multimolti's Techblog » Gaming

GPU Water Simulation in Games – Is it worth it?

multimolti — Sun, 09 May 2010 21:21:39 +0000

With DirectX 10, the chips of graphics cards (GPUs) started to be able to do other tasks than just displaying graphics. Their big amount of “cores” enabled GPUs to compute different kinds of tasks much faster than a CPU would be able to. Nvidia offered CUDA to do video-encoding, matrix-multiplication or Folding@Home. ATI offered basically the same calling it Stream.

Now more and more developers are using these possibilities to enhance the visual quality of games, e.g. for physics calculation with Nvidia’s PhysX framework or possibly in the future with the open-source alternative OpenPhysics. But GPU acceleration can also greatly enhance the quality of water in games. The game Just Cause 2 offers support for GPU Water Simulation and shows quite impressively the differences between “normal” and “GPU” water.

Video Comparison:

Screenshot Comparison:

Let’s start with some screenshots for comparison (click on the image for full resolution):

As you can see, the visual quality improves quite a lot. But how does this GPU acceleration affect the performance?

Benchmarking System:

Processor: AMD Phenom II X4 955 (3.2GHz)
Mainboard: Gigabyte GA-MA790XT-UD4P
Memory: 2×2GB A-Data DDR3-1333 (CL 7-7-7-24 2T)
Graphics: Gainward Nvidia GTX 260 (680/1400/1150MHz)
Hard Disk: Samsung Spinpoint F3 1000GB (7200RPM, 32MB cache)
Operating System: Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit
Ingame Settings: 1920×1080, advanced settings as follows:

Performance Assessment

In order to measure the performance loss for enabling GPU Water Simulation in Just Cause 2, I took three common situations and measured the framerates for an interval of time:

Falling: Airlift to Bandar Arang Batu Besar (24676/27047), straight fall into death
Flying: Flight from Kem Udara Wau Pantas (22217/23304) to Pelantar Gas Panau Seladan (29886/24713) for 30 seconds, high above the water
Base Jump: Jump from highest skyscraper in Panau City – Docks District (1116/13726) in northern direction until death

The following diagram shows the actual testing results:

The framerates dropped quite significantly on my system (details above), on average the GPU Water Simulation lowered the FPS by 40%. When flying high above the water the game was still running fast enough, but especially in the city with an average of 19 FPS and a minimum FPS of 16, the game became unplayable.

Conclusion

GPU Water Simulation really improves the visual quality of games, but also needs a lot of computing power and thus lowers the performance significantly. On my system the game Just Cause 2 was not playable with GPU Water Simulation enabled in scenes with much action or geometry. Thus it takes a really powerful computer in order to be able to enjoy the great quality of GPU-accelerated water.

Source files of benchmarks: JustCause2_GPU_Water.rar

Assessing Virtual Machine Performance: #3 VMware Player

multimolti — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 11:53:02 +0000

In this series, I’m going to focus on comparing different Virtual Machines running Windows and their performance regarding different tasks such as single-threaded CPU-only applications, multi-threaded programs or even games requiring hardware 3D acceleration.

This article will show you when and for what to use VMware Player.

VMware Player is quite similar to Sun Virtual Box. You can also configure almost everything, from CPU count over memory to graphics acceleration. VMware Player can’t assign more cores than the computer actually has to the VM, but features better hardware graphics acceleration and up to 256MB of video memory. This also enables Windows 7 to run Aero and the glass effects smoothly.

I installed Windows 7 64-bit in the VM and compared the performance to my native Windows 7 64-bit. Like in VirtualBox, hardware acceleration is supported, but not required. The installation is even easier than in VirtualBox: Tell VMware Player which OS you plan to install, and it automatically suggests hardware configuration and manages the installation process by clicking the right buttons. After installation, it will install the VMware tools that include 3D driver support and other programs that make using the VM more comfortable.

A nice function that both VirtualBox and VMware Player support is the option to assign devices either to the host OS or the virtual one. This enables the user to connect two mice and keyboards and assign them to host and virtual OS. Now the virtual OS can be moved to a second screen and both users can use the computer simultaneously.

Performance:

Settings:

CPU count: 2

RAM: 1500MB

GPU acceleration: yes, 256MB, DirectX 9

First of all, the Windows 7 System Rating shows that both CPU and GPU performance in the VM are quite good, only the memory is a bit too slow:

To test how strong the VM really is, I ran SuperPI and got these results: It took the VM 0.773 seconds longer to complete the calculation, which equals a performance loss of 3.3%. This is a quite good result, similar to Microsoft Virtual PC, but not as good as VirtualBox.

