Hi all,

I've been considering some changes to MGE that would improve performance and add new features, and it would be really helpful to know the general state of the hardware and OS of everyone out there who uses MGE on a regular basis. Obviously the more types of hardware that have to be supported, the less likely a particular feature is to perform well or even be possible, so just knowing what you're using would be a huge help. This is not a generic "What are you running" poll, it's specifically meant for MGE users who would be excited to be able to benefit from the advanced features of their video card, or disappointed if their PC was no longer supported by new versions.

So if you don't mind helping out, please http://www.gpureview.com/videocards.php. If you've forgotten what it's called, you should be able to see it's name by looking at your Display Properties in Windows on the page that shows your screen resolution. Once you've found it, note the values for "DirectX Compliance" and "PS/VS Version" and use that to fill in the survey.

Thanks a ton!

P.S. I skimmed through the forum guidelines and didn't notice anything specific that forbade me from doing a poll like this, but if I missed something and it's not allowed then I apologize.

Hi Liztail nice to see you around - I haven't voted in the poll yet as am in the process of picking a new rig - seeing as you ask about Direct X 11 - does that mean you have some capacity to use features from 11 in a future update to MGE?

I jotted down what I know for sure. The problem is that I have nVidia GeForce GTX 295x2 which means it's a bit more recent and fairly different from the version on that webpage.

I theorize SM 5.0, but I wouldn't know it seems to tag along DX11 which I'm pretty damn sure is within the cards capabileties.

Thanks for your hard work!

Voted; and to reiterate C_Mireneye, thanks a lot (and to all of the MGE developers) for everything so far. MGE is fantastic after so much work; improved performance or even more advanced features will always be welcome =).

No 200 series, not even the 295x2, can do DX11 or SM5. They are DX10, SM 4.0. (The little 210, 220, and 240 models and the OEM-only 300 series are the only ones that can do DX10.1, SM 4.1.)

nVidia didn't have anything with DX11 or SM5 until the much-delayed 400 series came out last month.

Hiya Liztail! :wave:
I've got nvidia 8800GT which only supports up to sm 4.0, but since the poll doesn't list sm 4.0, I voted 4.1.

And it's great to see your continued involvement with MGE development!

Anything is possible =)


Crap, I meant to have it in there! I added it, but now it's at the bottom ::sigh:: Thanks for pointing that out.

Imo the whole deal with DX11 tesselation is kind of weird. If I want tesselation why not just increase the density/detail of a the mesh you are creating? Why simulate it? instead of going more artifical graphical effects go with more actual geometry detail? The Shader world is getting a bit out of hand imo.

But maybe that is just my opinion.

Not quite the discussion for this topic, altho I suppose that depends on what ideas Liztail has in store =)

I think the idea of tessellation is awesome for a few reasons... here are a few off the top of my head: The amount of data you need to transfer from the CPU to the GPU across the bus for a given mesh is reduced. The vertex shader only runs on the original mesh, not the tessellated one, so you save time when doing things like skin or cloth deformation of a complex mesh. You get automatic LOD without having to store extra copies of the mesh on the GPU or dealing with deciding how to blend between one level and another smoothly (which often means drawing both for a while, which messes up the point). It can actually be cheaper to displace a tessellated mesh to add detail than to do an expensive parallax shader that just adds fake detail and won't affect things like the silhouette edge.

That said, you need to do a lot of extra stuff to make tessellation work, and I have no idea if it would be feasible to enable it in Morrowind. Unfortunately it's not as simple as flipping a switch in the API. The other major features of DX11, multi-threaded rendering, dynamic shader linkage, and compute shaders would all be easier to make use of in MGE than tessellation, I think.

Hi all?? Voted?? What the h... its this forum layout...

Any way to get global and cloud shadows in a future with MGE?

Multi-threaded rendering? Now that sounds cool



1) Yep... this is how the forum looks now . Yacoby and some others have some good mods for it, though.

2) Agreed, shadows would be awesome. Vtastek was working on implementations but he's had them in stealth mode for a while it feels like .


Edit: http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1082909-forum-style-alterations/ to the forum mods thread.

I see, well I suppose there are some valid points about tesselation. I'm still a bit dodgy tho, it's all this talk of different processors for geometry and shaders while lots of that could have gone into geometry fulltime while shaders would be fairly simple stuff. Oh well, I'm mostly talking from an article I read way back on "How much is to much?" referring to how ridiculous it's becoming. Stream processors fixed that a whole lot, but there is still a separation of processing that to me does not make sense.

Compute shaders are looking nice, multi thread rendering is useful for FPS also, all that is nice.

This is me dreaming but.. Dynamic clouds?
Another dream for me would be to include the detail map in distant meshes rendering.

