Low fps, especially around lights
dpiercey
Join Date: 2010-05-07 Member: 71658Members
Join Date: 2010-05-07 Member: 71658Members
This is the only game I have to lower my resolution to get acceptable fps. Usually adjusting shadows is enough to get decent frame rates in most recent games. I know you guys are no triple A studio but after two years the same problem exists. At 1920x1200 I get ~25 fps with everything fancy sitting in the start menu, ~40 fps with shadows off, but it's unplayable especially in the central room of mineshaft, I can't even go in there or I get <5 fps. Setting the resolution lower is the only thing that makes any significant improvement, but it makes the game look distorted, fuzzy and hurts my eyes after a while.
I've looked through the bug tracker and forums for tips, toggled my HT & parked cores, adjusted nvidia settings and swapped a bunch of different drivers, toyed with console commands, but none of that made a significant difference: Shadows off gained about 10fps, everything else 0-3fps. Am I missing some DirectX11 settings or something I should turn off that's eating resources? If not, have the devs mentioned anything recently about making some improvements before launch?
For anyone curious:
Win7HP 64 SP1
i7 920 (D0)
280m 1GB
12GB Kingston RAM
Reltek audio
Admittedly the video cards 4 years old and seen better days, but it never had a problem like this before. lol
I've looked through the bug tracker and forums for tips, toggled my HT & parked cores, adjusted nvidia settings and swapped a bunch of different drivers, toyed with console commands, but none of that made a significant difference: Shadows off gained about 10fps, everything else 0-3fps. Am I missing some DirectX11 settings or something I should turn off that's eating resources? If not, have the devs mentioned anything recently about making some improvements before launch?
For anyone curious:
Win7HP 64 SP1
i7 920 (D0)
280m 1GB
12GB Kingston RAM
Reltek audio
Admittedly the video cards 4 years old and seen better days, but it never had a problem like this before. lol
Comments
Admittedly the video cards 4 years old and seen better days, but it never had a problem like this before. lol<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Yet, I fear that is the problem. NS2 is mostly CPU limited, but as you describe it gets tough around a lot of shadows. That's the GPU giving out I guess. Performance will increase before 1.0 hits, I suggest you wait for that. If it's still bad after that, I fear you'll need a better GPU.
Also, the majority of the end-game frame rate problems are server-side as well -- completely out of your hands.
Overclocking to fix the fps problem has got to be the worst advice I see on these forums. Performance gains will be marginal and is risky for most common folk to be doing - they could easily fry their hardware by having just one setting wrong. And most people who already know how to overclock already have their system overclocked.
Full ready room 60-100fps, in the playable area of the map is 50-40 average until I come across certain areas with lots of lights and it dips low or becomes erratic. Shooting and other players being around doesn't seem to make a difference, vRAM maxed at about 900mb and the controller at 70% according to GPU-Z after a hour of playing like that. Alt-tabbing is really fluent in this game so I checked task-manager often, again CPU looked nominal even toward the end of games.
Definitely demanding a lot from the GPU, I just hope in the future for some optimization or ability to change quality/turn off more effects. I don't like to go making comparisons like this but BF3, Skyrim, X³, SS3 and just about all recent titles, all thwarted by the 280m with decent framerates at my native resolution with some form of AA and 16xAF. After a little bit of tweaking, usually with lighting, particles, shadows, it's all gravy. Anyway it just's something that I've been wondering about for the past while because I see reports of people with better video cards still having similar issues.
Also i7 920 has turbo boost bringing it to 2.93GHz, I've never had reason to overclock. I could probably squeeze out a bit more performance by changing the bclk but last time I looked (when I bought it), it wasn't easy to do. Also it's in a laptop so I'm not exactly sure how much extra power's available.
Thanks for that post dethovu, that's excellent news to hear.
The bottleneck of NS2 lies within the game logic code, which is inherently single-threaded. That is why you don't see much CPU usage, as it cannot utilize more than one core for this part.
Due to this severe bottleneck, people vastly underestimate the demands on the GPU. The engine is good, don't get me wrong. It runs reasonably fast, but it doesn't scale too well, so it will not be smooth on 4+ year old hardware. People always overlook this because the CPU bottleneck is so severe.
Comparing the game to big titles is not totally fair. The BF3 dev team has had more engine programmers than UWE has total employees plus a huge QA team and direct support from NVidia. Of course it runs and looks way better. Keep in mind the engine itself was written by one single guy.
Last, but not least: do not overclock a laptop. Ever.
If it's only certain lights then it could be the atmospherics effects, although I think the flashlight uses them too.
Anyway, try 'r_atmospherics false' in the console and see if that makes a difference.
