How many people are trying to target GMA 950 users?

Is anyone trying to target computers running Intel GMA 950 graphic cards? Or is that almost pointless?

 

I think Taumel has one. Id be keen to find a beta tester with one?
AC

 

I develope on a macBook now so I am using a GMA 950. I am doing a casual 2 1/2D game. To get speed up to 50fps I use ambient light only and not light sources. I may be able to oprtimize later and start using nicer lighting but that is a future consideration. I don't know if you could run a FPS type game macBook.

Cheers,
Grant

 

I'm also developing on a intel macbook... And I'm glad I'm doing that. I've already made a lot of speed improvements just by limiting particle life, polygon counts and intelligent use of shaders.

I'm working on a freeride snowboard-game, so it's kind of hard to make it fluent.

I think I'll only change the usage of shaders if the host has a better graphical card.


.kaaJ

 

GCalestine runs on any Intel card - we lose the bumpmapping, but it still runs (or walks, more like

 

Project Weasel is intended to run on pretty much anything

GMA 950s run the nature demo very nicely (I played around on several in an Apple Store). I figure they'll run most reasonably lightweight games.

 

We are trying to get WolfQuest to run decently on 950. OTEE fixed some render to texture problems for that card and even older Intel graphics in the 1.6.2 release.

On the Windows side, PCs with cruddy graphics chips still often have very fast (2 GHz or higher) CPUs, since Intel shipped a lot of fast P4s. So at least in our early testing, you get a decent AI framerate even though you have to cut back on the visual effects a lot.

We hope that we can do some checking in code to turn off some of the more dramatic eye candy like 3D grass, etc.

 

Glad to hear I'm not the only targeting the graphics card and/or developing on it

What framerates are most people getting on the "simple" setting? I've getting about 6-8 FPS for a relatively simple game.

 

I test sometimes my game in a mac mini g4 1,42ghz with a ati radeon 9200 with 32mb shared vram.
Is it slower than a intel mac with a gma 950?

 

Thanks soooo much for that suggestion! That raised by FPS on the simple setting 10, and on good it raised it 15 FPS!

Besides lights and combining meshes, are there any other tips you might have (besides optimizing my own code)?

 

in case you haven't seen them:

http://www.unifycommunity.com/wiki/index.php?title=General_Performance_Tips

http://unity3d.com/Documentation/Manual/Optimizing Graphics Performance.html

EDIT: Oops didn't notice the linky from aras ; )

 

The radeon 9200s don't have shared vram in any Macs I know of. In my experience they are as fast or faster than the GMA 950, especially in high triangle count scenes. See NCarter's Phoenix Final for a perfect example of this. 5 FPS in a GMA 950 when looking at a lot of triangles, 20-30 (if I recall correctly) on a Radeon 9200 with a _much_ slower CPU. They don't support as many special effects as GMA 950, but usually you can't use them anyways as they're too darn slow.

We really *had* to make the Big Bang Brain Games run well on the GMA 950. If you are making a game for the Mac market, you need to do everything to make it run well on it. You'd be losing a large market. Too many people have them, and they're still being sold. Freeverse spent a lot of extra time on their recent games making them okay for GMA 950, so I suspect it is basically a requirement to publish with them. I really would think it'd be similar with other publishers, unless there are exceptional circumstances.

In our case, it meant me running almost every model through a polygon reduction script inside of Blender. With the GMA 950, pretty much each triangle saved is that much higher FPS.

-Jon

 

Would you mind posting that script?

 

It's part of the regular old Blender download. No need to post it.

-Jon

 

Bad news for me.. since I get 60-100 fps in g4, I hope to get a decent fps in a gma 950.

 

Anything above 30 FPS is acceptable at least.

 

hmm - this makes me curious - if you don't mind me asking what were your overall polygon counts on average?

 

Yes, I know that, but if 20-30fps in 9200 = 5fps in 950 I expect mine 60 fps in 9200 = 15 fps in a 950 => too slow.

 

The most annoying thing about Intel cards are that they have a different performance profile than others: Its not that they are 4x slower than something else. It's that vertrices are MUCH more expensive (could easily be 20x slower).
Back in the days you could safely push 60k polys per frame - we did in GooBall and it ran FINE on a Radeon9200. Haven't tested on an Intel - and you can be damn sure I'm not gonna ;-)

Bottom line: Intel cards are VERY vertex sensitive, so you need to test on that hardware....

 

On the positive side, you can generally go from (say) 10,000 polygons to 2,000 polygons a heck of a lot more easily than from 2,000 polygons to 1,000 polygons if you need to do a bunch of geometry optimization before shipping.

My approach thus far is to do everything using subdiv with a very conservative budget which I can blow later

The original Lara Croft was ~700 triangles.

 

man that is lame - it sucks that its such a large portion of mac users too.

 

I really don't think the GMA950 is so terrible. Go try one out in a store.

Yes -- targeting GMA 950s will be extra work. But they're probably 40% of new mac sales (and most of the PCs I see in retail stores too). Apple just speed-bumped the MacBook and it's still GMA950. We all have to deal :-/

 

its one thing to turn off pixel lights, throttle down fx (particle systems etc.), mesh combine here there - its another thing altogether to have to severely decimate all your meshes in your external 3d app.

the question i'm asking myself right now, is it even worth it for me to attempt targeting this card? i'm doing an fps and while it certainly won't be current AAA level visuals - its not wolfenstien either ; )

i put a hard limit of 100K polys for my arenas, i've got 6 in various stages of completion it seems i'll be averaging around 40-60K per (which i know i'm new to this but i though that was pretty good considering the look i'm going for ; )

maybe i'll throw together a test scene or something see what it takes to get it playable - i don't know...

 

The average max triangle count for a scene in Big Bang Reaction, the most graphically complex, was about 22,000 triangles in addition to a few thousand in the form of particle effects. (For the whizzing "electrons")

Then three vertex lights. Pixel lights get turned off automatically when the framerate is too low for too long.

-Jon

 

um, wow - and you still had to reduce polys?

lol i think that may answers my other question then.

thanks jonathan ; )

 

No, that's what I reduced it down to. There's also a fullscreen glow on in most of the graphical settings.

-Jon

 

oh - still that's pretty low IMO. i'm using glow in my game as well.