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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

Browser Roundup – Opera, Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer tested

multimolti — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 16:31:43 +0000

There are so many browsers out there, with Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera just being the most popular ones. Internet Explorer has been the king of all browsers regarding the market share, but mainly because it was pre-installed on all Windows versions after Windows 95. But over the last months, Internet Explorer’s marketshare has decreased to only slightly above 60% while Firefox almost managed to break the magical 25%-barrier, and even Chrome can claim more than 6% although it was released just one and a half years ago.

Since more and more users seem to consider switching from Internet Explorer to other browsers, they all have the tough choice of finding the right browser. I created this browser roundup to compare the latest versions of all major browsers and show their strengths and weaknesses.

The Contestants

I used the latest available final versions of all these browsers. Beta or Alpha versions are not considered as they may be unstable and thus do not qualify for everyday use. Internet Explorer was running in 64-bit, all other browsers in 32-bit.

Opera 10.51 (10.51 Build 3315)
Chrome 4.1 (4.1.249.1036)
Firefox 3.6 (3.6.3)
Safari 4.0 (4.0.5 531.22.7)
Internet Explorer 8 (8.0.7600.16385 64bit)

The Benchmark System

This is the system used for benchmarking all these different browsers. All other tasks were terminated during the benchmarks except for Avira AntiVir.

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

The Features Tested

Performance – JavaScript and Rendering tested with Sunspider, Peacekeeper, Dromaeo, V8
Standards Conformity – Compliance to HTML, CSS and JavaScript standards tested with Acid3, CSS3 Selectors Test
Loading Speed – Time to load websites tested with Numion Stopwatch on three websites
Startup Speed – Time it takes the browser to launch
Memory Usage – The amount of memory used with 1, 11 and 25 tabs
Customization – The amount of addons and themes available
Security – Vulnerability to different hacks, block rate of malicious websites

Testing the security was a really hard job. The only reliable data was the block rate. All browsers passed the hacking tests and the amount of vulnerabilities over the last years does not allow to judge the security. Data for the mean time of patch release was not available.

The Results – Overview

I analyzed and created charts for every single test, but these detailed statistics won’t be interesting for most people, so here are the overall results. A German version of this summary can be found on PCMasters.de.

The results of all tests have been summed up and weighted in order to create these final results. Further details on the weighting can be found below. All results based on time (Loading Speed and Startup Speed) and the memory usage are inverted so that higher scores are always faster. Security is left out due to the reasons mentioned above. Please remember: All tests were executed on the system named above. Results on other systems may vary. Numbers (e.g. addons, themes, vulnerabilities) were current at the time of creation of this benchmark (14th of April 2010) and may increase in the future).

The Results – Analysis

Performance: This measurement of performance indicates how fast websites can be drawn, scrolled or zoomed after all the content have been loaded, and how fast complex applications such as Google Docs are running. Opera and Chrome are clearly leading regarding the JavaScript and rendering performance, closely followed by Safari. The popular Firefox browser is quite slow compared to the ones named before, and Internet Explorer is really much slower than the others. This aspect is especially important for slow computers like netbooks.

Standards Conformity: There are some standards like HTML and CSS that define how the website is supposed to look like. Web developers should write their HTML-Code according to the standards so the website can be displayed correctly. But when the browser used by a visitor does not comply to these standards, the website may not be displayed correctly or some buttons may not work at all. This really slows down web development because developers have to create different versions of their scripts and have to test all browsers which is quite costly. Low standards conformity in Internet Explorer 6 caused Google to dis-continue support for this browser in order to force users to migrate to better ones. All browsers except Internet Explorer 8 comply quite well to the web standards, just Firefox takes a little hit by scoring just 95% on Acid3. Users should really choose a browser that scores high in this section in order to be able to view and use every website perfectly.

Loading Speed: This comparison shows how long it takes browsers to load websites using the same internet connections. As you can see there isn’t much difference between all browsers, Internet Explorer is slightly faster than the rest, but only by a few percent. Opera and Chrome could perform better using their features Opera Turbo or Chrome DNS Prefetching, but these features were disabled during the test.

