Nick on nVidia, Poor Linux Doom3 Performance Explained

Nick Triantos, director of OpenGL software (writes and supervises the writing of drivers) at nVidia gave a fast paced and high content presentation about the architecture of GPU’s and how some people and organizations are working on getting them to do things besides graphics, primarily complex scientific simulations that require lots of parallel floating point operations. It was a very interesting talk with lots of technical explanations.

After the presentation, I followed him outside the lecture hall to ask him why Doom 3 runs at 15-20 fps in linux when it goes well over 50 or 60 fps in windows (800×600, low detail). He told me that he had called up “John” (Caramack) and asked why the performance was so poor in the linux port. Caramack said that the Doom3 engine has some programmable something or other, don’t remember what it was now, that wasn’t properly implemented in the linux port. Anyway, after I had several answers from several different sources, Nick was able to tell me that the issue would be solved in a patch update to the Doom3 lin bins. Now at least I know what I’m waiting for. =)

Update: I think it was “programmable pixel shaders”..

UPDATE Nov 23: It was 2 days ago now that I tried out the latest nVidia drivers, 1.0.6629, which were apparently released earlier this month. Much to my surprise, my Doom performance jumped from like 10-20 fps to a smooth-enough 30-50 fps. This is at 800×600 high detail. I’m betting it was a combination between the newer Doom 3 linux binaries and the new nVidia drivers. I guess they figured some stuff out. Now I can play my Doom 3 in linux! Yay!

Conference in Progress

Chris Horvath, visual effects supervisor at Tweak Films, presented some very impressive demo video clips of some of his experiments leading up to final products that made their way into recent big ticket films including LOTR3, Hero, and The Day After Tomorrow. While he did talk lots of technical jargon about 3D graphics engineering, he made it pretty clear that he isn’t an engineer, but his team more “hacks” their way through solving problems. It was in The Day After Tomorrow where there’s a scene of ocean water flooding into the streets of Manhattan, and he was explaining how he was putting sink holes in the pavement behind buildings to influence the flow of water without extra engineering. In the end, I found his talk quite interesting.

That was yesterday. Today, I got up at 7:00am for a 7:30 breakfast (donuts, bagels and OJ!). Guy Kawasaki, Garage Technology Ventures and former Apple Fellow, talked about the essentials that a young aspiring entrepreneur would need to know to get started. He was quite informative as he shot down paradigms suggested by others as being bad ones, and explained some new ones that many of us probably hadn’t heard of before.

And now I’m here watching a pretty hardcore CSE lecture about the technical aspects of solving problems using parallel processing technologies. Probably the least interesting and driest of them all so far, but that’s okay. I’m blogging instead.

Anticipation Grows as Conference in Chicago Nears

So I’ll be up at 7:00am tomorrow to get in a car with a group of guys and head to Chicago for the annual ACM student computing conference. Friday starts off with a job fair where we get to talk to lots of people from big organizations. Then, for the next couple days, we will hear talks from big important people from big important places like NVIDIA, SETI@Home, Apple, MIT, and more. I am very excited to spend the weekend at such an interesting place away from campus. Pictures will be taken. Fun will be had. Maybe I’ll post during the conference sometime for an update.

Microsoft is at it Again

I try not to get too worked up about it, but if there’s one thing that really bothers me about our corporate America, it’s how giant companies like Microsoft can and do use their immense power to influence everybody else. Big companies like M$ have been applying for and stockpiling patents on ridiculous things like double-clicking or a context-sensitive menu. I don’t know how our system lets them get away with this sort of thing, but they certainly do. Microsoft wants nothing more than to dictate how all of technology is used on our planet and just keep getting bigger and bigger and destroying anybody in its path.

And here they go at it again. I was just reading slashdot, as I religiously do, and came across this story at PBS. In it, Robert Cringely examines one of Microsoft’s latest strategies in “dealing with” the competition. He explains how in the beginning with 286’s and 386’s, we had the “IBM-Compatible” standard (obviously defined by IBM), but after a few generations, we ended up with “MSDOS Compatible” and now “Windows Compatible” machines. What does this mean? It means that Microsoft now defines the standard, and if you don’t adhere exactly to this standard, your hardware might not be Microsoft certified - or worse yet - might break with upcoming versions of Windows.

Microsoft can’t just tell the world that they’re going to break all backward compatibility and proceed to roll out products that only hurt users, so they have come up with a good reason. Oh, I know… have you seen those portable USB thumb drive devices? They come on key chains, in watches, in the form of MP3 players, etc. When you plug these devices into a windows machine, a new drive letter pops up in My Computer. Just open it up and now you can drag and drop files to and from it. Easy, isn’t it… perhaps a little too easy.

Enter Microsoft’s upcoming “fix-a-quasisecurity-issue-while-crippling-the-competition” plan. The new USB standard Microsoft will propose is going to implement a sort of DRM that will stop users from copying (read stealing!, M$ says) data to these devices. Not only will outside software/hardware makers be alienated from the market, but M$ will earn royalties on every device sold with the new standard! Go Gates Go! It will, of course, be incompatible with older devices so when you buy a new computer, you get to buy a new MP3 player and the rest.

We still have until 2006 before Longhorn ships, but a whole lot can happen before then. Microsoft plans to have most of our USB devices replaced in time for Longhorn. It sucks, but what can you do… I just hope enough people on this planet have the sense to avoid this new hardware before it’s too late and M$ already has them in their icy grip.

