Supported hardware question

[DBThanatos]

7 days bump? I dont think is bad at all

... a cheap piece of crap I bought at Wal-Mart. I don't know if you hear much about them down in Germany, but they're notorious for importing cheap goods.

Wait, isnt walmart the biggest meaniest company that is ruling the entire world?
(ok, reading about it, it seems that they tried to stay in germany, but they were basically kicked out)

Anyway, about the topic itself: Im ok with the general idea. In theory I should not say that, because that's just going to make GZDoom mostly unusable in my "extremely awesome integrated chip" Intel GMA 950. However, this should push me a bit to buy an actual graphics card.

[Gez]

Well, I got a new comp with a better graphic chipset: a GeForce 9600m GT.

Unfortunately, MSI made something so that it's not compatible with Nvidia's own drivers, and I have to instead use MSI's custom drivers. Which are lagging something like half a year behind Nvidia's; so this chipset which is technically compatible with OpenGL 3 is made only compatible with OpenGL 2.1. Oh well.

[Graf Zahl]

Did you buy the card separately?

If I got something like that I'd return it as defective. What's a card worth that doesn't even have up-to-date drivers?

Even worse for you, I got a major speed boost when I upgraded my drivers recently for my GF 8600. My guess is that NVidia fixed a significant bottleneck inside their driver code so you probably not only got an outdated driver, it's also most likely not working perfectly.

Well, at least I know now that I won't buy MSI again even though the GF6800 I got from them 5 years ago was a very good piece of hardware.

[Gez]

It's a laptop. (That one.) I also miss out on CUDA and PhysX because of that. Well, they'll end up updating their drivers eventually.

[Tormentor667]

Out of curiosity... when do you think will there be a new GZDoom with the new renderer you are working on?

[Enjay]

If you want to get an idea of how far things have come, grab the latest SVN and add

+gl_testnewrenderer 1

to the command line. When you start a game, you will see the floors and ceilings are being drawn but where the walls will be there are just HOMs ATM and no sprites are drawn yet either. I don't suppose it really gives much information, but it is interesting to have a quick look at.

[Remmirath]

Is it normal that my laptop gives me a fatal error whenever i put that cvar true?

[Enjay]

Well, given that it's just experimental and WiP it wouldn't surprise me if crashes happened. I haven't had a crash with it but perhaps my gfx card better supports the new code than yours?

[Remmirath]

Perhaps. The videocard on this laptop sucks bad: its driver occasionally gets into endless loops, thus giving me happy BSODs. :P
I should try it on my desktop PC; hopefully crashes won't happen there. :)

[Graf Zahl]

Is it normal that my laptop gives me a fatal error whenever i put that cvar true?

It means that your hardware or driver doesn't support the functionality the new renderer needs. Currently there are no checks for hardware support as it's all in an early development phase.

[Tormentor667]

If you want to get an idea of how far things have come, grab the latest SVN and add +gl_testnewrenderer 1

Got it, tried it. Now, what will be so much better with the new renderer?

[Graf Zahl]

Extensibility and hopefully performance. First it needs to run though so it will take some time untill you may see a difference. The first task is to get all functionality of the old renderer working.

[Sussudio]

Enabling Glowing textures creates some random stuttering when using the current renderer (though everything else seems to work just fine) and I suppose my video card is to blame, so, would this situation worsen? would it improve? right now the new renderer crashes with the following error: "(93) : error C5051: profile does not support conditional returns"

[Graf Zahl]

There you have the reason why the new renderer won't even activate if certain features aren't there. Glowing textures use shaders (the original code that worked without them was broken beyond repair and not really fixable.) and obviously your graphics card is not really up to the task.

The error message you get is another indicator for that. In such cases the engine will just disable the new renderer and revert to the current one.

[Remmirath]

Oh, FYI, my videocard is an ATi Mobility Radeon X1400. So far, it hasn't given me any problems with running other games.

I've attached the crash report here, if that might be useful.

CrashReport-newrenderer.zip

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