left side is nvidia, right side in ATI

(this opengl lag is present on both AGP and PCI-E ati cards)

I had another user test out SL with their onboard geforce 8400

the user got 20-30FPS average 

and he told me that his 3dmark 06 score is around 4000

My 3dmark 06 score is around around 9500

 

In opengl apps, 0MB video memory is used, check with every gpu monitoring tool I have all report 0MB usage during opengl game play

 

try running windows with 0MB memory and see how far you get.(while it wont boot, if it did run, it will be very slow

 

I tried the 9.1 drivers still the same problem  (since the hot fix drivers didn't come out yet, i didn't stick with them since my 3850 AGP  with 9.1 crashes to desktop on all of my games and the screen will revert to 640x480 at 4 bit color)

 

with 8.12, only these games on my system crash to desktop (when they crash the monitor will either kick into standby mode or the screen resolution will go to 640x480 4 bit

 

Crysis warhead, fallout 3, mass effect, sins of a solar empire, Saints Row 2

me and about 100 other users on multiple tech support forums have reported this problem to ati over the years multiple times and nothing was done

I currently use my geforce 6800 to play these games  as well as second life since i can get around 30FPS with it instead of the crappy 5-10 FPS with my 3850 (it is a wonder what video memory can do for a game)

 

while crysis does crash with in a few minutes of gameplay

I can max out crysis warhead with no lag and hold 20-25FPS at 1440x900

 

with second life no video memory is used so the card relies on system memory and page file for the same data so the GPU is almost idle waiting for data to process (when looking as a static scene with very little happening, the GPU usage will go up slightly and the frame rate will go up to 6-10FPS  but when moving or doing anything that requires new data to be rendered, it will go very slow as it system memory and page file instead of it's fast 60GB/s memory

ATI should see that video memory is important, thats why the average card has a memory clock speed of 2000MHz, if it was only as important as ati sees it with their opengl drivers, then we would still be using 100MHz sdram for our videocards or even 0MB to cut prodection cost

 

video memory is important.  loading data into video memory allows the videocard to access that data and work with it at 60-300GB/s instead of 1-2GB/s when relying on system memory, and the bandwidth limitation of the agp bus and the fact that the bandwidth of the system memory is being shared between all running apps including the OS, there just isn't enough to go around for the videocard. so games like second life lag.

 

a gefoece 8600 hits around 40-50FPS with second life, a geforce 8800gt hits around 70-FPS on second life

a geforce 6800 hits 25-30FPS

a geforce 7300GT

geforce 6600LE hits 15-20FPS

a geforce 5900xt hits around 10-15FPS

a geforce 6200 hits around 8-13FPS

a geforce 4, hits around 5-10FPS

 

on all of these cards second life is maxed out  as much as possible for the card

 

the videocards I have with me are a geforce 2(gets 1-3FPS with SL and doesn't support most of the quality levels) geforce 4, geforce 6200, geforce 6600, geforce 7300GT, geforce 5900xt, geforce 6800

 

the card sranging from geforce 4 and up run SL better than my ati HD 3850 AGP

and sadly enough, my videocards rnaging from geforce fx 5900xt and up run MAYA, 3ds max, photoshop cs4 and my animation tools much better than my 3850   so I am finding my self using my geforce 6800 more often

 

I have all of the latest drivers. I have even reformatted and reinstalled windows to give the 3850 a fresh start and have updated everything, nothing works.

 

direct 3d has no performance problems, they make full use of the video memory  and make full use of the GPU

opengl the most I have ever seen it use for GPU usage is 40-50% when running a professional opengl app (on gpu performance benchmarks involving opengl, in which no video memory is required (since they use almost no memory on my 6800 also) they use 100% gpu and run much faster than the 6800 but these are not real world test)

 

I have contacted ATI support and have had lengthly bickering with them involving me trying to tell them that I know the game runs the performance is just not up to par with what the videocard can do, and the support people insist to me that their videocard supports the game. it is like talking to a brick wall. I even sent them videos proving that I understand that the card supports the games the performance is just bad,  it is like the support workers cant wrap their mind around the difference between running the game and running it at a playable level, it is like they never herd of performance

having your card run slower than a card thats 6-7 years older than it is not a good sign.

