whats going on here?

I saw a tweak for Oblivion where you change the "max frames to render ahead" from 3 to 0 to improve performace.

I did that for my go7300 and noticed that it dropped my 3DMark from 1454 to 1263!! If its a performace tweak why does it have a negative effect on graphics? I noticed UT 2004 wasnt as good either when it was at 0 so chnged it back to 3 and everything was ok again.

what kind of tweak is this?lol!

 

didnt the tweak help in oblivion ? it helpt me alot i went from 3 to 8 fps ( yeah i know ).

the tweak does waht it says .this is the number of frames your gpu has ready before you need them . dont really know why you have worse numbers now.

 

Does that tweak work for all games? Or just Oblivion?

 

That's odd - perhaps it only 'works' on the higher-end cards. The Go7300 is slow to begin with. I did the tweak on the HEL80's Go7600 and saw a noticable boost in all games. 3DMark did not change. Keep in mind that the FPS will be no different when you do the tweak, but the game will feel faster, very noticably so. I'd say 5-8FPS smoother. Definitely worth doing if you have an Nvidia card.

 

I didn't notice a huge gain in performance, but it was definately faster than before the fix. Try reinstalling the drivers.

 

How'd it work on the x700

 

Never thought to try it - I don't know if ATI cards are set to render three frames ahead like Nvidia cards are by default.

 

But why do nvidias cards do that anyway? If setting it to 0 increases performace across the board then why is it set to 3 in the first place? Surely for it to be on by defalult it must have been proved to increase performace (like in my 3D mark).

Oh btw, I dont have oblivion I just thought I would try out that tweak to increase performace. To me it made sense as the GPU had less of a workload (it concentraed on what it had to render now as opposed to next) but it didnt really do that for me, hmmm.

 

Im not quoting you perse', but with a gain like this I would think that this would be geared tward mid -low end cards. Since the 7600 is a powerfull card and will play at good fps, you wont notice a huge difference. Kinda like saying you see a difference btwn 40 and 80fps (your crazy if you can tell the difference). But for some one who is getting single digit fps this would be a huge improvement.

yeah I think this is a nvidia tweak only.

 

In the general case, *allowing* the GPU to render ahead will provide better performance. That's all the option does. It doesn't force anyone to render three frames ahead, it simply means that you *can* do so.

Actually, it means that the CPU can run ahead of the GPU. When the CPU finishes a frame, it asks the GPU to render it. If the GPU is already busy with the current frame, it can't do that. So setting this option to 3 means that the CPU is allowed to move on and begin work on the next frame, while the one it just prepared is simply queued for the GPU when it gets time.

If the CPU gets 3 frames ahead, it's paused waiting for the GPU to catch up.

Setting it to 0 means that the CPU is only allowed to send off the next frame when the GPU has no work left.

*Usually*, setting it to 3 gives you better performance. However, there's a lot more to it, and it depends on exactly how the rendering code in that particular game works. So best advice is "try it in a bunch of different games, and see what works best".
Some games will run faster with one setting, others wont. (NVidia lets you define profiles for individual games, so you can tweak these settings on a per-game basis, if you like)