inexus

Using a 3080 running in 4K I never see the GPU being fully utilized. Usually around 50-60% load. This is with all graphics details cranked to max. The 30 series are dropping rapidly in price these days as the new 40 series will come out soon so they are clearing their stock. 

SB Pro is very CPU limited. 

Hej allesammen. Selv om jeg har boet downunder for mere end tyve år jeg har stadigvæk brug for dansk tastatur nogen gange 

Ran the new installer and after a while it used up all the space on my C drive.... trying to find out now what it dropped over there because the downloader appeared to download the files into the folder from which the installer ran (which was on the F drive).

update: Assuming it was some temporary data that got cleaned up after I killed the installer. 

Now when re-running it and it runs the installer for the maps it shows the existing path in the installer which is great but it complains about there isn't enough space as it for some reason uses the C drive to check. 

It was taken while playing. I sometimes use a reshade filter that blurs what isn't in focus which what was used above. 

On 12/22/2019 at 8:08 AM, MisterCommander said:

I have seen the requirements on the website for a GPU, such as a GeForce 10x0.

 

I am currently running an Intel Core i-5 (6 cores) 8th generation CPU with the integrated Intel UHD Graphics 630.  It actually does a pretty decent job. I was surprised of its quality for being integrated.  Frame rates are in the 40-50s.  I also have 32GB of RAM and it can share up to 16GB for video, so, RAM is not an issue.  I have never seen the entire system use more than 8GB during the game.

 

My problem though is that display seems a bit herky-jerky at times since I have installed version 4.162 of SB.  And sometimes the video will freeze for about a second, but everything else, like audio, keeps going without stutter.  I have the graphics settings in the game about as low as they can go and still have an image, and in terms of visual quality I am fine with this.

 

I am not a frame rate whore, so 60+fps at full graphics detail is not my goal, but I am willing to try a GeForce 1050 or 1060, (maybe even a 1030), if you think it is worth the $200 or so.  So, I am wondering what a few of you are running that you are happy with.  If you tell me that I need to spend $500+ for a GPU alone, that is not going to happen.  I know that I will already need to upgrade my power supply if I put in a higher-end GPU.

If the only thing you play is sbpro then I suggest you may save some money by buying an older GPU. But if you have any interest in any other games and future games then consider the nvidia 10* series of cards. A 1060 as Ssnake suggest is a good middle ground. 

I'm running a 2080TI, 9900KF@5ghz and the game is very CPU limited and has little time to refresh the screen. As soon as units start driving the fps drops a fair bit. 

- Increase the max size of maps - preferably unlimited. 

- Ability to change (or simply make) the line for routes thicker (hard to see on higher resolutions).

- shortcut: When creating a route have a sub menu for selecting the formation at the same time (instead of having to find the small triangle and set it there each time). 

- Improve path logic so that vehicles no longer trying to drown themselves each time they see a bit of water

10 hours ago, jena73 said:

correct, but its strange:

i gave correct order...march, column, slow..but all go bad...mah!

Did you snap your route to the road? It will ensure you make your vehicles follow the correct path. 

Not sure what the difference is. I've seen a few people having this issue in various applications so I'm not sure if it is tied to the CPU model or similar. I'm running an I7 5820K. 

I re-installed the patch again and the same issue is happening again. 

Installed update yesterday. Following when launching SB it wouldn't load (black screen for a couple of seconds and then back to the desktop). Uninstalled the update and SB would load again. 

Details on content of the update: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4512508/windows-10-update-kb4512508

Crash dump below for the error: 

39 minutes ago, Gibsonm said:

 

Refer my signature block.

 

Yes the funding model certainly is - There is a through life support model to refresh the boxes every few years (usually 3+ years per refresh). We don't spend great slabs of tax payer's money trying to be on the bleeding edge.

