IronHorseDeveloper, QA Manager, Technical Support & contributorJoin Date: 2010-05-08Member: 71669Members, Super Administrators, Forum Admins, Forum Moderators, NS2 Developer, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Subnautica Playtester, Subnautica PT Lead, Pistachionauts
Argh.. You're killing me, smalls.. Lol
This tool was only meant for devs so i apologize for it's difficulty to use..
You see the very bottom of the screen and it's vertical bars? Notice how each of your screen shots show one bar more red and highlighted than the rest? Every one of your pics has the same frame selected. That's the frame you are inspecting and unfortunately it isn't on the tallest bar /worst performing frame.
So while you may be pressing the space bar in time when the pause happens, you aren't moving to the correct frame for analysis.
Use the bracket keys [ and ] to highlight the tallest frame at the bottom of your screen.
THEN expand the purple horizontal bars for that specific frame.
My second-to-last screen shot is of the second highest frame. The large yellow one is because I unpaused/repaused during main menu.
I've highlighted 3 different frames in those 5 screenshots.
I see no spiking, however... even your "highest frame" looks like the rest.
I see nothing wrong in any of those screenshots... just the garbage collector doing its thing in the menu, which is acceptable. 17 and 13 ms total computing time for those frames is just fine, typically.
If you are getting actual consistent spikes, all those bars at the bottom wouldn't be so even, as seen in that pic.
So what i need you to do is run profile until you see said 40 second drop in framerate occur.. this way you will actually have spiking showing on the profiler, and something to compare to, and hopefully a culprit.
Thanks for your patience and i'm sorry for the difficulty
IronHorseDeveloper, QA Manager, Technical Support & contributorJoin Date: 2010-05-08Member: 71669Members, Super Administrators, Forum Admins, Forum Moderators, NS2 Developer, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Subnautica Playtester, Subnautica PT Lead, Pistachionauts
edited May 2013
This thread isn't for general drop in performance late game just fyi, its about a long abnormal drop that then resumes normally after a few seconds.
If you are experiencing this, please continue with the profile shots (we'll move onto something else if we can't capture it) and be sure to show two things : a) at least the profile shot of 15 fps scenario b) the transition from typical performance to said pause /drop
All of this from in game, not the menu, if possible.
I'm getting the same as the OP, periodic FPS drops e.g. sudden drop from 50FPS to 20 FPS for 30 seconds, then back up to 50. Happens on every map, sometimes I can go for an entire game with no bad periods and sometimes it happens 5 or 6 times per game, sometimes it only lasts for 10 seconds other times it will be 30+ seconds.
Related problem that happens much less often but started happening around the same time: my mouse input seems to be ignored for less than 1 second, this has only happened in maybe 5 games.
New shots, the FPS goes back up to normal approx 60% of the way through. During the first shots my fps is around 20.
IronHorseDeveloper, QA Manager, Technical Support & contributorJoin Date: 2010-05-08Member: 71669Members, Super Administrators, Forum Admins, Forum Moderators, NS2 Developer, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Subnautica Playtester, Subnautica PT Lead, Pistachionauts
edited May 2013
Ok yea.. that is a LOT of garbage collection..weird
Forwarding to devs.
**UPDATE** Do the o_stats step in the post after this one first, please! As it will show the culprit sooner
Mind doing three more (much easier) things in the meantime just for added info? :
1) Grab a screenshot of r_stats enabled in the console when your fps hits that consistent 20 fps range
2) Run techsupport.exe found in your NS2 install folder and upload the file it makes.
3) Grab a p_logall of a good example of a game/round when this occurs. You can type p_logall in the console and after the map changes it ends, or you can end it with p_endlog. The goal is to grab the shortest log you can that clearly demonstrates going from typical play for any length of time, and then the actual long drop in performance. You dont have to wait for the round to end if you've caught it clearly enough. You'll find the log in your hidden %appdata%\Natural Selection 2\ folder under some name like "client-5202013.plog" in chronological order. Zip it up/compress it and then upload to somewhere on the interwebs for further analysis.