Since the graphics acceleration really seems to work here, I tried some games to prove it. Older games such asCall of Duty, Couter-Strike 1.6 and Civilization were running nicely, Warcraft 3 had some texturing problems, and quite new games like Call of Duty 5 – World at War didn’t really run (I got around 4 FPS).

All in all, VMware Player is quite good in all fields: CPU performance, GPU performance and ease of use (installation and VMware tools). Moreover, working with it felt smoother than in VirtualBox or Virtual PC, but that may be due to Aero. This means one can work with VMware Player and even play older games. Regarding the possibility to connect keyboard and mouse to the VM and moving it to a second screen basically enables you to create a second, virtual computer that allows another user to work, play or watch movies on the same hardware at the same time.

Assessing Virtual Machine Performance: #2 Sun Virtual Box

multimolti — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 10:28:22 +0000

This article will show you when and for what to use Sun VirtualBox.

For these tests, I used a quite uncommon configuration: I ran a virtual Windows 7 on my native Windows 7. Most users probably won’t do this, but there is a reason why I chose this OS configuration: Sun VirtualBox allows you to use more CPU cores than you actually have.

The OS installation with Virtual Box is quite easy, just insert your install DVD into the real drive, create a new VM with the hardware configuration you like and tell VirtualBox which OS you’re planning to install. Then allocate your DVD to the VM and start the installation. Worked greatly with Linux, Windows XP and Windows 7 and VirtualBox automatically installed its tools to enable automatic mouse grabbing and this kind of stuff.

In contrast to Microsoft Virtual PC, VirtualBox comes with GPU acceleration, but only allows you to use up to 128MB of video memory. Moreover, the drivers are still beta, so the performance is not as good as you would like it to be.

Performance:

For this test, I didn’t choose settings that any serious user would try, but decided to test the option of using 8 cores.

Settings:

CPU count: 8

RAM: 2048MB

GPU acceleration: yes, 128MB video memory

I searched for a benchmarking program that can use any number of threads and found wPrime. Since it can be scaled to 4 or 8 cores, it was capable of running on both my real quad-core and on the virtual octo-core and still using all the cores.

The virtual octo-core was 0.303 seconds slower, which equals 1.9% performance loss. This is quite surprising when you consider that four of the cores are just simulated and the real OS and processor have to split up the work somehow. These results are even better than the ones I got from Microsoft Virtual PC where the performance loss was about 3.9%.

Hardware graphics acceleration should be there, but don’t expect too much. The drivers are still beta, the video memory is just 128MB and the graphics performance of VMs has never been close to the CPU performance. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get the DirectX acceleration to work, neither on Windows 7 64-bit nor on Windows XP 32-bit. That’s a pity because the only VM supporting graphics acceleration is VMware Player then.

All in all, VirtualBox is a really nice tool due to its possiblities of configuration such as using 8 cores, its easy installation and the CPU performance. There is no such feature as direct integration into the host OS as with Virtual PC, but nobody would expect such a feature, and the graphics power isn’t that awesome either, but still better than other VMs supplying just a standard VGA adapter without hardware acceleration or DirectX support.

Battlefield Bad Company 2 exclusive preview

multimolti — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 10:47:48 +0000

Yesterday evening, the Closed Beta of Battlefield Bad Company 2 started. I managed to secure a beta key and get the game installer and immediately started testing. First of all, a few screenshots and performance information, but more information and a video will follow! There is a torrent download for Battlefield Bad Company 2 that’s working quite well in contrast to the official EA servers or other mirrors that are really overloaded and keep crashing all the time.

The beta supports multiplayer and includes only the gamemode “Rush” with the map “Port Valdez”. Official sources say:

The Battlefield: Bad Company 2 PC beta will feature Port Valdez, a new vehicle focused map where up to 32 players will compete against each other as either the US or Russian armies in the game’s Rush multiplayer mode. Players will have access to five land and three air vehicles where the Russian side can use everything in their arsenal including Main Battle Tanks as well as the fast-moving Quad Bikes and Mobile Armored AA. The fight will also be packed with plenty of infantry combat fought alongside the waterline towards a great oil industrial landscape in the Alaskan mountains.

