Nazo on 26/2/2007 at 13:59

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Here's my current hardware:

Athlon 64 3700+ (San Diego) @ 2.4GHz (eg what would be called the "4000+")
2x512MiB of UTT CH5 memory @ 2-3-2-5, 1T latencies, 216MHz (DDR432)
Radeon X850XT-PE, core overclocked to 570MHz (unfortunately I have to run the memory at stock or slightly lower due to the dividers, so currently it's at about 589MHz.)

This is compared to an earlier setup of this:

Athlon XP 2600+ (Mobile Barton) @ 2.5GHz, 200MHz FSB (DDR400 of course)
2x512MiB of UTT BH5 memory @ 2-2-2-5, 1T latencies, 208MHz (DDR416)
Geforce 6800nu, all pipes (16 pixel shaders, 6 vertex shaders) unlocked and a little overclocking (can't remember exact numbers, but it wasn't as much as I'd hoped.)

Ok, here'sthe thing. The second setup I described is clearly worse in about every way, right? I mean, at 2.5GHz, a Barton is an impressive CPU, but, still, a San Diego at 2.4GHz still wins out by a noticable margin, so even the CPU should be worse. The thing is, I'm 99% positive that 6800nu was getting me 1280x1024 resolution video with FSAA and AF both enabled AND the high res textures applied. Now, with my newer setup, I'm trying only for 1280x1024 resolution (I got an LCD since then) with somewhat similar settings (again the high res textures too,) and I'm finding that on occasion -- in certain lighting in particular, it starts to drag down (I think the worst ones are the electric lights, but I've seen some torches cause troubles too.) At times it even starts sort of jerking, which seems to be a seperate issue from the framerates as it can jerk even while showing decent framerates. Mainly this happens when I actually look at a light and turn, but occasionally it has kind of slowed down and started jerking just as I stepped near that light even if not directly facing it. I'm sure the 6800nu wasn't running at some 500 fps, but it certainly never slowed enough for me to really notice anything and I had enjoyed so much getting to pretty much max out all of the quality settings to the game.

I've fiddled around with the settings a bit, but so far to no avail. The only thing that got the game to play smoothly for me so far was to run it in 1024x768 resolution. This game isn't as bad as some in lower resolutions, but I still would far rather enjoy the clarity of my LCD instead of needlessly adding blurring in there -- and considering that this card is considerably more powerful than the 6800nu (even after unlocking those pipes) as well as being better at Direct3D (which I keep reading people saying this game uses though I always figured it must be OpenGL,) I should really be seeing much better results from all of this, right? Turning off vsync did help a little (albet at the cost of very badly visible tearing sometimes,) but it really didn't help much other than to smooth things out a little. I tried a few performance tweaks as highlighted in this forum (namely disabling the blur -- I hate blurs in games anyway) and I'm not using bloom because, well, I just said why (I have always hated bloom so much...) I do have 4x FSAA, and 4x AF though, but then before I had them on the 6800 and it was ok. (Actually, I think I used 4xFSAA and 8xAF on the 6800, but it's hard to remember for certain.) I also tried 2xFSAA and 4xAF but didn't really notice a difference. I also moved the display sliders to "quality" instead of "high quality" but I don't like to go too low since that can cause some things to turn too blurry in my experience. Oh, and I have the FSAA set to performance, not quality and things like adaptive anti-aliasing are disabled.

Anyone have any idea why I'm seeing such a problem

Nazo on 26/2/2007 at 15:17

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Oops, yes. Sorry about that, I meant to say it and just forgot.


I realize that it's faster. That doesn't necessarily mean drivers though, it just means software. However, "every way" is not necessarily true. I have seen some games (ex Neverwinter Nights) that perform a lot better because they use OpenGL and ask a lot out of the video card in certain ways, so a 6800nu can actually beat an X850XT-PE in those rare games. Otherwise I've had a LOT better results with this card versus my old one though.


Not Catalyst, but Omega drivers (if you are unfamiliar with them, they make a lot of efforts to improve reliability and stability versus the official Catalyst drivers which all too often apply some quickfix to some newer game just to try to get a higher framerate out of it. ATi actually unofficially officially supports them -- they can't officially support them, but in an unofficial capacity they have done a lot to show support for it.) I'm using version 3.8.330, which is based on Catalyst 7.1.



And just what would you suggest searching for? Google doesn't keep a database of "best drivers for individual video cards" and that's a pretty vague thing to search for as well when you think about it. In fact, the best I could think of finding via searches for a supposedly "best driver" would just give you which of the latest drivers to use for the latest games, and the results wouldn't be particularly useful when trying to figure out which ones to use for an older game. Bear in mind here that I just find it unacceptable when people ask me to just keep uninstalling one set of drivers and installing an old one for one game, then uninstalling that and reinstalling the other drivers for another game. I play more than one game in a day, so this is just unacceptable. I need one set of drivers that is relatively universal, and so far these have been the closest barring REALLY old games (like Descent: Freespace -- which plays best via Glide anyway, so I just use a wrapper.)


