I'm moving over to an ATI video card- any real difference to CC creation?

[Legacy_OldTimeRadio]

               I managed to find a really cheap laptop with a dedicated video card but it's an ATI card.  I've never used anything but Nvidia for my 3D cards so I'm a little leery.  Still, it's got amazing horsepower for what I want to do with it and NWN seems to have run without any graphics flaws so far.  But I could have sworn that I'd read that ATI cards had problems with NWN. 

Mainly, I want to make sure there aren't any problems with alpha on textures or things relating to transparency.  It seems like everything else plays fine(?)

Here are the specs for it if that helps.

Any card owners (esp. people who have owned both Nvidia and AT)I who can comment what the differences are?

Thanks!
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Zwerkules]

               I had Nvidia before and an ATI card now and I can't tell any difference. Shiny water is said to work on ATI cards, but not on Nvidia, but for me it never worked no matter what card I had. I guess that's no great loss anyway '>.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_OldTimeRadio]

               

Zwerkules wrote...

I had Nvidia before and an ATI card now and I can't tell any difference.

So no problems with the textures on your tilesets, say, or anything like that?

Shiny water is said to work on ATI cards, but not on Nvidia, but for me it never worked no matter what card I had. I guess that's no great loss anyway '>.

I just made an area with shiny water and it looks like it's borked.  Sigh...I don't think that's enough for me to return the laptop, though.  I just hope that's the only "surprise".  Shinywater is weird in NWN, anyway.  It's basically bumpmapping but from the days when bumpmapping was very, very new.  At one point I managed to discover most of the rules for it but there apparently were issues with the way UV maps worked: If a UV map required a repeating texture, the bumpmap effect would get clamped.  Which meant no bumpmap tilesets unless the UV was redone model by model.  Even then, the channelscale and channeltranslate commands in the .TXI were less than loving and at best, you still wound up with a gray "skin' (the bumpmap) which you couldn't really modify much.  And since bumpmaps required cubemaps to work you had environment maps stepping on other environment maps, which might be what I'm seeing in the screenshot.

Anyway, but everything "basic" texturewise seems to work for you?  Especially things like alpha transparency or specular in the alpha?

Any other comments from ATI CC makers?
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Rolo Kipp]

               <arching his back...>

My poor disintegrating Thinkpad has a 32mb Radeon...
Edit: And you *know* I've been doing a lot of alpha mapping :-)
The only problems I have stem from minimal memory and slow CPU :-P
It won't even let me select Shiny water in the video options :-/

That and content creation using a trackpoint device because all the USB ports (*and* my favorite 6 button drafting mouse!) were fried by a stoopid Motorola driver >:-(

My pointing finger hurts :~(

<...with a groan and fumbling for wake-me-up>
               
               

               

                     Modifié par Rolo Kipp, 14 septembre 2011 - 04:11 .
                     
                  

            

[Legacy_OldTimeRadio]

               Ah cool, yeah, since you presumably took the screenshot it didn't look like there was any problem with your alphas at all.  Thanks as well for your input, Rolo!
               
               

               
            

[Legacy__Guile]

               The NWN Game is old, if you use too newer of a video card most likely it will not be supported, as newer hardware really was never supported by the game makers.

I've had issues with some ATI cards not even showing up graphics at all, all you get is a black screen, so I strictly used Nvidia cards only.

Furthermore, the NWN game really is NOT graphics intensive, in fact you can run it on most Onboard Video Controllers, seriously.  In fact it's often better to do so in many instances.  I found the game actually runs better on an old computer than my newer $1,400 computer, and that's mainly because of the Video Controller/Card used.  However that's not 100% true in all instances, while working in the toolset and creating content the newer computer far exceeds the older one in performance & speed, graphics not being a factor.

If you want the best results use a high frequency newer i3 CPU (3+ GHz) and use the settings in the .ini file to set the CPU Affinity to 0 for the game and then setup the toolset to use 1, so the toolset runs on the second core and not the first one, which your game runs on.  Also, you should setup your server to run on your second core and not your first one if you plan on playing the game while hosting a server.

As far as creating custom content, the more RAM you have the better, also using a Solid State Drive to install your NWN Game on is going to produce some really stellar results, performance wise, as it can read & write files instantaneously!  Running a Server or using the Toolset on a Solid State Drive is going to show you just how far we have advanced today in technology.

Hope that was helpful to someone.
               
               

               

                     Modifié par _Guile, 14 septembre 2011 - 06:04 .
                     
                  

            

[Legacy_Bannor Bloodfist]

               

OldTimeRadio wrote...

I managed to find a really cheap laptop with a dedicated video card but it's an ATI card.  I've never used anything but Nvidia for my 3D cards so I'm a little leery.  Still, it's got amazing horsepower for what I want to do with it and NWN seems to have run without any graphics flaws so far.  But I could have sworn that I'd read that ATI cards had problems with NWN. 

Mainly, I want to make sure there aren't any problems with alpha on textures or things relating to transparency.  It seems like everything else plays fine(?)

Here are the specs for it if that helps.

Any card owners (esp. people who have owned both Nvidia and AT)I who can comment what the differences are?

Thanks!

Many of the graphics tools (no, I can't remember which ones) and compilers etc, require NVidia to work correctly, the CONTENT displays ok on ATI, but the tools used to create that content don't work correctly.  Something about how specific calls are made to NVidia dll's or GPU. 

I wish I still had my notes on this, but I had started NWN with ATI, a higher end one at the time NWN was released, and I had constant problems when editing/creating tilesets.  Once I switched to NVidia, those problems went away.  But this was also many years back now, so it is possible that the newer ATI's will work.