Startup Speed: Determines how long it takes the browser to start up and load the front page (google.com in this case). Internet Explorer 8 is the fastest one here, but regarding the absolute values this doesn’t count much: Internet Explorer needs 0.8 seconds while Firefox, the slowest starting browser takes 2.4 seconds. Assuming the average user would start his browser 10 times a day, using Internet Explorer over Firefox would only save 16 seconds.

Memory Usage: Loading a website and rendering its contents always needs some of your system memory (RAM). But different browsers use their memory more or less efficiently, as the chart above is showing. Firefox and Safari were most efficient, Internet Explorer least efficient. Considering the fact that Internet Explorer used 521MB with 25 tabs open and 291MB with 11 tabs open, most users with modern computers (having 2-4GB of memory) won’t notice this much. Older and slower computers or netbooks mostly have limited memory (512-1024MB) and thus are more dependent on memory-efficient browsers like Firefox.

Customization: This includes the amount of addons and themes available for each browser. Many users don’t like the default interface of their browser and want to change it, or just want to add more features such as ad-blocking or notificiations (Facebook, Mail, etc) to their browser. This can be provided by using addons. The more addons and themes are available, the higher is the probability of finding just the ones you need. Firefox is most customizable with more than 12000 addons and 400 themes. Chrome and Opera with 4000/1400 addons and 400/120 themes can be adjusted as well, but Internet Explorer and Safari don’t offer many options here.

There is no way of summing up all these points to come to the conclusion “this is the best browser, this is the worst one”, because every user considers the aspects differently. Thus I will try to give some recommendations who should use which browser. I won’t recommend Internet Explorer anywhere due to its bad implementation of web standards and the shortcoming regarding performance.

The Results – Recommendations

Netbook-User: Netbooks have quite slow processors and thus need a browser with high performance, given by Opera and Chrome. But most Netbooks also have very limited memory, thus the browser should be quite memory-efficient like Firefox and Safari. Firefox is performing quite bad in all the performance tests, so Opera, Chrome or Safari would be the best choice for Netbook users.

Poweruser: If you surf the web every day for a long time using many different tabs you really need performance and memory efficiency. Again, Opera, Chrome and Safari offer these features in combination with perfect implementation of web standards. Safari’s loading speed is slightly better than Opera’s and Chrome’s, but Opera and Chrome have their Turbo and DNS Prefetching technologies respectively to boost page loading. It’s a difficult choice.

Customizer: If you want your browser to look exactly the way you need it, every button to be at the right place, and every feature to be directly available inside the browser, Firefox would be the choice. This browser offers more than 12000 addons and 400 themes for users for whom performance doesn’t matter that much.

Average User: The average user surfs the web only occasionally to check mails, research something or watch some video on YouTube. He doesn’t need any fancy features or designs and just wants to enjoy his web experience. Here almost every browser would fit, but most of them have a lot of features nobody actually needs. Chrome offers good performance, a simple interface with just the buttons required to do normal surfing and comfortable features such as an integrated history search inside the URL box.

The Results – Detailed Statistics and Analysis

The following part will show detailed statistics of the different tests and explain some results. All raw-data is stored in an Excel file you can download here, containing the exact scores and timings, URLs of tests and websites used and comments regarding errors or settings.

Performance:

Opera is leading regarding the performance, directly followed by Chrome and Safari. Firefox isn’t performing that well, but Internet Explorer clearly looses this battle. Its performance is far below the other browser’s, and the Internet Explorer 8 wouldn’t even start the Dromaeo test due to its bad implementation of web standards. Sunspider results are inverted to show runs per minute. On the testing system Opera was fastest with 6174 points in Peacekeeper and 434.52 in Dromaeo. Safari leads with an average of 595.4ms in Sunspider, and Chrome with 4397 points in V8.