My New TV

So I just got my new Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-250 yesterday, and after a few hours of tinkering with the complicated, but ever-so-cool MythTV, I manged to get it running. Now, I can use one of my two screens to not just watch TV, but have all the Tivo-like PVR functionality. That means I can pause, rewind, record, get an on-screen TV guide, and more. Since I already had two screens for my computer, instead of buying a TV, this was my solution. It was cheaper than a whole TV (just over $100) and also offers extra functionality. I don’t usually watch too much TV, but maybe that will change now that I have one.

Oh, I’m still working on those pictures. Maybe in the next few days I’ll put something online.

Doom 3 FPS issue resolved; More Gaming Followed

Last night, I finally beat Doom 3. I still think it’s one of the best games available for the PC right now. Totally captivating. The realism of the game along with the lack of opportunity to get distracted (solid gameplay) just sucks you right into the game. I’ve heard of people playing this game straight from beginning to end (about 20hrs?) in one sitting, and I can see why.

After I had beat the big guy at the end, it dawned on me that I had actually read somewhere already that there is some sort of bug in the nvidia drivers that causes doom3 to perform very poorly (fps) when dual screens is enabled. This page explains it all, but you need to either disable the second screen, or go into the advanced performance options and change the “acceleration mode” to single screen rather than the default setting of dual-head acceleration. This allowed me to still use the second head for aim/irc/web and still get full performance in doom3 on the first. After the fix, I was able to run at 1024×768 high detail at ~20 fps’ish. While it’s fun to play like this (BEAUTIFUL) it’s not as smooth, and that’s what REALLY matters. I’ve been playing at 800×600 low detail at about 60 fps. My GF FX 5600 128M is performing better than I thought it could.

So, needless to say, I had to play some more doom with my newfound performance boost. I took a few more screenshots, but I didn’t have enough really cool ones to bother posting them all. I started playing with some cheat codes and stuff, too. I turned on ‘notarget’ which makes the monsters play like they don’t see you at all. So I was able to shine my flashlight in this demon’s face and get a nice screenshot of him, which I cropped and resized in the gizzimp. (Original screenshot at 1024×768 medium detail.)

More News On my Computer! (+DOOM3)

I’m sure you’re all just checking my site every day to find out how my computer is doing, and well, I’m bored at work, so I thought I’d give you all an update on how that’s going.

After 3 power supplies and 2 motherboards coming from Newegg.com, I think I’m on the verge of having a nice stable machine. The last problem I was having even after I installed the new motherboard that came in last night was the network. Both the integrated nic as well as a PCI one I installed exhibit the same behavior. They flake out and stop sending/receiving traffic pretty often. Only by disabling the interface and reenabling it can I get the packets to resume flow.

It was my genius dad who had the great idea of checking the Asus website for BIOS ROM updates. Well, he found there was one, and in the release notes it says that it fixes a problem with ethernet when a PCI sound card is present (I have a SBLive! I use instead of the onboard sound). So, that definitely would apply to my situation. I wasn’t able to quite get my bios flashed last night before I had to go to bed, but I’m sure I’ll figure it out at some point tonight.

In other news, DOOM3 is a freaking great time. I have been playing it for the last 2 days now, and even at ‘low’ quality settings it’s very engaging. Even with my Athlon XP 2800+ Barton, 1024M PC3200, and GeForce FX 5600 w/128M it seems anything fancier than ‘low’ detail makes the animation get all choppy the moment there is anything complicated to render. This isn’t such a bad thing, though, because the ID Software people did a great job at making it look great even at this detail setting. I hope to take some screenshots (not many) and maybe elaborate on why it’s so great in another post soon.

Computer Update

Well I got the thermal goo on my proc, and it would appear everything is good. I went from an nForce2 based mobo to an Asus/VIA one, so I had to recompile my kernel with the new (10/100/1000mbit, btw) ethernet chip and IDE controller drivers among other things.

Also, I recently acquired an 800MHz/256Mb/20Gb Dell OptoPlex GX110 from Quicken Loans (my place of employment) for an insanely good price. They had a “wall” of these things that were basically getting “rotated out.” This has replaced the 266MHz machine that was dontated to me by my uncle. And the 160Gb hard drive I bought for that machine is now in this one. It will make a nice file server/dedicated _ server in the corner of my dorm room this coming school year.

Oh yeah, and for the first time I think I’m actually looking forward to going back to school. The dorm rooms in Wilson are situated with two people in each of two rooms connected by a bathroom. Both my roommate and I will both have singles, that means our suite will house two people instead of the typical four. That should be a good thing for a number of reasons….

Broken Computer

After several shipments from newegg.com and a lot of money and hardware exchanging hands, I find myself at tonight. My computer will stay on for some time, but then suddenly shut off for no reason. At first I thought it was a power issue with the power supply or a short happening somewhere between the motherboard and the case, but after some “tests” I’m now fairly confident it’s just a heat problem. The thermal goop on my CPU is a bit crusty and looks like it’s not doing its job properly anymore. A stop by my local CompUSA tomorrow should get me to the next step.

In other news, my 21^st birthday is coming up (this Saturday)! Wh00t! I don’t have any particular plans as of right now, but I’m sure I’ll come up with something good.