Prey very bad perfomance

[Miguel18]

Hello, I have a Fx 5600 ultra and I've installed prey demo. As doom 3 and quake 4 work perfectly at hight settings in a 800*600 resolution , I thought I would not find any problems running prey.But for my suprise, it run very very very bad, even with everything low, I'm getting like 20 fps or less,...
I don't understand...doom 3 and quake 4 run so well in my pc
Can anybody help me?

[Nihilanth]

I have P4 2.6 HT | Gb Ram | FX 5900xt and it's kinda messed up too. It's still playable, but I really need to tone down details to low as well as resolution to 800 or 640 not to see a slideshow.

[Oats]

I will need to have exerything on low and off including shadows @ 640x480, only thing I will have on will be Bump-Mapping.

[IwantMORE]

Even with exerything on low and off including shadows @ 640x480 it runs a bit to slow for my taste. Unless the optimise this heavily it will be a while before I get it as there is bound to be bits of the full game that would slow down too much.

But it looks ok still got a hint of that D3 'gloss' about it. Maybe I'll get this when I upgrade for DNF, whenever that comes out.

[lhaymehr]

K7@2100 and 5900XT Golden Sample and the game just doesn't play at all. I ran Doom3 and Quake4 at 1024x768 on high detail with this setup and had very good framerates, but in Prey i'm happy if it goes over 15 FPS.

I managed to spare some FPS by setting to 800x600 and the following cvars:
r_normalizeBumpmap 0
r_correctSpecular 0 (which is actually high Q spec in options)

I also use RivaTuner to force the game to run in 16bit, but all of this didn't help much, the framerates are awfull :(

Either there's a software problem on my end (which i doubt), or the game just has a lot more complex scenes than Doom3 which i don't really see :p .

Can anyone from 3DR please confirm that 5xxx cards performed this bad in the testing phase? Please.

[Cheapy]

Yeah, the 5200's performance in Prey is extremely atrocious at best, sub-10fps at the minimumest and lowest of all possible settings. Quake4 runs much better at medium detail on the same card.

Perhaps these special optimizations (GLSL?) are just plain out choking the fx badly.

[Mikeh]

Odd that folks that ran Q4 and D3 ok would have problems with this..

I actually find that Prey runs BETTER than the other two..

Go, HH!

waiting for Gold.

[robertowm]

I had a MSI 5600XT and I could run DOOM ]I[ and Q4 on high at 800x600 pretty well. But there were a lot of games I couldnt even get more than 5 fps like Hitman Bloody Money, Oblivion, FEAR, Call of Duty 2, Pacific Assault, Ghost Recon Advanced WF and Splinter Cell Chaos Theory. They were just unplayable...
I've read somewhere that the fx series sucks for the new tech these games are using, I think its that shader stuff... Anyway, some games you can just disable, but these new ones you cant. I think most of then dont even supported my old 5600xt at the minimum requirements. Prey was built on the D3 engine but it was probably modified a lot.

[FireFly]

Yes, I think Prey's use of (presumably very complex) shaders is what's causing trouble for FX users.

[lhaymehr]

Not really. If you look inside the Demo.pk4/glprogs you'll see all the shaders that are exact same as in Doom3. There are several new ones but i believe these are used for various other effects in certain explosions/new heat haze, etc. There is an improved bumpmapping and specular but i think those are disabled with these two cvars i mentioned.

Even the polycount looks almost on par with D3/Q4. Probably there's a whole lot more lights used in Prey scenes.

I think that us poor bastards on 5xxx are f*****. :(

Wish there was an option for Vertex lighting lol.

[Miguel18]

Can anyboy help us from 3d realms or Human Head Studios, I seriously want to play this game

[FireFly]

Not really. If you look inside the Demo.pk4/glprogs you'll see all the shaders that are exact same as in Doom3. There are several new ones but i believe these are used for various other effects in certain explosions/new heat haze, etc. There is an improved bumpmapping and specular but i think those are disabled with these two cvars i mentioned.
Well we know there are skin and hair shaders, and postprocessing shaders for things like contrast, saturation, tint, blur, and light bloom.

[Trojan-Two]

Get a cheap 6800 GS or a 7800 GS then you'll be set for awhile , New game engines means we need faster (core & memory ), Better vid cards (shaders etc.). Most of the FX (5) Series cards were just to slow. I had a crap FX 5200 so i know the pain . :/

[robertowm]

Get a cheap 6800 GS or a 7800 GS then you'll be set for awhile , New game engines means we need faster (core & memory ), Better vid cards (shaders etc.). Most of the FX (5) Series cards were just to slow. I had a crap FX 5200 so i know the pain . :/

That was what I did! I got a XFX 6800XT. Excelent cost-benefit! My drama with the fx5600xt is over thanks God... I sold it for a friend of mine for 80 dollars. lol :D

I am able to play Prey with every thing on high at 1024x768. I tested with an even higher resolution and could play just fine. Great graphics! I can also play all those games I mentioned on high settings.

[Cheapy]

The suspecting GLSL optimzations that people praise constantly with the newer, obviously better cards could be the culprit.

Perhaps an option to disable all that will help us unfortunate fx owners? Darkplaces is the same too (r_glsl 1 really slows down)

[lhaymehr]

I think there's more to it than that. Basically if you disable specular and bump you pretty much disabled most of it, but the performance still suffers. I really think it's the lights.

@Trojan-two:

So far i'm failing to succeed to find a right moment that will justify the price of the graphics hardware i plan on buying, yknow :) But i'm bound to build a whole new system pretty soon now :doh:

[Cheapy]

yeah, it's definitely the optimized lighting path

as a last resort you can try using 320x240 (r_mode 0) or 400x300 mode (r_mode 1). Text is rather blurry but performance is pretty fast. :D

[R-o-D]

My drama with the fx5600xt is over thanks God... I sold it for a friend of mine for 80 dollars. lol :D



geez, how could you rip off a "friend" like that?

[Brian Karis]

That is the reason these cards are unsupported. I have found the same poor performance on them as well. In fact I have found they run slower than geforce 3s and 4s. I don't know why. Some ideas to make it faster. Turn down all the shader settings. Turn off high quality specular and sharpen bumpmaps. This will bring you back to doom 3s lighting equation. This still didn't get it fast enough for me. You could then try turning off glow and putting r_renderer to nv20. You will probably need to restart the game to have that look right. This is the render path the geforce4s run in. That should make it faster at a bit or sacrifice to looks. Hopefully this gets it fast enough to play. Also make sure you're in 640x480. It certainly won't be fast above that.

[Cheapy]

putting r_renderer to nv20
that was it, now there's a HUGE speedup. Thanks! :D

[lhaymehr]

Bah, picking up a 6600 or something like that now is an absolute waste of cash cause i'm positive my 5900 beats it blind in plain ol' texture mapping :( What a retarded fact. Mainstream cards 2 generations newer than 5900 still have a 128bit memory interface and thus considerably lower memory bandwidth despite its higher memory clocks.

BTW, i actually found nv20 render path to be slower in certain parts of the scenes. Whatever. I guess i'll pick up Prey after i build a new sys.

cheers, and thanks for making it clear Brian.