 

I'm just saying that making the sort of sweeping assumptions / statements that you did aren't necessarily correct and if you spend lots of time building these new HiRes mods, you maybe disappointed that they:

 

a. Aren't used by "everyone" and

b. Aren't necessarily rolled into subsequent SB releases (since its pretty much the one core product with a Mil Spec and Commercial variants).

 

But by all means keep going and I hope at least some people use them.

 

I'm also wary of "allow us to import new static structures into the maps: The details to maps can be greatly enhanced through this" as there is a trade off between "prettiness" and "playability".

 

A town full of street furniture, walls, hedges, etc. (dare I saw "cluttered") tends to be a nightmare for AI path finding.

 

My suggestions were intended as constructive ideas to enhance the base offering of SB to provide more realism and immersion.

Your reply shows why people give up being part of this community if anything about SB that isn’t 100% positive.

32 minutes ago, Gibsonm said:

FYI, I'd be wary of comments like "made for the days when everybody were using 1080p; this isn’t what most people use today."

 

I know my copy runs at 1920  x 1280 and I have a fleet of several hundred boxes (6 sites, 200+ boxes per site) at work that don't even work at that.

 

Indeed this is one of the reasons why we like SB, it doesn't require state of the art graphics cards or monitors, with resulting massive hardware refreshing every year or so.

 

So while you may think 4K or 8K is the "norm" it doesn't extend across the planet.

 

I am not referring to 4K. I think it is safe to say that 1440 is more standard these days. SB doesn't run anywhere near any normal framerate on any modern PC, so I don't understand the argument that it runs well on older machines unless it is with reducing every single graphics setting to minimal 

With 'at work' does it refer to military usage of PCs? If that's the case then the funding model is quite different  

2 minutes ago, Gibsonm said:

So what are you waiting for ....

 

Hehe, yeah I'm trying to start on textures now. I will see if there are some websites that already have these (without copyright issues of course) and can be brought across to steel beasts. I watched the tutorial from ToyguyVT which is a starting point for missions. 

Thank you guys! Now I just need to practise how to make the textures. I really think when playing at higher resolutions the default skins look very ‘blurry’ which I’m guessing is because of their lower resolution.. 

Really nice screenshots mate. 

I think quite a lot can be done by our community to improve the perception of steel beasts and draw in new players. 

- more photos that brings out the good looking features of steel beasts: I find googling for steel beasts often being up older photos. 

- new single player missions to replace to existing ones: The missions seem quite old and perhaps they are using older and not refreshed maps. I found that only be go through map after map I started to find some good looking maps and went like ‘wow, steel beasts can actually look good’. Also a good theme makes a big difference.

- new higher resolution skins for the vehicles for download: the existing skins appear to still be made for the days when everybody were using 1080p; this isn’t what most people use today.

- allow us to import new static structures into the maps: The details to maps can be greatly enhanced through this. Perhaps can be part of the new delta map approach to pull in custom assets. 

Sorry for a long reply but I feel much can be done to improve and promote steel beasts and get new players and thereby more business for esims. A win-win

Is it possible to increase the texture resolution by modding the textures for say vehicles? 

I tried increasing a dds file for the challenger from 1024x1024 to 2048x2048 and it appeared to be rendered correctly. 

20 hours ago, Hoover said:

I confirm what you wrote . I use 4K and most of the time the sim runs great at 30-50 fps. As you, I have sudden drops in fps to a one-digit. Sometimes it‘s just traversing the turret left or right or looking through the optics and 💥 from 35 to 7 fps. I played with the idea to buy a quicker cpu, but as you I came to the conclusion that this would improve the framerate just a bit and not solve the problem. Conclusion: The only options a user with 4K has is...

•  to reduce the resolution (what in my case will never happen)
• wait, for a solution from esim

Specs:

4K (3840x2160) resolution in a medium size scenario I get about a nice 40-60 fps

• System: Win 10 Pro / 64bit,

  • Ram: 32 GB

  • CPU i7-5960X 3 GHz

  • GPU NVIDIA GTX 1080 Ti

Changing the resolution has almost no impact (at least if your gpu is not fully utilised at 4K which is my case). I provided screenshots earlier to demonstrate the difference in resolutions. 

