46 replies to this topic

[toxie]

just installed the new 270.61 on my laptop and boy is VP slow with it.. yuk! (i.e. completely unplayable, any other games run normal)
(by now back on 267.76 -> everything back to normal speed)
is somebody else having the same problem with 270.XX or is it just on my machine? (i'm just curious)

[mrmachine]

hi, i have a dell420-xps 4 gigs mem.
the new driver 270.61 works fine
no problems.

i do use all bata drivers.
testing them. no problems.

i don't know about laptops,
never used one.

stan

[rob046]

This driver looks like it has been a lifesaver for me. Fixed an issue that myself & some others are having, & even got a little performance boost!
http://www.vpforums....s...st&p=114103

[maceman]

I have tried about 20 drivers now including the 270. The 270 driver worked very well on my system!! i cannot recall the exact fps I was getting but it was very good, i don't remember much studder.

Unfortunately, there is a problem with FP workingin with anything other than 260.99, so I am back using this driver because I find I am actually using FP more these days. Super smooth and awesome physics on my computer,unlike other reports- it is great for me.

I am CAB only, so when playing FP, I always change flipper strength and table slope before playing a new game. Once i set it up properly, the physics and play is amazing.

i stillhave some small glitches withVP on the usually higher resource intensiveones, but the majority are smooth as silk as well so no complaints.

Maceman

[jdsabin1]

Unfortunately, there is a problem with FP workingin with anything other than 260.99, so I am back using this driver because I find I am actually using FP more these days. Super smooth and awesome physics on my computer,unlike other reports- it is great for me.

I am CAB only, so when playing FP, I always change flipper strength and table slope before playing a new game. Once i set it up properly, the physics and play is amazing.

This post intrigues me. When I watch FP videos on YouTube, many of them are grogeous (albeit with a 'FLOATY' ball). The EM reels and things though, and with unreleased VP tables such as Evel Knevil (sp?) and Playboy, it makes me want to jump into the FP fray on my cab as well. Alas, backrevving a video driver and trying to figure out how to get FP working with HyperPin and my existing VP-only setup seems monumental to me and I never did find a real good tutorial on FP like there was using VP.

Hopefully EM's and continued graphic improvements will make FP eventually a distant memory.

Thoughts?

[SnailGary]

Just installed that latest driver and this totally rocks on my system! I can confirm what Rob046 and Maceman have reported above - the performance issues that I reported on that other thread are virtually gone now!!

Oh what a joy!

[maceman]

*** just to comment on the "floaty ball" thing in FP.....

what i find, is that is a matter of the table slope.I find that just loading a table is almost always "floaty"...but after i change the slope, and then change the flippers to compesate for the slope change, it is very close to a real table to me.

This isn't across the board on all games however, same with VP. it depends on scripting as well, but i have gotten older games (Sphere's for example) to run smooth as silk as well, so my guess is just fiddling with the settings to get something that works well and then remember those changes to do for the next table, etc....

By the way, there is a good game that has working reels on FP, very cool! I think it is called space mission. If i was video savvy, I would vid my table and upload to show people, but i am not sure. You would be shocked to see how good FP works for me-and this is coming from someone who bashed FP for months before my new card upgrade!!!

Maceman

*** also, i have found even a fifference of slope of 0.X makes a difference....so for example Ihad lunchtakeout set to 9.0 and it played weird, but then when i ended update 9.3, it ran great! Ittakes some fiddlin/ but well worth it. I like the features in FP better for table set up as well...takes forever going in and out invp, whereas fp youcan do it on the fly- with the 260.99 driver only!

Edited by maceman, 21 April 2011 - 05:20 PM.

[KEG]

Well I just tried the newest driver's myself, on a GTS 450. Works really nice so far and I also found my overall FPS have gone up significantly. Thanks for the heads up. I just updated to 267.59 the other day and this new driver was not out yet.

[BigBoss]

*** just to comment on the "floaty ball" thing in FP.....

what i find, is that is a matter of the table slope.I find that just loading a table is almost always "floaty"...but after i change the slope, and then change the flippers to compesate for the slope change, it is very close to a real table to me.

This isn't across the board on all games however, same with VP. it depends on scripting as well, but i have gotten older games (Sphere's for example) to run smooth as silk as well, so my guess is just fiddling with the settings to get something that works well and then remember those changes to do for the next table, etc....

By the way, there is a good game that has working reels on FP, very cool! I think it is called space mission. If i was video savvy, I would vid my table and upload to show people, but i am not sure. You would be shocked to see how good FP works for me-and this is coming from someone who bashed FP for months before my new card upgrade!!!

Maceman

*** also, i have found even a fifference of slope of 0.X makes a difference....so for example Ihad lunchtakeout set to 9.0 and it played weird, but then when i ended update 9.3, it ran great! Ittakes some fiddlin/ but well worth it. I like the features in FP better for table set up as well...takes forever going in and out invp, whereas fp youcan do it on the fly- with the 260.99 driver only!

