FPS Drop When Looking at Mountains

[Ultra]

Hello,

 

I noticed when playing MP on 104th and TAW servers (the mission where blue starts at Kolkhi and Kobuleti, red starts at Sukhumi and Gudauta), I get a loss of FPS only when looking towards the eastern mountain range. It drops from 50s-60s to 20s. What would this be from? It's not like there are a lot of objects in that direction.

 

My Settings: Pretty much everything on High, except Depth of Field=Off.

 

Specs:

i5-4690 3.5GHz

2 Crossfired R9 270X 2GB 256-Bit

MSI Z87-G55 LGA 1150

16GB 240-Pin DDR3 1866

Rosewill 750W 80+ Bronze

1TB 7200 RPM

Corsair 60GB SATA III SSD

Windows 8.1 64-bit

[Ultra]

This is still happening. I'm thinking it's either just that mission causing it or maybe that section of mountain range is being rendered strangely by the 1.5 Beta engine. I've had FPS drops of 60s to 10s just from looking toward those mountains during the mission. The current netcode may also be responsible or contributing, I'm not sure.

 

Is anyone else experiencing this?

[Ranbi2Delta]

I do get quite a few multiplayer stutters when looking towards the mountain range on servers like the 104th especially.

 

Not so much FPS drops, though.

[Ultra]

Hmm, now I'm wondering if it's maybe caused by a lot of tree shadows being rendered in the distance. I'll have to mess around with my settings and see if it changes. Hopefully the problem just disappears with a hotfix for me :D.

 

Thanks for your input Ranbi2Delta.

[sFalcon]

Disable Lens Effects

Disable Depth of Field

Disable HDR

Disable shadows (or use flat only)

 

Then try again :)

[Ultra]

Disable Lens Effects

Disable Depth of Field

Disable HDR

Disable shadows (or use flat only)

 

Then try again :)

 

I'll try it out today. I already have depth of field off, that's a big FPS killer for my system.

[Ultra]

Ok, so I did a bit of testing and came to some conclusion. I took a graphics heavy scene that was dropping my FPS and went through changing each setting to see the FPS difference during that scene. The scene was pretty much just me flying at and above some forest covered mountains, not much else.

 

Conclusion: the only two settings that had any significant impact when changed were: the MSAA and the Tree Rendering Distance.

 

Now most of the FPS drop happened when I was flying at a close forest-y mountain, so I don't think the Tree Rendering Distance is the main culprit but it has something to do with the trees themselves.

 

In my scene, there were hardly any other objects besides my cockpit that would be using the anti-aliasing, so I think the trees are using the MSAA and hogging a lot of my resources.

 

What do others think?

[hansangb]

Ultra, what did you start with -MSAA wise - and what did you settle on?

 

hsb

[Ultra]

I started on '16x'. Right now I have it set on '4x'. The lower I set it the better it gets. I can live with 4x for now. Hopefully it is something that improves as the beta is worked on. An interesting note, my frames didn't really get much worse when I bumped it up to 16xQ.

[dburne]

I started on '16x'. Right now I have it set on '4x'. The lower I set it the better it gets. I can live with 4x for now. Hopefully it is something that improves as the beta is worked on. An interesting note, my frames didn't really get much worse when I bumped it up to 16xQ.

 

I wonder if your 2gb of vram might be contributing to this?

 

I notice on my single GTX 970 FTW 4gb card, my vram usage typically stays between 2.2 and 2.3 GB.

I do however have all my settings at the highest , with exception of cockpit displays set to 512 and DOF off.

 

Have you monitored your vram usage whilst playing?

[Ultra]

....Have you monitored your vram usage whilst playing?

 

Could be that. I haven't monitored it, I'll check it out. I forgot to put in my the specs that I'm running one 1920x1080 res screen. Also, I never had problems with AA pre-1.5 and I could run AA at the highest setting fine, if that makes a difference.

[dburne]

Could be that. I haven't monitored it, I'll check it out. I forgot to put in my the specs that I'm running one 1920x1080 res screen. Also, I never had problems with AA pre-1.5 and I could run AA at the highest setting fine, if that makes a difference.

 

It does, but also with the new Edge engine in 1.5 I think it utilizes much more of the graphics card being DX11 versus the older DX9 engine.

I too am running the game on a single 1920x1080 screen, but I do have a second monitor hooked up just for monitoring purposes.

