (6 votes)
Loading ...Getting by with the bare minimum
Ben Hardwidge
Strangely, most companies don’t send you a bottle of champagne when you write something less than favourable about their products. Or ever, in fact. This is one of the few downsides about being a technology journo; sometimes your blood is wanted and your enemies intend to extract it via several days’ worth of angry phone calls.
As a case in point, I’ve just had a conversation with a representative from Nvidia in response to our results from the Company of Heroes DirectX 10 test. I’ll spare this chap any vitriol, as he’s a genuinely good guy and he always deals with me professionally (which is more than you can say for some people in the industry). He informed me, however, that the view from the top of the green Nvidia towers is that you should really look at the average frame rate to get an overall feel of the gameplay, as opposed to the minimum frame rate. Now, before I dismiss this as brontosaurus poo, it’s worth bearing in mind that the minimum frame rate can indeed be misleading at times. If, for example, the minimum frame rate was recorded at a moment when the game stuttered to access the hard drive, or it was only a one-off spurious result, then it should definitely be dismissed.
It’s also true that some people will accept the odd dip in frame rate if the game is playable for the most part. Benchmarking isn’t an exact science, and a degree of subjectivity always comes into play. It’s for this reason that we drew a line at the 25fps barrier, and now consider anything below that line to be unplayable. Unfortunately, FRAPS won’t work with DirectX 10 shaders, but you can use the statgraph command in the Company of Heroes console to see how often the frame rate drops. We tried this with a GeForce 8800 GTX at 1,680 x 1,050 with 2x AA, and found that the frame rate was usually around 30fps. However, the frame rate occasionally dipped into the low 20s, and even below 10fps at one point.
While some gamers would accept this, we still think it’s highly disappointing that a card that cost £500 when it came out can’t play a DirectX 10 game with a smooth frame rate just a few months later. This is why it’s important to have standards, even if they don’t necessarily represent everyone’s preferences.
Sure it’s not bad coding ??
I play with XNA a lot and i’ve seen first hand how i can make code that does exactly the same thing 10 different ways and even though i have a pretty quick machine i only have an 8500 gfx card simply out of principle that a good game should not be all about graphics and where graphics are used they should be coded in a fashion that allows them to run at a descent framerate for even a reasonably low spec machine.
My latest work with DX10 suggests a 20% to 40% increase of the same code in DX9 however I actually saw some techniques take a performance drop.
nVidia just don’t like admitting they aint perfect 
… can you blame them … they do own the gaming market practically.
I hear so many horror stories about ATI and thats just getting the things running at all so i’d be happy with the odd low framerate under extreme pressure if i was nVidia compared to ATI they really have nothing to worry about.
I think that within a year all of the issues will be sorted and most DX10 games will be playable