[Shadowcaster]

Hello. I'm new to the SCP community, but I've been a freespace fan for quite a lot of time. I recently stumbled upon the SCP, and I can't say how impressed I am.  However, I''m rather mortified because no matter how many diifferent configs I try, I cant seem to get decent frame rates on my machine. Don't get me wrong, I dont want 60+ fps or anything, but  I'm sorta shooting for a playable 22-28 FPS range. Problem is, in all but the worst-looking d3d configs, I get horrible framerates whenever a capship comes into view. Heck, even fenris-class cruisers make my game slow down to a crawl. I tried searching a bit in the forums or the wiki, but I found little help. What  little info I did find was not of much help.  Running the game w/out  -htl makes it  unplayable slow,  -nospec doesnt do much in terms of speed.  
I run the game in 640X480X32, which I think is reasonable, w/ the -t32 tag enabled, and no AA.  OPEN GL is faster in game (albeit slower in the tech room), but it doesnt display any of the cool effects (glowmaps, shinemaps, 32bit effects, etc...) I dont know if this is because they're not implemented in OGL mode yet, but I never saw that mentioned in the readme.  Finally, I'm using the build bobbau(sp?) posted in the "latest builds" forum (the r version, not the debug version), with the 3.1 SCP launcher.  can anyone give me a hand? thanks in advance.

EDIT: SPECS ARE IN SIG... forgot to mention that, sorry.

[Bobboau]

and your system specs are...?

[redmenace]

welcome to Hard Light Productions

Exits are to the sides and rear, emergency flamethrowers can be found under the seats. And if you run into a large 5-limbed creature while wandering around in the air ducts, give it your lunch. Hopefully it's just Carl, and he'll leave you be.

[phreak]

look in his sig

the latest build is in a thread somewhere.  OGL doesn't have 32 bit textures in our internal builds, but thats rather buggy at the moment so its best just to use the one from Nov 18th

[Terorist]

I was going to start a new thread with my own performance test reports, but I guess I'll just stick them here instead (I don't mean to hijack it, just to provide some comparison at the same time).

First, the specs:
Duron ~800
250 Mb
GeForce 2 GTS 32 Mb, latest drivers
Win2k SP4

Launcher 3.2
Using this build; it should be very new if not latest, it has RT's speech stuff included (dated 24.11.):
http://mysite.freeserve.com/thomaswhittaker/c_code/freespace/fs2_open_r.rar

Command line flags: -htl -d3d_no_vsync -fps
Settings at video tab: dx8, 1024x768x32, use large textures, no antialias

I played the main campaign and in the Surrender, Belisarius! mission I noticed slight drops/jerks in fps whenever an ani or something was loaded (pilot chatter etc.). These were only slight jerks, but noticeable... When Psamtik jumped in, the fps stayed up when looking at it. However, when it thrashes the Belisarius, as soon as the shockwave ani stars to play, the fps simply dies. It goes down, under 10 for a while and then jerkily starts to get up again. When the debris starts to fly and there are only the smaller explosions playing, it's around 20-30 again.

I made a test mission where capships explode, and shockwave kills the fps for some reason. The other fireballs don't seem to affect it much, though the fps is sadly low, under 30 most of the time. I'd have thought it'd stay a little higher more steadily on this machine. When there's not much in view it's over 40 or 50, e.g. when looking at a lonely Hecate it was over 50 (though when I took a screen cap it sank below, seems like disk activity affects it greatly?).

Playing without HT&L is pretty much impossible, the fps at the beginning of The Place of Chariots (NTF cargo depot + Boadicea) seemed to stay under 10 with only fighters, cargo and sentry guns in view...

Oh, and when warping out, the ships don't disappear after the vortex. When warping in, it looks like the glowmaps or something are visible before they pass the vortex. Were these old, known bugs already?
Edit: removed obsolete screen cap link

[Trivial Psychic]

I get the same warp problem on my GF2 MX 32MB, and oddly enough a friend of mind had the same problem with a GF4 based card (the MX equiv. I think).  Now he's got a Radeon 9600 Pro 128MB, but I don't know if the bug still appears.  I guess I'll have to put "new vidcard" at the top of my PC upgrades for next year.  This year it was a 120GB WDC HDD, last it was a Samsung 17' monitor, year before it was CDRW and another 128MB SDRAM-133.

Later!

[SnakeEyes]

I get pretty much the same performance issues and I also have very similar configuration.

Specially I remember the warp effect not hiding the ship when it warps in.

I have some FPS drop problems but they are not as dramatic as the ones you mention. But that must be because my specs are slightly higher.

AMD K7 1,3 Ghz
512 MB RAM
GeForece 4 mx440 64MB

[Terorist]

The memory usage has gone up, I suspect it might be due to that... having to swap in the middle of the game? Making fs2_open a bit lighter on the memory side than it currently is would definitely be an important goal. It seems we've added resource (=memory) hungry feature after another after another; we now have, e.g., several texture maps per model in use at the same time etc... Some optimizing would be good, yes?

[Shadowcaster]

What I don't understand is if this is regular behaviour. I mean, original FS2 ran great on my machine,  how mch slower can it be w/some of the new features? Can anyone with a similar low-end config get decent fps? If so, I'd really like to hear some pointers, or maybe if some settings are real performance killers, which ones to use and which ones to avoid.

[Johnmike]

Where's the Launcher 3.2?

[RandomTiger]

If you are running D3D use d3dlowmem.
Launcher is in my sig.

Dont use pcx32 or t32 as they use x2 the amount of texture memory. Im surpised your system is performing that poorly.
Is that a PCI gfx card you've got there?

[Shadowcaster]

gf4 mx 420 PCI. To think that not long ago I was using a 16mb m64. Not that the Gf4 is much of an improvement though, it's still slow as hell.

[RandomTiger]

With my old system P3 450 TNT2 (AGP) I get high twentys for simple levels with htl on.

[Setekh]

Which MX420 do you have (as in, how much RAM)? Welcome to HLP, Shadowcaster.

[Shadowcaster]

64 megs of uber-slow sdr ram. overclocked to 183 memory and 305 core.

[phreak]

well we released a new test build.  its apparently been running faster

[Terorist]

It does, but just a little. Shockwave ani still slows things down, not a record low like before but very much nonetheless. I tried The Place of Chariots today with it, and it was... slowish and jerky! Could it be all that pilot chatter? I'll see if I can come up with more usable feedback later...

[Bobboau]

have any of you tryed the 3d shockwaves?
(those of you haveing slowdowns with them)