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Kw4h
Dragon's Rage
Intrepid Crossing
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Posted - 2007.11.28 20:05:00 -
[1]
So, after I cleaned my desk, I started playing around with the graphics settings to see what was causing the massive performance hit when I undock in FD-.
First off, the 2GB DDR2 RAM, 8800gtx, and dual core amd64 6000+ shouldn't have much trouble with Trinity 
Anyway, I came to the point where I set the Shadow quality from 'Extreme' to 'High'. What happened is that my fps raised from 5.6 outside station, to 25 - which is good. But, I did not see any graphical changes. I was expecting that the issue would be self-shadowing other ships, and that with 'high' it would be turned off. Again, I did not see a change. And if there's none, then why bother leaving it in anyway?
Oh, I also have 16xQ AA and 8x AF on, if you think the framerate is low for that card 
Can anyone tell me what exactly the difference is, except for the major performance hit?
Ninja-question: Where's the AA and AF settings in-game? Driver-setting workarounds are sooo 2002! 
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Planet Sight Wallpaper - EvE map |
Kw4h
Dragon's Rage
Intrepid Crossing
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Posted - 2007.11.28 20:05:00 -
[2]
So, after I cleaned my desk, I started playing around with the graphics settings to see what was causing the massive performance hit when I undock in FD-.
First off, the 2GB DDR2 RAM, 8800gtx, and dual core amd64 6000+ shouldn't have much trouble with Trinity
Anyway, I came to the point where I set the Shadow quality from 'Extreme' to 'High'. What happened is that my fps raised from 5.6 outside station, to 25 - which is good. But, I did not see any graphical changes. I was expecting that the issue would be self-shadowing other ships, and that with 'high' it would be turned off. Again, I did not see a change. And if there's none, then why bother leaving it in anyway?
Oh, I also have 16xQ AA and 8x AF on, if you think the framerate is low for that card
Can anyone tell me what exactly the difference is, except for the major performance hit?
Ninja-question: Where's the AA and AF settings in-game? Driver-setting workarounds are sooo 2002!
_
Planet Sight Wallpaper - EvE map |
Kw4h
Dragon's Rage
Intrepid Crossing
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Posted - 2007.11.28 20:54:00 -
[3]
meh, unpopular question I suppose. Are high-end graphics users really that rare?
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Planet Sight Wallpaper - EvE map |
Ajja 17
Ars ex Discordia
GoonSwarm
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Posted - 2007.11.28 21:04:00 -
[4]
"Extreme" shadows are well, extreme.
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Kw4h
Dragon's Rage
Intrepid Crossing
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Posted - 2007.11.28 21:06:00 -
[5]
I'm sure it is, I just don't see any visible difference :P
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Planet Sight Wallpaper - EvE map |
MOS DEF
0utbreak
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Posted - 2007.11.28 21:14:00 -
[6]
Same here - can't see a diff. The difference from norml to high is quite big though.
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Sleepkevert
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Posted - 2007.11.28 21:18:00 -
[7]
 Originally by: MOS DEF
Same here - can't see a diff. The difference from norml to high is quite big though.
On small objects like ships it's hardly noticeable, i agree.. But switch between the two and look at the station shadowing... The diffrence is noticeable there. (You go from rounded square shadowing to a nice straight line shadow.)
_______
Sign my sig! |
Razin
The xDEATHx Squadron
Legion of xXDEATHXx
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Posted - 2007.11.28 21:22:00 -
[8]
I could be mistaken but I seem to remember seeing that turrets get their own shadows at "extreme" setting. Perhaps this coupled with the LOD not working correctly causes the FD- undock performance problems.
...
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Tressin Khiyne
Minmatar
Interstellar Vacation Center
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Posted - 2007.11.28 21:33:00 -
[9]
16X AA is overkill. My roommate is a 3D modeler, does ridiculous B movie stuff, and only does 9 pasess on his proofs. Any more than that is really spinning your wheels unless it's a one-time deal, and every bit counts. Your essentially doubling the load on your GPU for a minimal increase in appearance. Even that is doubtful, More AA is not always better. Some scenes just won't look as good if the entire scene is anti aliased 10x as they would have with only 2 passes.
--
There are 10 kinds of people in this world; Those who understand binary, and those who don't.
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Aronis Contar
Caldari
Independent Manufacturers
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Posted - 2007.11.28 23:36:00 -
[10]
I'll try to keep this simple, so please everyone who knows their CGI stuff don't bash me:
For shadows to work, the shaders on your models have to know whether light is reaching them from a light source, or not. There are various ways to do this, but the most prominent (and the one used by EVE) is called Shadow Mapping.
This means that EVE renders a picture of your ship as seen from the light source - the sun in our case. This picture is called the shadow map.
It's not a normal, shiny picture though, but rather it saves the distance from the light source for every pixel into the shadow map. Parts that are very close to the light source get very small numbers (close to black, if you will), parts that are very far away get very high numbers (whites). So essentially a picture of your ship as seen in fog, with no textures or stuff.
Then, for each pixel that finally lands on your screen, the shaders check in the shadow map if they are close to the light (which means they are lit by the light), or if they are obstructed by something closer to the light (which means they are in shadow).
The main deciding factor for this to look pretty is the resolution of the shadow map. If the resolution is very low (let's say, 256x256 pixels), then you'll see big chunky squares at the borders of the shadows. So, the obvious choice is to make the resolution very big.
This brings two problems with it:
-) The time required to create the shadow map increases greatly. Even though it requires no surface shaders and textures to work, creating a really big picture of your ship can take a sizeable chunk of time. And the shadow map has to be recreated for every frame you see on the screen, so ideally, it should be very quick.
-) Memory required to store the shadow map also inreases greatly. Shadow maps usually are 32 bit per pixel pictures, since you want high precision in the shadow map values (otherwise all sorts of ugly artifacts can crop up).
