Posted by kapca @ 16:32 BST, 28 September 2011 - iMsg
So I underclocked my onboard VGA and found some spots on many maps where I get fps-drop for no apparent reasons (and as you can see in this example on the picture, the spot(s) have no slowdown(s) in cpma, only in QL)
You're probably just positioned in areas where the occlusion/portals are switching between more or less rooms/cells.
Those levels are all split up into invisible chunks to everything but the rendering engine and depending on where you are and what your point of view is depends on how much of the level gets shown.
Lastly onboard VGA is likely to suffer from driver issues over independant cards. Onboard means the chipset to most people, so if you mean sometthing else, change your terminology.
Underclocking like overclcking can give strange results. Juse leave the card at default. T4 is a small open level so its mostly all being drawn at same time in regular play.
Plus with them moving to qlive a lot of stuff will have been changed and probably not by carmack.
If you never saw this map, FYI we are looking "out" from the map on those pictures, so r_novis 1 makes no difference at all. (If you are in doubt, I attached a picture for you with r_novis "1")
Also it's an ion-itx, so it's a geforce 9400GS, which is terribly slow, but it's a fully functional nvidia chip (and btw, it runs cpma rock steady 125fps, even when it's underclocked). It's uses the very same nvidia cuda cores and runs by the official nvidia drivers like any other nvidia card, and underclocking does nothing else but slows it down, which was my goal to identify the slow spots of the map.
you would probably need an id dev to debug it to actually give you a confirmation. But they won't care cos most pc's will run it well and even with fps drops, it's likely to be only for a few ms while the player runs around.
IMO its a rendering issue/bug/driver. I doubt you will trace it down to anything particular as its likely to be deep under the hood as its not obvious what is causing it.
There are lots of spots like that on a given map, and a shit lot of players ( with relatively good PCs) are getting slowdowns on maps like toxicity or t4, etc...
I'm just trying to understand the cause, and (while I hope that i'm wrong on this one:) I doubt that anybody at id gives a single fuck about QL now.