who were you talking to naturalviolence?
You. Sorry I was multitasking and must have quoted something from another thread. It's fixed now.
I asked skid in another thread if there is a way to observe what the real hardware is doing in specific games such as Twilight Princess when loading areas like Hyrule Field. So far everything that has been tested and observed points to it being a bug that affects certain hardware rather than it being slow because of loading the geometry and textures. Perhaps it's a problem decoding the texturing environment that affects a certain group of hardware.
I'd be interested to find out what the game is doing on the actual hardware and have the results dumped to an SD card. This would likely involve running the game through a homebrew application to get the needed results, not sure if any homebrew apps exist for this purpose.
It's annoying. Every time I feel like I'm close to the answer I end up getting results that completely prove it wrong.
Why, what results are you getting?
I've gone through many theories now. I'll give you an example. At one point in time I thought it had something to do with ati drivers/cards, and I was so damn sure of it. But then I found out JADS had an old 9800GT. I asked him to try it and he got the same results with a 9800GT and the latest forceware. So the issue has no relation to nvidia vs. ati despite that fact that it only affects certain people.
But it might still be a video card issue, does everyone who is unaffected have high end graphics hardware with around 1 GB GDDR5 Vram? Out of the tests so far, does any of the members who are unaffected by slowdowns have a Geforce 9xxx or similar ATI card with 512 MB Vram? More specifically a Geforce 9800 GT with 512 MB of Vram or has everyone who has been unaffected by these slowdowns so far have a high end graphics card with nearly 1 GB fast GDDR5 Ram? Hyrule Field might need a card with sufficient amount of Vram, fast GDDR5 Vram to process the texture environment and vertices. If this is the issue, it could probably be alleviated by caching vertices and textures to disk on the fly if possible, so this data only needs to be processed once and can be loaded from the cache whenever it's needed again.
For the testing, it should be considered whether these members who are unaffected by slowdowns, have anything in common, such as powerful graphics hardware.
Quote:does everyone who is unaffected have high end graphics hardware with around 1 GB GDDR5 Vram?
Yes but so do I and I'm affected by it along with many others with high end cards with 1 GB or more of fast vram.
Quote:Out of the tests so far, does any of the members who are unaffected by slowdowns have a Geforce 9xxx or similar ATI card with 512 MB Vram? More specifically a Geforce 9800 GT with 512 MB of Vram or has everyone who has been unaffected by these slowdowns so far have a high end graphics card with nearly 1 GB fast GDDR5 Ram?
Yes. JADS did not have the issue with either his 9800GT or hd5850.
Quote: Hyrule Field might need a card with sufficient amount of Vram, fast GDDR5 Vram to process the texture environment and vertices. If this is the issue, it could probably be alleviated by caching vertices and textures to disk on the fly if possible, so this data only needs to be processed once and can be loaded from the cache whenever it's needed again.
Based on the tests we have run so far I would have to conclude that this is not it. High end vs. low end video cards don't seem to make a difference. However I need more people with low end cards before I can say for certain.
Quote:For the testing, it should be considered whether these members who are unaffected by slowdowns, have anything in common, such as powerful graphics hardware.
Trust me I have looked over every single hardware difference in everyone's rigs who signed up. But I can only do so much, I still need more people with a wider range of hardware.
Based on what I've done so far:
Nvidia vs. ati = no change
newer drivers vs. older drivers = no change
high end video card vs. low end video cards = no change
I do notice that all of the unaffected people have the newest generation of intel cpus (lyynfield and bloomfield, clarkdale users are still effected) yet for some reason only some of them are unaffected, not all.
When I noticed this pattern I thought I should talk about it with a dev, so I did. I told sonic everything and he seemed to think we were on to something big. He said a lot of theoretical stuff about it that I didn't understand then said he was going to make us a test to see how the mutexs were being handled (I don't even know what a mutex is). He completed the test but didn't know how to port it to windows, he needed another dev to do that for him and unfortunately that never happened.
I really wish I could post the results here but the HDD that they were stored on is no longer functioning..... At least I posted JADS results in the thread. I would have killed myself if I had lost those as well. I really need to start backing up to a cloud service.
Quote:When I noticed this pattern I thought I should talk about it with a dev, so I did. I told sonic everything and he seemed to think we were on to something big. He said a lot of theoretical stuff about it that I didn't understand then said he was going to make us a test to see how the mutexs were being handled (I don't even know what a mutex is). He completed the test but didn't know how to port it to windows, he needed another dev to do that for him and unfortunately that never happened.
I really wish I could post the results here but the HDD that they were stored on is no longer functioning..... At least I posted JADS results in the thread. I would have killed myself if I had lost those as well. I really need to start backing up to a cloud service.
For some reason I always had the feeling that this issue might be similar to the Windwaker Deku Tree Room slowdown that was fixed a while back, or at least it being a bug and not related to how much needs to be rendered.
Did you discuss Kiesel-Steins patch with Sonic, and why it speeds up rendering of Hyrule Field? Another weird thing is, just like the actual issue itself, the patch worked for some but not other members. I would like to hear the theories that SonicAdvance1 discussed with you if you don't mind, it would be nice if he and other developers would lend themselves to discussion of this issue so a solution can be found hopefully.
Quote:Did you discuss Kiesel-Steins patch with Sonic, and why it speeds up rendering of Hyrule Field? Another weird thing is, just like the actual issue itself, the patch worked for some but not other members. I would like to hear the theories that SonicAdvance1 discussed with you if you don't mind, it would be nice if he and other developers would lend themselves to discussion of this issue so a solution can be found hopefully.
No. This was before this thread was created and quite some time before kiesel Steins patch was created or even theorized. I've noticed that most if not all of the people that didn't get a significant speedup from the patch already had a decent framerate to begin with. The problem is since the issue only occurs late game many of the people saying this or saying they don't have a slowdown may simply be to early in the game to be affected by the issue.
As for the conversation with sonic. As I said, it was way over my head. I believe he said something about mutexes and thread management but I don't remember much and I didn't understand half of it to begin with.