Upgraded video card, DX9 slower?

[NaturalViolence]

Never thought of that. Good theory.

@kylebisme

Go into the nvidia control panel and change the power setting to "prefer maximum performance".

[kylebisme]

The power settings option is a possibility I hadn't considered, but unfortunately it's just as slow either way. Also, I've been watching the card's clockspeeds and such, and it's kicking up properly to full speed when running Dolphin, and GPU load shows 94% while getting 35fps in the opening view of SMG with DX9 and everything cranked by no AA, while it's only at 43% and a full 60fps in DX11 with the exact same settings. So, something very odd is going on, but I'm at a loss as to what it might be. Anyone have any other ideas?

[Squall Leonhart]

Yeah, the new cards are just not as good at D3D9.

[kylebisme]

Do you mean the newer cards aren't as good with Dolphin's DX9 plugin specifically? As all the benchmarks I've seen show the 470s are notably faster than the 260s regardless of API, and the 470 has preformed much better for me in everything else I've tried, DX9 and otherwise, only Dolphin's DX9 pigging is running worse.

Just for testing, I swapped back to the 260, changing nothing else, which gives me 53fps at 71% GPU load in the opening view of SMG with DX9, and 43fps at 46% in DX11, compared to the 35fps at 94% in DX9 and 60fps at 43% in DX11 with the 470 . Others with the newer Nvidia cards don't have such crappy DX9 performance in Dolphin, do they?

[Squall Leonhart]

Quote:and GPU load shows 94% while getting 35fps in the opening view of SMG with DX9 and everything cranked by no AA, while it's only at 43% and a full 60fps in DX11 with the exact same settings. So, something very odd is going on, but I'm at a loss as to what it might be. Anyone have any other ideas?

You can actually get high load by forcing low clock rates, yet low load with high clockrates, so it can still be the card isn't being utilised properly.

first off, get afterburner or precision and monitor the gpu load and frequencies while dolphin is running.

second, make sure dolphin is not being effected by settings in the nvidia control panel, Dx11 won't take on nvcp settings usually, but d3d9 may.

third, play with the threaded optimisation setting, and make sure prerender frames is higher than 0.

[kylebisme]

The clocks are still kicking up properly to full speed when running Dolphin, just like I said they were a few posts back. As for the driver settings, I'd reset the defaults as soon as I noticed the issue, but changing the ones you suggested didn't have any effect.

I'm still curious about your "the new cards are just not as good at D3D9" comment, on what basis did you come up with that?

[Squall Leonhart]

The architecture for Dx10 and 10.1 cards was made with DirectX9 backwards compatibility in mind, a number of trade offs were made with the Dx11 parts to achieve better Dx10 and 11 performance, at the cost of some Dx9 performance. They should still be much faster than the older cards just on shaders and clockrate increases, but per transistor, they aren't as effective as the previous cards.

If we could find a dev to replicate this behavior on Fermi parts, we might find it is an issue with the way shaders are behaving.

[Anti-Ultimate]

They only need to port EFB -> RAM to the DX11 Plugin then i am going to use it more often

[kylebisme]

Anti-Ultimate, is your GTX 580 slower with the DX9 plugin than the DX11 one? I went over to a friend's house last night who also has a 470 with an i5 and Windows 7, and found the exact same issue there, so I'm curious if the problem is with Ferni cards in general or the 470 in particular. Regardless, everything else is notably faster on my new card, other DX9 applications included, so other than trying older Nvidia drivers I'm at a loss as to what might get me running good in Dolphin with DX9.

[Anti-Ultimate]

Nope it isn't.
It's faster with DX9.
It's an Asus GTX580 Voltage-Tweak