Saturday 21 October 2017

IMPORTANT UPDATE FOR NVIDIA GPU OWNERS:
An important message for owners of Nvidia GPUs.  The last few sets of Nvidia Display drivers have broken the engine's graphics when shadow mapping is enabled (soft shadows) causing black square glitches to appear all over the screen. Shadow mapping has to be disabled to remove these glitches, however, it makes the game even more taxing as shadow mapping made the game run faster, but Nvidia doesn't seem to care and have not addressed this issue in any subsequent driver updates. It's highly likely that a fix may never arise. You can disable shadow mapping by pressing the ~ key to bring up the console and type


"R_Shadow_Shadowmapping 0" (without the quotes)


The game will run slower but at least the game will run without that horrific glitch introduced by Nvidia's drivers.

I also found the Darkplaces Engine, is not well optimized for Nvidia Pascal Architecture (GTX1050, GTX1060, GTX1070,  GTX1080, GTX1080ti & TitanXP) GPU's 

This problem hits Quake HD Remix hard!  I had better performance on my old 4Gb Gigaybte GTX970 G1 Gaming card than I do on my Gigabyte Xtreme Gaming GTX1080 Waterforce. I think this is to do with the Darkplaces engine as I have had similar unexpectedly low FPS issues with other Quake mods on Darkplaces as well. 

Quake HD Remix has become unplayable for me.  Games such as DOOM (2016) can pump out a near-constant 120FPS, but QuakeHD Remix runs like I have a Potato for a rig. On Quake HD Remix (Without parallax Occlusion Mapping) I get FPS as low as 15 in the main hallway and between 20-40 in-game when on my GTX970 it was near 60FPS across the board, with 50 in the main hallway (I think the Rain effect is a weak point for performance).  As a direct result, I can no longer make video recordings of Quake HD Remix on my current rig, as I sold my old GTX970 and, as such can not swap GPU's