<!--quoteo(post=1950194:date=Jul 10 2012, 12:35 AM:name=Dghelneshi)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Dghelneshi @ Jul 10 2012, 12:35 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1950194"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Comparing the game to big titles is not totally fair. The BF3 dev team has had more engine programmers than UWE has total employees plus a huge QA team and direct support from NVidia. Of course it runs and looks way better. Keep in mind the engine itself was written by one single guy.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
No, should the performance problems persist after version 1.0 it is entirely fair to criticize UWE for it. Not necessarily for writing bad code (I'm sure Max and Dushan are excellent programmers and work very hard), but for picking the wrong technology or for setting too ambitious/unrealistic goals for their team size.
Also, the majority of the end-game frame rate problems are server-side as well -- completely out of your hands.
Overclocking to fix the fps problem has got to be the worst advice I see on these forums. Performance gains will be marginal and is risky for most common folk to be doing - they could easily fry their hardware by having just one setting wrong. And most people who already know how to overclock already have their system overclocked.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Actually, it <i>is </i>his system (in the case of shadows/lighting causing performance to tank, owing to the low CPU clock and low spec GPU, as player said).
A small overclock (like an i7 920 to ~3.5ghz) is extremely easy to do safely if you replace the stock cooler with something half decent (like $30-40 range). It's not going to require any voltage tweaks or other weirdness. The improvement will be something very obvious if you hit the right tipping point - it's not like adding 1/3 on to his clock on a modern multicore CPU is something <i>small</i>.
With that GPU, overclocking won't be worthwhile. With a better GPU, you'll still need to overclock to see the benefits. Unless you're prepared to play NS2 for like 3 hours a day and really love it, I'd say wait for the LUA optimizations to come in..
Also, this is kinda debatable: what hard drive are you running the game from? An SSD will give you a nice boost in a few spots once the GPU/CPU are taken care of (but again, don't bother with it before the other two are in place).
Mobile?
You aren't on a laptop are you? If you are, you can forget about OCing as being an option, typically.
I have an i7 920 OCed to 4 ghz using corsair's h60 water cooling that costs $60. Worth every penny. Game runs well enough to play just fine - and i saw no difference between my old 295 gtx and my new 570 gtx. The biggest change was from 32 bit to 64 bit, and that mentioned overclock.
Due to this severe bottleneck, people vastly underestimate the demands on the GPU. The engine is good, don't get me wrong. It runs reasonably fast, but it doesn't scale too well, so it will not be smooth on 4+ year old hardware. People always overlook this because the CPU bottleneck is so severe.
Comparing the game to big titles is not totally fair. The BF3 dev team has had more engine programmers than UWE has total employees plus a huge QA team and direct support from NVidia. Of course it runs and looks way better. Keep in mind the engine itself was written by one single guy.
Last, but not least: do not overclock a laptop. Ever.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I don't see any bottleneck in my case, CPU0 like I said doesn't go over 80% utilization. That seems pretty good in my opinion. I'm not trying to say parallel threads or tasks is a bad thing, sure if you have 10s of millions of dollars to buy a licence or make the framework from scratch and do it right, giver balls. I just figure it's not worth doing on a program that isn't cpu/mem bound. Giving up at this point because "inherently single-threaded," isn't an option either. Better solution would be to optimize the code already present, and if that's not possible they need to think about adding the ability for the end-user to turn the fancy stuff down or off completely. Multi-core support brings a whole bunch of new bugs and problems to solve, performance is debatable depending on context, it's expensive to implement, and it's just plain hard to do.
I'm certainly no expert on this stuff, but I do read a lot. If you are, please correct me or post some source I can check out so I can learn something. I'm just curious how and why you figure game logic issues are present and solvable by multi-core support and maybe expand a little on why you think the engine doesn't scale well. If the cpu was an issue, wouldn't the GPU utilization be erratic instead of steady 98-100%?
If you can point out another game to compare this to that uses an engine that's similar in development cost I'd be welcome to try that out. I think you missed the point I was trying to make though. If people are having similar issues, with newer hardware then mine then that's bad news bears.
Also I'm not sure if you've been living under a rock past few years, but overclocking in a laptop is viable for sure. 4 years ago people were getting stable 4GHz from 975s, probably higher now with the newer cpus, all with air. I wouldn't recommend it to any average user, but outright saying not to do it is not right.
<!--quoteo(post=1950230:date=Jul 9 2012, 11:21 PM:name=internetexplorer)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (internetexplorer @ Jul 9 2012, 11:21 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1950230"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Also, this is kinda debatable: what hard drive are you running the game from? An SSD will give you a nice boost in a few spots once the GPU/CPU are taken care of (but again, don't bother with it before the other two are in place).<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Nothing fancy, 7200rpm 16mb cache, hitachi. But having a SSD would only help preloading resource, afaik once your in the game all the assets are stored to vm or vram.
Also I'm not sure if you've been living under a rock past few years, but overclocking in a laptop is viable for sure. 4 years ago people were getting stable 4GHz from 975s, probably higher now with the newer cpus, all with air. I wouldn't recommend it to any average user, but outright saying not to do it is not right.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
NS2 is still heavily in development and isn't a released product, and as such it is far from optimized, so there's very little to compare it to currently.
