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About games' performance and gpus

ntg

ntg

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Joined
24 Nov 2008
Posts
2,499
I always see that when a new game comes out there is a raft of issues with gfx performance that take a number of driver updates to sort out.

So I've been wondering, how do the game developers test the games before release to make sure they work as designed if these drivers are unavailable? I may have got the process wrong I suppose but I'd be interested to find out how the whole testing for gpu's work.
 
amd drivers...

they went back to beeing crap again , nearly every new game has beeen a issue for amd GPU's users recently
 
I gave up on amd because of driver issues. It was mainly crossfire issues though that I had. Ditched my pair of 6870's for a single nvidia GTX480 (at £200 new!) and haven't looked back since. Games just work now.
 
They probably test a handful of common systems, however these systems aren't always monster PC's like like you and I are used to owning.
 
I think I didn't phrase my question right, when game developers design and develop a game, how do they test their graphic engines/results?

Obviously they can't be testing it in the current line of gpu's or they would know they don't perform adequately (so then, how do you know how it's supposed to perform?)
 
There's just far too many factors involved - they test a handful of different setups that probably match the various points in the performance spectrum in people's homes, but with the amount of hardware configurations out there, nobody can know that it'll run fine on all hardware. This is one of the reasons Bethesda have said that developing for PC is a headache.
 
I gave up on amd because of driver issues. It was mainly crossfire issues though that I had. Ditched my pair of 6870's for a single nvidia GTX480 (at £200 new!) and haven't looked back since. Games just work now.

You got yours during the spate of GTX 480 SE and SOC shippings from the Middle East?

Ah man, I wish I had got in on that.
 
amd drivers...

they went back to beeing crap again , nearly every new game has beeen a issue for amd GPU's users recently

Complete rubbish, Skyrim is fine, okay xfire doesn't work(it apparently will if you force it, can't test myself), 99.9% of people don't use xfire, not sure if SLI works or not. Rage was crap for everyone, in as much as the engine is crap, the game looks in lots of places like crap, and the texturing bugs are almost entirely down to the game. Aside from those which were mostly fixed by tweaking the config files, I had no other issues from the moment the game was available.

The vast majority of new games have NO issues unless you go peeing around with drivers and settings every 4 seconds. Aside from Rage, Skyrim, BF3, Cod568 all work fine.

The past 2 months have seen one of the buggiest games in recent history to come out, and both Nvidia and AMD had issues, and most of those issues were fixing things the game did wrong.

You need to read between the lines, in the past 2 years AMD have dominated enthusiast sales of people like the people you will see here.

If 60-70% of people have something between a 5850 and 6970, and 30-40% of people have a 460-580gtx, then you SHOULD see more posts with more problems from AMD users. more people comment on a problem in AMD drivers if it comes up, for two reasons. There are more frequent drivers, and more AMD users who update their drivers constantly.



Anyway, as far as the op goes. The problem is, as a games dev you'll generally work on a fairly set fairly stable game for a long time, working hard on the content, then towards the end, when you get to the stage of optimising after you factor in texture sizes, content, bug fixes and stuff, I would hazard a guess that in optimising you introduce a raft of new graphical bugs that end up needing to be ironed out.

Nvidia don't come close to getting every game "perfect" neither do AMD, neither do consoles, but being a very standardised platform there tend to be less bugs and less crashing.

Back to the way games are made, to a degree it works as, guys make an engine, when it works, they probably work with Nvidia/AMD to get a driver to fix any bugs, they'll often work FAR closer with one or the other if its a Nvidia or an AMD game, more of the former(largely due to cash available to spend on that kind of thing). But once the game is somewhat finished combined with a whole raft of bug fixes found in beta's, there is usually fast and furious optimisation and bug fixing going on, but fix one thing, break another, and that's often why you have AMD/Nvidia drivers working in beta, but something gets changed for final and you have all kinds of issues and need a new driver. This seems to be almost exactly what happened for Rage.
 
RE RAGE I suggest you read the patch notes and Carmacks twitter/blog posts.

Both developer and AMD comfirmed the game was working flawlessly on the AMD test setups at id with the development drivers provided by AMD yet they were slow on releasing public drivers that properly supported it and even cocked that up when they did. Granted there are some issues with nVidia setups to but they are for the most part on less common setups, for most mainstream nVidia setups using the updated drivers for RAGE which were released in a timely fashion it just works.
 
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