1.30.0.16 odd FPS drop

[MWHITMAN]

A few of us have notice a FPS drop when facing certain directions in towns.

For example in Montfacon if you look SE I drop from 50 FPS to 30. Look any other direction and it stays at 50 FPS.

It looks like it must be a building, or block of buildings, maybe the normal map on them, but you just can't seam to tie it down to which building is causing this.

Easy to repeat, and maybe something worth looking into.

[OLDZEKE]

Just to add, from af as para look all directions. When you look sse toward town fps will drop 1/2 to 2/3rds. You can walk towards lowest fps heading and it takes you right to the town.

[abidubi]

Try looking for tall grass in that direction. I get FPS slowdowns from tall grass on both the mac and PC client. In a small town on PC client it takes me from 80ish to 60ish. That was just a medium sized field though. Might make the difference between 30 and 20 FPS.

[gaff]

Also look at the same spot in the current game, the tall grass is probably the issue and is similar on the current server. I get the same fps in the current spot testing offline in montfaucon looking and running through the tall grass as I do on the current version testing offline.

[RedRebel]

I also noticed this to an extent.

Lifting directly North from Antwerp airfield. Looking north FPS fine at around 50. Look East towards Schilde direction and it drops to 5 FPS.

[abidubi]

Was the sun rising? Was it in your field of view? I know it hits FPS hard on the mac client, not so bad on PC (205 down to 170, or 60 down to 30 in big battles 1.29) but who knows, maybe certain video cards get hit harder.

[DOC]

View frustrum. What's being rendered when you look in any direction ? Towns have magnitudes more polygons and triangles when you render them compared to open country. This isn't new for v1.30 it's always been that way. Stand outside Antwerp and look away with the city behind you, then turn around and look directly at the city. Or any town. Remagen has always been strong in this regard, as it has a lot of buildings in the two towns there (Unkel across the river a very very short distance away) ... other small towns in v1.30 have more buildings in them than v1.29 as part of a recent "very small towns" upgrade. Maubeuge was one of those upgraded. The more buildings and objects you have to render the more pronounced the effect is.

If you want to do some comparitive testing and draw up a profile chart that would if properly controlled and compiled reveal if there is anything different, and maybe what that differance (if any) is, that would be great.

Otherwise all you're saying is it takes more work by your GPU to render 500,000 triangles than it does to render 500, which is not that surprising.

If anything strange is happening, it's going to take some detailed analysis to determine that or not. Going offline to identical points in the terrain and comparing them (v1.29 and v1.30) is always a good start to this kind of evaluative process.

[GOPHUR]

^^agree

Compare offline live vs beta and see if there is a change.

[OLDZEKE]

Using same unit, brit smg, at same location on both offlines/montfalcon NE hanger, touching south faceing, east door with door frame in left side of screen.

1.30.0,16 beta:

Average 56fps looking slightly east of due south, aim point little garage shed building. Turning to due north fps average 95.

Current live version:

Average 75fps looking at above mentioned shed.

Turning north to same north aim point fps average around 95 or very nearly the same as beta version.

E2160 OCed to 2.35ghz

2 gigs ddr ram

9600gt 512 meg ram

win xp pro sp2

plantronics dsp500 headset as primary sound

Have not loaded beta on vista home drive as I can't find a modum driver that will work on vista for this modum but will load it up and check offline in a few.

[DOC]

Try a few other places. Sedan, Dinant, Namur, Tienen and Shilde would be a good start. Make absolutely certain everything is set the same, the v1.30 beta may reconfigure some of your settings, be really really sure that they are identical between v1.29 live and v1.30 beta. Thanks for testing.

[eigenman]

Make sure your settings are exactly the same too.

[OLDZEKE]

OK, I think this is it. New buildings added to one of the building blocks.

This from on top of wab bunk dinant.

In all other directions beta fps are same or slightly higher but looking in the direction of the new buildings you get lower fps (which is understandable as more pollys and textures to handle).

Was getting a bigger hit on mont af due to there being 2 (maybe more) of these new building sets lined up when looking south from the af.

