Possible Bug for Age of Empires 3 running on GMA X3000/X3100

[davidc1]

A forum poster in Notebookreview pointed out to me a possible performance bug in GMA X3000 and X3100 in Age of Empires 3. Since I run games pretty good compared to rest of the people, I suspected that it may be that its just Vista running bad. So I tried it out.

1024x768 Everything High

20-25 fps
5-10 fps when ships are around
3-5 fps and dropping with ships firing at each other(went as low as 1-2)

The fact is when the ship is firing, it lags. It REALLY LAGS BAD. It becomes a slideshow, akin to setting Crysis at mid-high settings. This shouldn't happen. Its simple particle rendering. I think its highly likely a bug. Either in hardware or the drivers. Since the drivers aren't perfect it must be the drivers.

I tried putting the settings to all low and it wouldn't change much. I know when I go back to my town which shows no ships and water, the performance improves by at least 10x(which shows that Early Z is working).

Please look into this problem. I would very much appreciate it for the sake of the G965/GM965 users.

(We don't care about DX10 driver or the ability to run with DX10 features. We need basic problems fixed. Problems like games not being able to start up at all, textures corrupted or missing, and performance bugs like that in AOE3. After all that is fixed then make DX10 driver. How the hell are you guys supposed to make a high end workstation/3D gaming discrete graphics card when the integrated GPU isn't even working properly yet? 3D workstation performance will show the quality of the drivers. Nvidia is the best in this regard. I wish you get at least to ATI's driver quality INTEL!!)

[davidc1]

This is so stupid. I am sure with the amount of people running their integrated, they would put more resources into developing their products. The people who has bad experience with Intel's integrated will probably never go back to Intel's IGP again. There will probably some that will refuse to even buy their chipsets and processors. There is much more at stake here than $3 per motherboard INTEL!!!

How many people would like it if the price difference was raised to $15 with 2x the performance, compatibility of Nvidia/ATI cards, and good video playback?? I would pay for it.

[Chuck_De_Sylva]

Did you try with low settings? If you install FRAPS and record the play, what is the average frame rate?

[c1t1z3n0]

Although this isn't about AOE3, I thought I'd add a couple things I noticed about Age of Mythology that the X3000 has some issues with. AOM ran perfect with my last Intel motherboard, D101GGC with ATI Radeon Xpress 200 chipset. In fact, all 3 of my favorite games ran perfect. (AOM, StarCraft and Quake3Arena). When I got my new motherboard, DG965WH, with the X3000, there were pros and cons. Granted, driver issues seem to be key, but I think maybe Intel might want to at least start testing on popular 3+ yr old games to see if their basic driver support is there(I know they test games, but the following issues "seem" simple to spot/fix). Here's a list of pro's and con's I've found with each game:

D101GGC pros: AOM/StarCraft/Quake3: ran with no glitches and always playable

D101GGC cons: AOM/StarCraft/Quake3: none

DG965WH pros:

AOM: seemed to run a "little" more smooth when scrolling

StarCraft: graphics looked a "little" better

Quake3: graphics looked better

DG965WH cons:

AOM: the "fog of war" covering the battlefieldis not working properly. its not rendering the fog, but it does render total black squares until you move into that subset of the map. its like you can see the area as blank even though there might be trees or enemiesthere, and until you move closer its hidden. seems to be a texture blending or maybe zbuffer issue.this worked perfect on the ATI Xpress.

StarCraft: i have to change into 16-bit color mode before i start the game, otherwise the graphics are hosed. its like the color table is milked down to 256 color or something. this workedperfect on the ATI Xpress.

Quake3: none that i've noticed.

This is all under Vista, with the latest G965 drivers. I understand writing graphics drivers must be hell, but I would think testing against these popular games would at least be a good idea, and would give good indications where basic problems are in rendering. I agree with the idea of give me a stable driver that works on old games before even going to DX10 support. Just my 2 cents.

ps. If you can't make it work with the current drivers, steal ATI's old drivers/code and just don't tell anyone. :) I understand the architecture is different, and its not a simple recompile, but they obviously got these basic issues right, so its a good place to look.

[davidc1]

madcvdesylv:

Did you try with low settings? If you install FRAPS and record the play, what is the average frame rate?

From the first post: "3-5 fps and dropping with ships firing at each other(went as low as 1-2)

The fact is when the ship is firing, it lags. It REALLY LAGS BAD. It becomes a slideshow, akin to setting Crysis at mid-high settings. This shouldn't happen. Its simple particle rendering. I think its highly likely a bug. Either in hardware or the drivers. Since the drivers aren't perfect it must be the drivers."

There's no need to explain this. Everything else is fine, but there is a problem related to ships and especially when they are in combat. Load up AOE3 with GMA X3000(XP or Vista) and make ships, go attack others, and see how bad it lags. It doesn't matter which settings, I have tried everything low, and it still lagged like hell. This is clearly a bug.

I have a feeling Intel may be concentrating on newer games too much they are completely neglecting the older ones. Well not many people get integrated to play newer games.

[fckncrzy]

AOE Behavior

Game runs at around 25FPS at medium graphics settings, even when the game progresses with more objects on screen, & soldier battles the game stays quite fluid, rarely drops to 15FPS

To simulate the problem situation/possible bug:
- Create an object that fires cannons (preferably a ship)
- Fire at building (preferably a ship)

FPS drop to 5-10 the smoke/debris effects seem to take there toll on the GPU.

This becomes progressively worse as you play:
- Move the screen away from the area, frame rate will rise
- Move back to cannon fire, the frame rate will become progressively worse, I even had a ship battle that went to an unresponsive 0FPS for several minutes, had to end task.

[fenvarien]

c1t1z3n0:

AOM: the "fog of war" covering the battlefieldis not working properly. its not rendering the fog, but it does render total black squares until you move into that subset of the map. its like you can see the area as blank even though there might be trees or enemiesthere, and until you move closer its hidden. seems to be a texture blending or maybe zbuffer issue.this worked perfect on the ATI Xpress.

Regarding AoM: Simply backup the i845.gfx, now backup geforce3.gfx and finally rename geforce3.gfx to i845.gfx and you're done :) AoM plays with all resolutions and finest graphics. Enjoy! The *.gfx files are in the gfxconfig (and gfxconfig2 for The Titans) subfolder. Maybe Intel should add this to the GMA965 FAQ to help other AoM players using the X3000/3100 chipset.

Fenvarien