Standards Conformity:

In order to check whether a browser complies to web standards, the Acid3 and CSS3 Selectors Test were used. Opera, Chrome and Safari pass Acid3 with 100%, Firefox scores 92% and Internet Explorer only 20%. All browsers except Internet Explorer passed the CSS3 test with 100%, Internet Explorer just passed 349 of 578 tests.

Loading Speed:

In order to measure how fast a browser can load different websites, the numion’s StopWatch was used. Loading speed was tested on three different websites and recorded as the average of two tests. Loading times for ESPN range from 2.2 to 3.5 seconds, from 0.5 to 0.9 seconds for Google and from 2.1 to 4.5 for this website. As you can see, the results are not really homogeneous, so one can’t conclude that one browser is loading faster than the other one.

Startup Speed:

When looking at the startup speed (starting the browser and loading the homepage google.com), Internet Explorer is clearly the winner and Firefox clearly the looser. But when considering the time it actually takes the browser to launch, from 0.8 seconds for Internet Explorer and 2.4 seconds for Firefox, this doesn’t really affect the browsing experience and can be neglected.

Memory Usage:

In order to measure the real memory usage (which can be quite difficult for browsers like Chrome who run multiple processes) the total memory usage of the whole system was measured before browser launch, after 1 tab, 11 tabs and 25 tabs. The memory usage results are inverted to show lower usage as higher score. Running one tab with just google.com in it, all browsers except Safari required between 55MB and 61MB, while Safari took only 32MB. Running more tabs, Firefox clearly leaves the concurrents behind with just 165MB for 11 tabs (others between 219MB and and 291MB) and 271MB for 25 tabs (others between 372MB and 521MB). For calculating the total score the memory usage for 25 pages was weighted only 50% because most users never open that many tabs. You can find the list of pages opened in all browsers here.

Customization:

To compare the ways of customizing the different browsers, the amount of addons and themes was assessed. Firefox has more than 12000 addons and, followed by Chrome with only above 4000. Similarly, Firefox has most themes with more than 400, closely followed by Opera. Internet Explorer and Safari didn’t have many addons and no official way of customizing the interface or theme. There were some third-party applications to chance their looks but they can’t be considered as official themes.

Security:

Comparing the security of different web browsers was a really hard job. The company scanit released a test that tries to crash browsers using various security leaks, but every browser managed to resist all of them. Then the block rate of malicious websites was considered: Internet Explorer blocks 85% of all malicious links tested, followed by Firefox and Safari with 29%, Chrome with 17% and Opera with only 1%. Just blocking links doesn’t make the browser safe from hacker attacks, so this does not really show the security of a browser. Then the public security vulnerabilities (leaks that are known to the browser developers and hackers that were not closed by a patch before being known publicly) were counted (inverted in the diagram). There was no data available for Chrome, and since Safari only had 4 of these vulnerabilities it is clearly leading here. The last diagram shows the amount of vulnerabilities found for each browser in the NVD. But since some browser exist for a very long time (e.g. Firefox and Internet Explorer) and some just for a few years (Chrome), I can’t really compare the amount of vulnerabilities ever found. This is why there is no total security score in the summarized diagram.

I hope this browser roundup gives an overview over the features and possibilities offered by each browser. If there are any suggestions, please comment! Screenshots to prove all results are available, but too big to be uploaded here. If you want me to prove any of the results, just comment or write an email and I will send the screenshots.

Assessing Virtual Machine Performance

multimolti — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 17:06:53 +0000

If you want to try a new operating system, but don’t want to put your computer and data to the risk of being corrupted, virtual machines can come in handy. They are small programs simulating to be a completely independent system with CPU, GPU, memory, HDD, DVD drive and so on and can run another operating system parallel to the one you’re actually using.

There are three major virtual machines out there: VMware Player, Sun VirtualBox and Microsoft VirtualPC. I took a look at all of them and compared their strengths and weaknesses. If you want to read the full review, have a look at the posts below:

Assessing Virtual Machine Performance: #1 Microsoft Virtual PC

Assessing Virtual Machine Performance: #2 Sun Virtual Box

Assessing Virtual Machine Performance: #3 VMware Player

I will also write a short summary of each VM in this post, but for now the detailed reviews should be enough.

