Jump to content

Ghost

Recommended Posts

First off my system specs

AMD X2 6000 (3ghz)

Geforce 8800GTX (768mb)

4096 MB RAM

RAID 0 harddrive configuration

Windows Vista 64 Ultimate

Latest video card drivers from nvidia

SB 2.460

I am experiencing extreme FPS slowdowns and stuttering when i unbutton my TC, the worst when i unbutton fully (standing up)

I have no other problems with low fps in SB, when in external view or when the tc is buttoned i have very good FPS, mostly around 62.50 droping to 50, i have tried fiddling with the terrain sliders to no help, but as soon as i unbutton my TC the FPS crashdives to between 11 and 7, i can be looking at exactly the same scenery in external with no problems whatsoever but as soon i go to TC view it drops.

Another thing that comes with it is a bad case of stuttering and im not talking about the slowdown caused by the FPS drop, it's the kind that freezes the whole image for a milisecond or two every couple of seconds, hard to explain but hopefully you'll understand what i mean.

I'm gonna do more investigative work when i get home today, if anybody knows anything about this issue let me know.

Ssnake let me know if theres anything i can do to make things easier for you, any logs from dxdiag or something similar.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Replies 64
  • Created
  • Last Reply

Top Posters In This Topic

I also get very dramatic FPS drops as soon as there is artillery fire causing massive smoke.

The reason why its so dramatic from the TC view is imho simply because there you have the biggest FOV to calculate. If i use binocs or button up or use optics FPS goes up again.

Hell, even on 800*600 my rig gets down to ~ 12-15 FPS.

RIG:

C2D 6600

4GB RAM

NVIDIA GT250

WINXP

Ssnake: Is this more a problem off CPU-demand or GPU?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I experienced the same problems yesterday and tried various game settings. A combination of detail settings and ingame effects (smoke from artillery, woods) seems to be the cause.

I can play the game smoothly (62.5 fps) with all three detail sliders at 100. As soon as HE rounds are hitting the ground near me and I'm facing the smoke, FPS drops are huge (4-5 total fps) and the game gets unplayable.

If i decrease the ground clutter slider, the game gets playable again. Surprisingly only the HE rounds are causing this issue on my system. I've tried extensive usage of smoke, units, fire, and smoke from destroyed vehicles. Those doesn't affect the performance at all.

And i've made another interesting observation:

Someone in another thread mentioned that the overall performance on certain maps is quite bad. One of those is "Hasty Defense 01 - Classic Map". So i tried the scenario and indeed, performance was horrible (15 fps on average detail settings). I've played with the detail sliders a little bit (ald+d) and set them to the following values: 50, 20, 1. FPS were back to normal (62.5 fps).

If I now try to increase one of those sliders just by 1 Point, FPS drops back to 15. If i keep increasing them all the was to 100, fps just stays at 15, even if i max out all three.

System Specs:

OS: Vista 64

RAM 6 GB

CPU: Intel Core2Duo E8500 3.17 GHz

Graphics: Nvidia 9800GTX+

Sound: Creative X-FI Fatal1ty

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Moderators

And i've made another interesting observation:

Someone in another thread mentioned that the overall performance on certain maps is quite bad. One of those is "Hasty Defense 01 - Classic Map". So i tried the scenario and indeed, performance was horrible (15 fps on average detail settings). I've played with the detail sliders a little bit (ald+d) and set them to the following values: 50, 20, 1. FPS were back to normal (62.5 fps).

If I now try to increase one of those sliders just by 1 Point, FPS drops back to 15. If i keep increasing them all the was to 100, fps just stays at 15, even if i max out all three.

I can tell you (since I made the scenario) that the map in "Hasty Defense 01" was made with Dark's old map maker program. The old map maker seeded terrain tiles which has the appearance of it being "sprayed" on the map in various places like a speckle brush spray can in a graphics editor so there are lots of individual terrain tiles here and there with different terrain. Trees are also layed invidually in many cases. This does translate to lower FPS on these types of maps, so there is really no other explanation for it other than certain maps WILL offer fewer FPS because of how they are made. Other than that, I am just saying that some maps will offer drastic frame rate differences.