Being based on the new Frostbite Engine, the game has quite high system requirements:

Recommended Frostbite PC Specifications for BFBC2 & BF1943:
Processor: Quadcore
Main memory: 2GB
Graphics card: GeForce GTX 260
Graphics memory: 512MB

Especially explosions are really nice in this game, thus I created a “flip-book” of pictures (click to enlarge):

Ingame screenshots:

Medieval II: Total War multiplayer fix

multimolti — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 23:42:10 +0000

When trying to play Medieval II: Total War multiplayer in LAN mode, you may encounter the problem that the players can’t see each other in the lobby and can’t find the hosted game despite of correct versions, network configuration and firewall settings.

There is a quite easy fix for this problem, just follow the steps below:

Browse to the directory containing Medieval II (e.g. C:\Program Files\Medieval II Total War)
Open medieval2.preference.cfg with notepad
Scroll down to the [network] section and edit the following line saying “use_ip = “. Put your LAN IP address after the equals sign and save the file
Restart the game, now everything should work nicely!

If there are any other issues, please comment and I will try to help!

DreamHack Winter 2009

multimolti — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 22:25:47 +0000

On 26th November 2009, the ”World’s Largest Digital Festival” DreamHack Winter started in Jönköping in Sweden. I was lucky and won the journey to Sweden as well as the ticket, sponsored by Razer. Razer even chartered a bus and painted it with the Razer logo just for the DreamHack festival:

The official website describes DreamHack as “the word’s largest LAN-party and computer festival” with more than 12,000 participants. DreamHack is focused on everything one can do with computers: gaming, communication, programming, designing, music and so on. Moreover, there were many gaming tournaments with famous teams from all over the world in games such as Counter-Strike, Quake, Warcraft 3 and Street Fighter.

Participants had to bring their own computers and equipment, but got a quite nice Gigabit Ethernet and an extremely powerful internet infrastructure in return. Speed-Tests I did on DreamHack certified downstreams of almost 100MB/sec and upstreams of almost 50MB/sec. In actual downloads, I was able to reach 7.5MB/s downloading and 8.7MB/s uploading.

In addition to gaming events, there was also a Dream Expo of different hardware and software companies showing products and doing overclocking competitions or giving away products. Furthermore, live bands and singers, games and events on stage and movie screening during night added to the fun. There were also lots of really powerful computers (the best featuring Intel Core i7 975 Extreme Edition, 12GB DDR3 RAM, 4xGTX 295) with many games installed (Modern Warfare 2, Couter-Strike, Left 4 Dead 2) provided by different hardware and software vendors (Razer, Fujitsu, R.U.S.E). Thus even persons visiting DreamHack without a computer or any hardware had enough to see and enjoy.

Surprisingly, 10% of all participants were female and some were even competing in the tournaments. I will add some pictures and a video in hope of giving you an idea about DreamHack!

Enable Anti-Aliasing in Risen (nVidia cards)

multimolti — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 20:12:26 +0000

Risen is a single-player fantasy-themed action role-playing game released just a week ago. While the graphics is quite good in some parts (lighting, shadows, weather effects and environment), the developers didn’t manage to integrate Anti-Aliasing due to the HDR (High Dynamic Range) effects. Here is a way how you can enable Anti-Aliasing anyway, working only for nVidia graphics card though.

1. Download and install nHancer

nHancer is an Advanced Control Panel and Profile Editor for nVidia graphics cards, enabling you to optimize the display of games and customizing driver settings. This will allow you to force the nVidia driver to activate Anti-Aliasing, no matter what the game wants. Download and install the latest version of nHancer from the official website or from the local server.

2. Rename the Risen executable to Vanguard

Go to the binary folder of your Risen installation, probably C:\Program Files (x86)\Deep Silver\Risen\bin and rename Risen.exe to Vanguard.exe. This will force the nVidia driver to apply Anti-Aliasing settings usually applied for the game Vanguard which are also working for Risen.

3. Enable Anti-Aliasing settings with nHancer

Now launch nHancer and let it search for all profiles if this is the first time you start the application. Once the list in on the left side is populated, search for Vanguard and select the according profile. Once you selected it, tick “Anti-Aliasing” in the “Enhancements” tab on the right side and select the Anti-Aliasing mode you prefer. You will probably have to do some experimenting to find the right setting for your hardware, but I suggest to use “Multisampling” and then the 8x or 16x setting.

My GTX 260 can easily run Multisampling 8x and 16x without big performance losses, but using Supersampling or Combined 16x will kill the performance to around 2-3 FPS. Try various options for your graphics card and select the one which looks best without losing too many FPS.