While increasing both table slope, flipper strength, and flipper angle all help future pinball, there is simply nothing that can be done without actually writing physics engine code in the main app, to make this thing play like pinball. Play a few real pinball machines and compare. It's not even 50%.

[maceman]

That may be true..... Although the goal is obviously to emulate real pinball as much as possible, it will always be digital pinball and we shouldn't forget that....
I can say for certain that I have a minimum of 20 FP tables that play like real pinball with the changes I made. I would say on an equal comparison, that about the same could be said about VP, although lately, I think it may be lower on my machine.

You may be comparing game to game?? I am including OG tables, some of which run better than the ones trying to emulate a manufactured table. There are also some others in the work that have excellent physics. Rawd's new TH table, if you watch that one is smooth as silk but I don't know what he tweaks to get it smooth like that. So, I can't always compare to real tables if they are sometimes OG's....

Just as a side note.... I think the FP version of Black Night plays closer to the original than VP. I played that game 1 million times for sure growing up, and the FP version i have on my table is almost perfect- more like 70-75% I would say, but even so, I think i like JP's version better..so to me it isn't always exactness, but the fun factor!!

Mark1's The Wall on FP is smooth as well, but i modified that one for cab.

Maceman

[rob046]

FP physics. They just aren't good. & while higher end machines allegedly can provide slightly better physics, I haven't really noticed this. I'm running an i7-930 at 3.82ghz, & basically the fastest single GPU in the world. & I only run one monitor at 1920x1200. 6gb of high end DDR3 RAM, raid0 setup, & one of the best monitors money can buy. Yet FP still kinda plays like a turd here, & I've already spent way too much time messing with it. The bottom line is that there are flaws in FP that are simply built in that we can do nothing to change.

Flipper physics. Flippers basically play like they have no rubber on them. We all know about the bumper & slingshot problems, & ball friction problems. Yes, if you tweak a table a certain way you can get it to play a bit more reasonable. However, I don't like my EM's to have the flipper strength of a DMD era table!

Maceman, hearing you talk about BK made me want to fire it up in FP. I'm playing the 1.02 Ultra Edition version. It plays awful for me, & I have played BK & many other early SS Williams, even owned one for a while recently, so I have a pretty good idea on how they should feel. Well made table, but FP's physics just bust the game up. Can barely even get the ball up the center ramp, it does something weird near the top that slows it down & it doesn't quite make it most of the time. All the objects feel like they are made out of ice (no friction), & flipper aiming is horrendous (default talbe, no tweaks). But this is no different than most other FP games.

Maybe it is the older driver version you are using? If it is, that sucks because I'm not gonna use older, inferior drivers that hurt performance on VP & other games I play just for FP. But I'm curious to know if that does make all the difference. Maceman, I'd suggest you do make a video of the table playing as accurate as you say it does. I'd love to see it, & if it really does seem to play better then I'd to get to the bottom of why it does. It is actually very easy to record gaming video. Even a program as simple as fraps can do it. Play your game, hit your video hotkey then your video will record. If you just do a quick google search on capturing gaming video or checking out fraps, I think you'll be able to do it no problem.

What do you mean by "smooth". I think "smoothness" & accurate physics are 2 totally different things. Also there really isn't anything an author can do to make ball movement smoother. That is all on the end user side of things & what kind of hardware you got.
Of course more simple tables that don't eat up many resources are gonna get higher fps by default.

These days all FP tables should run smooth for just about everybody with a decent rig. FP can give me some jittery ball here & there, but I've learned that is just the nature of FP & has nothing to do with frame rate. FP just isn't optimized as well as it should be. Also my eyes are VERY sensitive to things like ghosting & ball jitters. A ball that might appear to most to have no ghosting or no jitters might not appear that way to me. I've sat in the same room with 3 other people when I was talking about ghosting, & I very much saw ghosting in the VP blank table test, & the 3 other people thought I was crazy & saw no ghosting. Even in my 2ms Samsung & LG's monitors I saw ghosting pretty bad. & ghosting can sometimes come across as jittery, but I'd say more blurriness.

Since that day I swore off TFT LCD monitors. I'll probably never buy TFT again after seeing what IPS & S-PVA panels are all about, like the Dell Ultrasharp, & better yet my current monitor, the HP ZR24w. Both these monitors have much higher (worse) response times on paper than the 1ms & 2ms TFT's out there, yet the ghosting is MUCH better on them! Nearly gone entirely! & with my HP, stuff like input lag is the best I've seen since I've used CRT monitors! TFT panels are such shit! I still don't understand how so many people buy them & put up with them. I could go on & on about this stuff.
Back on topic, monitors also determine what appears smooth to some people, & also an individual's eyesight (sensitivity) to things like ghosting.