 

I cant return my 3850 to get my money back  and I spent good money on this card.  because I spend a lot of time reinstalling and trying hundreds of fixes, the return period has passed on my card.

 

My system specs:

Motherboard:
CPU Type DualCore AMD Opteron 170, 2717 MHz (9.5 x 286)
Motherboard Name Asus A8V (5 PCI, 1 AGP, 4 DDR DIMM, Audio, Gigabit LAN)
Motherboard Chipset VIA K8T800Pro, AMD Hammer
System Memory 2048 MB (PC3200 DDR SDRAM)
DIMM1: G Skill NS 1 GB PC3200 DDR SDRAM (2.5-3-3-6 @ 200 MHz)
DIMM2: G Skill NS 1 GB PC3200 DDR SDRAM (2.5-3-3-6 @ 200 MHz)
BIOS Type AMI (03/15/06)

Display:
Video Adapter ATI Radeon HD 3800 Series (512 MB)

 

 

many of my friends who use geforce 8 series cards all report framerates of 30-80FPS depending on their card model.

 

if data comes in slow, then it will come out slow, regardless of the GPU speed. since the gpu can process data faster than it can sent to the videocard. the bulk of the data is often loaded into the videocard RAM  where the super fast memory can send the data as fast as the GPU will take it 

 

while some opengl games may run ok, sl has more trouble since the content is user created and textures and other contrent are not otimized for quick loading. you will have users using a 1MB 1024x1024 texture for a shirt button

so SL is very memory intensive so not having any video memory is especially hard on games like second life

 

Setting second life to low settings has little to no  FPS difference

-------------------------

AMD opteron 170 @ 2.71 GHz

2GB ddr 400 overclocked

ATI radeon HD 3850 AGP 512MB direct3d memory, 0MB OpenGL memory

More info on the 0MB opengl problem here 

http://forums.amd.com/game/messageview.cfm?catid=279&threadid=108194&enterthread=y

Edited: 02/14/2009 at 02:44 AM by cutepuppy671

Hi.

I am with you on this one.

I bought my Ati HD3650 January 2009. That serious issue was the first thing I noticed. Since I always played more OpenGL games!

If ATI doesn't fix this, I for sure won't be buying their products anymore.

 

-------------------------

Athlon XP 133*15\1.65V@200*11.5\1.85V

Abit AN7

Asus AH3650 SILENT 512 MB for DirectX / 0 MB for OpenGL

Corsair TWINX1024-3200XLPRO

Windows XP SP3

Edited: 02/05/2009 at 08:38 AM by artbio

I asked the ATI developers to look at this.  If the game / app is decently coded the caps should have no effect anyway since there are at least 5 different ways to detect Video RAM in OGL for Windows.

-------------------------

Game.AMD Administrator

youtube video showing the problem

was recorded using a camera since screen recorders cause games to lag

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOYY9awjoeg

 

the average gpu usage stays around 20-30% nomatter what you look at in SL

the CPU usage is generally around 30-40% in sl, but can go up to 50-60% in some cases if a major change is seen like a griefer attack

the main performance limitation becames bandwidth because things are buffered into system memory instead of the video memory

 

-------------------------

AMD opteron 170 @ 2.71 GHz

2GB ddr 400 overclocked

ATI radeon HD 3850 AGP 512MB direct3d memory, 0MB OpenGL memory

More info on the 0MB opengl problem here 

http://forums.amd.com/game/messageview.cfm?catid=279&threadid=108194&enterthread=y

Edited: 02/05/2009 at 10:48 AM by cutepuppy671

> at least 5 different ways to detect Video RAM in OGL Does it mean the same, "Video RAM" and "Video RAM, that both hardware and software can use (to keep textures)" ? Is Layers=0 on screenshot is RAM size calculate in some standard units, rather than megabytes (in other word, can the game be sure, that if it has xxx MB that means strictly it has YYY layers?)? Is it correct to force drivers into mode that they frankly claimed is incompatible to them ? And if to talk about hacking and overclocking (remember, patching BIOS and drivers to re-enable texture units and turn Radeno 9500 into 9700? same thing it is), is there a way to hack and override reported caps and force driver/game to see reported texture memory and texture layers whatever gamer doees want and see if itworks and makes difference?

i have the same issues with second life, i purchaced my 3870 mainly for it, but now ive had to pull out from SL coz its just unplayable on ATI hardware..ive dropped my old GF6800 back in as a test and it gets a better framerate than the 3870 yet its wayyy older.

sure..second life doesnt have the best code every written, but it doesnt help when ATI screw with the drivers every month. it used to run fairly decient on ATI back with 8.6..but when 8.7 came along..it was slideshow then crash city..Linden labs were made aware and they fixed the crashes after a few tries, but they couldnt fix the slideshow coz it had nothing to do with them.

