Really Bad Performance On New System. Heat Blur Choppy!!!

[EtherealN]

Capsilus, sorry för the short reply, but i am typing on my phone.

 

The performance difference you see between multiplayer and singleplayer are caused by the server handling dike things. This would indicate either CPU or hdd as a possible source. Have you tried comparing with an empty map?

[capsilus]

Capsilus, sorry för the short reply, but i am typing on my phone.

 

The performance difference you see between multiplayer and singleplayer are caused by the server handling dike things. This would indicate either CPU or hdd as a possible source. Have you tried comparing with an empty map?

 

No problem, thank for the quick reply. I will load some empty maps tonight and test. Will also run a hdd speed test to make sure drive if running well.

 

Does FC2 make a lot of calls to the hdd? I was under the impression that it would go to the hdd at game boot load everything into ram and play. but what you are saying is that it makes calls to the hdd while I'm in game sitting on the runway looking from left to right and only shutters really bad when looking at a specific spot. say on the f15 weapons practice mission looking left at the radar truck while on runway fps is down to 11, when looking right fps is back up to 50+

 

Can you say for certain that my quad Q9400 2.66ghz processor doesn't quite cut it for FC2 and I should get something more like a i7 930 and up.

 

I even overclocked my Q9400 to 3.2ghz, running all my other games even faster the system was very stable and at good temperatures FC2.0 still gave me the same problem. I'm now running at 2.9ghz and very cool.

 

I'm beginning to think that this may be a win 7 problem related to recent patches. I have read on this forum that some people are getting much better performance win 7 pre patch. I think that what I will try next. fresh drive with win 7 and no updates.

 

Cheers. by the way, when can i jump into the a10c? :D

[EtherealN]

FC2 does sometimes have to make a bunch of calls to the HDD. There's also sound calls to the HDD in some circumstances, though this shouldn't cause what you are seeing (it should occur equally in multiplayer).

 

The reason why it has to communicate with the HDD is that it is a 32-bit process, and adress space is limited. So even if you have 16GB of memory the process will only have access to 2GB (or 3-4 under very specific circumstances, I'm a but shady on how those flags work).

 

Your processor should be fine. I get occassional stutters with my processor running at stock (3.16GHz), which would be comparable to your overclocked system, but mainly when "looking someplace new" - for example when I force the engine to load a new patch of terrain for the first time, or look in the direction of an unusually large amount of units.

 

On the A-10C, the current ambition is "2010", so before January 1st for the digital download, unless something unforseen happens. No promises tho - there is that guy named Murphy and I hate him. :P

[Rodney]

FC2 does sometimes have to make a bunch of calls to the HDD. There's also sound calls to the HDD in some circumstances, though this shouldn't cause what you are seeing (it should occur equally in multiplayer).

 

The reason why it has to communicate with the HDD is that it is a 32-bit process, and adress space is limited. So even if you have 16GB of memory the process will only have access to 2GB (or 3-4 under very specific circumstances, I'm a but shady on how those flags work).

 

Your processor should be fine. I get occassional stutters with my processor running at stock (3.16GHz), which would be comparable to your overclocked system, but mainly when "looking someplace new" - for example when I force the engine to load a new patch of terrain for the first time, or look in the direction of an unusually large amount of units.

 

On the A-10C, the current ambition is "2010", so before January 1st for the digital download, unless something unforseen happens. No promises tho - there is that guy named Murphy and I hate him. :P

 

That happens with a lot of games too! Richard Burns Rally and Colin McRae 3 come to mind. One thing I have done to alleviate the problem is to create a Nvidia profile. I set V-Sync "ON", set triple buffering to "ON", threaded optimization to "OFF". Once in the game if it allows me to I bring up Task Manager and set the Priority to "REALTIME". It helps a lot with certain games.

