General Performance Drops

[Volt_Cruelerz]

Over the past few patches (more or less since I joined at update 5), I've seen the framerate of this game slowly drop. The game I develop and League (among others) are unaffected, so it's not on my end.

I say this because at this point, the game is more or less unplayable for me unless I turn off everything and reduce the resolution. It's gotten progressively worse and I don't know what to say, but update seven kinda finished things off. I want to play, I really do. I actually like most of the new system. But if my framerate is so low that I can't fire properly and can't sprint, the game is more or less unplayable. I spent about thirty seconds just trying to sprint at a climbing wall earlier just so I could progress through the level. That isn't acceptable.

I don't know what's been happening internally over the past few patches, but it is much slower now than it was two months ago.

This doesn't even account for ice levels or infested levels where there are all sorts of extra things everywhere.

Edited March 21, 2013 by Volt_Cruelerz

[Narog-1]

yes my framerate drop as well

[Soulie]

Yeah, my framerate has dropped into the unplayable range when there's a lot of stuff happening on screen. I thought it was just the new outdoor maps, but after playing the 2 original map types, it's the same there.

[Golgotha]

I am experiencing the same, major FPS drops that usually occur when multiple enemies (5+) are in the same area as me.

I didn't change anything, Same Hardware, same Graphics options, but major FPS loss since update 7.

[DARKKi]

Same goes for me too. What graphic option hurts the framerate worst?

[CubedOobleck]

I'm having FPS drops in U7 when there are too many enemies in one room, though for some reason it doesn't happen on defence missions, which is wierd as defence missions have even more enemies at once.

Though my FPS drop is nothing game breaking like what you are experiencing, but it's definitelly noticeable and annoying.

Edited March 21, 2013 by CubedOobleck

[fratous]

I've started getting FPS drops as well since the 7.1hotfix.

I doesnt appear consistent when the drops occour, but it seems to happen alot in the mining missions.

What also is strange is when the massive fps drop happens, my GPU usage gets cut in half (it goes from ~30% usage to as low as 8%).

Ive also had my display driver crash once since the 7.1hotfix, which is a first for me.

Can't help but feel its PhysX engine related since im using a nvidia card and there was a physx change in 7.1.

Toggling Nvidia Physx option on and off doesnt stop the issue for me.

Driver 314.21, GTX Titan.

[ZAPTONE]

My FPS has been bad since the most recent update as well.

[breakandburn]

I have no problems with any of the new tilesets, even the large planetside tiles run smoothly with one exception:

The Infested defense mission is unplayable for me. No idea what exatly causes the enormous drop, but something needs to be done there. That map needs some serious optimization. Maybe it's the particle effects but something just eats away the performance there.

[fratous]

bumping for DE to see.

getting 20 fps just should not be happening.

[Is_oke]

Another bump.

The last time I've played this game was about 1-2 months ago and it ran smooth (60FPS+) everywhere, no matter how complex the scene, now I got back into it and as soon as 2-3 enemies pop up it gets almost unplayable, especially in the infested levels.

Win7 x64, i5 2500k @4GHz, 8GB RAM, GTX 570 (314.07)

[FanZeroEx]

Another bump.

The last time I've played this game was about 1-2 months ago and it ran smooth (60FPS+) everywhere, no matter how complex the scene, now I got back into it and as soon as 2-3 enemies pop up it gets almost unplayable, especially in the infested levels.

Win7 x64, i5 2500k @4GHz, 8GB RAM, GTX 570 (314.07)

Yeah noticed this, infested levels are a bit choppy now.

[dizzke]

Glad this isn't just me. I'm sure they will fix it. I play single player and it runs fine. I play multiplayer and my fps dropped really low.

[Slayblaze]

TEMPORARY FIX for framerate drop: Disable "Local Reflections". On my nVidia system it makes a huge difference (doubles my framerate) and I can hardly notice the slight visual difference without those subtle reflections.

[Volt_Cruelerz]

I've had Local Reflections disabled from the beginning.

Edited March 22, 2013 by Volt_Cruelerz

[fratous]

I have mine just happening out of nowhere.

I can have perfect performance one playthrough, and then the next just out of nowhere in the middle of the mission, BAM, sub 20fps. GPU usage dropping to ~10%, and CPU usage remaining normal.

