speculation about 3D game performance under Gallium3D+Mesa

I know that Gallium3D+Mesa port from Hyperion is not available for AmigaOS4(.2) yet (nor any hints as to when it will be available), but I thought it was worth making a note of how well it already performs (on Linux of course), since that should give us a ball-park idea for what kind of performance to expect on suitable AmigaOS4 systems (i.e. a Radeon HD PCI-Express card & a decent CPU, both of which sadly rule-out the Sam440).

And well, I ran into some interesting benchmarks that I'll surely forget about if I don't post them now:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page ... em=doom3_linux_mesa&num=6

The most interesting result (given that Doom 3 is now open source) is that at 800x600 (with over-kill Ultra Quality), Doom 3 on a Radeon HD 4650 gave 72 fps with Doom 3, while a HD 4850 gave 86 fps. Very playable I think!

The results at 1280x1024 resolution (also with over-kill Ultra Quality) were not so good, but I think still perfectly acceptable: Doom 3 on a Radeon HD 4650 gave 34 fps, while a HD 4850 gave 67 fps. They didn't test the HD 4890 (which is x1.5-2 times as powerful as a 4850), so we can only guess how it would perform.

And then of course most people probably won't be running Doom 3 with silly settings like Ultra Quality, so that should significantly boost frame rates.


OTOH, we won't be running Doom 3 on a 4-core 3.3GHz CPU, so we may end-up being limited by our CPU power. But it is at least nice to know that the speed of Gallium3D+Mesa shouldn't be a particular problem, despite some claims (on other unmentionable web sites) to the contrary.

By comparison Doom 3 running under Windows at 1280x1024 & Ultra Quality (using a closed-source OpenGL implementation) might manage 120+ fps. i.e. 3.5 times faster than Gallium3D+Mesa. So clearly Gallium3D+Mesa still has some bottlenecks to sort out, but as Gallium3D+Mesa now appears to be the defacto 3D stack for Linux, there will surely be a lot more work done on it (particularly with Doom 3 now being open source).


BTW, one more interesting thing I read, which is reassuring since we appear to be focusing on Radeon HD cards:
Quote:

@CrhisH
In the same thread 1 year ago, brothers say "can we please stop speculation until port will be not done, as linux specific tests make no sense".

There is that thread. In which you also was involved.

For now all of this about linux-specific gallium not so interesting anymore, but what is intersting - exactly aos4 version realisation, and until you or others can't talk about it, there is no point to back to linux-benchmarks again. Its can be faster than aos4 ones, and can be slower than aos4 ones.

Quote:

And

Quote:

Being 3.5x times as slow as what the chip could normally allow is quite a problem to me, if you ask me. :)

And I don't know Doom 3 in particular, but with Quake 3, CPU/Memory speed also had a great impact on the final benchmarks (like 48fps on Peg2 vs 76fps on Mac mini). But maybe it's less true with Doom3, which i imagine should rely more on GPU, but that's just a wild guess, it might also be very CPU hungry too.

Hello!

I 've mentioned on other thread(s) on awn as well: People shouldn't have high hopes for G3D. Though, it will be a major improvement over existing 3D driver system of AOS4.x, it won't offer anything near closed source drivers or tweaked 3D drivers.

As for the linux/D3 benchmark I have my doubts: D3 is prone on having in game severe fps drops, depending on the scenery. Which were the limits? My computer (3 years old laptop, Core2Duo@2.24Ghz, 9600GT 512MB Ram, DDR2 400Mhz) reaches 60 fps (1280x1024 ultra quality) as well, but can also drop around 18!

Furthermore, don't forget that 3D games require as well good cpu and fast ram access. The benchmark of linux/G3D was done on a monstrous Intel i5 / DDR3 (with max oc@2133Mhz!). Neither Sam460 nor X1000 can offer anything close to that. As for the 86 fps (that is a high number) on 800x600, I have to ask, who uses in 2012, a decade old resolutions to play games?

Still, I speculate that G3D will boost fps rate on older 3D games (Quake series will sure benefit).

@kas1e Quote:
I do not think it is a problem for us: Given a certain 3D card, there are two possible bottlenecks to performance of a 3D game like Doom 3:

1. The CPU; which needs to be fast enough to calculate the 3D scene for each frame.

2. The 3D stack; The necessary instructions are sent to the 3D card by the 3D stack (e.g. Gallium3D+Mesa). An efficient 3D stack will send less instructions (and less complex instructions), so that the 3D card has less work to do, meaning it can generate the 3D scene faster.