New version of Opera catching up with Chrome’s performance?

multimolti — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 17:59:41 +0000

There is an updated benchmark including Opera 10.50b and Chrome 5.0 here!

A newly released pre-alpha version of Opera promises to radically improve the browser’s performance and speed of displaying and loading websites. The official developer website even claims that “[Opera 10.50] is fast, more than 7x faster in SunSpider than Opera 10.10“. Since Google Chrome has been the fastest browser on the market so far, followed by Apple’s Safari browser, we may have a new player among the best-performing browser.

I downloaded and tested Opera 10.50 and found out that it actually is much faster than before, but also very unstable. I ran Peacekeeper three times, the first time it went well, the second time it was much slower and the third time it didn’t start the benchmark and showed just a blank page. I had to re-install Opera in order to fix this problem. But please keep in mind that this is a pre-alpha release and not meant for everyday use.

In comparison to Chrome 5.0.307.1, Opera 10.50 lost by 12.8%, which is actually a big improvement compared to Chrome 2.0.170 and Opera 9.64, where Opera lost by 60.2%. Safari, once the fastest browser, scored 28.6% less than Chrome, thus giving up its second place to Opera.

Considering the fact that Opera is still pre-alpha and that the development team will improve it before releasing the final version, one can expect Opera’s Peacekeeper score to increase again, bringing it dangerously close to Chrome.

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!

New webserver and domain

multimolti — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 19:18:28 +0000

Since October 1st, 2009, this website is hosted on a new and hopefully faster and more reliable server. Hostmonster is providing the hardware, and since their computing centre is located in the USA, the website should be faster when being accessed from the United States. Moreover, I got a new domain multimolti.com and all traffic to multimolti.de is redirected to the new domain.

If you find any links still pointing to the old .de-domain, please notify me so I can change it. Thank you!

Increased Google speed with Caffeine

multimolti — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 18:29:19 +0000

For some time, the developers at Google were working at a solution to make their search engine faster. Now you can test the new search architecture called “Caffeine” yourself.

Obviously, they reached their goal of increasing the search speed, but didn’t change the searchÂ behavior. When searching for normal terms, you can feel a speed increase of up to 75% in my tests, but when using more complex searches with quotes, there is almost no difference.

You can test the new Caffeine search here: http://www2.sandbox.google.com/

Some speed tests:

Search term	Old engine	Caffeine	Difference
multimolti	0.39 sec	0.22 sec	21%
install windows 7 on asus eee pc	1.01 sec	0.25 sec	75%
“install windows 7 on asus eee pc”	1.07 sec	0.84 sec	21%

As you can see, when using quotes, the difference is not that big.

AdBlock Extension for Google Chrome

multimolti — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 08:50:46 +0000

UPDATE: With Chrome 4.0, there are official extensions and a better ad-blocking plugin available! Please check out the AdThwart extension to block advertisements in Google Chrome!

Adblock scripts for Firefox, Opera and even Internet Explorer have been around for a while, but until now, there was no easy-to-install extension for Google Chrome with a similar Â functionality.Â The latest release of Google Chrome, version 3, has added easy support for extensions, and a nice guy called gg3po has developed an extension to disable advertisements on websites.

Here is how to activate that extension:

Step 1: Prepare Google Chrome
First of all, download Google Chrome Channel Changer (alternative download), launch it and set the mode to Dev. Then click Update to save the settings.
Step 2: Update Google Chrome
In Chrome, click on the settings button (on the right side) and select About Google Chrome. The appearing window will check for updates and download them, if available. After the download finished, close Chrome.
Step 3: Enable extensions
Now right-click on your Chrome shortcut, select Properties. Add “–enable-extensions” (without the quotes) as launch parameter to your Target path.
Step 4: Download AdSweep
Launch Chrome, now extensions should be enabled (although you won’t see any change yet). Go to http://www.adsweep.org/ and download the Extension for Chrome (not the User Script!) (alternative download).Â A window will pop up asking you whether to install the extension, click OK.
Step 5: Restart Chrome & start surfing ad-free!
Now most ads on websites shouldn’t show up any more!