In the weekend I tested the same scenario with differences in cpu speed. 4.4, 4.0 and 3.5ghz. I measured only a minor difference in FPS. Based on extrapolation of this data I believe that a scenario with say 30 FPS today on a 4.4ghz cpu may be 4-5 frames faster running at 5ghz. 

For me ‘playable’ in a pro means at least 40+ FPS. In any other sim/game I go for 60 FPS. 

An interesting thing is that going to the map view often brings back a good improvement of FPS so it feels like the cpu is still doing a fair amount of the graphics. 

After having reading people's results and I've tested a large number of different scenarios it seems unlikely that a descent framerate can be achieved even on the fastest overclocked CPUs and GPUs today unless the missions are fairly small in terms of landscape complexity and units. I've given up the idea of upgrading to a 9900K@5Ghz as I only think it would provide a few more fps.

It's really hard to poinpoint what is causing the slowdown. I had a scenario where changing ground cover from 44 to 45 would make the fps drop 10 frames from 40 to 30. If i reverted the value to 44 it would go back up to 40... 

On 7/31/2019 at 2:19 PM, Volcano said:

Well, to be clear, you can technically mod trees branch textures, but as far as official community games on SB.com (such as TGIF) -- altering tree or bush textures will cause that person to be banned from community games, due to the tactical implications of changing these textures to increase visibility, which also includes modifying vehicles textures to make them "high vis" as well. This would be discovered via the host screenshots.  Of course if you don't play SB.com community games then so what, I guess, but its considered cheating if you play with others with modified textures like this.

 

But before, just two days after 4.1 release, we start talking about modifying tree textures (which is generally frowned upon), you should know that there are actually several types of new pine trees in SB. For a "less bushy" European pine tree just use the map themes with "Europe" in the name. Examples:

 

_eSim_Woodland_(Europe-summer)

_eSim_Woodland_(Europe-summer)_high vis woods

 

There are actually quite a few new tree types.  A good starting place would be to take the _eSim_ prefix themes and edit them to your own liking, since tree types cannot be changed from default in general, but the "Europe" themes have less bushy (non-north American) pines, while the _eSim_Arid_(Africa-dry) theme has the African trees and termite mounds (it also has the Australian trees included like the other map themes do).

 

That said, the default pine tree should also be OK for Europe, but the European style tree is included for those that are picky.

 

 

Thank you! I'll have a look at that!

For people having Nvidia based cards I suggest using something like MSI afterburner 4.6 as it allows you a detailed breakdown of how your GPU and CPU resources are utilized and point you towards where you may have any system bottlenecks for fps. 

https://www.guru3d.com/files-details/msi-afterburner-beta-download.html

On 7/30/2019 at 11:14 AM, thewood said:

One thing I noticed in my first run through with APS is that they do impact APFSDS, but only reduce the energy or penetration.  Had a BMP-3 fire off an APS round at a sabot and hit it, but the remnants still killed the BMP-3.  Happened three times.   Even TOWs went on to hit T-80s, but with almost no energy.  That is cool.

 

 I came across this video on youtube. Appear to be very effective

On 8/1/2019 at 1:25 PM, AKA_Clutter said:

OK, a newbie results that fully following all the guides.

 

My settings are at the default with a screen resolution of 2560 x 1440 and I ran the scenario for about 12 minutes.  I did bounce around to the 3 different spots, went to different positions and used the different sights.  Although I did get the FPS to show (via the menu and not the key press), I also used FRAPS to record the framerates.

 

Results are :

 

Frames	Time (ms)	Min	Max	Avg
45781	766579	17	64	59.721
	12.7 minutes

 

Of the 765 fps recorded, there was only one"17, one 21, on 37, and two 39 fps.  the rest were > 40  with over 600 recorded at > 60 fps. 