[Moa]

You might also like to ensure that your anisotropic filtering (AF) is lowered to something sensible like 4x. If you have it at 16x it will make a noticeable difference in fps on the ground. I noticed that even my Radeon 5970 was brought to its knees in LockOn if I had AF up at max. Turning it down made things a lot smoother. I didn't notice this problem in Armed Assault: Operation Arrowhead (could run with AF on max) but I think that LockOn has far more polygons on screen in general (being mostly at ground level Arma gets to make some optmizations - and when it is in the air the visibility range is tiny compared to LockOn - plus it can use all four of your cores as well). Also check anti-aliasing (AA) is not too high either. You might have a faster machine but they never seem quite fast enough to run with all the LockOn settings on max as well as all the graphics card renderings on max too.

 

Also make sure the number of frames being pre-rendered is not high. I set mine to zero, since when you really need the frames, during a furball, you are turning quickly and the pre-rendered frames are probably wasted effort.

 

The difference between the multiplayer experience on the 104th and the single player experience may be because the multiplayer server may be reducing your visibility distance or world detail level (required to prevent a player with a bad computer introducing a lot of lag to all other players). I haven't checked with the 104th admins, but this is likely to be the case (and explain what you are seeing). You could confirm this by seeing if there is a frame rate increase if you decrease the view distance and world detail in a single player mission you create.

[capsilus]

That happens with a lot of games too! Richard Burns Rally and Colin McRae 3 come to mind. One thing I have done to alleviate the problem is to create a Nvidia profile. I set V-Sync "ON", set triple buffering to "ON", threaded optimization to "OFF". Once in the game if it allows me to I bring up Task Manager and set the Priority to "REALTIME". It helps a lot with certain games.

 

Thanks Rodney, I did what you suggested but no change. Still when I load say F15 air to air weapons practice I get high frame rates looking to the right but when I sweep over to the left looking at other planes on runway and radar truck fps drops for 90+ to 10.

[capsilus]

You might also like to ensure that your anisotropic filtering (AF) is lowered to something sensible like 4x. If you have it at 16x it will make a noticeable difference in fps on the ground. I noticed that even my Radeon 5970 was brought to its knees in LockOn if I had AF up at max. Turning it down made things a lot smoother. I didn't notice this problem in Armed Assault: Operation Arrowhead (could run with AF on max) but I think that LockOn has far more polygons on screen in general (being mostly at ground level Arma gets to make some optmizations - and when it is in the air the visibility range is tiny compared to LockOn - plus it can use all four of your cores as well). Also check anti-aliasing (AA) is not too high either. You might have a faster machine but they never seem quite fast enough to run with all the LockOn settings on max as well as all the graphics card renderings on max too.

 

Also make sure the number of frames being pre-rendered is not high. I set mine to zero, since when you really need the frames, during a furball, you are turning quickly and the pre-rendered frames are probably wasted effort.

 

The difference between the multiplayer experience on the 104th and the single player experience may be because the multiplayer server may be reducing your visibility distance or world detail level (required to prevent a player with a bad computer introducing a lot of lag to all other players). I haven't checked with the 104th admins, but this is likely to be the case (and explain what you are seeing). You could confirm this by seeing if there is a frame rate increase if you decrease the view distance and world detail in a single player mission you create.

 

Hey Moa, my AA is only set to 4x and AF is at 2x. I even had them off to see if there was a difference and there was none. Why this whole thing bugs me, if there was a clear bottle neck, and with low settings I could see a difference in performance then I would not be pursuing this at all.

 

I will play around with the pre-render frames and change it from 3 to 0 just in case.

[capsilus]

Hi Everyone. Ok, so I went out and got a new hdd, seagate 7200rpm.

I set up a fresh copy for win 7 ultimate x64 and this time I did not do any of the updates so it's a pre patch version. Only thing I installed was the latest Nvidia display drivers and LOMAC + FC2.

 

Same low fps shutter problem on single player maps as on my other partition.

 

I think it's my quad core Q9400 clocked to 2.9ghz and 465 GTX super clocked just don't cut it for FC2.

