I think it's mainly the ammount of geometry. . .

[Spoudazo]

Well,

Doing some more tests, and I set everyting to the lowest the in-game settings would allow me. At first it was around 30fps or so, then after that, it stayed around 50fps. The textures, effects, lighting/shadows, were all turned down or off, and still it wouldn't average 60fps.

I'm thinking the 3d engine isn't as well optimized for such huge landscapes, at least yet. The reason the frames almost doubled after a minute or so of playing is perhaps because the rest of the level is loading when you first start the game, or the textures, etc. are all getting settled in. This was with 2gb of RAM, so RAM was not lacking, nor was the burst speed, etc. of the HDD.

You agree?

[Biro]

Well I think it's mostly the use of bumpmapping and normalmapping in the game that's causing the problems for the most people. Specially the ones with a mid-low end graphic card.

Bumpmapping is a way to get flat textures as for example a wall to appear as it's made out of thousands of polygons while it's actually the texture that is causing the effect. Bumpmapping is as far as I can see used on almost all the walls/brickfloors and so on and currently there is no way to turn this off in the game.

Normalmapping is when you have a model made out of alot of polygons for example the characthers in GR:AW and you create a "normalmap" out of this model, a flat texture, which you apply to the model you are actually using in-game. Again to give the illusion of a very detailed character. No option in the game to turn this off either.

I think it's the Bumpmapping that's "killing" most machines and I really hope there's an option to turn off this in the full game. Currently I have better graphics on my GR1 then on GR:AW and that's with a Radeon9800.

[Spoudazo]

Well, at least it all (or none) was done with parallax mapping, then we would ALL get around 30fps, hehehe.

[GRT]

Hey Biro, nice to see you

I noticed a ton of bump and normal mapping throughout the whole mission so im sure it hogs alot.

[Spoudazo]

Hey Biro, nice to see you

I noticed a ton of bump and normal mapping throughout the whole mission so im sure it hogs alot.

←

Isn't there a way to turn it off (like in Quake 4 and other games)? If we can turn it off, then we can see if it helps much or just some.

[BornToKill]

I ran this at 800*600 all settings low and easily got 70fps using a Radeon 9700Pro 128mb, 1Gb Ram, P4 2.8ghz.

I then increased the settings until i started to suffer laggyness.

I managed to get 1024 res @70hz with textures on Medium, Effects on low, AF low, dynamic lights On, dynamic shadows Off and achieved a smooth and very playable 40-50fps.

Pretty good if you ask me for a low spec card.

[stevenmu]

Well,

Doing some more tests, and I set everyting to the lowest the in-game settings would allow me.  At first it was around 30fps or so, then after that, it stayed around 50fps.  The textures, effects, lighting/shadows, were all turned down or off, and still it wouldn't average 60fps.

I'm thinking the 3d engine isn't as well optimized for such huge landscapes, at least yet.  The reason the frames almost doubled after a minute or so of playing is perhaps because the rest of the level is loading when you first start the game, or the textures, etc. are all getting settled in.  This was with 2gb of RAM, so RAM was not lacking, nor was the burst speed, etc. of the HDD.

You agree?

←

Hehe, no offense meant but the contradiction in your post is pretty funny

You seem to realise that that having 'such huge landscapes' is a technical challenge and yet seem to expect them to be able to 'optimise' it to great framerates. Let's compare GRAW to a game that people consider to be well optomised, such as HL2. In HL2, for me at least with only one measly gig of ram, the game would pause every minute or two to load up the next coridor or alleyway. It would also pause with a loading screen every 5-10 minutes, and on top of that it would stop to load each level. This was fine for HL2 but in the context of GRAW that would be completely unacceptable, imagine turning a corner and having to wait a few seconds for the geometre/textures etc to load, that would be a horrific handicap in a game like this. GRIN have said that not only can we move from street to street, and area to are with no loading, which is exactly how a game like this NEEDS to be, but there's also no loading between missions, we move seamlessly from one to the next. This in effect means that Mexico City is one giant sandbox for us to play in. The only other recent games I know of that attempted anything like this are Boiling Point (the less said about this the better) and and Oblivion, which despite having many loading points and alot of dynamically generated stuff (vegetation etc) is still a system hog. People keep talking about 'optimisation' as if GRIN (or any other developer) can just wave some magic optimising wand over a game and suddenly everything will run a lot better (some idiot even posted somewhere that any modern game could run on a Geforce 2 if devs just optomised their games).

I've only done a small bit of Direct3D programming, but (and I'm 99%sure the sam holds true for any 3d programming) the only way to have the kind of large, open, multi-route landscapes that GRAW does is to either use a huge chunk of CPU time to work out what does and does not need to be rendered or throw a ######-load of geometry and textures at the GPU and let it work out what needs to be displayed. Considering all the other stuff the CPU has to handle, I personally think the latter of those options is the best.

The bottom line is that GRIN could have, and most likely did optimise the ###### out of this game and it would still take a hell of a lot of power to run.

(I'm going to put this next part all in caps because many people with super-high-end rigs are complaining about performance without listening to what others are saying. This is not aimed at the original post or poster)

MY RIG= A64 3200+, 1GB CHEAP RAM, 128MB 6800NU AND THE DEMO RUNS PERFECTLY @ 1280*960 WITH EVERYTHING HIGH (except textures)

[nasa15]

Ahem.

GRAW doesn't use bump maps, it uses normal maps. A bump map is a grayscale image of the color texture most of the time, or it can look like a height map, which is still devoid of color. Normal maps are tri-colored textures (red, green, and blue with each color representing a direction in 3D space) which describes the orientation of each pixel on the surface.

Bump maps are grayscale and contain less lighting detail than do normal maps of the same resolution.

[Biro]

@GRT, thanks! Nice to see you too!

@Spoudazo, don't think it's possible to turn it off in the demo.

@Nasa, thanks for clearing that up. As it contains more lighting detail aswell, I guess it's even heavier for the graphic cards to handle the information then if they had been using bumpmaps. Would have been really nice to see how the game would run if we was able to turn this off and only use the flat 2d textures we know from GR1. Atleast I would be more then happy if this was working better then the 30fps I have now at 1024*780.