System specifications are: WIN 10 Pro, I7 8700k @ 4.8 GHs, 64GB 3600 RAM, EVGA 1080 ( 8 GB VRAM), Predator 27" 1440P and running for a SSD.

 

I plan on tweaking the setting and rerunning the scenario.

 

 

@AKA_Clutter - Does any of your CPU cores max out? I'm curious to find out whether it's worth upgrading to run with a 5ghz CPU. 

Here is a comparison between 4K and 1080P. There is not really any difference in fps between the two. 

All graphical details are maxed out (i.e. 16AA, shadows at 10, road level at 5, etc). The load on the GPU is around 40%

If I max out general, ground and terrain details it doesn't impact the fps (maybe 1 fps diff). 

System: 2080TI, 5820K@4.4ghz (6 core, HT not enabled), 16GB DDR4. 

17 hours ago, Ssnake said:

I'm not sure if the discussion of "why" is leading anywhere. I trust that our programmers are doing the best they can under a whole host of limiting factors (such as still having to work with the DirectX 9 framework).

 

So, let's focus on what can be done in practice. You have a machine that should be able to run Steel Beasts with great framerates if you're willing to compromise with the settings in the one or other place.

1. Screen resolution. You may not like this advice, but you'll instantly boost your frames by switching to 1920x1080 resolution or similar, rather than running at 4K (where the text and the icons are too small anyway)
2. Pull the ground clutter slider down. 20 is "good enough" in my opinion, but in any case, if you're noticing a substantial reduction at "40+" it's pretty obvious that you should keep it at "under 40".
3. Consider reducing the shadow mapping level to 5...7
4. Maybe a different antialiasing mode still delivers acceptable quality at better frames. If you set the regular antialiasing slider to "0" you can try out the alternative modes.

Thanks for the suggestions Nils. I will try them out and report back.

I've tried to lower the resolution to 2560x1440 and it had little impact. My monitor is 43" so 4K isn't that tiny  I tried various antialiasing options in SbPro as well as using reshade and it has no impact on the fps as the GPU is never utilised fully; It's definitively tied to the CPU usage hitting nearly 100%. I'm contemplating to upgrade to a 9700-K@5Ghz and see how much that would help.

I will try some more scenarios and see if I can possibly narrow it down more. 

11 hours ago, Hoover said:

Further impressions:

• maybe it's fantasy, but the scene lighting looks much better
  • more immersive,
  • especially with a large screen
• greatly improved bouncing roadwheels together with the new terrain engine make vehicles in motion optically heavy
• main gun firing picks up a lot of dust, looks great
• path finding is much better now, the player or the AI can overtake now other vehicles without traffic chaos or slowing down
• incoming artillery graphics effects are spectacular
• SB is a lot quicker than in previous versions.
• with 4K (3840x2160) resolution in a medium size scenario I get about a nice 40-60 fps

  • System: Win 10 Pro / 64bit,

    • Ram: 32 GB

    • CPU i7-5960X 3 GHz

    • GPU NVIDIA GTX 1080 Ti

• improved framerates lead to a much easier and fluent targeting of the enemy

• 4.1 - the dot one extension is the understatement of the year!😄

 

What is medium size? I find that a number of the single player scenarios runs at a low fps around 25-30. Others runs ok, so I wonder if there is some difference in the maps or scenario data causing such large differences - i.e. what the CPU is doing as it is always the bottleneck while the GPU is idling. I even turned on real time ray tracing shaders and, as I'm guessing there is no global illumination, (after all nothing apart from vehicles have shadows) it had no impact. 

I run with 4.4Ghz, 4K, 16GB, 2080TI and often only get around 30fps. The 'ground cover' slider is the biggest fps killer once it hit 40+ I don't understand why as it appear more as simply sprites duplicates than anything that would cause the CPU to make more calculations.