 

So next month I'm getting i7 960 and will try with 465 GTX, I hope this will give me the performance I want.

 

What card is better for FC2, nvidia or ati ?

 

For now I'm going to tweak with the graphics config file and lower some of the terrain features / etc.

[EtherealN]

Well, this is very weird. Your hardware really should be quite able to handle this. The only thing I've seen that is similar is half a second or so of microstutter when I (immediately after startup) look at a new direction (irrespective of what's there - just the terrain loading). I do however have the pre-caching features of Vista disabled on my machine since I don't like it filling my RAM with whatever it wants. :P

 

For FC2, I'd say nVidia have the best track record. There are a lot of issues affecting DCS and FC2 with AMD's Catalyst AI feature and on older cards OpenGL drivers. Fortunately the Catalyst AI stuff can be turned off quite easy so that should not dissuade you.

 

For general use it pains me to say but I think AMD (they've now decided to drop the ATi brand name for future cards) is best value for money - especially if you are the one paying the electricity bills.

 

I still think that your specification really should not have any issues, but if you are decided on upgrading (I should ditch this old 775 scrapheap sometime too, but at 4GHz there's just nothing out there that makes it say uncle so I have issues defending the expense), I'd say go for the i7 930 instead of the 960. The only difference between the 930 and 960 is 0.4GHz of clock - it is literally the exact same silicon, but with a different default and max Multiplier, but adding 250 dollars to the pricetag.

 

For that money you can buy yourself a good case (100 dollars) and a good aftermarket cooler (50 dollars) and crank the 930 up to 4GHz, way outperforming the 960's stock performance. (Or just stay with the standard cooler and overclock it up to the 3.2GHz of the 960.)

[Rodney]

Hi Everyone. Ok, so I went out and got a new hdd, seagate 7200rpm.

I set up a fresh copy for win 7 ultimate x64 and this time I did not do any of the updates so it's a pre patch version. Only thing I installed was the latest Nvidia display drivers and LOMAC + FC2.

 

Same low fps shutter problem on single player maps as on my other partition.

 

I think it's my quad core Q9400 clocked to 2.9ghz and 465 GTX super clocked just don't cut it for FC2.

 

So next month I'm getting i7 960 and will try with 465 GTX, I hope this will give me the performance I want.

 

What card is better for FC2, nvidia or ati ?

 

For now I'm going to tweak with the graphics config file and lower some of the terrain features / etc.

 

Well, this is very weird. Your hardware really should be quite able to handle this.

 

I second what EtherealN says. Your hardware should be way more than enough for FC2. One thing i'd like to add which I forgot to mention but someone else did is to try setting your Maximum pre-rendered frames to = 0, you can also experiment with 8 to test maximum extreme settings.

 

My hunch is it's the 64 bit Nvidia drivers. Even though I have 4GB of ram I'm running W7 32bit. I was having serious stuttering issues with certain games. Once I switched over to 32 bit, things got much better.

 

If I were going to replace my Nvidia 9800GTX+ i'd get the GTX 460 because it's running on the much newer GF 104 GPU chip. They are faster, run cooler, require less power than the GF 100 GPU's.

 

If you are in the US Newegg.com was running a special for the MSI Cyclone 1GB overclocked card $204 after rebate with free shipping.

[Slayer]

Get back to the basics Id say. When you installed the new processor did you clear CMOS and go through each setting? Have you checked for a newer BIOS? You might be missing a microcode update for your chip or something. Sounds to be processor related. On the flip side your graphics card could be causing the issue, I know for instance that my board would not work with GTX470's and 480's until they released a BIOS update.

 

Also with Windows 7 you should go into power options and make sure it's set for high performance(under advanced settings there are many things that affect the processor). If not it could be impacting performance as cores ramp up and down or your harddrive could be going to a low power state etc etc

Edited September 8, 2010 by Slayer