A common factor here seems to be nVidia cards again...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Members

In order to help the frame rate, use contiguous forests wherever possible, eventually skirted with a rim of other trees for some visual variety. Ground tiles don't make much of a difference as far as I know (but what do I know...). Likewise, I still recommend avoiding large villages/cities with many (and densely placed) houses. We are working on solutions that will make city rendering more efficient, but like so many other things this takes some time.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Out of curiosity i wanted to know if my problems are OS, Driver or Hardware issue. So i got my Windows XP working again (Had an Creative sound driver issue, but thats another story). I've just finished some testing on "Hasty Defence 01"-Map. Here are the results:

Slider Setting: 90, 70, 40

NVidia Driver Version FPS:

174.74 ~33

175.16 ~35

175.19 ~32

178.13 ~36

178.24 ~35

180.48 ~36

181.20 ~38

181.22 ~37

182.06 ~39

182.08 ~39

182.50 ~40

The frame rate ist much better on XP, even with quite high detail settings. And drivers doesn't seem to be the problem. Interestingly enough, i noted a totally different behavior on XP: For every slider increase, i get a little decrease in FPS (thats what one should expect). So no more big performance hits on slight detail setting change.

I've tested the drivers with the following workflow:

- Boot System

- Deinstall NVIDIA driver

- Run NVidia Nasty File remover

- Reboot

- Install new driver

- Reboot

- Start Steel Beasts and play

- Note FPS

@Volcano

I know that the Scenario has a huge affact on FPS. What i wanted to illustrate is the strange behavior. The apllication performance does not seem to scale with detail settings on my Vista, on XP it does scale with the settings. I just picked your map because it hat the worst performance on my system. I thought that it might help me figuering out what went wrong.

Looks like im back on XP while playing SB Pro :)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Moderators

One thing to mention here:

I would *never* max out your detail sliders to 100. With a high resolution setting like 1680x1050 or so, then it will likely bring any system to its knees. There is a known issue about the manner in which buildings are drawn (which is on the list to be overhauled), and this is compounded even further when the detail sliders are maxed out. HE artillery will drop the fps by 5-10 or so simply becuase there is a lot of smoke, dust and splash effects going on. This combined with maxing out all detail sliders would certainly make it unplayable unless you are operating at lower resolutions.

I would recommend putting all sliders at default, then maxing at only the Ground Cover slider if anything. You will probably get the best visual effect to speed trade off; you just can't really expect to max out all the detail sliders and have a "playable" experience. That said, we are of course looking into strange fps drop issues though, and any problems that might be related to detail sliders.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Moderators

Another thing I realized too, make sure that something called "Adaptive Anti-Aliasing" (if you have it) is disabled. This performs antialiasing for transparent textures and can wreak havoc on the frame rate with all the grass and tree textures. I suspect this has nothing to do with this thread, it is something that I came across on an ATI card which improved frame rates dramatically.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I have instaklled SB in my laptop running Vista 32 and with a ressolution of 1440 x900 at 32 and I run the sim at a steady 30 to 40 fps all the time.

I have s built in Nvidia card 8600 GS M and it works real nice.

However I would like to suggest to all Nvidia Users to try this program to help tunning their Nvidia Card

NHANCER

This has been the solution to all my Nvidia trobles since long ago.

You can run the sim and do Alt+tab, change some settings in your Video card and inmediately see the effect in your game and fps performance.

it is a great tool for tunning an specific profile for for each sim/game for your Nvidia.

On SB I discovered that on the Antialising, Sb only likes Multisampling and I can run the sim at 16xQ, however if I try supersampling or Combined the FPS drops dramatically.

Nhancer is free and would allow you to try as many profiles for your sim while ingame so you do not need to restart the sim everytime and once you find the best balance to your sim vs video card it will store it so if you create a profile, everytime you launch that specific sim, Nhancer will "tunne" your Nvidia card to the best settings to that specific Sim.

It really makes a difference on Nvidia cards

Link to comment
Share on other sites

thanks for the info Furia, but i think this problems is not really about people running on to weak hardware getting low fps because of that, many of the FPS issues are very irratical, like my slowdown from the TC view, somebody mentioned that it had to do with the larger FOV from TC position, because the FPS goes back up when you use binos, problem is I should be experiencing the same thing in external view (F8) but i don't.