IronHorseDeveloper, QA Manager, Technical Support & contributorJoin Date: 2010-05-08Member: 71669Members, Super Administrators, Forum Admins, Forum Moderators, NS2 Developer, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Subnautica Playtester, Subnautica PT Lead, Pistachionauts
edited May 2013
If you feel up to it, you can further diagnose these garbage collector heavy moments with o_stats entered in the console. Or o_stats Vector... using the pause key on the keyboard will pause the on screen debug text, which is very useful with this tool.
This tool will definitely show WHAT exactly is causing all this garbage collection, if you can capture multiple screenshots of when it becomes garbage collection intensive, thatd be perfect for us!
Thanks!
Also, @ricez , can you triple check you have no mods active/subscribed to / files in workshop folder?
Comments
This tool was only meant for devs so i apologize for it's difficulty to use..
You see the very bottom of the screen and it's vertical bars? Notice how each of your screen shots show one bar more red and highlighted than the rest? Every one of your pics has the same frame selected. That's the frame you are inspecting and unfortunately it isn't on the tallest bar /worst performing frame.
So while you may be pressing the space bar in time when the pause happens, you aren't moving to the correct frame for analysis.
Use the bracket keys [ and ] to highlight the tallest frame at the bottom of your screen.
THEN expand the purple horizontal bars for that specific frame.
I've highlighted 3 different frames in those 5 screenshots.
I run everything on low/off except for particle effects.
edit: I have multi core rendering ON and texture streaming ON. - just disabled it though.
I see nothing wrong in any of those screenshots... just the garbage collector doing its thing in the menu, which is acceptable. 17 and 13 ms total computing time for those frames is just fine, typically.
Here's what spiking looks like: http://i.imgur.com/bXKA5Y0.jpg
If you are getting actual consistent spikes, all those bars at the bottom wouldn't be so even, as seen in that pic.
So what i need you to do is run profile until you see said 40 second drop in framerate occur.. this way you will actually have spiking showing on the profiler, and something to compare to, and hopefully a culprit.
Thanks for your patience and i'm sorry for the difficulty
I don't recall seeing any obvious long frames, it seems that every frame gets longer during these periods.
My FPS will drop from ~50 to ~15 or from ~30 to ~10 during late game battles.
If you are experiencing this, please continue with the profile shots (we'll move onto something else if we can't capture it) and be sure to show two things : a) at least the profile shot of 15 fps scenario b) the transition from typical performance to said pause /drop
All of this from in game, not the menu, if possible.
Thanks!
Related problem that happens much less often but started happening around the same time: my mouse input seems to be ignored for less than 1 second, this has only happened in maybe 5 games.
New shots, the FPS goes back up to normal approx 60% of the way through. During the first shots my fps is around 20.
This last one is on the "normal" frame.
Forwarding to devs.
**UPDATE** Do the o_stats step in the post after this one first, please! As it will show the culprit sooner
Mind doing three more (much easier) things in the meantime just for added info? :
1) Grab a screenshot of r_stats enabled in the console when your fps hits that consistent 20 fps range
2) Run techsupport.exe found in your NS2 install folder and upload the file it makes.
3) Grab a p_logall of a good example of a game/round when this occurs. You can type p_logall in the console and after the map changes it ends, or you can end it with p_endlog. The goal is to grab the shortest log you can that clearly demonstrates going from typical play for any length of time, and then the actual long drop in performance. You dont have to wait for the round to end if you've caught it clearly enough. You'll find the log in your hidden %appdata%\Natural Selection 2\ folder under some name like "client-5202013.plog" in chronological order. Zip it up/compress it and then upload to somewhere on the interwebs for further analysis.
This tool will definitely show WHAT exactly is causing all this garbage collection, if you can capture multiple screenshots of when it becomes garbage collection intensive, thatd be perfect for us!
Thanks!
Also, @ricez , can you triple check you have no mods active/subscribed to / files in workshop folder?
As of 260, it's back to square 1, FPS drops happen more frequently and drop lower as before.