You may want to attempt to view some of the contents on wayback machine regarding the tech support/self help forum to find Video card issues/solutions.  I know there were a large number of issues/solutions, but most of the problems with ATI were truly only answered by switching to NVidia.  NWN itself was written/designed for NVidia, and somewhere in the various tools there are specific calls to NVidia functions that ATI did not support back then.


Edit:  NWNmdlcomp will have issues for sure.  It may appear to run, but it can cause issues, or crash out on specific types of graphics details on a given mdl.  The source code for that was written specifically for NVidia since the NWN Engine was developed for Nvidia as well. (then ported, and most of the porting works on displaying things, but not the compiling).

There was another one, but I can't seem to remember what tool it was.
               
               

               

                     Modifié par Bannor Bloodfist, 14 septembre 2011 - 07:03 .
                     
                  

            

[Legacy_Failed.Bard]

               I used to have a horrific memory leak within the game itself on my ATI card, while still under Vista, due to how the card handled dynamic lighting.  Better than 10 MB a minute in memory bloat.  Within an hour NWN would be using a gigabyte or more ram.
 While I haven't had an issue from that under win 7, I can't say if it was the OS or the newer drivers that fixed that issue.
 Depending on your OS/drivers on the laptop, it might be something to keep an eye on.

 Vetical Sync still crashes me instantly.  I'm not sure the reason for that, so I just leave it off.
 The shiny water issue was mentioned already.  I think all ATI cards have that problem regardless of generation and driver, though I've only run NWN with two different ones, so it's not by any means a complete sample group to really say that definitively.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_OldTimeRadio]

               @_Guile - Thanks for the info.  The core information is very useful!

@Bannor Bloodfist - I totally forgot about that!  There were a couple of tools affected.  I just tried the BioWare DDS compressor and a preliminary test shows it  appears to output things correctly.  I will do some more detailed tests because I just realized it might write out the image fine but the mipmaps might get borked somehow.  I just tried processmodels.exe (faster than NWNmdlcomp but doesn't do skin mesh well) and that seemed to work too.  Both of them just quick tests, I'll have to do more testing to see if they and NWNmdlcomp.exe will be really working correctly under this system.  Thanks again for the reminder- I had read many of the same threads over the years but forgot about them.

@Failed.Bard - Thanks, I'm not sure how easy that one is going to be to test (I'm running under Windows 7) but that's another good thing to think of.
               
               

               

                     Modifié par OldTimeRadio, 14 septembre 2011 - 07:37 .
                     
                  

            

[Legacy__Guile]

               I believe AMD is about to release their FX Series of CPUs, these are going to be REALLY awesome CPUs, they just shattered the Gunius book of world records at an astounding 8+ GHz, and they can Overclock to 6 GHz + on a freaking air cooler! << Wow!  The thing that will make the FX Series so great is not Just the CPU Clock Speed (not so important) but using SATA 3 (6 Gb/s)  & DDR 1866 RAM!  Those two factors are going to increase performance expotentially, not just for the game, but for servers as well.  As I state earlier, solid state drives are what you want to use to host a NWN Server on, reading and writing to the database is going to be instantaneous, furthermore, loading the game will be a lot faster!

Nevertheless, if you want stellar performance you really do have to upgrade your computer to something newer. Llano (AMD's new APU) is a really nice CPU to work with on NWN, or even the Core i3-2100 << This CPU/GPU is really awesome & affordable, so if you want something reasonable get the i3-2100.

I'm really wanting to lean towards the AMD FX series of chips for the next 2-4 years, these chips are going to make Intel 2nd best!  The great part is they will be coming out in 2 / 4 / 6 / & 8 Core CPUs, which in itself is just awesome!
               
               

               

                     Modifié par _Guile, 14 septembre 2011 - 10:00 .
                     
                  

            

[Legacy_Master Jax]

               As I've said many many many times before, I had 3 ATI cards in the past, and they all had problems with NWN. Indeed, they are cheaper and faster, but when it comes to finesse and actual gaming, nothing has ever surpassed the 2 Nvidia cards I've had in my life.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_OldTimeRadio]

               Thanks for all the information.  I've decided to stick with the lapto but shinywater is definitely screwed up.  AFAIK, shiny water and any kind of bumpmapping in NWN has to have a cubemap in order to work.  A cubemap in NWN's case is 6 individual images which are stitched together by the video card to make a virtual cube which is mapped onto the surface of a shiny or bumpmapped mesh.  I was right about the environment maps "stepping on each other".  The programming for NWN when it comes to cubemaps isn't the greatest and while environment mapping on creatures doesn't mess with bumpyshiny under NVidia, it actually causes the the regular environment map to be inserted into one of the slots which the cubemaps occupy- which just screws stuff all up. 

The other thing, and this is bizarre, is the cubemap appears to inherit motion from the player model.  (!) Theoretically, it would seem like the only thing which might even hope to fix that situation would be stripping out all the environment maps on anything except ttr01__env or maybe no environment maps at all except for the ones involved in shinywater and finding out and addressing why some forms of motion are being inherited from other objects.  From what I understand of how different types of environment mapping is done, switching everything over to cubemaps might actually be a good idea (I think it would work) but too much work too uncertain an outcome.  Too bad.

'>

On a positive note, ATI doesn't seem to show any difference from NVidia when it comes to compiling models in advance and the massive horsepower you can tap into there.
               
               

               

                     Modifié par OldTimeRadio, 02 octobre 2011 - 07:14 .
                     
                  

            

[Legacy_Tarot Redhand]

               I have only ever used ati cards and have not had any problems doing cc with them.

TR