Hard Light Productions Forums
Hosted Projects - FS2 Required => Between the Ashes => Topic started by: McFettnippel on December 19, 2017, 12:02:24 pm
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Hello there,
I've been playing FreeSpace since I was a little kid nearly 20 years ago, but just recently discovered that there is this awesome community with loads and loads of new content for one of my all-time favorite games. I highly appreciate all the work that went into all these mods! But, not having played this game in a decade and never stumbling across this community, I am a big noob regarding all modding topics.
Now on to my problem: I am playing on a rather strong system and I am experiencing very bad framerates in most of the campaign missions in the Between the Ashes mod. In other mods like Blue Planet or ST:R I always stayed at my framecap of 120 fps, regardless of the situations or the amount of ships I encountered. In BtA however, many of the missions seem to involve a lot of ships and much debris, and that almost always kills my fps and brings it down to around 30, which is barely playable (at least in my experience). I do sometimes reach 120fps at the start of missions when there's hardly any ship around, but that changes rather quickly.
I already played around with the various graphic settings in the wxLauncher and ingame, to no avail. My GPU usage hovers around 20% and I got one CPU Core going around 50-70%, but there is no obvious bottleneck there; though the CPU usage fluctuates a lot, it never reaches higher 80's and the GPU is nearly always constant at those 20%. I even disabled CPU and GPU overclocks to see if that would help any, but it didn't.
So my question is: What do I do wrong? Is there any settings I have missed which are framerate-killers? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
I am playing on FS2 Open 3.8.0 AVX 64-bit and using the latest wxLauncher. I have downloaded the entire mod library which was available during the FS2 Open Installer configuration, so all assets should be available.
My system:
i7 6700k @ 4,6 GHz, never reaching above 65°C
32GB DDR4 3200MHz RAM
Asus STRIX 980ti @ 1490 MHz, never reaching above 75°C
Corsair HX1200i 1200W PSU, so no power delivery concerns
and a BenQ XL2720t 120Hz monitor (hence the framecap)
I hope I provided all the information that is needed, but if there's anything I missed, feel free to tell me! :)
Thanks a lot for this awesome mod. Cheers!
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I hope I provided all the information that is needed, but if there's anything I missed, feel free to tell me! :)
Almost! Please post your fs2_open.log file. Instructions on how to do this can be found in this post.
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Sorry, I have used the search for anything relating to performance issues, but I missed the "Read before posting" topic which I probably should've read :sigh:
I've attached the log. Though when following the instructions, I thought I'd find it in the Appdata\Roaming folder, not in the game folder. Did I use the older version of FSO Installer? I downloaded it directly from the website, though I didn't use the Java application, but rather the .exe (I don't like Java :nervous: ).
[attachment stolen by Russian hackers]
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Though when following the instructions, I thought I'd find it in the Appdata\Roaming folder, not in the game folder. Did I use the older version of FSO Installer?
No, you're just using portable mode (which obviously changes where files get written to).
First thing to check would be disabling shadows; they're easily the biggest performance drain, and the situation you described ("lots of ships and lots of debris") sounds like a worst-case-scenario for shadow rendering.
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I don't have much to add here. He's on an i7 6700k with a 980ti. It should be able to handle nearly anything we throw at it...
My computer is not quite that spec but it runs BtA just fine, with shadows. Of course I don't try to hit 120FPS with it, soooo. I think it hovers around 50-60 on my computer, but I'm unsure.
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Thanks for your replies, I'll try disabling shadows as soon as I get home again. I guess that's just another flag in wxLauncher, something like -noshadows?
It seems that the worst offenders for this are missions involving the Antares Station, it just tanks everything if i look at it, regardless of distance (even that mission where it exploded and sent stuff everywhere, where you were like 20km away). The crazy thing though is the CPU/GPU usage hardly ever reaches higher levels, even in those situations. It's really weird...
This mod made me realize that I'm a **** pilot, lul. I went on killing sprees just fine in FS1, FS2, FSP etc with keyboard and mouse, but in BtA these Seths and Horuses just keep circling me and I just run out of mouse pad when they do that :banghead: . My wrist seems to be broken now :lol:
Thanks again for this awesome mod!
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Thanks for your replies, I'll try disabling shadows as soon as I get home again. I guess that's just another flag in wxLauncher, something like -noshadows?
The opposite; you currently have shadows enabled (-enable_shadows) and you just have to uncheck that option.
