Our ReVolt Pub

Any ways to improve it's gaming performance or atleast somebody forced to coexist with a computer using this video adapter? I can't even play RV at decent speeds even at it's lowest setting. And by decent, i mean 30fps and up.

NOTE:

.Intel's control panel doesn't help.
.My HDD isn't loaded with junk.
.Other programs aren't choking the CPU.
.I'm using the latest drivers by Intel (which are still crappy from what i read).
.GMABooster doesn't supports the chip.
.Windows 7's visual effects are diasbled.

I bought a netbook a while ago with the same GPU. Worst mistake of my life (almost). It turns out Intel thinks it's perfectly acceptable to take a PowerVR GPU, slap it into their Atom processors, and never write working drivers for it. The world was promised a zippy mobile GPU with DirectX 10.1 support all in a 3.5 W package, but that didn't happen. Worse, the DirectX 9.0c and lower support it does have is buggier than a termite hill. I'm pretty sure the GPU also hijacks the CPU to process commands Intel never bothered to put into the driver. I and many others have been complaining to Intel for months and they never do anything to alleviate the problem. Now that the GMA 3600 is no longer the newest generation GPU, there's even less of a chance that we'll ever get the performance we were promised.

Short answer, you can't make RV run well on the GMA 3600.

Out of curiosity, do you encounter the polygon morphing artifacts like the ones in my video? (Skip forward to about the 9 minute mark)
[youtube][/youtube]

pawer126 @ Apr 28 2014, 03:06 PM wrote: Out of curiosity, do you encounter the polygon morphing artifacts like the ones in my video? (Skip forward to about the 9 minute mark)

(video)

Yes. Guess we'll have to wait for some user-altered drivers.

Also, do you experience non-working games? I mean, game launches, then the screen turns black and system freezes until hard reset or BSOD.

No, I've never had that happen. On many occasions I've launched RV from a shortcut, lost patience because nothing happened, killed revolt.exe in Task Manager, and tried again. It starts right up after that. I've never encountered a freeze or BSOD while playing Re-volt though.

Not with RV, but other games. Sega Touring Car Championship, Nascar Racing 3 and Need For Speed II SE, which even worked in my Satellite L505D with Win7 64, don't work on my netbook. Other games will run windowed if available but won't if fullscreened, like Kega Fusion and DOSBox, and other ones will work fullscreened without freezing the system.

I've never tried those first two games, but I have tried NFS2SE, both with the software renderer and Zeckensack's Glide wrapper. The software renderer version worked OK-ish with some Windows 7-specific tweaks, but the Glide version was too slow to play. I generally dislike emulators and avoid DOSBox like the plague, but I can say that I haven't had a BSOD in a long time. That's not to say that I haven't had problems other than with performance and rendering accuracy. Every time I try to open the Intel Control Panel or the Rapid Storage Technology applet, they crash for no apparent reason, with no exit code.

I'm curious about why NFS2SE worked on yours and not mine's. Is the game patched with no-CD?

The only games that I managed to get working in fullscreen are Nascar Racing 1999 Edition, Nascar Road Racing and GeneRally. Also forgot to mention in my previous post that Road Rash freezes at race start, with only the horizon being visible.

All the aforementioned games work fine and faster on my mom's HP Mini 110, which has a 945GM Express Chipset Family and an Atom @ 1.6ghz like the one my BGH Schoolmate 12Tv netbook has. However, Nascar Racing 3 and NFS2 aren't compatible with the integrated screen, requiring a monitor to be plugged in order to play these 2 games.

Also took a look at you blog. Looking forward into it.

No, but it does work with this:
http://www.classic-gaming.net/file/download/11889/

All you have to do is make sure that explorer.exe is not running; that way the colors stay accurate. You can use Task Manager to launch NFS2SEN.EXE if you don't want to write a script.

I've played only GeneRally out of those games, it works great. It's sad that so many old games choke on such a new GPU when it takes hardly any processing horsepower to run them smoothly, especially when the weaksauce 945 can play them with aplomb. I can say that V-Rally 2 Expert Edition works almost perfectly, with minimal polygon morphing.

Thanks for the interest, I should probably get around to writing some more content.

Thanks for the patch, and you're welcome.