So you do have a laptop?
No, i haven't been living under a rock, but i do have ample experience with both building PCs and laptops (Even from scratch) and know the limitations that come with laptops typically. IF you bought it retail/didnt build it yourself then there's a good chance that the power supply is very near the operating wattage and thus not typically capable of providing enough voltage to do a %65 increase in clock speed, as per what i suggested - not to mention the gorilla in the room that is the lack of proper heat dissipation/cooling that is inherent with the small form factor that is laptops! (yes, i know plenty report their stock i7 920 heatsink handling a %50 increase, but that probably wasn't in a laptop)
I obviously wasn't saying not to do it, that's why i used the word, "typically". But you better be well versed in overclocking, and especially in laptops, as they are an entirely different beast.
Goodluck to you sir.
There are people who can play NS2 at a sold fps, but they have 4Ghz+ CPUs and current GPUs. With my AMD Phenom II 820 at 3.5Ghz and a GTX460 I get a pretty regular 30-60fps, with drops to low fps on occasion. Everyone acknowledges that the game is not optimized but you are getting unplayable frame rates because you have an older computer, people with current specs can manage an enjoyable experience.
<!--quoteo(post=1950238:date=Jul 9 2012, 09:40 PM:name=dpiercey)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (dpiercey @ Jul 9 2012, 09:40 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1950238"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->But having a SSD would only help preloading resource, <u>afaik once your in the game all the assets are stored to vm or vram</u>.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
You would think so, but no. However, an SSD is not going to offer a very note worthy improvement.
About that single-threaded stuff, you cannot read that off your task-manager properly, as it'll only tell you usage over a certain timespan (a second), while Windows can and does switch the process around on the cores constantly within that timeframe. The problem is Lua, which really is single-threaded, and there isn't anything that can be done about that (this far into development anyway). The problem is compounded by the fact we're talking about game-logic, which itself is also inherently single-threaded.
1. It's a beta
2. Devs are working on it
3. Overclock your CPU
4. Wait for 1.0 release
Pick your choice
so let us hope for that performance-miracle.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I've seen people believe in stranger things. :)
I've got my fingers crossed that the developers will have everything sorted at 1.0 release.
This CPU when taxed, it will run at ~3Ghz with Intel's Turbo-boost technology. I get avg 40-60 fps, with 30-40fps in combat. I also run a GeForce 470. I think the old 280m is his main problem, not his CPU.
i5 2500k 3.3ghz oc to 4.5ghz
Nvidia 560ti - SLI ( SLI is not supported ingame right now )
8Gigs rams
- If you have a p8p67 motherboard make sure you don't have energy saver on or it will drain about 30 to 40 fps out from the game, turn on performance or auto mode and even put Digi+ VRM Frequency to Auto.
(copy paste from a Valve Employee to help you understand what choke is)
There is no connection whatsoever between choke and actual bandwidth limitations of either clients or the server. Choke is directly related to a client\'s game \"rate\" setting, which each client requests individually based on its own setting, but subject to your server\'s sv_minrate and sv_maxrate values. If the server would like to send a client some data but cannot because sending more data at that time would overrun the client\'s rate setting (because of a low rate setting, or lots of stuff going on in the server, or the client\'s updaterate being too high, whatever), then that client gets choke for that server frame
I've given up all hope on 1.0 also being playable. Considering 1.0 is supposed to be released late summer. I don't see any engine tweaks that will make this playable for me in the near future, if it all without upgrading my system. Also to be frank, this is the exact reason this will be the death of the game. Not many gamers have 4,000 dollar rigs.
I've given up all hope on 1.0 also being playable. Considering 1.0 is supposed to be released late summer. I don't see any engine tweaks that will make this playable for me in the near future, if it all without upgrading my system. Also to be frank, this is the exact reason this will be the death of the game. Not many gamers have 4,000 dollar rigs.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I would stick around until 1.0. I have every confidence in the abilities of the UWE team, but I'd rather they delay the release and make sure everything is perfect than put out an incomplete game - the general public (particularly those who have never heard of NS) will be less forgiving than this community of fans who only want the developers to succeed and produce a hit game.
Although I still hope that they keep the minimum specs down - can't really afford a new CPU and motherboard in these hard times ... :( That would be most appreciated!
This CPU when taxed, it will run at ~3Ghz with Intel's Turbo-boost technology. I get avg 40-60 fps, with 30-40fps in combat. I also run a GeForce 470. I think the old 280m is his main problem, not his CPU.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
you don't run the same CPU, unless you have a <i>mobile </i>version
compared to a desktop 920, it will have a much slower pcie architecture, not to mention different/less pipelining, fewer features like turbo boost, hyperthreading etc (turbo in mobile i7s is notoriously bad)
mobile CPUs are always many steps below desktop CPUs (even if you buy a 'gaming notebook', which is almost a scam to be honest)