Introversion

Generally, certain cards seem to render text funny, which causes said cards to lag terribly in menus, which proceeds to cause the gamespeed to work wrong, which causes sync errors.
Or so we think, so far.
The problem seems to occur on most Nvidia 5-series cards, but also happens on at least 1 ATI card.
Incomplete list of cards affected:
Nvidia 5200
Nvidia 5500
Nvidia 5700
ATI 5900 FX


ORIGINAL POST:
Shwart!!

syncerror-2008-09-19--22-17-48-client2-team2.txt

Game continued after Shwart!! left, of course.

@Shwart!!: Building Detail level? Hopefully that bug's been squashed, but...

Which map? Try to get other players to come and post around here?

EDIT: Please, both of you upload preferences.txt

EDIT EDIT: Who was hosting (in both games)?

EDIT EDIT EDIT: Any of you playing with xbox controller?

EDIT EDIT EDIT EDIT: Shwart!! upload a dxdiag?

Leap of Faith was the map for the three player one.

EDIT: Waiko was hosting the 2nd game (the only one I was involved with).
Prefs.txt is here; Can't get you a dxdiag as I'm running wine. Shwart!! was the one out of sync, so I doubt that wine was the issue (it didn't cause problems in the beta):


Hope that helps. I haven't had any errors since and am enjoying the game happily.

I have other detail setting set lower, but I left BuildingDetail on high just in case.
Ill have the files up in a second...
EDIT: Got them.
preferences-f106.txt
dxdiag-e0f4.txt
Oh, and I wasn't using an Xbox controller.

Shwart!!

Finally found the cause, but no solution yet.
My system causes the simulation speed to be very fast for the first 15 seconds or so of a game.
Thus, when joining, I (usually) desync.
When hosting, it makes everyone go very fast for a while.

Shwart!!

Yeah.

When playing in Shwart!!'s game's, it goes unusually fast for about 10 seconds. After that it returns to normal.

Just to clarify, this happens for him in single player as well, so it shouldn't be a lag issue.

for the first 10 secs off some sp games i play the game play is fast and i think i usally cause sync errors... what does it all mean? what do i upload?

We don't know what it means.
However, if you could upload a dxdiag.txt, that would be very helpful.

Shwart!!

Shwart!!, nice find!!!

hmmm, probably unrelated but we never know:



Time to update your video driver?

---------------

LazyBuhdaBelly:

1)'Start' windows button
2)'Run ...' or the search bar in Vista
3)Type 'dxdiag.exe' in the 'Open' textbox and press the 'Ok' button
4)Once the 'dxdiag.exe' dialog is up, click the 'Save All Information ...' button.
5)Choose a destination for the file (ie: your desktop) and a name for the file (ie: 'dxdiag_info.txt')
6)Post the content of the file here.

Have done. No help. Actually, that driver was already a rollback, trying to fix various problems (not MW related).

Shwart!!

I've found the problem.
The Nvidia GeForce 5700 series of cards is already known to cause issues, namely that the menu runs extremely slowly.
However, it is not limited to this. The extreme slowdown in the menus has a tendancy to change the simulation speed when a game is started.
Thus, a client using such a card will generally desync because they are running ahead of the server.
EDIT: On review of others' posts, this extends to the 5500s, too. Possibly the entire 5 series of cards.

For this reason, I have to suggest that some more attention be payed to why the 5x00s don't work right- the issues go further than we thought.

A possible solution would be the nerfing of menu effects, as an option, so it doesn't lag so extremely.

Shwart!!

Fascinating; the 5 series GeForces were always a bit behind the 9 series Radeons of the same generation, as something got screwed up, concerning the number of registers available for the shader IIRC; I think I read on Anandtech once that this was why it was rubbish at rendering Half Life 2 when it came out; NVidia were moaning that the engine was written with an ATI bias, but it transpired that the HL2 engine was actually a level playing field on which the NVidia cards were simply shit...

the GeForce 5 series (FX) and Radeon 9### range was pretty much the first big technology specification arms race of the long lived DirectX 9. nVidia lost, badly, by totally overshooting the spec, (they got their own back with SM3.0 in the 6 series), the consequence of which is that the whole FX range has broken pixel shader 2.0 support. Unfortunately for nVidia card owners, pixel shader use sky rocketed, resulting in the cards being pretty much universally slated.

Interestingly, Dar/Multiwinia barely even uses pixel shaders during common gameplay, if at all, and even if it did they're unlikely to be SM2.0. The game is in opengl too, so, really, by the virtues of performance history, the FX cards should pretty much be as good as or better than the (otherwise) equivilent ATI card of that generation.

I'm not 100% certain, but I don't think this is the problem you're looking for.

The 5700 and 5500 were late, budgety additions to the range, and, though I may be wrong, I think they've been causing issues with the Darwinia engine for quite a long time.

Except that Darwinia has never given issues related to this card. Ever.
Plus, it has been stated by one of the developers that the menu uses additional effects.

Interestingly, I went from a 5700 to an ATI 9200, and though the seriess are supposed to be equivalent, I'm finding that the 9200 is far better for running Multiwinia.

All pointers, from what tests I've run, tweaks I've done, and information I've found, point to the Geforce 5s as the problem here.

Shwart!!