Question to the graphically inclined...

[kirkyg]

Ok i've noticed that on ssX tricky that the game has noticeable framerate drops on occasion. I also notice on the cut scenes before playing it studders. Its almost as if they left vsync off or something was not designed correctly in the game's engine. Just curious if any of you knowledgeable alot in the area of video card's output and animation/graphics production had any ideas why a game like this studders on a powerful machine...yet DOA3 which has the best graphics of any game i've ever seen has a solid ass framerate.

btw, i rented ssx tricky i thought it wasn't too fun at first but after i started playing it it really is pretty **** fun.

kirkyg

[mattcoxonline]

Originally posted by kirkyg
...is pretty **** fun.

Sorry, don't know the answer. But this bit entertained me for about 3 seconds....

I was thinking of other words to go in here other than d*mn.
sh*t worked well, or maybe crap. Or for you Americans - darn...?!?!

[Big Ben]

Originally posted by mattcoxonline

Or for you Americans - darn...?!?!

Actually, Americans would likely use the phrase "sh*t, yo" or "mutha f*ckah"

As for framerate problems, it's likely due to the slow loading time. Looking at PGR you see this when the cars load at the car select screen. I've read that the best way to improve (not fix) this problem is to replace the standard IDE cable in the Xbox with a ATA 133 compatible one. Of course, if you do this, you must open your Xbox, which voids any and all warrenties. Plus you'll need a size 10 star screwdriver and a small phillips head. Make sure the IDE cable you replace it with does NOT have the break because your Xbox will not work with the break.

I beleive you can find an article on it somewhere on some site, but I don't remember where and I didn't bookmark it, sorry.

-Big Ben

[kirkyg]

it's likely due to the slow loading time.

big ben,

thanks for trying but it has nothing to do with ide cables. Frame rate and load times have nothing to do with one another. Media access time and data transfer rates are the major culprit of this. Load times are pretty consistantly fast on xbox games. I have to say im impressed there although i wish they had slapped 128mb's or more of ram on the system which wouldnt' have costed them much.

The framerate is directly related to the amount of graphical data being processors (polygon's, T&L, etc.) by the video card and CPU.
That being so, the xbox can handle that fine except if the game was not designed well.

matt, LOL well i meant d*mn none of those other words even fit :)

kirkyg

[Frostberg]

1st off, Sh*t wouldnt work...2nd 64MBs of RAM is MORE than enough...its more than the rest have and if you think about it, 64MBs of dedicated RAM to your XBox games...yeah thats more than enough...In SSX Tricky I noticed that too, when you are going down a fast course and there are a bunch of boarders around you and silly objects and such, but it doesnt do it that much...It doesnt happen that often, but it makes you wonder if something it wrong because the Xbox should be able to push out enough polys for a port like SSX Tricky...Hopefully a game that is optimized and built around the XBox will solve the problems, but when you get into those large areas with a lot of objects and especially moving ones, it will get slower with all the detailed objects, but even games built around the Xbox slow down, like Halo...

[Hugh_Jass]

I think it has less to do with the capabilities of the XBOX and more to do with SSX Tricky being a lousy port.

[kirkyg]

hugh, i was thinking along those lines also. Actually i've noticed it didn't always mess up with lots of characters and extras on screen. Sometimes it would happen in places that weren't all that graphic intense. I think its just a ****ty port.

kirkyg

[Gdiguy]

actually, the slowness in car loading screens in pgr is due to the hard drive, which is probably the slowest thing in the xbox... :)

from anandtech: "Microsoft elected Seagate and Western Digital to provide drives for the Xbox so if you open a unit up you're likely to find either a Seagate U Series 5 or a Western Digital Protégé WD80EB drive. Both are very slow (by PC standards) 5400 RPM drives that are also extremely quiet. Both drives are single platter designs meaning that they inherently run quieter and cooler than multiplatter drives. "

[Big Ben]

5400 RPm is more than fast enough... in fact, for loading times the difference between 5400 and 7200 is almost none unless you're storing game information on 2 very distant parts of the hard drive.

Also, game data, like the PGR cars, are stored on the DVDs not on the Hard Drive, therefore making the Xbox's hard drives unconnected to the car load time issue.

The reason I would suggest the IDE cable as a fix for SSX is because the level would be loaded in portions if it is too large (which is something the game designer should have thought of before) and a faster cable would increase speads from both the Hard Drive and the DVD to the motherboard and caches.