I would guess this is some combination of an SB bug/compatibilty problem with Vista 64. Could also be driver related, but just to clear things up im not experiencing the same problems as the guys with the GTX260/280 cards, who have very low fps all over on Vista 64bit systems

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Moderators

Well, FWIW, here is the latest community fps test results (see attached .zip file). Thanks to everyone that took the few minutes to test this.

You can't really say the fps is erratic across the board in every case, but you can say that it is erratic across the board on nVidia cards. It looks like ATI cards are more consistent in their frame rates. I have apparently stubled across the ideal video card too... which seems to be an ATI Radeon 4780 for the time being. Two of these together with CrossfireX is the ideal setup it seems.

Also, I may as well mention this here (I don't know where else to mention it): if anyone is using CrossfireX then you MUST be in fullscreen mode for it to utilize this feature. This is probably obvious but I was not aware of this and was playing it in windowed mode and, to my dismay, seeing no noticable fps increase when I thought Crossfire was working.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

What i still want to point out is that these things even happen to me on 800*600 or 600*400. I dont think anyone who posted about the FPS-drops in this thread has a rig so weak that it shouldnt be possible to play on decent FPS in 600*400. And even on this with settings set to 0 it gets almost unplayble.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Well, FWIW, here is the latest community fps test results (see attached .zip file). Thanks to everyone that took the few minutes to test this.

Hi Volcano,

thanks for the figures. Is it possible to add the architecture (32-/64-Bit) for the Vista Systems? Some just say Vista.

Is it possible to download the testsetup somewhere, so i can get comparable results?

Raskil

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Moderators

The ones that just say "Vista" are (presumably) the 32 bit version. All the 64 bit versions of Vista should say "Vista 64" or something similar.

Sure, we can make the frame rate test available again (I think it already is, but we have to update the document), let me get back to you on that...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Moderators

Yes, actually we see an issue with the Ground Cover slider. If it is set above 35.4 some strange things start to happen including graphics anomalies on some graphics cards and drastic slow downs on others (or both). The sliders *should* be set at Defaults (50.5 for the General and Ground) and then no higher than 34.3 for the Ground Cover. Sorry about that and we will look into the issue.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Yes, actually we see an issue with the Ground Cover slider. If it is set above 35.4 some strange things start to happen including graphics anomalies on some graphics cards and drastic slow downs on others (or both). The sliders *should* be set at Defaults (50.5 for the General and Ground) and then no higher than 34.3 for the Ground Cover. Sorry about that and we will look into the issue.

Nothing to be sorry for with me, it's a program. No matter how much developers try there will always be a bug hideing somewhere.

The funny thing is I upped the ground cover to 40 and have a steady FPS of 62.5. Doesn't seem to jump around as much as it did, and I set the graphics card to high quality. LOL

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Moderators
Nothing to be sorry for with me, it's a program. No matter how much developers try there will always be a bug hideing somewhere.

The funny thing is I upped the ground cover to 40 and have a steady FPS of 62.5. Doesn't seem to jump around as much as it did, and I set the graphics card to high quality. LOL

Ok, just be on the look out for disappearing trees on some maps while looking through the GPS view (if you come across this then you will notice trees popping in and out of the GPS view, but it probably only occurs on very dense maps). If you see this happening then you will need to lower the Ground Cover down to ~34 or so.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Members

Technical background: There is an upper limit to the total number of plant and ground clutter objects to be drawn per scene. If the total number of trees and ground clutter objects exceed a certain threshold - 40,000 I think - the most distant objects get deleted from the rendering queue (which tend to be trees).

To that extent there is no fixed "safe" limit like "35.4" for the slider settings, as much will depend on the density of ground clutter objects per terrain type and therrain theme. With a density of 5 for ground clutter the slider can be higher before trees get deleted in the distance than if the density was set to 50 or more.

Another performance relevant question is what type the ground clutter is. Stones/boulders/pebbles are relatively uncritical as they do not involve transparency. Grass and bushes do. Hence, with lots of them around transparency anti-aliasing will require considerably more GPU cycles than with objects that have no or fewer transparent elements.

Generally I think that no modern card should suffer from the ground geometry slider being at 100% (which avoides noticeable hill/ridge line popping), and the same applies to ground textures (although I can't see a noticeable difference between 100% and maybe 75%, so why go beyond that). Ground clutter I keep at about 15% usually. That's sufficient to indicate the type of terrain yet low enough to avoid critical situations with respect to performance.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.


×
×
  • Create New...