This is how a website looked before and after enabling the AdSweep extension:

Currency Exchange Rates API

multimolti — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 09:45:42 +0000

There are so many websites out there who can calculate Currency Exchange Rates for you, e.g. Google Search, Bing Search or Yahoo Currency Converter. But what if you just want to have the exchange rate to use in your Desktop or Web Application? It would be kinda troublesome to extract the rate from one of the websites above, especially when they decide to change the layout of their HTML code.

That’s why I decided to create a very simple Currency Exchange Rates API. This API allows you to either get the conversion rate from US Dollar to your desired currency or can directly convert an entered value. The output is plain text, without HTML or XML attributes for easy access from all sources.

How does it work?

Just call the URL of the API with your desired exchange rate as parameter, e.g.

index.php?curr=EUR

for Euro. This will return the exchange rate from USD to EUR:

Which currencies are supported?

All in all, 126 different currencies are supported. See a list of all supported currencies on the index page.

Are the values up-to-date?

The API updates itself once an hour, so the values you’re getting may be up to 1h old. This should be good enough since these values are for information purposes only.

How can I use the API on my website?

This example shows how to use the API to display 100$ in € (please replace the & stuff in the URL with a normal &, can’t display it correctly here):

$amount = 100; // amount in your original currency, e.g USD
$oricurr = "USD" // iso code for your original currency
$newcurr = "EUR" // iso code for your new currency
$url = "http://www.multimolti.com/apps/currencyapi/calculator.php?original=".$oricurr."&target=".$newcurr."&value=".$amount;
$result = file_get_contents($url);
echo $result." ".$newcurr;

How does the calculator work?

The calculator works almost the same way as the API itself. Call calculator.php with three parameters: original, target and value. original and target are ISO codes of the currency, and value is the amount of orignal currency to convert. The output is the corresponding amout of target currency.

How accurate are the values?

The acuracy of the exchange rates can’t be guaranteed. All values are for informational purposes only. See the footer of the index page for more information.

Mirrors (most recent list):

Please use multimolti.com or sann-gmbh.com since they’re the most stable ones!

Websites using the Currency Exchange Rates API:

http://momento24.com/en/, “Currency” tab in the sidebar.
More will hopefully follow soon!

If there are any questions about the API, bug reports or feature requests, please feel free to comment!

New “intelligent” search engine Wolfram|Alpha launched

multimolti — Tue, 19 May 2009 16:09:06 +0000

On May 15, 2009 Wolfram|Alpha (sometimes just called WolframAlpha) went online. Wolfram|Alpha (in the following just refered to as “WA”) is an answer engine, meaning it can handle complete sentences and questions as search queries.

The special thing about WA is that it doesn’t just display a filtered collection of links to other websites matching your search query, it rather “compiles” all available information on the internet into a overview page showing all interesting facts about the term you searched for.

Currently, the website is mainly focussed on natural sciences (mathematics, physics, engineering), geographical data, stocks and unit conversion, but I’m sure more topics will follow soon. Currently, searching for “The Beatles” returns nothing, but searching for a some mathematical equations gives you a hell lot of information: Plots, Limits, the Derivative, Series representations, Integrals, … It can even show you the way it computed the Derivative with explanations about the methods used.

When entering cities or countries, you will get a map and information about the population, weather, flag, languages, currency and so on. Wolfram|Alpha can also compare data, e.g. the GDP of China and the USA.

Whole sentences are fragmented into different parts, e.g. “Where was Bill Gates born” is structured into “Bill Gates” and “place of birth”, resulting in “Seattle, Washington” and the geographical information about Seattle. Wolfram|Alpha answers some questions in a humorous way, e.g. when asking for the meaning of life, it returns “42″ (quote from “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”).

All in all, Wolfram|Alpha seems to be a very good alternative to Google when searching for information in one of the topics mentioned above and wanting to have a quick overview over the most important data.