Author Topic: Severe performance degradation in several mods  (Read 711 times)

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Offline Seeker

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Severe performance degradation in several mods
Hello there.

Long time Freespace player here, my current computer is about 3 years old, decently powerful (Ryzen 5 2600, RX580), and, until recently, could play most mods without any noticeable fps drops.

That has changed, I can't pinpoint when, exactly, but I think i first noticed it while replaying Solaris (fps drop to the single digits).

I've also seen it in Babylon 5 and Dimensional Eclipse.

Didn't feel any similar performance drops in other games, so it's definately Freespace related.

So, does anyone have any ideas on what might be wrong? Something I gotta install, or some setting I should change?

Appreciate any help!

 

Offline Goober5000

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Re: Severe performance degradation in several mods
Did you turn on shadows?  If so, turn them off; they can be a real performance drain, especially on older systems.

 

Offline Seeker

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Re: Severe performance degradation in several mods
I didn't touch the settings before I started to notice issues, and by now I'm not sure how many combinations I've tried.

But my latest attempts were all with shadows turned off.

Babylon 5 had shadows turned on before, so I turned them off and tried again to no effect. FPS was constantly under 30, ocasionally below 10.

Completely at a loss at what might be causing this.

Strangely enough, I don't seem to be noticing this while playing FSPort (with MediaVPs), even while recording it with OBS at the same time.

 

Offline EatThePath

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Re: Severe performance degradation in several mods
I'm both fearing and hoping this is something driver related, we've had a number of people with AMD carts report similar things lately...

Things that might help you: the -no_vsync flag seems like it has sometimes had an impact. If it doesn't, you may also need the -no_fps_capping flag. Thinking about things that have changed relatively recently in the engine, it might be productive to try -noenv and -no_deferred as well. Either of those last two would have big visual impact when removed and it's definitely bad if they're the issue, but if either fixes it entirely it'll be suggestive about problem areas.

Things that might help us hunt this down: Definitely let us know if any or none of those flags helped, naturally.

If you have patience for more troubleshooting, debug logs would be very useful. You generate these by playing in fastdebug, which you can use via the dropdown menu button in the bottom right of mod cards. Then in the same interface there'll be an upload debug log button that'll give you a link you can post here. Simply starting the game, loading a typical mission and exiting the game immediately after should generate plenty of info. The following debug logs would be ideal...

A well-preforming mod (fsport)
A poor-preforming mod (b5?)
Check a mod that hasn't updated much recently such as DE, run it(in fastdebug) as you normally would, then again after having used modsettings to pick an older version of FS2. If an older version runs significantly better, having both debug logs would be useful.
If going back to old engine versions doesn't work, you could also try rolling back to older GPU drivers.

If you can't do all or any of that, I'd entirely understand. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be many AMD cards among the devteam, so it's hard to get any of this kind of investigation done ourselves.
Name your damn turrets and sounds! Numbers alone aren't helpful!
"if disco is dead then I am the laser lich"
"...[Warmachine] keeps changing as fast as EatThePath can force the engine to do his dark bidding..."

 

Offline Seeker

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Re: Severe performance degradation in several mods
Thank you for your comprehensive reply.

I wouldn't be surprised if the source of the problem is related to graphics card drivers, especially if other amd card owners have similar complaints.

In any case, I went ahead and tried out Solaris and B5 (I keep calling it that but technically it's The Babylon Project, but I'm sure you knew that) with the flags you recommended. My impression was a very slight improvement in both. Solaris started at the 60 fps range, quickly dropping into the 30s, often dipping into the 10-20 range. B5 started around the 200 fps range, drop to 30-40 range once combat started, further drop into 10-20 in some areas.

I didn't notice any drop into the single digits, which I suppose is an improvement  :lol:

Also went ahead and colected the debug logs from FSPort and B5. Just started a mission in each and exited the game.

FSPort: https://fsnebula.org/log/647b11fea281b6f22bb2e1bf

B5: https://fsnebula.org/log/647b471d7647feb56cb2e1ce

I'll give DE a run with your recommendations later and I'll edit the post, if that's ok.

Thanks again!


  

Offline EatThePath

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Re: Severe performance degradation in several mods

I'll give DE a run with your recommendations later and I'll edit the post, if that's ok.

Thanks again!
By all means, and you're also welcome to post saying that you've made the edit so we notice  :)

So far, if FSPort has acceptable performance and TBP doesn't, those logs help narrow things down a lot. Both are running on 23.0, so the difference isn't engine version, and it isn't any of the more recent changes in dev builds which rules out some potential culprits. If I recall the assets properly I think we can safely expect TBP to need less resources than FSP+MVPs, so it's not running out of memory...

If it were possible to do tests of TBP with only one of the go-faster to see what ones specifically make a difference that would be useful. Knowing that something in there makes it faster but it's still that bogged down definitely says something's busted.

I've noticed two things in the logs that might be worth testing. TBP is using the -fxaa and -stretch_menu. fxaa very well could make a big difference to the driver, stretch menu shouldn't in regular gameplay but stranger things have happened. If you can test without them, that would be helpful. I'm not sure how many hoops you need to go through to disable default flags, if knossos doesn't let you do it through the regular flags interface you may need to edit the mod.json file in TBP's mod directory(restart knossos after you do if so).

The other thing is that there's some messages in the log about having to load textures in .tga rather than the standard texture types. It's conceivable that something broke in how the drivers handle that I guess, and a quick search tells me Solaris has some .tga textures, as well as BP which has been the subject of some of the AMD reports. But it it looks like that's briefing and interface stuff so it's pretty unlikely to be the issue. But if nothing else shakes out, I might try to send you some texture replacements for TBP to test.
Name your damn turrets and sounds! Numbers alone aren't helpful!
"if disco is dead then I am the laser lich"
"...[Warmachine] keeps changing as fast as EatThePath can force the engine to do his dark bidding..."

 

Offline Seeker

  • 22
Re: Severe performance degradation in several mods
Hello again.

I tested out BP after deleting the -fxaa flag, and there was a significant difference in performance. Consistently above 80 fps.

Tested out DE after doing the same, noticed improved performance as well.

I installed Blue Planet, made no changes to the settings, performance was poor. I'll admit I haven't played BP in a while (early last year, probably), but I'm confident there was no slowdown before.

So it seems Anti-aliasing is the "culprit" here?

I'm not seeing any AA related flags in Solaris that I can turn off and test, but I might just not be reading it right.


 
Re: Severe performance degradation in several mods
you could try the -no_post_process flag and see if that changes things - but with Solaris I strongly suspect that the issue there is trails, which is a known performance issue that's being worked on.
« Last Edit: June 06, 2023, 05:14:52 pm by Grizzly »