ATI is really turning out to be the worse of two evils..sad really, coz they could kick butt with the right management

-------------------------

4CoreDual-vsta, Pentium D 3.2Ghz, Corsair Twin2x2048-5400C4, HIS IceQ3 HD3870, 2xSATA 3xIDE HDDs, Digital TV tuner

i tested with rivatuner and just about every other gpu monitoring app i could find, all say 0MB memory in use with opengl apps but full use of video memory with direct 3d apps are used

 

 

-------------------------

AMD opteron 170 @ 2.71 GHz

2GB ddr 400 overclocked

ATI radeon HD 3850 AGP 512MB direct3d memory, 0MB OpenGL memory

More info on the 0MB opengl problem here 

http://forums.amd.com/game/messageview.cfm?catid=279&threadid=108194&enterthread=y

Rivatuner reports no memory because D3D and OGL allocate RAM differently, on OGL the driver or the app can allocate RAM so 3rd party utils dont know what is being allocated.

-------------------------

Game.AMD Administrator

but in all of my nvidia cards, they show memory being allocated for opengl apps in any monitoring tool I use and in those games they run much smoother than with my faster ATI card.

the bottleneck is the opengl drivers for ati not showing any available memory.

 

I checked with the group that does the DNA ati drivers  and he said that when he looked through the ATI opengl drivers he couldn't find a entry involving the memory (a entry thats present in the nvidia drivers)

 

 

-------------------------

AMD opteron 170 @ 2.71 GHz

2GB ddr 400 overclocked

ATI radeon HD 3850 AGP 512MB direct3d memory, 0MB OpenGL memory

More info on the 0MB opengl problem here 

http://forums.amd.com/game/messageview.cfm?catid=279&threadid=108194&enterthread=y

Edited: 02/06/2009 at 01:21 AM by cutepuppy671

You may think you have stumbled uppon the holy grail of OGL driver performance but you havent.  You really think that the driver engineers have missed something so simple?

For Second life perhaps where its badly coded but the vast majority of OGL games offer reasonable performance pretty close to Nvidia cards, if it was this issue then the framerates would be wildly different.

-------------------------

Game.AMD Administrator

I have seen engineers do worst  through my years of using both nvidia and ati hardware.

a few years ago, nvidia released a driver update that had a messed up registry entry (fixed with a single dword edit), the problem was that anyon with out a SLI setup would have endless popups from the nvidia drivers telling them that they don't have SLI )

it was fixed in about 2 weeks with another update but thats a pretty big and simple mistake that nvidia's quality control didn't catch for some reason

and thats a company that was able to make second life and prey  for the PC run much faster on a 5 year old card than it did on radeon 3850

 

while SL may be poorly coded but the graphics system they did a ok job

with I run prey I still get a decent framerate and no real lag

but when moving around the framerates on my geforce 6800 are higher than that of the 3850, while it is still smooth on the 3850, it is not as smooth as with my 6800

many well made opengl games are very efficient with working with very little memory bandwidth since the developers put a lot of work into making their games on more than just a few high end systems (the more systems your games run on, the larger your market is and the bigger the chance of someone buying your game is (prey was well worth the $25 )

SL has a lot of user created content and textures

it's kinda like how a onboard  nvidia card that shares system memory can run many d3d games and opengl games that look better than SL but once a user tries to run SL, it is lag central, but a card frm them thats slightly slower or the same fast and has it's own dedicated memory will run those games even faster as well as SL smoothly (if you search for older videos showing laptop performance you will see the problems of sharing system memory with the videocard )

many opengl games even though they will run ok, many of them have trouble using even 50% og the gpu, they generally hover around 20-40%

seems to be a common problem, if you look at the requirements for almost any gpu accelerated professional app, you will see this in the requirements (when they use opengl as their rendering engine)

