Hard Light Productions Forums
General FreeSpace => FreeSpace & FreeSpace Open Support => Topic started by: Mr_C on June 17, 2019, 09:05:00 pm
-
Hi all, I'm having a problem with FSO for some years now. I thought it was due to the limits of a GTX750TI I had. Now the system I use is an overclocked 8370, 16Gb Ram and an RX580 8Gb. There is no change in fps. I get slow downs that make gameplay choppy. Opening up task manager shows low CPU utilization on all cores and the GPU is also low. I don't get it :confused:
For example, in Blue Planet, the Massive battle simulator gives 6.8fps average with CPU running at 20% and GPU around 47%.
Kentauroi race starts up at 37 fps typically, but if I turn the ship and look at empty space for a couple seconds, then, it goes up to 75fps and when I turn back around it holds the higher fps...
Any assistance will be greatly appreciated. What other information do you need?
-
Freespace Open utilises only a single CPU core, hence low total usage. You'd need to monitor the one core that bears most of the load. It's normal for the GPU to do next to nothing when the CPU chokes up.
While FSO gets about 30% of a performance hit on AMD graphic cards due to poor OpenGL driver support, the 580 should be more than enough to play this game comfortably.
You could also try playing the Icarus cutscene (first mission of War in Heaven 2), I think it's a bit more realistic load.
As for the graphic settings you can try to squeeze more FPS by disabling shadows. You could also check if disabling deferred lighting brings any increase in performance.
-
Resolution and detail are the two things that hit me most.
-
Is FSO one of those games that benefits from setting the CPU core affinity to single core? I remember doing that for some older game in the past.
-
Give it a try :yes:
-
Resolution and detail level should mostly have effect on the GPU usage. I doubt it will help with CPU bottlenecks, unless you go down to potato levels.
You could try setting FSO affinity to one or two cores (I've seen it regularly do stuff on the second one, not sure why). Another thing would be setting its priority to something higher or even real time.
Also note that WiH has got some really complex lighting in missions and it complicates the rendering work a lot. Many other FSO campaigns need far less power to play comfortably.
-
Disabling shadows helped a little.
And yes, one core was close to 85%.
Setting affinity maxed out that specific core and maybe helps 1-2 fps.
Anything but the native resolution looks, well, not as great.
So it looks like the bottle neck is the CPU single core performance like you said.
Thanks everyone for your advice.
-
(I've seen it regularly do stuff on the second one, not sure why).
There's a small amount of multi-threading in FSO, IIRC the "standard" music runs in its own thread.
-
shadow quality 2 is a spectacular framerate drain for not a lot of gain
AMD cards in general all underperform when running FSO since it uses OpenGL and AMD don’t have the resources to write good OGL drivers.
-
shadow quality 2 is a spectacular framerate drain for not a lot of gain
At the risk of sounding like a complete dumbass, how do you alter the shadow quality, and some of the other settings such as lighting? I have heard people tell of levels for such things, but I can't see them in the FSO settings or in the in-game options detail menu. Any advice greatly appreciated :-)
-
Through altering the command line - for Knossos probably custom settings, but I don't know for sure.
https://wiki.hard-light.net/index.php/Command-Line_Reference#-shadow_quality
-
Through altering the command line - for Knossos probably custom settings, but I don't know for sure.
https://wiki.hard-light.net/index.php/Command-Line_Reference#-shadow_quality
Thank you. At the risk of sounding even more of a dumbass, how do I use command line flag, alter the command line etc? It might be worthwhile updating the wiki page with this info for newbies and general technophobes like me :lol:
-
Doesn't Knossos have a "custom settings" configurator? For all other launcher you only have to edit the cmdline_fso.cfg in the data folder.
-
Doesn't Knossos have a "custom settings" configurator? For all other launcher you only have to edit the cmdline_fso.cfg in the data folder.
Yup, I figured it out. I just added the -fps to the end of the text in the custom flags box in global flags, the hit apply to all. It musy have worked because I now see the FPS counter in the corner of the screen. I set shadows to 1 and reduced the anisotrophic filtering a bit and Icarus is running smoother now - a nice consistent 40-60 FPS with a slight drop to 35FPS when ships are 'over flacking' :p