Now you've got my curiosity up. If all those video cards seem to have troubles with 1280x1024, I should very much like to know what is going on here. It sounds like the problem has nothing to do with drivers, but is, in fact, the game itself at fault. One thing I wonder, I just swapped my widescreen LCD for a standard sized one out of sheer frustration from the lack of good solutions on running 99% of the games out there on a widescreen LCD (I swear I think only some 1% or so actually natively support widescreen or can do it via a clean modification that doesn't cause numerous bugs) and I had wanted to play Thief 3 on it before I gave up and did the swap, and one of the things I read about was a sort of backwards hack to try to get the game to run in widescreen. It was massively unstable and had issues though. One thing I'm wondering is if they've done something to the engine that made it somehow not get along very well with resolutions that aren't perfectly 4:3 ratio? Since 1280x1024 is the only standard resolution which breaks from the usual 4:3 ratio that all the others followed, it occurs to me to wonder if perhaps that could be the culprit. Has anyone successfully run the game in 1600x1200 smoothly to verify one way or the other? Anyway, on the subject of the widescreen gaming, I wonder if anyone has ever come up with some kind of better way of setting "custom" resolutions for this game? I wouldn't mind playing in 1280x960 for example as it would probably be a lot cleaner than 1024x768 (and come to think of it, where is 1152x864) and if the engine hates non-4:3 ratio for some reason, then it might solve the problem well enough to tolerate.

PS. I REALLY want to hurt the guy responsible for coming up with the concept of just enumerating video modes into a fixed list when the Windows API allows any application that wants to just ask for a list of available video modes... Requiring that users use only those within a fixed list seems just massively stupid to me. Was there any actual reason that they did this? I mean, I'm sorry, I know I'm kind of coming off a bit rude here, but games that used this method have driven me absolutely insane for years even back before I had an LCD. There's just no reason to do it...

Nazo on 26/2/2007 at 16:37

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Thing is, I can't even thing of any way to get started. It's not something you can search for with conventional methods, you'd have to really carefully pick your search. (That or dig through hundreds if not thousands of pages and posts...) The problem is, the term "best video card driver" is about as subjective as "which is best? Apples or oranges?" So you have to find a way to search objectively for something subjective... It can be done, but not easily, and I just don't know that I feel like dealing with it since it would likely end up with me just having to try out a ton of different drivers myself to find out which one to use.



I doubt it, but it was a thought at any rate. The thing is, the widescreen trick was a serious hack that actually tried to make the game run at some insanely huge number and something in the system just kind of did a wraparound or something and set a more sane resolution of something that was at least somewhat widescreen. A proper way of doing this, however, would be something such as the third party tool out there to modify the executable -- for example, there is a tool which can modify several of the Need for Speed games to set a custom resolution, which is necessary because they too have an enumerated list rather than just simply pulling up the list of available modes and letting the user get what they want. Among their problems were issues such as with the GUI, so I'm thinking that it may be theoretically possible that somehow some bit of code was added to the engine that made it become picky about resolutions that don't follow the exact specifications they expected. I'll be honest with you though, this seems highly unlikely to me. In particular, the Unreal engine -- which T3 is based off of -- has no troubles whatsoever with ANY resolutions (well, probably up to 2048x2048 maximum,) so it would take some interesting modifications to break this functionality I think.

Oh, and you'll only find 1600x1200 of those resolutions I listed. That's why I was asking if anyone came up with a better custom resolution method. I have never had the luck of owning a monitor that can manage 1600x1200, so there's no way I can test such a resolution to see how the game plays.


I suppose, but it's such a pain, and I have only recently installed them. I may give it a shot later when I have the time and can afford to reboot and all, but I'll be honest with you, I think there's a 0% chance it will make any visible difference.

Nazo on 27/2/2007 at 06:40

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What is that supposed to tell me? They're just benchmarks. And they don't even cover Thief 3... They're also quite old and outdated anyway. What I'm saying is that "highest framerates in the latest games" does not translate into "best drivers" -- especially not into "best drivers for a fairly old game that sites like that do not test."


Did you test it thoroughly? In particular, the tutorial level has this spot after you first step into that guy's room where the light that's on the right side in the middle of the room which would jerk for me at 1280x1024. Also, do you have quality settings (other than the FSAA you already mentioned) bumped up to max and the high res textures installed? If you saw jerkiness at 1600x1200 but not at 1280x1024 and you had the same settings as me, then I guess that would prove that a non-4:3 ratio is not the problem.