For OpenGL support: Adobe After Effects supported OpenGL 2.0 card (NVIDIA recommended)

and sadly enough, to get 30FPS from hardware accelerated preview and use other accelerated effects from after effects, as well as in photoshop cs4, I have to use my 6800

the only areas that I see ati cards performing properly are render test that involve very few textures or no textures (removing much of the need for memory, it will render the stuff like 20 times faster than my 6800

 

While i cant 100% prove it is a memory problem that cause the performance drop when lots of textures are introduced since ati doesn't release enough info on their drivers and they seem to go out of their way to stop other groupd from modifting their drivers (you could try this, open maya 3d, then open fraps (to monitor framre rates) then make a few cubes, then texture them using lots of high res .HDR images, then spin the camera around then notice how the framerates are higher on a slower nvidia card than with ati)

other than more opengl extensions being supported, 10 more, in 9.1  the texture array layers were added but no texture memory.

-------------------------

AMD opteron 170 @ 2.71 GHz

2GB ddr 400 overclocked

ATI radeon HD 3850 AGP 512MB direct3d memory, 0MB OpenGL memory

More info on the 0MB opengl problem here 

http://forums.amd.com/game/messageview.cfm?catid=279&threadid=108194&enterthread=y

Edited: 02/06/2009 at 12:52 PM by cutepuppy671

 

I did the following test with the game Serious Sam 2. The game can run in D3D9 and OGL modes. I tried running the game in D3D mode as well as OGL mode and check the difference with RivaTuner.

As you can see in the following graph, GPU usage stays near 100 % while in D3D9 mode. However it doesn't get near 60 % throughout the whole OGL test! There is also a 10 to 20 FPS drop from D3D9 to OGL! But it’s difficult to see that from the graph.

-------------------------

Athlon XP 133*15\1.65V@200*11.5\1.85V

Abit AN7

Asus AH3650 SILENT 512 MB for DirectX / 0 MB for OpenGL

Corsair TWINX1024-3200XLPRO

Windows XP SP3

I took another couple of screenshots. To better demonstrate the FPS difference.

-------------------------

Athlon XP 133*15\1.65V@200*11.5\1.85V

Abit AN7

Asus AH3650 SILENT 512 MB for DirectX / 0 MB for OpenGL

Corsair TWINX1024-3200XLPRO

Windows XP SP3

here is my rivatuner log from running a opengl game

when just standing around, the gpu usage is around40%  if i move around the framerates drop the cou usage remains around the same, and the GPU usage does dow as new textures appear on screen

as more textures appear on screen and as the view changes to see more for example when flying, the GPU usage goes lower  to around 20%,

the game gradually slows down as more textures  load, if i go to a location with very few textures,  the gpu usage goes up and the framerates increase (regardless of other objects)

 

log for when the game has only been running for a few seconds

 

and here is the game after it has been running for about 20 minutes

notice the area where the gpu usage is around 15-20% thats when my player was walking around the same area, but as textures enter and leave your view, the frame rates go down to a unusable level, (slower than even my geforce4)

 

 

 

the cpu usage also goes down a little the main bottle neck seems to be the lack of video memory usage (as more textures become visible, the system memory usage does up, the cpu usage goes down and the GPU usage goes down)

-------------------------

AMD opteron 170 @ 2.71 GHz

2GB ddr 400 overclocked

ATI radeon HD 3850 AGP 512MB direct3d memory, 0MB OpenGL memory

More info on the 0MB opengl problem here 

http://forums.amd.com/game/messageview.cfm?catid=279&threadid=108194&enterthread=y

Edited: 02/11/2009 at 02:25 PM by cutepuppy671

Very good findings, and very good documented also, nice job. I think this clearly classify OGL as BROKEN. Adding to this that Cat 9.1 just dumped on us the big OpenGL 3.0 lie, AMD should sell their product with no OGL support at all at this "industry standard"

-------------------------

E7200+AC Freezer 7 Pro PWM, Asus P5Q+2xAC 80mm PWM fans, Kingston 2x2GB DDR2-800 5-5-5-18, Asus EAH4850 512MB, 23" Full HD Fujitsu-Siemens LSL 3230T, 320GB WDC WD3200AAKS 16MB SATA 3GB/s, Windows 7 Ultimate x64

they added some opengl 3 but it is not enough to run anything using it

they didn't even change the version info if a game was made to make good use of opengl 3.0, ati cards wouldn't run it,  nvidia is well on it's way to supporting 229 opengl extensions while ati is strugling with 130 extensions.