Then make sure “Anti-Aliasing compability” is checked under the “Compability” tab and “Vanguard” is selected in the drop-down menu below.

4. Launch Risen and have fun with smoother edges and less aliasing

Now you can just launch Vanguard.exe (your Desktop shortcut may not be working any more) and enjoy the better graphics! I took some comparison screenshots for you to see which Anti-Aliasing setting has which effect and how big the performance losses are. Graphics settings:

Resolution: 1920×1080
Details: Everything “High”, Depth of Field deactivated (looks ugly),
Config tweaks: ViewRange set to 16000

Anti-Aliasing off, 55 FPS
Multisampling 8x, 35 FPS
Combined 16xS, 3 FPS

As you can see, there is not much difference in the image quality between Multisampling 8x and Combined 16xS, but the performance differences are huge. I recommend to use Multisampling and not Supersampling or Combined.

Create HUGE Crysis Screenshots up to 450 Megapixels!

multimolti — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 19:41:48 +0000

Using a few console commands, you can easily create giant screenshots of Crysis with resolutions of 28800×16200 or more megapixels, which corresponds with 225 times Full-HD resolution!

Here is how to create such enormous screenshots:

Launch Crysis, select any graphics settings you want and load a savegame
Open the console by pressing the ` key on English keyboards, ^ key on German ones (below Esc and to the left of 1)
Type con_restricted 0 and press Enter. This will unlock all the restricted console commands.
Now use e_screenshot_width and e_screenshot_height followed by the desired number of pixels, I used e_screenshot_width 28800 and e_screenshot_height 16200 for my huge image.
By default, your screenshot will be saved as TGA file, you can also change the filetype by entering e_screenshot_file_format followed by either jpg, tga or bmp
Select your fists as weapon by pressing “1″ twice
Enter cl_hud 0 to disable the HUD
Enter e_screenshot 1 to take a screenshot. This may take a while, Crysis will render many parts and put them together as one big image later on.
Your Screenshot will be located in Crysis/Game/ScreenShots/HiRes as a large TGA file. I recommend IrfanView for viewing the picture, most other programs will crash when trying to open such a big file!

I resized my resulting 1.3GB TGA file to 1920×1080 pixels afterwards in order to be able to publish it here, but of course all the cool details are gone that way. Your result may look like this:

Click here for 1080p version of this screenshot. I actually set all graphics settings to Ultra High and have no idea, why the water reflections and stuff are missing… probably gone due to the down-sampling. Don’t take too many screenshots, otherwise all your HDD space will be gone…

Below are some moreÂ down-sampledÂ versions of 450 megapixel screenshots. The weird stripes you can see don’t appear in the full-size versions, so I think I have to blame the down-sampling again…

New version (1.1) of Airship Assault released!

multimolti — Thu, 28 May 2009 17:51:19 +0000

Today I uploaded the latest version of my MultiInput game “Airship Assault” which resolves most known bugs. ItÂ is the first game that uses my MultiInput library in order to support many players playing the same game on onecomputer with multiple mice connected to theÂ computer.

Major changes:

Mouse sensitivity can now be changed ingame
Game Launcher added, checks whether XNA Framework 3.0 and .NET Framework 2.0 are installed before launching the game
Optimized game file package
Music file not needed to play the game, if missing, the game will just launch without music
Source code optimized in many parts

Download Airship Assault 1.1!

Solve Painkiller error “invalid control char near …”

multimolti — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 04:45:06 +0000

If you encounter errors when playing some Painkiller levels or starting a multiplayer game, and the error looks like the one below, there is an easy way of solving it.

[string "../Data/LScripts/Templates/ParticleFX/Environments/SnowEnvironm..."]:1: invalid control char near `char(1)’
[string "../Data/LScripts/Templates/Items/C1L3_korzenie.CItem"]:1: invalid control char near `char(1)’
[string "../Data/LScripts/Templates/Items/C1L3_uapka.CItem"]:1: invalid control char near `char(1)’

First of all, patch Painkiller to the latest version (1.64). If the patching doesn’t work because you don’t have registry entries, download my Painkiller registry entries here.

Then you have to download these template files for Painkiller and extract the archive using WinRAR or any other archiving program into the Painkiller directory (e.g. C:\Program Files\Painkiller). If it asks to replace files, select “yes to all”. Now your game should work perfectly!