Maybe they are not LOD shifting to low lod/low textures soon enough?

Settings are same both versions.

[gaff]

I wouldn't consider that a huge issue, you have a speedtree and a couple new buildings in view, I'd expect a little drop in FPS.

[DOC]

What concerns me though, is that taking podunk little 10 building towns and improving them to be better and more immersive fun places to play and fight in (which I did to a number of the worst ones I found as I went around fixing bugs) ... should come at that high a price in FPS. I might have expected some loss but not as high as that, for example, in Dinant which had a bunch of stuff there already, and was only rebuilt on that side of the river because it got corrupted in an editor crash.

I'd appreciate a bunch of testing in, say ... those towns I listed (which I know got changed) because ... well worst case scenario I'll trim them back to less buildings if I have to. Shame really, taking a town from 10 buildings to 20 or so really makes it a better place to play. Some of the changes were just to make better alleyway/narrow street layouts that vehicles (tanks) can't use effectively.

In reality 72 FPS going down to 64 FPS doesn't affect THAT player at all. I'd be more worried about the 20 FPS player getting 17 FPS however. We'll have to see how bad this is, I hope it's fairly minor because the improved towns are much better and we'd like to extend this to all the old podunk towns if we can. Some of them are pretty bare from the old "center of the map" days.

[zaltor]

What concerns me though, is that taking podunk little 10 building towns and improving them to be better and more immersive fun places to play and fight in (which I did to a number of the worst ones I found as I went around fixing bugs) ... should come at that high a price in FPS. I might have expected some loss but not as high as that, for example, in Dinant which had a bunch of stuff there already, and was only rebuilt on that side of the river because it got corrupted in an editor crash.

I'd appreciate a bunch of testing in, say ... those towns I listed (which I know got changed) because ... well worst case scenario I'll trim them back to less buildings if I have to. Shame really, taking a town from 10 buildings to 20 or so really makes it a better place to play. Some of the changes were just to make better alleyway/narrow street layouts that vehicles (tanks) can't use effectively.

In reality 72 FPS going down to 64 FPS doesn't affect THAT player at all. I'd be more worried about the 20 FPS player getting 17 FPS however. We'll have to see how bad this is, I hope it's fairly minor because the improved towns are much better and we'd like to extend this to all the old podunk towns if we can. Some of them are pretty bare from the old "center of the map" days.

My fps take a slight very slight hit, but My smt heap errors were all (4 in total) 3 over schilde while looking at town for Panhard, and one over tianen, not sure if its connected or not, memory leak?

[OLDZEKE]

Doc, do'nt these building have LODs and lower textures that swap at longer ranges? I'm assumeing yes.

Reason I ask is that from the north hangers at mont if they are LOD and have a low res texture set i would think they should'nt be hitiing fps at all from that distance. It's aproximately 1.2k from the north hanger to the nearest "town" building.

Tests were with normal maps off on both installs as with normal maps enabled my fps suffer more.

EDIT: I musta miss hit the normal maps setting as it seems it does affect fps in beta version. so referance to beta not accepting "disable normal maps" was my mistake.

Need others to test this as I am running older vid drivers (this mobo will no boot on later than 8x nvidia, it's a known deal and asrock support says it's nvidias prob so use 8x drivers)

[gaff]

There's a tree and bush inside the Maubeuge -Berlemont Depot. Also some of the buildings in Mont are underground a bit, sidewalk goes under the grass.

But it looks like my big frame drop in the new Maubeuge might be the addition of the 3 new factories where previously there was only one, they spit out alot of sprites out of the chimneys for the smoke, so that may be part of the issues.

I'll keep testing.

[OLDZEKE]

Scratch the normal maps thing,I just rechecked dinant and beta version takes more fps hit with normal maps enabled.

All testing here on with normal maps disabled.

Standing on wab bunk at namur looking due north at new buildings in 1.30.0.16 = 58fps.

Live version from same vantage point = 70fps.