It would be great if ati could just rip someof the code from the nvidia opengl drivers and make it work with their cards (i'm sure nvidia wont mind)

PS if you run the nvidia fog demos from their site, you will see a error window appear and will scroll down at at like 5000 lines per second showing errors loading things into memory  because it is expecting there to be a texture buffer

 

 

-------------------------

AMD opteron 170 @ 2.71 GHz

2GB ddr 400 overclocked

ATI radeon HD 3850 AGP 512MB direct3d memory, 0MB OpenGL memory

More info on the 0MB opengl problem here 

http://forums.amd.com/game/messageview.cfm?catid=279&threadid=108194&enterthread=y

yes, Everest lists all OGL extensions, supported or not. I pasted a rather long list from Everest Ultimate OGL properties, from my card - an ASUS EAH4850 512 mb, based on the standard HD 4850 pcb, here

Everest reports the OGL 3.0 support in 4800 series as 80%.

 

-------------------------

E7200+AC Freezer 7 Pro PWM, Asus P5Q+2xAC 80mm PWM fans, Kingston 2x2GB DDR2-800 5-5-5-18, Asus EAH4850 512MB, 23" Full HD Fujitsu-Siemens LSL 3230T, 320GB WDC WD3200AAKS 16MB SATA 3GB/s, Windows 7 Ultimate x64

Edited: 02/06/2009 at 07:01 PM by toyo

try driving a car with with 20% of the engine missing and see how far you get. (ati isn't really focused on performance since it is something that users often discover especially with opengl, after they buy the card they just want a long list of supported things in their product description and ads (most videocard reviews often use only D3D games so ati focuses on d3d. in which case, the performance is very close to that of nvidia )

for me i don't find ati cards even opengl 1.x ready  because of the memory problem

theres a difference between support and functionality

anyone can pick up a blade and use it but but you wouldn't let a monkey with a blade do brain surgery on you

the ati opengl drivers can pick up some opengl images and throw them on the screen but they don't know how to properly use the videocard.

it is like having a bus driver that only knows how to turn the stearing wheel to the left.  there pretty much useless, while they may be able to use the bus, their method of using it wont get you anywhere

 

-------------------------

AMD opteron 170 @ 2.71 GHz

2GB ddr 400 overclocked

ATI radeon HD 3850 AGP 512MB direct3d memory, 0MB OpenGL memory

More info on the 0MB opengl problem here 

http://forums.amd.com/game/messageview.cfm?catid=279&threadid=108194&enterthread=y

Report those problems to ATI through proper channel and link this post to them. It's the only way for bugs to be fixed.
That, or those problems to be publicly posted on a major hardware review site

-------------------------
CPU: Intel Core i7 920@3.8, MEMORY: 3 X 2 GB GSKILL PI-BLACK PC12800, BOARD:ASUS P6T Deluxe, VIDEO: Powercolor 4870X2, PSU: BEQUIET STRAIGHTPOWER 700W, OS: WINDOWS VISTA 64 ULTIMATE

theres a large group of users from many forums like the guru3d, g4 tech support, tech support guy, hard forum and a few others reporting to ati, it has been going on for the past few years  and it has never been fixed

 

it seems as if the ati problem report section is kind a like a trash can.

 

you know how some companies will have a "complaint" box in the building, it is just a box that they empty in the trash at the end of the day  it is designed to keep the complaints out of their regular mail so they don't have to look at them and can pretend that they don't exist

if ati doesn't feel like fixing it, then they should release all of the code and other development info and tools related to their opengl drivers because groups like DNA and a few others want to fix the problem but ati takes extra steps to keep people from modifying their drivers

-------------------------

AMD opteron 170 @ 2.71 GHz

2GB ddr 400 overclocked

ATI radeon HD 3850 AGP 512MB direct3d memory, 0MB OpenGL memory

More info on the 0MB opengl problem here 

http://forums.amd.com/game/messageview.cfm?catid=279&threadid=108194&enterthread=y

Edited: 02/07/2009 at 01:48 PM by cutepuppy671