In other news, found out that International Rally Championship w/patch 4.80 and Sega Touring Car Championship work under my netbook. IRC requires explorer.exe to be terminated and set to Win98 compatibility, and STC must be run under DirectDraw due to screen flickering and transparency problems with Direct3D (1.02 patch).

Also tried Lego Stunt Rally, but the menu buttons are invisible.

And noticed that NFS2SE works with my netbook's integrated screen, unlike my mom's HP. Same for STC & IRC. Hooray!

Glad I could help!

I think I know what the problem with the HP's screen is. I believe NFS2SE runs at 800x600, but that HP's screen has only 576 vertical pixels. A possible workaround is to unlock hidden resolutions that are bigger than the screen's native 1024x576. http://netbookist.com/blog/2011/06/26/h ... ma-driver/.
I got Civilization 4 to work (poorly) on my netbook with this trick. It really comes in handy, although squashing a large 4:3 picture into a small 16:9 screen looks atrocious.

As far as I know, it supports up to 640x480 in software mode. Maybe Glide allows 800x600?

Also, turns out it wasn't the patch you gave what made it work. Nascar Racing 3 (with mipmapping problems) & Road Rash are also working now. Should be the Windows Update I did over a week ago, as one of the 118 updates (forgot to enable automatic updates back when i got the netbook) might have adressed the compatibility problems.

So I guess this closes the compatibility topic and brings us back to the GMA 3600's performance problems?

Two games I also recommend: Grand Prix Legends and LEGO Creator, which don't have any CD detection enabled so they're netbook friendly. GPL requires some easy-to-do patching in order to get it running in Win7, and doesn't performs bad under the 3600.

I don't know, I never could get Glide mode to work at a decent speed. There doesn't seem to be a resolution option in software mode, just adjustable "graphics quality" or something similar.

So yeah...performance issues...someone will pop into the Intel forums every so often and complain about drivers, but they get ignored and I doubt we're ever going to get the performance we paid for. I've been looking at a netbook upgrade, something with a brand new graphics architecture that actually works. After this stunt Intel pulled, I don't want to go back to them, but I don't know how AMD netbooks perform on the CPU end. *sigh* decisions, decisions...If I could get a netbook with an AMD quad core processor at 1.6 GHz, that would be perfect.

All right, I'll try out those games, maybe put up a video on my blog. I tried Geoff Crammond's Grand Prix 3 the other day; in HW accelerated mode, it's totally unplayable and has texture transparency issues, but software mode is buttery smooth. If only I could figure out how to play the darn game.

you should try nGlide, anyway, the performance is ironed to your graphics card
Intel GMA cards are knowns to be kind of the worst gpus, if its built-in its even worse because it uses on-board memory and cpu

try running the game you "want" in windowed with task manager, re-volt might not be a real deal, but other games may be

also, if you're on x64, you wont be able to run 16-bis software like nfs2

Regards

PS: you guys could monitor the computer with another one (remotely) when running the game with issues full screen, you can use Remote Registry and performance counters thing

P.S2: Intel provides good drivers, the issue is that the OEM doesn't update the driver, or intel wont update it for the platform/card... make sure it's not legacy, which os you guys are using? you guys might be able to tackle this with windows 7 (unless the os is 7 )

fyi GMA 945 is kind of one of the shittest cards that are ABLE to run aero without issues lol

I already tried nGlide, same results as Zeckensack's wrapper.

Yes, Intel GMA is awful no matter what iteration it showed itself as, but the 3600 is completely different architecturally from Intel-designed GMA GPU's. The 3600 is actually a renamed and higher-clocked PowerVR SGX545, so while it does use system memory, all graphics calculations happen independently from the CPU unlike the GMA 950 and 3150 before it. At least that's what's supposed to happen. I'm fairly sure the 3600's graphics driver hijacks the CPU to perform basic calls that older Intel GPU's could handle with ease; that's the only explanation I can find for the godawful performance coming from hardware with decent theoretical specs. The 3600 should trample old low-end cards like the GeForce 6200 LE, but instead it gets creamed because of those drivers.

Windowed mode doesn't help. In every game I've ever played on the 3600, fullscreen mode yields better performance. Granted, some games have flickering issues when in fullscreen, but I don't want to drop the framerate to run windowed.

Running a 64-bit OS on this hardware just isn't possible; there aren't any drivers for the 3600 and Intel has confirmed there never will be.

