KotOR: The Last Word
I finally have a happy ending for the VBO performance issues with Knights of the Old Republic. Devout readers of this blog (and its comments) might remember that the VBO performance issue that I filed on KOTOR's outdoor Dantooine levels got assigned to me once I started working at Apple.
Now I didn't look into this immediately - I had to get up to speed at work and had some more pressing tasks to work on - but when I was in Phoenix 2 weeks ago, I did fire up KOTOR on my old PowerPC Mac Mini with Radeon 8500 and run it under the GM version of Leopard.
The money shot: Leopard fixes the VBO performance regression that started in 10.3.7. I tested with both the original GM version of KOTOR and the latest Universal patch (1.03d). The prior workaround - disabling VBOs via the .ini file - caused performance degradation everywhere else in the game, so what you ultimately want to do is keep VBOs on at all times when running KOTOR under Leopard - and enjoy. :-)
Comments
Great!
Posted by: Anonymous | October 30, 2007 01:15 PM
Brad, in leopard openGL are really fast that previous system?
Posted by: cecopido | October 30, 2007 01:19 PM
Yay! A great birthday present for me... Thanks for your work on this.
Posted by: Colin | October 30, 2007 01:35 PM
What the lower Kashyyk levels, with the fog and stuff? Or really any steam effect, they all seemed to slow the system down. Is that a VBO issue too, or something else?
And Brad, from the benchmarks I've seen so far, Leopard isn't any faster for gaming than Tiger, and in fact slower in some. So what's the deal?
Posted by: Jon | November 4, 2007 12:31 PM
"And Brad, from the benchmarks I've seen so far, Leopard isn't any faster for gaming than Tiger, and in fact slower in some. So what's the deal?"
Beats me. Without any data to look at, I haven't a clue. If you have a link or some numbers (and a system profile to go with it) we can take a look.
I can say that in our benchmarks here, we're not seeing much in the way of performance regressions with GL in Leopard - and in some cases (as with KOTORs degenerate VBO case) we're now faster than Tiger.
Posted by: Brad Oliver | November 6, 2007 12:48 AM
PERFORMANCE COMPARISON:
Tiger versus Leopard:
http://www.barefeats.com/leopard.html
Posted by: cecopido | November 8, 2007 03:44 AM
Those Leopard numbers all look to be within 1 or 2 frames of Tiger, so much so that I'd go so far as to say that data is inconclusive.
The Doom 3 number is a little more pronounced, but i've noticed in benchmarking it here that it's flaky - if you run the timedemo 4-5 times, the numbers gradually increase. The testing methodology for Doom 3 is not stated, so I don't know if those benchmarks reflect that or not.
Posted by: Brad Oliver | November 8, 2007 06:56 PM
Sorry to bother you again, but any comment on the Kashyyk and Manaan slowness with mist/steam? Bug, crappy hardware, what?
And I was referencing the BF article before, though mostly looking at the fact that there hasn't been any performance increase, rather than the slight regressions that may or may not be real.
Posted by: Jon | November 16, 2007 01:44 PM
"Sorry to bother you again, but any comment on the Kashyyk and Manaan slowness with mist/steam? Bug, crappy hardware, what?"
Well it's hard to guess anymore - it's been a long time since I knew those answers. That said, what hardware are you running on?
Back when KOTOR was released, the Radeon 8500/9200 was the slowest available that KOTOR supported, and I would expect if you're still using that hardware, you'll see some chuggy performance here and there.
Posted by: Brad Oliver | November 20, 2007 01:36 PM
No, it's a GF6600 in a G5 Quad with 3GB RAM. Running at 1600x1200 and texture quality at high, I get slowdowns in the Kashyyk underworld and on some areas of Manaan, both of which are steam/mist related.
I also can't enable ansio or AA without a significant performance hit, but I suspect that's just the weakness of the 6600.
Anyway, love the game and I hope your presence at Apple will mean a better OpenGL for OS X.
Posted by: Jon | November 24, 2007 10:53 AM
Very interesting info, Jon. Are you running Leopard? I don't know if I've ever heard of slowdowns in KOTOR on a G5, so it may be worth investigating.
Posted by: Brad Oliver | November 27, 2007 01:15 AM
Yes, I'm running Leopard. I'll try to replay the Kashyyyk level later this week and see if the fog still hurts performance, but I know it still was in 9A466. I haven't really noticed any performance difference (better or worse) between Tiger and Leopard.
System Specs:
Quad G5
GeForce 6600, 256MB
3GB RAM
stock 250GB HD
Posted by: Jon | December 10, 2007 01:07 PM
I can now confirm this bug on 10.5.1. And even bumping the quality down to medium doesn't help.
Posted by: Jon | December 29, 2007 09:30 PM
Turning shadows and/or grass off doesn't help either, since neither of those get rid of the mist.
Posted by: Jon | January 2, 2008 11:56 AM