OpenMW 0.39.0

[scrawl]

Has anyone addressed the AMD performance issues, especially involving the water shader? Myself and another user posted very similar benchmark results with similar performance behavior, the biggest similarity between us being both AMD processors. Even a simple "OpenMW relies heavily on IPC performance, the water shader renders on the CPU, and that will not change" would suffice, just so myself and others would know what's up

I'm assuming that few if any of the developers of OpenMW use AMD cpus, but if the game doesn't run well on them you should take care in case that's a problem you want to take care of.

You don't optimize your projects for a particular CPU architecture, unless you're doing very low level stuff.

OpenMW will still be CPU limited on some systems, that is to be expected. Since Morrowind's release in 2002 GPU's have improved much faster than CPU's have. Morrowind scenes aren't very taxing for today's GPU's, while the CPU portion has still remained a constant factor.

OpenMW relies heavily on IPC performance, the water shader renders on the CPU, and that will not change

That's pretty much it. All rendering relies on a certain amount of CPU work to feed the GPU. The upcoming Vulkan API is looking to remedy that by giving the coder more direct access to the graphics hardware.

I am not familiar with the particular AMD CPU's you have, but if it's a lower end model then that would explain the performance issues.

Post a screenshot of the F3 profiling overlay, then we can see where the bottleneck is.

As for the water shader, there's nothing much special about, it just causes the scene to be rendered two more times from the reflection & refraction viewpoints at a lower resolution. If you are CPU limited, then it is expected for the water shader On to perform at about half the framerate compared to the water shader Off. If you were GPU limited, then the difference would be minimal due to the lower resolution of the render textures.

[SquireNed]

I use an AMD processor with no issues. There may be an issue with AMD APU's or the like, but my FX 8350 has no problems for OpenMW.

Now, admittedly, the 8350's a huge processor.

[bahamut]

Im using a mobile amd GPU and i have same issues with water shader

[Lagahan]

Was just re-installing windows for a mate of mine and moved him from an fx6300 to an fx8350.
I've found that while they manage great with more multi-thread optimized games (most modern titles on DX11), my 2500k blows them out of the water for single threaded tasks. I think its more of a factor of how these chips are designed architecturally than specific code being a bad implementation on them. I'll be going back to my mates house to overclock his CPU out the wazoo to suck some more framerate out of CS:GO for him since even with -threads 8 @4GHz vs my -threads 4 at 4.8GHz he gets on average half the framerate I do, GPU wise he has an R9 390 @1.1GHz and I have an R9 290 @1.1GHz. Its definitely an instructions per clock performance deficiency in that case and probably here too. In saying that I wouldn't mind a bit more performance out of the water shader myself since it massacres my framerate down to half but it'll come with time.

[Pherim]

Was just re-installing windows for a mate of mine and moved him from an fx6300 to an fx8350.
I've found that while they manage great with more multi-thread optimized games (most modern titles on DX11), my 2500k blows them out of the water for single threaded tasks. I think its more of a factor of how these chips are designed architecturally than specific code being a bad implementation on them. I'll be going back to my mates house to overclock his CPU out the wazoo to suck some more framerate out of CS:GO for him since even with -threads 8 @4GHz vs my -threads 4 at 4.8GHz he gets on average half the framerate I do, GPU wise he has an R9 390 @1.1GHz and I have an R9 290 @1.1GHz. Its definitely an instructions per clock performance deficiency in that case and probably here too. In saying that I wouldn't mind a bit more performance out of the water shader myself since it massacres my framerate down to half but it'll come with time.

Yeah, I sometimes wish I'd bought an Intel CPU when I got my PC three years ago, because I knew I would be playing many older, single-threaded games and I also knew I would mod them to hell, like Morrowind and Oblivion. Both were heavily CPU limited when I played them (on an FX-6300), but yeah, on the other hand I really don't mind having spent the extra €100 for an SSD instead of a more expensive CPU. It's still so much faster than anything I had before and so far there was nothing newer I had problems with playing. Then again, I never buy new games. Newest I have played so far was Shadow Warrior (2013). Anyway, it's well-known AMD CPUs are far inferior to Intels in terms of single-thread performance.
Yes, the water shader takes quite a few fps, but it's still so much better than it was pre-OSG. And looks great. I always had ugly artifacts and really bad fps with the water shader enabled in the older versions.

[Lagahan]

Yeah, I sometimes wish I'd bought an Intel CPU when I got my PC three years ago, because I knew I would be playing many older, single-threaded games and I also knew I would mod them to hell, like Morrowind and Oblivion. Both were heavily CPU limited when I played them (on an FX-6300), but yeah, on the other hand I really don't mind having spent the extra €100 for an SSD instead of a more expensive CPU.

Yeah the best advantage that AMD has over Intel is absolute bang for your buck though, the cost of the CPU,Mobo and RAM for a decent FX6300 build doesn't even total up to what my CPU and RAM ended up being, while delivering really good performance for the price. I just got lucky with the upgrade cycle and could justify the price of moving from my C2D to Sandy at the time and CPUs have more or less stalled since then, hopefully Zen or Skylake-E will be a decent enough jump to retire this old 2011 chip.
Anyway should probably let this get back on topic lol

[dontpokethebear3893]

I use an AMD processor with no issues. There may be an issue with AMD APU's or the like, but my FX 8350 has no problems for OpenMW.

Now, admittedly, the 8350's a huge processor.

I have the 8350 as well and was experiencing issues where, with the water shader turned on, the framerate would half performance and it was strictly CPU based. The game was really only utilizing two cores. I also am using an AMD 290x GPU. I wonder if the shader issue has more to do with incompatibility with AMD cards, forcing it to render on the CPU, than it does AMD cpus limiting the game in general?

[SquireNed]

I run a 8350 with a GTX 970, so that may be part of the deal. I'm going to do some more intentional testing of the water shader either tomorrow or whenever I get a moment's free time.

[psi29a]

Morrowind at 4K on OpenMW

10fps isn't that bad, reminds me of running 800x600 on the Raspberry Pi.

More 4K shots from above...

[raevol]

Morrowind at 4K on OpenMW

That's awesome.