PS: What? You mean like remote game benchmarking? I would much rather use FRAPS to run benchmarks than mess with a remote connection.

PS2: False. Windows 7 is the only OS Intel will support for the 3600 (and by support I mean not support); anything else is garbage and doesn't work (except maybe Windows 8).

FYI: And the GMA 3600 is one of the worse cards that's able to run Aero WITH issues

just wow, lol, but fraps hits cpu even more than it used to, performance counters are built-in also you should try 8.1 (probably there's drivers), well, the best would be buy another computer, what issues with aero lol, which PS it haves? lol, post full specs and fresh benchmarks. (by full specs i mean including speed, voltage, codename, etc)

FRAPS doesn't affect framerate unless it's recording a video or displaying the framerate onscreen. Benchmark runs hide the counter so there's no performance hit. If anything the hard drive will be slightly more active as FRAPS writes the benchmark info to it.

I've already looked into Windows 8(.1) drivers, there aren't any. I could theoretically use the Windows 7 drivers on Windows 8.1, but I don't want to go through the trouble of setting up a new OS when my screen is too small to run apps from the Windows Store, which is one of the biggest reasons I would ever upgrade to 8.1. I'm looking for a new laptop/netbook/hybrid/whatever, but so far I haven't found the perfect one.

On the GMA 3600 there are sometimes random corruption issues with window previews (like when you mouse over an icon in the taskbar). Not really a big deal, but that combined with overall sluggishness irritates me.

Specs:

Intel Atom N2600 (1.6 GHz Hyperthreaded dual-core)
Codename: Cedarview
Voltage: 0.91–1.21 V
Intel GMA 3600 @ 400 MHz (6.4 GFLOPS)

I don't see how these will help anything, but there they are.

pawer126 @ May 21 2014, 05:24 PM wrote: FRAPS doesn't affect framerate unless it's recording a video or displaying the framerate onscreen. Benchmark runs hide the counter so there's no performance hit. If anything the hard drive will be slightly more active as FRAPS writes the benchmark info to it.

I've already looked into Windows 8(.1) drivers, there aren't any. I could theoretically use the Windows 7 drivers on Windows 8.1, but I don't want to go through the trouble of setting up a new OS when my screen is too small to run apps from the Windows Store, which is one of the biggest reasons I would ever upgrade to 8.1. I'm looking for a new laptop/netbook/hybrid/whatever, but so far I haven't found the perfect one.

On the GMA 3600 there are sometimes random corruption issues with window previews (like when you mouse over an icon in the taskbar). Not really a big deal, but that combined with overall sluggishness irritates me.

Specs:

Intel Atom N2600 (1.6 GHz Hyperthreaded dual-core)
Codename: Cedarview
Voltage: 0.91–1.21 V
Intel GMA 3600 @ 400 MHz (6.4 GFLOPS)

I don't see how these will help anything, but there they are.

a decent computer could be the alienware ones, i have an acer aspire one 722 bz454 from 2011 and its pretty decent if you do productivity and softcore gaming (and getting 20 fps with Source Engine).

you can try -gamegauge in revolt, let it run and it creates a fps.txt with the results.

have you tried disabling Aero Peek (live display that hides windows) or disabling Aero at all and/or stopping the DWM (UxSms) service?

so intel site doesn't have 8.1 drivers for your card?

I would say to live with it until you get the new computer, or learn to play games that work ok in there..... (not any game).

of course with special configurations

Gilde will be always more resource consuming, if you were a 3dfx card owner you'll understand.

Here's the thing, though, your 722's CPU is 15% slower than mine in highly multithreaded tasks like video encoding. I would much rather have an AMD netbook than an Intel one, but 1 GHz clock speed just doesn't cut it for me.

I don't get your fixation with benchmarks. No matter how many fps I get, there will still be ugly polygon morphing artifacts in many DirectX 6-era games like Re-Volt, and Intel will never fix it.

Yes, I've tried that, it doesn't help. I used to run on Windows 7 Starter (which doesn't have Aero), but now I have Ultimate with Aero enabled and performance is the same between the two.

Nope. Not now, not ever.

I've been trying to find games that work, and there are quite a few that actually do. Quake 3 runs great! X-Men Legends 2 works surprisingly well given the 3600's track record.

I wasn't really expecting great performance out of the Glide wrapper, it was more of an experiment than anything else.