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Okay, that seemed to mostly do the trick. I still get framerate dips, but nowhere near as bad as before. Now I just have to figure out what to do with those two darn Typhon Distroyers around the Cruiser :nono:
I killed all the fighters, but they don't wanna go away...
Thanks for your help, guys!
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I have a similar system (i7-3770k OC'd and a 980 Superclocked) and I have everything turned on and I get 120fps most of the time. I have dual monitors as well as using SweetFX.
So I am not sure why he is having troubles.
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Well I was going to say the same, I have 2 computers with lesser spec (i5 6600 with GTX 1070 and i5 3570 with GTX 1060, each with 16Gb of RAM) and both of them run fine (1920*1080 at only 60fps in my case as my screens are a bit old with everything on in the launcher). The only moment I had fps drop was when I played exile and forgot that I was running 7z packing a big archive in the background... When the archive was finished, I never got under 60fps unless a checkpoint is reached. With your spec you should have no problems at all ^^
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I have two 1080p monitors connected, too. I just had a mission (the one where you talk to Greenbark or something and then to the Vasudan on the derelict station) where it got pretty bad, even with shadows disabled. GPU only reported 25% usage and i barely got above 40 fps the entire time. At least no combat happened there...
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Thanks for your replies, I'll try disabling shadows as soon as I get home again. I guess that's just another flag in wxLauncher, something like -noshadows?
It seems that the worst offenders for this are missions involving the Antares Station, it just tanks everything if i look at it, regardless of distance (even that mission where it exploded and sent stuff everywhere, where you were like 20km away). The crazy thing though is the CPU/GPU usage hardly ever reaches higher levels, even in those situations. It's really weird...
This mod made me realize that I'm a **** pilot, lul. I went on killing sprees just fine in FS1, FS2, FSP etc with keyboard and mouse, but in BtA these Seths and Horuses just keep circling me and I just run out of mouse pad when they do that :banghead: . My wrist seems to be broken now :lol:
Thanks again for this awesome mod!
Keyboard + mouse user here !
It's not possible to dogfight properly just with the mouse. Use the mouse when you have the advantage to land your shots, or when you're closing in ; but when you're attempting to face the opponent you should definitely use keyboard controls to turn your ship, it's much much faster.
How I'm playing this : my left hand covers speed + bank rotation + missile firing + targetting + wing commands + countermeasures + energy management.. My right hand covers either mouse (aiming, first weapon fire on LBM, second weapon switch on RMB, auto-speed on MMB), OR the numpad (aiming mostly)
I do not hesitate to leave the mouse alone and just switch on numpad when I'm in close range fights. When the enemy ships are at < 100m from you, you don't need precise aiming anyway. As soon as they burst out, I just pick mouse again.
As for performance, I usually play with Shadows disabled AND specular maps disabled too. Reflection is just too much of hassle to be handled by my GPU.
PS: if 30 FPS is unplayable for you, I would suggest you try Blue Planet 2 on my old spec.. I was running it at 5-10 FPS whenever I was facing a Terran ship. The "and now i will kill your framerate" dialog on Just Another Day was no joke for me, it was real, which made it all the funnier :P
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and a BenQ XL2720t 120Hz monitor (hence the framecap)
Probably not the issue you are having, but this reminds me. I have a dual screen setup, one is a 120hz screen, the other a 60hz. Once I put that one screen to a 120 refreshrate, my gpu (a GTX570 at the time I was having that issue) for whatever reason, would just never switch to 3D rendering performance, and my framerate would be absolutely bollocks in any 3d application I tried to run. Things would only ever run properly with both screens set to 60Hz.
Again, I doubt thats the issue you're having, but it might be worth a try to set your screen to 60hz and give the game a whirl, with shadows turned on again. Just to rule out the possibility.
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Also, FSO has a hard framecap of 120 FPS regardless of your monitor refresh rate; in fact your refresh rate is completely irrelevant when vsync is off, which your log says it is.
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I've swapped keybindings a Bit and seem to do better now. Thanks for your suggestion!
Regarding the framecap, I set RivaTuner to cap FSO at 120 fps so as not to potentially break the game. Hence I didn't notice the game's own cap.
The strange thing is that in any other mod I do not experience these issues... I'll just have to cope with it I guess.
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You could try a recent nightly build. There have been some performance optimizations since 3.8 came out so that build may work better for you.