-Big Ben

[kirkyg]

"actually, the slowness in car loading screens in pgr is due to the hard drive, which is probably the slowest thing in the xbox..."

Duh :)... the ATA 100 cable increases the data transfer rate and improves speeds by about 15% for the Hard Drive. IT however is NOT the slowest thing in the xbox. The slowest communicating device in the xbox is the usb connectors used for controllers and rumble packs in them.


5400 RPm is more than fast enough... in fact, for loading times the difference between 5400 and 7200 is almost none unless you're storing game information on 2 very distant parts of the hard drive.

Also, game data, like the PGR cars, are stored on the DVDs not on the Hard Drive, therefore making the Xbox's hard drives unconnected to the car load time issue.

The reason I would suggest the IDE cable as a fix for SSX is because the level would be loaded in portions if it is too large (which is something the game designer should have thought of before) and a faster cable would increase speads from both the Hard Drive and the DVD to the motherboard and caches.

I agree from benchmarking i've seen 5400 and 7200 rpm hard drives has similar seek times and data transfer rates are complementary to their ata rating (33/66/100).

This is a good question thats been brought up in my mind. Im guessing just using logic that its caching...i checked out anandtech.com and here is what he says:

"Case in point of how slow the hard drive is can be seen under the titles Project Gotham Racing (PGR) and Dead or Alive 3 (DOA3). In PGR's car select screen and in DOA3's character select screen there is a delay between the time when you select a car/character and when the picture actually appears on the screen. Originally we assumed that this delay was because the system was reading off of the DVD, but upon closer inspection it's clear that the delay was in accessing the hard drive. What's even more interesting is that the delay continues to exist regardless of how many times the car or character is selected in succession, indicating that the data isn't being cached to main memory. With a larger 128MB memory subsystem, it is quite possible that developers would have been able to circumvent this small but noticeable delay by caching the models to memory."

http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1561&p=8
thats the link to the site it also shows pictures in case you haven't played these games and noticed it.

kirkyg

[Big Ben]

I believe, if you open up the Xbox, you'll see that the DVD drive is also connected by the same IDE cable as the Hard Drive. This means that if the DVD drive is ATA compatible (which it is), an ATA cable would improve read speeds from that as well.

In the article I read about the load times in PGR, it said that it wasn't related to the hard drive because none of the data is stored on the hard drive. They obviously could be wrong, but I would agree taht it's unlikely that they would cache the models to the hard drive just to move them into the on-board or chip caches. It is possible, though.

I do agree that this load time is due to the smaller amount of ram, but there's nothing we can do about that. So is there any solution in sight? Not that I know of?

What causes the SSX tricky problems? Probably the same thing that causes them in Dave Mirra and Tony Hawk... Poor Ports.

-Big Ben

[Shadow Fox]

Originally posted by Big Ben
I believe, if you open up the Xbox, you'll see that the DVD drive is also connected by the same IDE cable as the Hard Drive. This means that if the DVD drive is ATA compatible (which it is), an ATA cable would improve read speeds from that as well.

In the article I read about the load times in PGR, it said that it wasn't related to the hard drive because none of the data is stored on the hard drive. They obviously could be wrong, but I would agree taht it's unlikely that they would cache the models to the hard drive just to move them into the on-board or chip caches. It is possible, though.

I do agree that this load time is due to the smaller amount of ram, but there's nothing we can do about that. So is there any solution in sight? Not that I know of?

What causes the SSX tricky problems? Probably the same thing that causes them in Dave Mirra and Tony Hawk... Poor Ports.

-Big Ben I was wondering how long it was gonna take you guys to figure this out, but seeing as kg posted this thread, I found it personally entertaining that he couldn't figure out why SSX stutters, but swears to the grave that DOA3 is the best thing he's ever seen.

Yes, it was a poor port. Why? For money. Nintendo and Microsoft both contracted EA for launch games, and given that all they did was take the PS2 code and port it to Open GL sdk's for GCN and Xbox, that's the end result- a crappy game that could've been gold on both systems. Same for Fifa and Madden, minus the GCN version. The SSX next-gen versions even still contain PS2 resource forks, which may be the start of the problems, although the PS2 dev kit is the REAL problem in the first place.

To put it very simply: you can take the game out the PS2, but you can't take the PS2 out of the game.:D

-Official Ninja of GameTavern (and NDose II)

[kirkyg]

shadow, thats what i said...its a crappy port...its ashame they didn't take the time to actually design the game around the console its being sold on :P.

kirkyg