[MWHITMAN]

Good news DOC, your town redesigns aren't a issue.

I think Zeke nailed it when he says LOD's.

We could find places where looking in a certain direction would drop your FPS a lot. And those places could be facing the edge of a town with open fileds behand it. Just when you thought you had found what building was causing it when you got close your FPS didn't drop.

I think the issue is related to the mid-distance LOD on one or two buildings. Up close you get no FPS drop, but from 50-100 meters you do.

Hard to totaly isolate what building this is but the one Zeke posted is certainly a candidate.

Back to more testing.

[DOC]

I'll ask the artists to take a look at LOD configurations. However, we have an AWFUL LOT of buildings in the game now, it would be foolish to just have them look at "all of them" trying to find something.

What we need to see if this is actually the issue, is screenshots of the specific buildings in question. I would be sad indeed if the outcome were be to dumb down those new town layouts. However, if it were of the greatest benefit to the most players, I would do it.

Let us hope that's not what it looks like posts are indicating needs to be done.

[vangard7]

I spawned a 109f1 the other day at Montfacon and had 12fps all around.

Restarted the game.

Spawned a 109f1 again and had normal FPS. (70)

[OLDZEKE]

DOC, my best assumption would be a LOD issue on those added buildings. I would suggest checking models LODs as well as texture LOD (if textures are of a LOD type, I have no wy of knowing if the game uses DDS type textures or not).

I can gues at several things but no idea if any guess is in the ballpark. Those new buildings are (or appear to me) to be more polly heavy than the older style...arched windows, roof overhang etc. I understand and expect some fps hit at highest LOD, you can't model higher polly counts and not have some fps hit. Being that the fps remains quite high from distances where the speeed tree objects in the same area drop LOD I would guess that those new buildings are either not dropping LOD or I assume may be double LODing (keeping the high LOD while loading in a lower LOD.

But again it's just guessing.

I have grandkids all day but will try to take a plane up today and see if this fps drop is noticable from different alts. Course with my grandson about he always wants to play my "shooting game" so no sure how much testing I'll get in He so loves roaming about in offline.

[OLDZEKE]

Well after just saying that I may not have time I did repete a test area that MW, myself and another tester checked last night at Namur.

This time though I also didcheck both versions offline (last night we just noted that fps dropped into the high 30s/low 40s there.

Test setup today, disabled all onscreen elements except the fps info hud...no chat, health, mini map.

I ran a brit rifle up south road to 1st bend in road and positioned my avitar on the left side of road on the bend. (3rd person view to verify positioning). I picked a window in a building to set the front sight of my rifle on (unzoomed).

Live 1.29 version was average of 38 fps.

1.30.0.16 version was average of 45 fps.

Soooo, I am at a total loss now as to what is going on.

This needs tested by others.

I want to be helpful but not sure that I am being such.....

[MWHITMAN]

Tried to narrow this down further last night but failed.

Also got some VERY odd results!

Tested standing on the crossroads in the main part of Monfacton town, noting my FPS facing N, S, E & W.

N S E W

1.29 offline 57 61 66 56

1.30 offline 46 62 67 38

1.30 Online 38 55 45 32

Now given things like AI etc with online version I expected to lose a few FPS between 1.30 offline & on, but losing 22 looking East online seamed VERY odd!

Now this is the Strange bit. I went back to retest both 1.29 offline & 1.30

again. When I did this I get results almost exactly the same as for 1.30 online! How is that even possible?

So fo the time being I've given up trying to prove this one way or the other. I'll recheck when .17 is released.

[OLDZEKE]

Yea me too MW. There is just too much about the workings of the game that I have to as to if it's this way or that.

I assume that my computer only renders what textures are actualy in my viewing area or triangle of view. I may even assume that everything pollywise (objects) within a set radius is also loaded and that the texture loads as I pan my view. But I can only guess.

I am not sure it is a building or building block. If it is a building I'm leaning toward the bldg31 as the textures seem to have a speed blur effect when moveing toward or moving side to side when in fairly close view.

But that could be my out dated vid drivers too.