[Ultra]

Ok a couple of things.

I ran the same scenario checking MSI Afterburner. My Pagefile was maxed out the whole time! Memory usage was high, but not so much to be problematic. Also in MSI Afterburner you select the GPU you want to monitor in settings right? But then it also shows you the GPU2 usage at the same time? Cause I was seeing my GPU1 readings at 99, but my GPU2 readings stay between 0 and 30%.

 

So what's going on here?

[dburne]

Cause I was seeing my GPU1 readings at 99, but my GPU2 readings stay between 0 and 30%.

 

So what's going on here?

 

Well that is interesting. I do not run SLI so I won't be of much help there, but I wonder have you tried running it just on a single GPU to see if there is any difference?

 

I don't think I ever see my single 970 run that high on usage, I think it runs between 80-90% in heavy activity. I will have to pay more attention to that and see if it gets up toward 100%.

 

Edit: Your pagefile is maxing out? That does not sound right , you have 16gb of ram right?

[Ultra]

I'll check it out now.

 

What does it mean that my Pagefile usage is really maxed out?

 

EDIT: Yeah 16G of RAM

[dburne]

What does it mean that my Pagefile usage is really maxed out?

 

Where are you seeing that?

[Ultra]

MSI Afterburner displays it.

[dburne]

Well I think there is still an issue with memory leak, but I would not think you would see it max out that danged fast, not to mention I would think your physical ram would max out first then it would be maxing out your pagefile?

 

Edit: I will have to monitor my pagefile next time I fly and see what it does. I would think if your pagefile is full and it is writing to disk you would see more issues than you are seeing. Maybe it is just making full use of it or something...

Edited November 5, 2015 by dburne

[Ultra]

It looks like my PC has set my pagefile allowance very low, like 5gigs, I don't know why. I'm going to manually increase it and see if that helps but I just have a couple of questions.

 

Should I put my Pagefile usage on my SSD, HDD, or split it?

and

What should I set for the minimum? It looks like the max should be 1.5 times my RAM amount from the tech forums.

[dburne]

Should I put my Pagefile usage on my SSD, HDD, or split it?

and

What should I set for the minimum? It looks like the max should be 1.5 times my RAM amount from the tech forums.

 

Well back in the day, it was generally thought best to move the pagefile to a different drive than the OS resided on. I think that line of thinking has changes especially with Win 7 and beyond....

 

I would leave it on the system drive as it defaults to. I have 16 gb of physical ram, and according to Afterburner my pagefile is 8gb.

Not sure why yours would be at 5gb if you did not manually set it to that.

Have you checked lately to make sure all your physical ram is properly recognized, ie does Windows show you have 16 gb?

 

With 16 gb I doubt you need 1.5 times your amount of ram, again I think that was a good school of thought back in the day but probably not needed nowadays.

I personally think letting Windows manage the pagefile nowadays is probably the best option, but certainly if you want to play around with the max I doubt it would hurt.

 

Edit: Personally I think the clue to maybe your issue lies in the GPU usage numbers you are showing...

Edited November 5, 2015 by dburne

[Ultra]

Ok, both my BIOS and Windows recognize my 16G's. I'll mess around with it and see if there's a difference. Just another question, there is Initial Pagefile Size and Max Pagefile size. I don't really understand what I should set to what.

 

EDIT: Yes it seems strange my second GPU is reading so low...

[dburne]

Ok, both my BIOS and Windows recognize my 16G's. I'll mess around with it and see if there's a difference. Just another question, there is Initial Pagefile Size and Max Pagefile size. I don't really understand what I should set to what.

 

If I were going to manually set something, I would probably go 8gb initial and 16 gb max just for testing purposes...

[dburne]

Also check and make sure your video card is not downclocking on you, I have no idea on how AMD cards work, I know with Nvidia if they reach their max power target they can down-clock on ya, or if they reach a certain threshold on temps as well...

 

With it mainly happening when looking at full mountains, sounds like it is a vram issue or gpu usage issue.

[Ultra]

I'm going to have to play around with it tomorrow. There is definitely something not working correctly, some of my performance numbers don't make any sense. :(

 

Thanks for all the help so far.

[dburne]

Glad to help any way I can, not sure how much help it has been though. Let us know how you make out in your testing tomorrow.

 

I would suggest if not too much trouble try testing with one gpu to see if any difference.