You are lucky if your eyesight doesn't let you notice ghosting/trailing too much. But then no matter your eyesight, many TFT panels just flat out have ghosting that pretty much everybody will notice. & when playing as much pinball as I do, smoothness (no ghosting or input lag) is probably even more important for us pinball people than it is for hardcore FPS gamers!

[jdsabin1]

'Yet FP still kinda plays like a turd here'. <-- This scares me. I just backrevved my video driver and tomorrow I load 95 of the best FP tables on the cab. I guess we'll see how it goes. I love the older EM tables though and VP just doesn't have the variety that FP has. I also want to see what the fuss is about the non-commercial tables like Three Angels and Wild West. If I don't like it I can always go back to 'False' in the HP ini file and stick with just VP tables like I have now (and move up to the latest nvidia driver in the process). VP is not without faults though - I have a heavy hitter machine and I *still* get slowdown/lag when using UVP. The UVP concept is fantastic but to say it is not optimized would be a HUGE understatement. Both platforms have their place IMO, especially on a cabinet where I will have people of all types playing on it. Some don't care at all about having 'physics that match a real cabinet' while more purists do prefer the VP physics.

[numiah]

Unfortunately, there is a problem with FP workingin with anything other than 260.99, so I am back using this driver because I find I am actually using FP more these days. Super smooth and awesome physics on my computer,unlike other reports- it is great for me.

Maceman

As of today I'm running my cab with the 270.61
All works well, even FP !

I gained a lot of performance in VP compared to 268.xx
I had a few doubtfull tables, CV, X-Files and the new totan.
All stutter issues are gone for me.

This time I'm sticking to newer drivers.

[gStAv]

Cool beans! Gotta try them out asap then!

[bent98]

Unfortunately, there is a problem with FP workingin with anything other than 260.99, so I am back using this driver because I find I am actually using FP more these days. Super smooth and awesome physics on my computer,unlike other reports- it is great for me.

Maceman

As of today I'm running my cab with the 270.61
All works well, even FP !

I gained a lot of performance in VP compared to 268.xx
I had a few doubtfull tables, CV, X-Files and the new totan.
All stutter issues are gone for me.

This time I'm sticking to newer drivers.

What OS are you running?

[gwjrabbit]

No noticable difference to me, running an i7, and two 9800 640meg Nvidia cards. I get about 1100-1200 on AFM, as low as 400-500 on TOTAN (but really very playable). Would always love more, but not sure what to tweak at this point. Performance in VP seems to be alchemy. Dedicated sound card? 1gig Video cards? who knows. As far as I can tell NOTHING is actually bottleneckign when I run performance tests. Never spike use on either the video cards or the processors.

[numiah]

I use Win XP 32 on my cab.
I never had to change any script for the startshake command.
All I get is 1 second lag when I nudge for the first time to the left. After that no more problems nudging as long as I play.

And yes, on my cab the FP blackglass works as it's supposed to do in both HP and FP.
So all is good.
Only thing I needed to do for VP after installing newer nvidia drivers was move the DMD with the dmd mover program and rearrange the screen order.

So next one complaining about nvidia cards/drivers suxoring donkeyballs can get a foot....

/me = happy with 270.61

Edited by numiah, 23 April 2011 - 03:54 PM.

[bent98]

I use Win XP 32 on my cab.
I never had to change any script for the startshake command.
All I get is 1 second lag when I nudge for the first time to the left. After that no more problems nudging as long as I play.

And yes, on my cab the FP blackglass works as it's supposed to do in both HP and FP.
So all is good.
Only thing I needed to do for VP after installing newer nvidia drivers was move the DMD with the dmd mover program and rearrange the screen order.

So next one complaining about nvidia cards/drivers suxoring donkeyballs can get a foot....

/me = happy with 270.61

I forgot to ask, what cards are you running?

[numiah]

My total setup is :

E6600 on stock speed
Asus P5N-D
2 Gb mem
1 x GTS450 playfield and backglass
1 x ATi 3450 DMD
64Gb SSD
Creative X-Fi gamer (since two weeks and i gained a few FPS with this as well)
Ledwiz
I-PacII
LG 47" 1920*1080
Panasonic 30" 1280*960
Samsung 19" 800*600

WinXP 32, stripped of all bloated services, but I have networking remaining for updating etc. Using as shared networkdrive and RealVNC.
I even had the guts to mix nvidia and ati together without any problems. Thanks to Micro$oft for having this possibility in WinXP ! Can't be done in 7 afaik.

As you can see it's pretty mediocre, but it runs quite perfectly.
Have to say I didn't touch UVP yet as it would slow things down quite a bit.

Link to hyperpin buildthread : Numiah build

VP is set to max out everything, ramps, textures sizes everything.
Same goes for FP.

[maceman]

Numiah,are you saying your score is working on the backglass in FP with the newer drivers in windows 7 64 bit??????

Check again please.

Edited by maceman, 23 April 2011 - 07:33 PM.