[djjdiss]

ok guys heres a tip to make the game look better and increase your fps slightly:

Go into the display options and disable motion blur (a huge fps killer in most games) bloom AND color correction. Not only will the game run a bit better but it will look better too, unless you like $&*&*#(%&ly bright surface reflections and a vaseline glaze being smeared all over your screen that is. You can also set this game to perform better rather than look better in the Nvidia settings for those of you using an Nvidia card. This game also renders quite a bit on the cpu side of things so eliminating unecessary background processes will help when there are a ton of mobs on the screen.

hope that helps =)

[djjdiss]

there is also a memory leak somewhere in the coding on this game. Windows has told me before that my performance is low only when playing this game. Might be worth while to increase your page file if it isn't set close to the max already to offset this problem a bit.

[Volt_Cruelerz]

ok guys heres a tip to make the game look better and increase your fps slightly:

Go into the display options and disable motion blur (a huge fps killer in most games) bloom AND color correction. Not only will the game run a bit better but it will look better too, unless you like $&*&*#(%&ly bright surface reflections and a vaseline glaze being smeared all over your screen that is. You can also set this game to perform better rather than look better in the Nvidia settings for those of you using an Nvidia card. This game also renders quite a bit on the cpu side of things so eliminating unecessary background processes will help when there are a ton of mobs on the screen.

hope that helps =)

Except that I've already tried all that. My graphics card isn't the best so I had most of the graphics options disabled from the beginning. I've had to disable more and more as time passed until eventually I had to cut down the resolution and turn off everything to be playable and at level 10+ on Xini, it starts to cease helping.

there is also a memory leak somewhere in the coding on this game. Windows has told me before that my performance is low only when playing this game. Might be worth while to increase your page file if it isn't set close to the max already to offset this problem a bit.

Almost anything large written in C++ will have memory leaks in some way. Unless it's large enough to fill up my 8 GB of memory such that I have to start paging in and out, I really doubt that's the problem (for the record, I've pulled up task manager, it's much less than that).

[Jytra]

I was monitoring GPU usage during a few missions and noticed at times when there were large groups of enemies on the screen, my GPU core speed would drop, as would the usage, giving me a choppy framerate. I changed the power setting in the NVidia control panel from "Adaptive" to "Prefer Max Performance" and that seemed to help a great deal.

I've noticed similar FPS drops with other games as well, most of them related to how certain GPUs try to inact some form of power throttling or lowered GPU usage, causing adverse effects. In most cases, it's some line of code on the driver end that tells the GPU "Hey, you don't need to work so hard, cut back a bit..." when the CPU goes "Hoooooooooly sh******!"

I should also add that my FPS got quite a bit worse when I enabled the PCIe 3.0 patch for my motherboard (NVidia 6xx cards don't natively run at 3.0 speeds on X79 motherboards unless the patch is used), when the exact opposite should happen.

Edited March 23, 2013 by Jytra

[UnderYourBed]

Same here; I run an AMD set-up.

[-Mira-]

I've been running the game with all graphical extras disabled, 800x600 resolution (at 16:9 aspect ratio, and the fact that I can do that is something I applaud the devs for) since pre-update 7 but the story's always kinda been the same, I get great FPS solo except in very wide areas and with lots of enemies onscreen, but it's still generally always decent enough to be playable.

In multiplayer (and note that I avoid hosting whenever possible because I know my upload speed and ping aren't sturdy enough for it) every player that joins is a huge fps decrease, with 4 "decent enough to be playable" becomes the baseline in low-population areas and with lots of enemies or wide spaces it becomes "spray around and hope one of the 5 bullets you get to shoot every second hits something because lol trying to actually aim like this"

And it does feel like it's definitely gotten even worse since update 7, not so much in the places where fps was already passable, but multiplayer slideshow mode is even worse than before. The fact that it's mostly multiplayer where it happens makes me think networking probably plays a big role, and its certainly possible i just always wind up with S#&$ty hosts, but it still seems like there's improvement that could be made on the game's end both on graphics and networking.

Also, while it's not a replacement for fixing whatever inoptimizations have snuck in, it would be nice to see some more graphical customization options like you see in... nearly every other PC game out there. Things like texture quality (not just texture memory), model quality, filtering level, and the like. Or better yet, unencrypt the graphical configuration files and allow them to be edited like many other games do (TF2 and other source engine games, Blacklight: Retribution, and Tribes: Ascend all come to mind right off the bat). That way, people like me who are willing to sacrifice graphical quality for a smoother experience can be satisfied, and for those who have super souped-up computers can push their graphics as far as they want, and then everyone's happy. That's probably an idea to make a separate thread for though.