You tell me. But, to answer part of your question, if you look in the "%USERPROFILE%\My Documents\Thief - Deadly Shadows\Savegames\User Options\" folder, you'll find an options.ini file (assuming you haven't changed the default location to save games at -- but I think that if you had done so you would already know where the file is.) Inside this file, you will find a resolution= statement that uses an enumerated list. For example, resolution=2 is 1024x768, and 3 is 1280x1024. The widescreen trick involved setting resolution=-2 which caused the game to freak out and set an insanely impossible resolution which Windows forced down into whatever it finds as the nearest acceptable resolution (which, btw, has varying results because I got 1280x1024 when I tried it just now to see what would happen.) I have so far been unable to find any report of anyone actually getting the game to willingly set a resolution not in its list other than that little hack-job level trick that causes frequent crashes and other problems.


Yeah, but it's a complete exercise in tedium. Also, you can't always just reboot at the drop of a hat. Sometimes you have things running that you can't just shut down on a whim. I will do it, I'm just saying that I can't until I finish what I have running that I have to finish before rebooting.

Nazo on 27/2/2007 at 08:14

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Nor are older ones automatically best either. I'm saying that benchmarks are not a good indication. The problem is, the video card manufacturers just kind of cheat on all this and keep applying little changes here and there for all the latest stuff. As such, if you look at benchmarks alone, you're generally going to find that the latest or very nearly latest drivers are the "best" by just judging that way. However, what TRULY matters is the much more subtle question of what has actually changed within those drivers? Sometimes a newer change is better for an older game even, but sometimes a newer change is worse. About the only way to be sure if you don't keep up with all those changes, fully understand them, AND fully understand their use within the game in question is to just simply try them all one by one and see which ones produce the best results in the particular game. That works out to a lot more than just some 5 minutes, and I have to say that before I try something like that I'll just put up with 1024x768 resolution however bad it may look.


Sorry if it seems that way, but the only way to eliminate all the variables and verify 100% that it's not just some unusual thing like the game not liking non-4:3 ratios or one of the other things involved is to duplicate the settings. Though if you get a chance, I'd ask that you try 2xFSAA, 4xAF at 1280x1024 sometime when you get a chance. Still, I think this says that the game just somehow still manages to require incredible amounts of power out of a video card. I don't quite understand why it is that my old 6800 seemed to do so much better then. Perhaps I just remember wrongly and I used 1024x768 on it too back then. *sigh* I must admit that it's a little shocking to find that a game of this age is capable of pushing such a powerful video card (relatively speaking) so hard though.


Er.. It has to be. Try typing this into your Start->Run :
notepad "%USERPROFILE%\My Documents\Thief - Deadly Shadows\Savegames\User Options\options.ini"
If you just don't see it there then the only explanation would be that you moved the savegame folder via that registry key (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Ion Storm\Thief - Deadly Shadows\SaveGamePath) which defaults to the user's profile. You can look in the registry to see where it has been moved to if it has been. You should find the Resolution= statement on approximately line 12, depending on your settings (or perhaps not depending since I think that section of the INI doesn't actually shift around much.) The game stores no values elsewhere (eg not in the registry or whatever) so it must be there or else you would be unable to control your resolution and would always get the default. Honestly though, getting access to that configuration won't really help you much. We need some sort of hack or something to force a custom resolution I guess, because the game just isn't going to accept numbers not within its preset list. Anything outside the expected list just causes really weird things to happen.


You misunderstand. I didn't say I won't do it, just that I can't always do it at the drop of a hat and that I think it's going to make no visible difference whatsoever anyway. I can probably try that out later tonight as this processing is just about finished I think, but I couldn't yesterday. It's just an awful lot of trouble to go to for what will usually be no difference (you don't have to change your drivers quite as often as you may think. Windows gets messed up because you keep installing new programs, removing old ones, and etc so files change, new files get added, fragmentation occurs, and so on. The video drivers don't actually change a lot though.)

EDIT: I tested 1280x1024 again, this time with 0xFSAA, and 4xAF. Framerates stayed above 60 FPS at all times, but I still saw jerkiness around one really bad light that I had a savegame next to. I think something else is going on here besides just performance loss. Whether it's an issue of the game engine itself or what, I couldn't tell you, but this clearly proves that benchmarks won't help I think considering that FPS itself is not a problem. I should probably add here that I know it's not the monitor because I just came from playing Need for Speed: Most Wanted with a hack that removes that god-awful motion blur effect (also in 1280x1024 of course) and I definitely would have noticed if it jerked like T3 seems to be doing. In fact, I'd say I'm getting better results from turning vsync on after all. It's just almost as if something is sort of "missing" somewhere so it skips some display updates or something (only, internally, not externally.) I don't know how else to desribe how it feels.