What's the max shader model for the GTX 260? :unsure:

EDIT: handicap is that I'm on Windows XP, so no DX 10 and greater.

SM 4.0 I believe

Should be shader model 4.

Out of curiousity, which revision do you have? Core 192 65nm, Core 216 65nm, or Core 216 55nm?

How do I find out? I still have the box, if that helps. I can't find my specific card on Newegg nor Amazon anymore, even though I got it just this last winter.

---------
Voted:
9.0c DX
4.0 SM
Windows XP 64-bit

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EDIT: @Connary: I know, the new forums are horrible. Try implementing the tools and code from http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1082909-forum-style-alterations/page__hl__alterations. By the power of Greyskull Stylish, I http://i468.photobucket.com/albums/rr50/Alaisiagae/Random/BGSF%20Tweaking/bgsf_what_snapback.jpg

I'm not going to decide what features to add for a while, my first goal is to clean up the code to make MGE easier to extend. That said, I don't mind speculating on feature ideas...





Shadows would be nice, but the main problem is that there's no way to render the current Morrowind scene from a different angle. You could maybe have anything you exported as a distant static cast shadows onto the scene (since MGE knows how to render those), but dynamic moving objects would be out, and terrain would be out since the distant terrain is a different shape than the local terrain and would end up intersecting it and causing patches of wrong shadowing. Casting fake cloud shadows might not be too hard, but actually having a dynamic sky with volumetric clouds is something I don't have an experience in.

What did you mean by detail map in distant mesh rendering?


Looks like http://www.gpureview.com/GeForce-GTX-260-(55nm)-card-604.html And yeah, it is a shame that DX 10 and 11 don't work on WinXP, but it's interesting to see that so far only about 1/3 of people are still running XP. Even if I don't switch over to DX 10 or 11, though, this info still gives me a good idea about the hardware capabilities that people have in DX9, though. For example, it looks like just about everyone probably has multiple render target support.

I had voted before SM 4.0 was added to poll. So, -1 for 4.1, and +1 for 4.0.

Edit: Changed, but I won't change DX10 to DX9c, because I'm capable of it in Vista, but just I don't use it.

You can change your vote by first deleting your current one and then voting again.

No problem. Thanks for updating the poll.

And because the new forum software now allows us to delete our vote :twirl: , I'm able to redo my vote properly:
WinXP
DX 9.0c limited by OS - card is capable of DX 10
SM 4.0


[edit] ok, fixed my vote so that it reflects DX 10 capability.

Should be able to tell with http://www.techpowerup.com/gpuz/, which can also let you monitor temperatures and a few other things. The "Technology" field will show whether it's 55nm or 65nm, "Shaders" will show either 192 or 216.



Ah, the hard, thankless work of moving so much around with the intent to change nothing. The novices like myself who are useless at reading MGE's source but still want to see how it works will appreciate the cleanups, though -- and I'll be looking forward to new features whenever the come!

While we're making fantasy wishlists, allow me to post mine:
-- Multi-threaded rendering (if that's as useful as it sounds, it'd be nice to actually utilize more than one core for Morrowind...)
-- Attaching shaders dynamically to objects at runtime via script commands
-- Volumetric shaders in place of stock weather effects
-- Global illumination using Peachykeen's lightcache code

What? I said fantasy. On the downside, I'd probably have to upgrade my PC to make use of it all... but on the upside, I'd get to upgrade my PC!

The poll results make me feel like a loser.
:cry:

Technology: 55nm
Shaders: 216 Unified
DX support: 10.0/ SM 4.0

So, uh, what does the nm thing mean? Do I have a bad card? More shaders are good, right?

Oh, no, by no means is it a bad card; sorry, just curious about it was all . More shader units is a good thing, and using a smaller manufacturing technology can lower power draw and heat. However, what I'd heard was that the cooling units on the 55nm versions were cheaper quality than the 65nm versions -- sort of cancelling out the gain from the smaller manufacturing technology. Mine is a 216/65nm version, but if I had 216/55nm I would probably end up taking it apart just to see... ^_^

But, uh... thanks for satisfying my curiosity =).

The GT200 chip (used in all the GTX 2xx cards) comes in two scales: 65nm and 55nm. The difference is the size of features on the chip: 65nm vs. 55nm. Smaller is better, because smaller chips are cheaper to manufacture and use less power while making the same performance. There were several models of the GTX 260, and what you have is the best one.

A fully functional GT200 chip has 240 unified shaders. GTX 260's are made from GT200's that have 192 (the original) or 216 (the Core 216) working unified shaders. (GT200's that have all the unified shaders working go into the 275, 280, 285, and 295 cards.)