If one of these is a lot slower than the other, then you have a bottleneck, and the frame rate will be mostly determined by that slow bottleneck. Given that the Gallium3D benchmarks show it is much slower than Windows, we can deduce that the bottleneck is Gallium3D...


...AND YET Gallium3D still managed to produce 34 to 86 fps at Ultra Quality! I already find these perfectly acceptable for gaming (never mind that they should improve in the future).

And further, although our CPUs are much slower than those used for benchmarking Gallium3D, we should not have to worry too much about worse frame rates (than the currently acceptable results), because it is Gallium3D not the CPU which is the bottleneck.

P.S. There is no harm in wanting "as fast as possible", but at some point things are fast enough that "faster" won't matter to most people. I would rather enjoy "good", than get upset that I don't have "perfect". You can describe this as the "glass half full" view.

Quote:
That was not the purpose of those results. Instead it showed that at 800x600 both a Radeon 4650 & 4850 performed very similarly, while at 1280x1024 the 4850 was much better. This tells us some useful things, e.g. that (currently) Gallium3D needs a more powerful 3D card for higher resolutions. We can therefore decide the best Radeon HD card to buy, before Gallium3D is ported to AmigaOS4(.2) .

Well going by the results open-source Gallium3D is yes slower than closed-source solutions, but hey lets be serious.. going by these stats...

http://openbenchmarking.org/embed.php ... DEONGAL66&sha=6300a80&p=2

Its only at this resolution do things look less impressive. Bearing in mind this is the 'Ultra' setting. Your average gamer is not going to worry about dropping the setting back one or two steps.

Hyperion will have picked up the open-source Gallium3D code, but once they've optimised the crap out of it - no doubt it will become in its own right closed-source.

I don't see any major concern here.

Ragarding the "perfect for gaming" comment... are we gonna play Doom 3 forever?! That is an old game by computer standards! Sure it's nice to have it runing on an Amiga but hey, I've played through that game a couple of times in Windows and also on Linux using WinE. It was really fast on both I'd like to add.

So what about anything newer than Doom 3 and Quake 4?

Oh it doesn't matter, the platform won't get anything newer or better gamewise so it doesn't matter. I WILL play throuh Doom 3 once again once it's possible but damn this is depressing... sorry but it is. It is such a loooong way to go.

Most of the interesting OpenGL games are free open source software anyway.

Strangely I never really got into the FPS-genre. First contact was playing Wolfenstein across the college network during lectures lol thinking gee this sucks look at those blocky graphics can't wait to get home and play real games on my Amiga.
Then along came Doom, much better graphics, but still the same boring genre. Didn't really play it a lot, flirted with Doom 2, not touched 3 or 4. The only other FPS I have played at length is Assault Cube on the Mac.
I prefer turn-based games rpgs such as Dofus and Wakfu - games you have to think about - even WoW doesn't interest me - just looks like a glorified FPS.

In essence to me, 2D games are whole lot better as more 'love' and 'passion' has gone into them at a pixel level. Outside of the computing world, you could compare a Pixar 'classic' against something more contemporary such as Dumbo. Shrek is just a bunch of polygons, I'd rather watch Wallace and Gromit thank you. However having said that, Ratatouille, was a masterpiece within the polygon world.

At the end of the day whether its 2D or 3D, substance and a good storyline/gameplay is more important than anything else.

@djrikki

3D does not make games autocratically better, the coder and graphic artist has put the same love and work in to the project, 3d graphic can make a game look a lot better but some times it brings the game to new level.


Just look at Trine and Trine 2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-k7Zkp_4ro4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAm1fpx5GoQ&feature=fvwrel

I love to se more Amiga Developers taking advantage of 3D in platform games and shout me up type of games, I'm sick of pixels and old AGA/OCS games.

@djrikki

Aww, a friend at heart

Everything you said i can absolutely second except my genre of love will always be adventure games (also action-adventures to an extent).

That's why i invest my short free time in keeping ScummVM up to date...biggest collection of adventure classics playable on OS4.

I am waiting and hoping for Gallium 3D only because residual and the masterpiece Grim Fandango will make a leap forward in playability with hardware 3D.
(Of course that and the fact that OS4 with hardware accel will fly)

Good luck to the devs working on it