Pages
▼
Feb 28, 2013
Storm talks about Nvidia drivers
Source: http://world-of-kwg.livejournal.com/165410.html
At this moment, with our game and the Nvidia drivers we find ourselves in a rather stupid situation. The 306 driver series are stable, but they have low performance on mobile chipsets. Version 314 is unstable (it causes crashes when accessing some interface elements) but it improves performance on mobile chipsets by 50-100 percent!
Both we and Nvidia are working at this moment to fix the crashes. So there's hope. If the game doesn't crash for you when using 314 drivers (it doesn't crash for most people and works normally on most machines) and you have a mobile chipset (the one ending with M, for example GeForce 640M), I recommend using these new drivers.
Discussion:
- Storm states it's nobody's fault, just a coincidence
- Storm also states that the crashes happen in the interface (SS: the tech tree to be exact, drop-down menus, research etc.), often a large amount of crashes is caused by mods
- this bug doesn't concern Radeon products at all
- Wargaming is cooperating with Nvidia on this directly, Storm however doesn't know about the details of cooperation
"- Storm states it's nobody's fault, just a coincidence"
ReplyDeleteHa ha! Doesn't want to anger nVidia, but also doesn't want to admit their own mistake.
It has nothing to do with that. If you are a programmer (or any common sence for that matter) you should know that even if something looks and is alright in the beginning a new line of code can break the old one. This happens to pretty much every programmer out there.
DeleteSay for example you have a search function on your website, and then adds another search function where you can find people instead of everything else on the website. The new search function can break the old one. It can be caused by many reasons. Biggest one is that it was maybe not you who created the first search functions line of code, and there by not know much of how that programmer built the code.
It's really hard for multitudes of programmer to not mess up seeing as some might be used to their own way of coding, while another is used to another way. Yes they try and go an equal path but sometimes it just happens that you use your own way of coding by mistake. Which can lead to error in the lines of codes.
No problem with that, that is why there is a practice in programming called "unit testing". You write a piece of code and then you test it, not only for possible new bugs that find their way in, when adding new features, but also for backwards compatibility (for example: will adding feature X break other features that were already implemented before?). This is especially true when working in a large team, becouse, as you say, human errors are inevitable. And since humans do know of their limitations, they also found a way to counteract them. Check, check again, and when you are sure there are no problems: check again.
DeleteSince you like common sense so much let me ask you one thing: who is responsible for piece of code if not the programmer who wrote it?
Another bad joke from Wargaming. Totally uncalled for, since they should have simply said: "guys, there are problems with our game, we are working on fixing the issue, and you will have solution soon". But well...
Unit Tests are no "ultimate solution", its just one way to try to make it better. But you cannot test every possible circumstance with it.
DeleteThe responsibilty is not important, you will have errors that past QA, because they don't have this much time. Time is money.
"Try to do your best, but tomorrow it has to be done"
Those performance boost that new drivers give won't come from nothing, they (NVidia/ATI/Intel) use all kind of tricks to make code run faster (rearrange code excecution order, decrease image quality where it's not noticiable...), witch in some times lead to all kind of nice bugs, so in the way it's just a coinsidence that WoT happen to bug with some specific hardware/driver combos.
DeleteThe thing is why would a game/program/website need a bug test from other people if the programmer should make sure that it works?
ReplyDeleteYou say that humans can counteract it by doing multiple checks. Even doing multiple checks doesn't make up for human errors, humans do errors even when checking. If you write a letter to someone and one word is written wrong the person might read it right even tho it's written wrong.
Besides the errors doesn't necessarily come when writing the code. The errors can come when pushing the code public.
For example during a beta you can have solved many bugs and don't see any new once, yet when pushing the beta version to the live servers bugs can appear.
The reason you often have many betas or bug tests is because your group of people can't find the bugs, but people outside of the development might. Yet there always come through a lot of bugs and even if you fix those bugs new once may be found.
I currently run the 314 drivers on my m11x for that performance boost. It is very nice.
ReplyDeleteYep, 314 is also working nicely on my 520M. Luckily, those nvidia bugs never happened to me on any drivers.
DeleteStill not sure I understand any of this. It is clear from a casual sweep of the forums that those of us experiencing issues with Nvidia drivers had the trouble start long before this, and involve in-game crashes, not menu interface issues. So whatever they are working on will not help me, and I'm not sure why this takes precedent over a long standing issue that effects at least as many people. I continue to have a top flight computer that will play everything in the world at maximum settings - except World of Tanks.
ReplyDeleteGame utilizes only one CPU core. Thus, one core handles engine, physics, graphics plus any other services/programs you have running (not all of them are multithreaded). It obviously becomes a bottleneck - CPU can't keep up with GPU demands. This is reason why game has jerkiness and slight stuttering on even highly powerful machines. In recent patches they added small multicore support (only second one gets used; no official figures but it seems to be around 10% or so utilization) and patch 8.4 will introduce nVidia SLI support. This is just a drop in the bucket though, as it benefits really small percentage of players. A proper multicore support (at least two cores, prefereably four) would do wonders for majority of players.
DeleteAnd, Mr. Anonymous, had you strolled through the forums as I suggested, you would know this isn't the issue either. Cores are running just fine, never tapped out, and I specifically bought this computer with higher single processor rates knowing this about WoT. It has nothing to do with the CPU, as far as I can tell.
DeleteBeyond that, proper multicore support will be a long time in coming. I know that's one of the reasons they bought out the company whose engine they are using, but it will take awhile for that upgrade to come to pass.
looks like this problem is more related to mobile chips than desktop chips.
ReplyDeletei have an GTX 680 and used "all the drivers that came out since that card/wot exists" and never ever had any of the described issues like FPS drops, crashes, freezes or what ever.