Does Supcom work with windows 11?

soulgamer31 · 17 Nov 2021, 15:05

Im curious to know if anyone has tried playing supcom with Windows 11 yet. Ive been thinking of upgrading for a while now (supposedly 11 will improve game performance) but im not sure if FAF will work properly once i make the transition. It already works fine with Windows 10 so i imagine the same would happen with 11, but im unsure. Has anyone tried that yet?

Sprouto · 17 Nov 2021, 17:14

There's been no evidence that Windows 11 will have any impact on game performance - that I've seen. Do you have any links I can follow ?

macdeffy · 18 Nov 2021, 17:56

No performance difference for faf that I've seen but plenty of other bugs so if you like those, upgrade away. /S

In all seriousness any gaming upgrades won't be realized until direct storage and newer cpus and even then it would only benefit newer games that make use of those.

Perhaps improved scheduler could have a small benefit with alder lake but i doubt it.

arma473 · 18 Nov 2021, 19:26

Please focus only on the question that @soulgamer31 asked, which is if anyone is aware of any FAF bugs that are specific to Windows 11.

Is anyone aware of any bug, unwanted behavior, or significant performance decrease, that only happens when you run FAF in Windows 11, but not when you run FAF in Windows 10? If so, please report it here.

This isn't the right thread to talk about minor performance issues or performance optimization.

Femboy · 18 Nov 2021, 19:56

none at all

Sheikah · 18 Nov 2021, 23:17

I have been running windows 11 for nearly month and developing the client and noticed no issues

soulgamer31 · 5 Dec 2021, 16:15

Okay, thanks for the answers guys. I think im going to bite the bullet and try upgrading. I'll report back here if i encounter any problems. Cheers

oles · 5 Dec 2021, 16:15

@soulgamer31 Hey! Could you please share experience on how does FAF (and windows 11) working for you?

thecore · 5 Dec 2021, 22:47

I have upgraded to Windows 11 and have found there is no issues with FAF client or Supreme Commander Forged Alliance. In fact I haven't seen any issues with any of my older games. Windows 11 does feel faster than Windows 10 so for me so worth the upgrade.

Corsaire · 17 Dec 2021, 12:26

Does work on Windows11 on Mac M1 with the faf-client executable set on "Safe emulation"
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/porting/apps-on-arm-program-compat-troubleshooter

Corsaire · 20 Dec 2021, 13:00

@corsaire said in Does Supcom work with windows 11?:

Does work on Windows11 on Mac M1 with the faf-client executable set on "Safe emulation"
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/porting/apps-on-arm-program-compat-troubleshooter

One bit of advice however, it "works" but has a desynchonization problem.
See this topic https://forum.faforever.com/topic/2796/desync-on-all-replays-and-games-with-windows-11-arm-on-m1-max-apple/6

Sheikah · 20 Dec 2021, 13:24

This is not necessarily an issue with Windows 11 but rather the hardware it is running on. If the hardware performs non deterministic calculations or gets different answers than other machines the game will desync.
Not much to do with windows 11 I believe

Corsaire · 21 Dec 2021, 01:17

@sheikah
Couldn't it be possible to reinforce the code for those calculations to make them really identical?
I mean having two computers giving different results for a same calculation is kind of, bad.

Makes you remember the infamous Pentium processor floating point hardware bug...

Programs such as Matlab does tons of calculations and don't get throw out the windows whatever the processor or the OS that makes them run.

Jip · 21 Dec 2021, 07:13

@corsaire said in Does Supcom work with windows 11?:

I mean having two computers giving different results for a same calculation is kind of, bad.

This happens all the time. Particularly floating point numbers (in comparison to doubles) is easy prey to giving different results. It may be small, but if it determines whether something got hit then suddenly you have a desync. You can read this article that scratches the surface of the issue.

Corsaire · 21 Dec 2021, 08:13

@jip That's a nice article you got here.
Interestingly it points to a possible solution for the case we are facing.

Jip · 21 Dec 2021, 11:02

A solution if we had access to the source code of the engine - which we do not :sad_cowboy:

Katharsas · 21 Dec 2021, 22:04

We would not be able to rip out floating points out of the egine even if we had source code access. Maths, graphics and physics libraries for games and even C++ compilers all usually are written explicitely for floating point numbers instead of simulating it with fixed point arithmetic. Switching away from floating point, if at all possible, would probably result in an engine too slow to be usable.

And for little reason, becasue the imprecision of floating point is not really the problem here. A problem only appears if the imprecision varies from machine to machine. If you use the exact same hardware/software, you will still have floating pint imprecision, but it will be the exact same imprecision on every machine, so the game will not desync.

However, when hardware is emulated you often run into problems where the emulation has to do things slightly different than real hardware for performance reasons.

Anyway that doesn't matter much because we still need engine source to find problems with the strictness of FP operations.

Jip · 22 Dec 2021, 12:00

@katharsas said in Does Supcom work with windows 11?:

And for little reason, becasue the imprecision of floating point is not really the problem here. A problem only appears if the imprecision varies from machine to machine. If you use the exact same hardware/software, you will still have floating pint imprecision, but it will be the exact same imprecision on every machine, so the game will not desync.

I think this is incorrect.

In the CPU when processing floats they are processed using full precision instead of 32 bits. However, when the thread is taken off the processor the intermediate result is stored back into 32 bits (as it is a float and not a double). This can cause any computation to divert.

I think in FA they use double precision for everything. I know that at least Lua uses double precision by default.

Corsaire · 22 Dec 2021, 13:14

I was thinking, it is probably a very naive thought but, can the calculation be done by another code, like a mod?
Or is it something that is done by a part that is untouchable?

Dragun101 · 22 Dec 2021, 19:44

@jip said in Does Supcom work with windows 11?:

A solution if we had access to the source code of the engine - which we do not :sad_cowboy:

We do legit have access to alot of the games' code. While not helpful for above problem I do think it is worth stressing that we do have alot going for other games don't.