The default shadow map resolution in EVE is 1024x1024 pixels. That means that for each ship and station in each frame you see, the engine has to create a 1 megapixel image of each object, store it in memory, and then use it while creating the final image. At 32 bits, that is a 4 MB image for each object.
The high setting sets this to 2048x2048 pixels (16 MB), and the Extreme setting to 4096x4096. That is huge, and is enough for most offline CGI jobs used for film effects. Also, each shadow map then takes up 64 MB of graphics memory - again, this is huge.
So, if you undock with shadows set to extreme, and there are 4 ships on the screen and 1 station, then 80 megapixels of shadow information which amount to 320 MB of graphics memory have to be recreated each frame.
I suspect the major hit some people see when they activate Extreme shadows is because onboard memory on the graphics card is running out, and DirectX is starting to swap texture information to main memory over the AGP/PCIe bus. Which is dirt slow compared to on board memory.
But really - I think even 1024x1024 is big enough, I rarely am zoomed in enough to see the pixelization artifacts with that.
Ciao, Aronis!
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Sleepkevert
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Posted - 2007.11.28 23:51:00 -
[11]
Well.. if you put it that way, i'm surprised my 8800GTX was even able to get out 6fps with 20 ships in view with the shadows on extreme 
Thanks for explaining
_______
Sign my sig! |
Aronis Contar
Caldari
Independent Manufacturers
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Posted - 2007.11.28 23:53:00 -
[12]
Only shows you how unbelievably powerful todays graphics cards are :)
Ciao, Aronis!
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Verite Rendition
Caldari
F.R.E.E. Explorer
Atrum Tempestas Foedus
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Posted - 2007.11.29 05:04:00 -
[13]
Even 1024x1024 sounds like it's a bit big if EVE isn't using LOD on the shadow maps as everyone believes. 1MB per object, a fleet fight at a POS with a couple hundred participants and their drones is going to overwhelm even a 768MB 8800GTX just due to the shadow maps, never mind anything else going on.
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FREE Explorer
Lead Megalomanic
EVE Automated Influence Map |
Aronis Contar
Caldari
Independent Manufacturers
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Posted - 2007.11.29 08:23:00 -
[14]
I'm pretty sure there is a minimum on-screen size an object has to have for shadow maps to be rendered.
Ciao, Aronis!
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Sleepkevert
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Posted - 2007.11.29 08:49:00 -
[15]
Originally by: Aronis Contar
I'm pretty sure there is a minimum on-screen size an object has to have for shadow maps to be rendered.
Ciao, Aronis!
Well, not _yet_  Try it. Go to the station in FD- and zoom completely out. You'll still have single digit FPS with more then 20 ships on screen
_______
Sign my sig! |
Verite Rendition
Caldari
F.R.E.E. Explorer
Atrum Tempestas Foedus
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Posted - 2007.11.29 12:16:00 -
[16]
Originally by: Sleepkevert
Originally by: Aronis Contar
I'm pretty sure there is a minimum on-screen size an object has to have for shadow maps to be rendered.
Ciao, Aronis!
Well, not _yet_ Try it. Go to the station in FD- and zoom completely out. You'll still have single digit FPS with more then 20 ships on screen
It scares me a bit that things like that aren't working with less than a week to go.
----
FREE Explorer
Lead Megalomanic
EVE Automated Influence Map |
Sleepkevert
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Posted - 2007.11.29 12:36:00 -
[17]
Originally by: Verite Rendition
Originally by: Sleepkevert
Originally by: Aronis Contar
I'm pretty sure there is a minimum on-screen size an object has to have for shadow maps to be rendered.
Ciao, Aronis!
Well, not _yet_ Try it. Go to the station in FD- and zoom completely out. You'll still have single digit FPS with more then 20 ships on screen
It scares me a bit that things like that aren't working with less than a week to go.
Yeah, me too. But we all have faith in CCP.
(and all the older players know that playing within a week after patch day is going to be limited to watching the inside of a station if you don't want any crashes
_______
Sign my sig! |
Kw4h
Dragon's Rage
Intrepid Crossing
|
Posted - 2007.12.01 21:13:00 -
[18]
Someone said that 'extreme' was only working when AA was not forced on. I couldn't reproduce it, wondering if there's anyone that can...
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Planet Sight Wallpaper - EvE map |
Sleepkevert
Rionnag Alba
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Posted - 2007.12.01 23:23:00 -
[19]
Originally by: Kw4h
Someone said that 'extreme' was only working when AA was not forced on. I couldn't reproduce it, wondering if there's anyone that can...
Well, i don't know if you have that from me, but when i force AA, my client refuses to boot even and just dies...
_______
Sign my sig! |
Fudspari Hjikla
School of Applied Knowledge
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Posted - 2007.12.06 11:58:00 -
[20]
Good explanation of shadow maps however it is not entirly correct
Originally by: Aronis Contar
... snip...
The default shadow map resolution in EVE is 1024x1024 pixels. That means that for each ship and station in each frame you see, the engine has to create a 1 megapixel image of each object, store it in memory, and then use it while creating the final image. At 32 bits, that is a 4 MB image for each object.
... snip ...
Ciao, Aronis!
While this would be an option I would be incredebly disappointed if ccp chose to implement it this way. Creating a shadow map per object is incredably not helpful. (while it would be possible for dynamic objects so you don't have to stream the vertex buffer X times every frame)
Usually you can use Post perspective shadow maps (or a few of them if you want to go all the way and lod it) to light the entire scene at once. So this means only one map per lightsource (optionally per camera but since we only have one in eve). The trick is to fit the shadow map so it fits your post projective space. At any rate those huge (2048^2) maps still suck memory though.
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