General performance issues

Hikeeba

<div class="IPBDescription">Stuttering frame rate</div>433 Celeron
96MB RAM
8MB ATI Rage Pro
Win98
And I'm running in D3D.

I would normally chalk up something like this to my system rapidly approaching "museum piece" status, however CS, DoD, and Half-Life run just fine without a hint of slowdown.

When I first load a map, either LAN or internet, my system starts choking.  The frame rate picks up again after I spin around a few times.  It does this every time I enter a new area as well.  After I run through the whole map, it settles down.  However, if there's anyone else on the map, I constantly jump between silky and slide show.

As said before, HL and every other mod I've played runs just fine, but NS has fits.

Anything I can do to fix this?

Relic25

If I had to guess, I'd say that your setup seems really lean on RAM.  NS is pretty intensive when it comes to memory, even on client machines, because the size of maps, texture load (including models), particle systems, and everything else.  This would explain why everything seems to settle out as you move around.  I get the same thing on my home pc.  Even though it's a beefier system (1.5 ghz, GF2 mx 400), I only have 128 megs of RAM and I see this same effect.  My machine at work is slower (800 mhz), but it has 512 megs of RAM and everything loads and runs fast and smooth.  With the really low RAM capacity on your graphics card, the system memory gets hit even harder.  So the slowdowns you see are probably the result of hard drive paging.  Next time you're in a game, watch you HD light while you run around.



<!--EDIT|Relic25|Nov. 01 2002,16:27-->

Wiwo

Besides getting more ram and a better graphics card, is there anything to be done?

NDGhetto_Fractux

On my server (AMD T-Bird C 1.4Ghz, 384MB RAM) which is a dedicated linux box monitoring the processes, the problem is that it's using my CPU like mad.

hlds process is using 84% of my CPU, and around 25% of my memory resources.

And I'm only running a 10 person server.

Relic25

The server-side problem is well known now and is being addressed as soon as possible (see the natural-selection.org site).

Hikeeba

Relic:

I was afraid of that.  There is a lot of HD paging going on.  If there's nothing that can be done beyond getting more RAM, is there any chance a furture update might streamline the memory demands somewhat?  If it weren't for the messed up text in OpenGL, I wouldn't have a problem as while I get much lower performance, it's also much more stable.

Relic25

Unfortunately, I can't see much more client-side overhead being cut.  There is just simply so much graphic stuff in NS that has to be loaded.  The maps and textures are one thing, but when you think about all the sprites, HUD items, and model skins that must be loaded for all the different stuff in NS, it's easy to see why it consumes so much memory.

Don't let this issue get confused with the server-side cpu/memory issues though.  That's a bug.

Hikeeba

Alright, I don't get it, but I won't question it.

I switched to software mode on the odd chance it would make a difference, and lo and behold the hd paging has vanished and everything's silky except for the soon to be fixed server bug.

The only two issues I have now is that the right-click menu shows up as a bunch of overwriting white text at the top left and the faulty colorkeying on the alien HUD.  But, I figure those will be fixed when software mode is officially supported.

No problems here now.  

Thanks for the great mod!