How many people are trying to target GMA 950 users?

[anon_87667939]

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

[AaronC]

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

[Ryuuguu]

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

[kaaJ]

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

[NicholasFrancis]

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

[podperson]

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.

[anon_72585682]

@""

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

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.

[anon_87667939]

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.

[Aras]

@""

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

The key to performance (especially on GMA950): use vertex lights. The details are in the docs.

…and of course, don’t measure FPS in the editor. Build a player and then you’ll get the real numbers.

[Lka_1]

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?

[anon_87667939]

@Aras Pranckevicius

@""

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

The key to performance (especially on GMA950): use vertex lights. The details are in the docs.

…and of course, don’t measure FPS in the editor. Build a player and then you’ll get the real numbers.

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)?

[drJones]

@""

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%20Graphics%20Performance.html

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

[anon_51268168]

@""

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?

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

[anon_87667939]

@Jonathan Czeck

@""

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?

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? :lol:

[anon_51268168]

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

-Jon

[Lka_1]

@Jonathan Czeck

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.
-Jon

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

[anon_87667939]

@""

@Jonathan Czeck

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.
-Jon

:shock:
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.

[drJones]

@Jonathan Czeck

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

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

[Lka_1]

@""

@""

@Jonathan Czeck

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.
-Jon

:shock:
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.

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.

[NicholasFrancis]

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…