[GammaDraconis6]

Hey guys,

I'm attempting to play Blue Planet: Age of Aquarius - The Director's Cut. I can play the mod with no problems, but when I'm looking at the new ship models I'm getting very low FPS. My desktop computer is an i5 3570k, HD 7970, 8 GB of RAM. I can play the Freespace 2 campaign using the 2014 media VPs at 1920 x 1080 on the highest possible graphics settings and get fine FPS. But playing BP: AOA DR at 1024 x 768 on the lowest possible graphics settings still gets me FPS problems when staring at the new ship models. For example, I get exceptionally low FPS during the intro movie.

I [hopefully] followed the instructions to the letter in this thread (http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=68213.0), including all the performance troubleshooting instructions.

I set the open build to: fs2_open_3_6_17_SSE2_BP.exe
I have the 3.6.12 Media VPs in my Freespace 2 folder.

I'm not really sure what else to do. Please help! Thanks, guys. I really want to play this wonderful campaign. 

[General Battuta]

Go to the F2/options menu in-game. Turn 'lighting detail' down to the fourth or third notch.

You're suffering (probably) from the performance hit inflicted by the BP builds' deferred lighting.

[The E]

A few things:
1. The 3.6.17 build you're using is ancient, you should use the build linked to here.
2. You can also use the compatibility pack, so that you can use the official 3.7.0 build.

[General Battuta]

If you use the compatibility pack it'll turn off deferred lighting, so that's another way to improve your performance.

[GammaDraconis6]

A few things:
1. The 3.6.17 build you're using is ancient, you should use the build linked to here.
2. You can also use the compatibility pack, so that you can use the official 3.7.0 build.

That fixed it perfectly. I'm now getting great FPS on the highest graphics settings. Thank you so much!

And thank you to everybody else who responded (and so quickly too).

[GammaDraconis6]

If you use the compatibility pack it'll turn off deferred lighting, so that's another way to improve your performance.

Yeah, you were right. Lighting on 5/5 gives me fps issues. On 3/5 it's fine though.

[General Battuta]

Enjoy, and feel free to post your thoughts! We love hearing reactions as people cruise through AoA's wild cosmic adventures and then slam into WiH.

[Crybertrance]

Btw, just wondering, why is the deferred lighting system so performance intensive? I mean he has got a pretty high end machine...

[General Battuta]

Deferred lighting is more efficient than normal lighting on a light-per-light basis, but it also attempts to render many more lights.

[Kobrar44]

Except HD 7970 is card you benchmark by rendering 3k or so lights. Just saying. Also I don't have that much FPS problems on GT520MX. Just slightly unplayable with all the glow lights.

[Phantom Hoover]

Deferred lighting is more efficient than normal lighting on a light-per-light basis, but it also attempts to render many more lights.

Doesn't the BP build reduce the number of lights if you turn down the lighting setting (thus preventing the Balor slideshow effect)?

[General Battuta]

Yes, that's why that setting is so important when using deferred lighting.

Except HD 7970 is card you benchmark by rendering 3k or so lights. Just saying. Also I don't have that much FPS problems on GT520MX. Just slightly unplayable with all the glow lights.

Rendering a light in FSO probably isn't as efficient as doing so in a benchmark, given the age of our engine.

[The E]

Except HD 7970 is card you benchmark by rendering 3k or so lights. Just saying. Also I don't have that much FPS problems on GT520MX. Just slightly unplayable with all the glow lights.

Except the Catalyst drivers have had some rather puzzling regressions in them recently.

[Crybertrance]

Except HD 7970 is card you benchmark by rendering 3k or so lights. Just saying. Also I don't have that much FPS problems on GT520MX. Just slightly unplayable with all the glow lights.

Except the Catalyst drivers have had some rather puzzling regressions in them recently.

So what you are saying is that the slowdowns due to deferred lighting are mainly on AMD gpu's due to driver issues rather than hardware  limitations?

[The E]

I am not discounting the risk that the implementation may be suboptimal. But I do know that I've seen some weird and frankly inexplicable behaviour out of the GCN-based cards when it comes to the deferred renderer that (presumably) aren't present on nVidia cards. So my guess? Bad drivers.

[Crybertrance]

I am not discounting the risk that the implementation may be suboptimal. But I do know that I've seen some weird and frankly inexplicable behaviour out of the GCN-based cards when it comes to the deferred renderer that (presumably) aren't present on nVidia cards. So my guess? Bad drivers.

Oh, wonder why AMD is making sub-optimal drivers these days, mainly for GCN based cards and for older titles, maybe 'cuz of mantle? Btw, I don't know about matters regarding this stuff, but isn't there a way to voice the weird stuff in the drivers to AMD?

[Kolgena]

Only a small portion of the gaming market uses opengl for pc games (basically linux, and mac if you're so inclined), so my guess is that AMD probably doesn't spend much time on it for optimizations.

[The E]

Oh, wonder why AMD is making sub-optimal drivers these days, mainly for GCN based cards and for older titles, maybe 'cuz of mantle? Btw, I don't know about matters regarding this stuff, but isn't there a way to voice the weird stuff in the drivers to AMD?

Sure there is. And I've done so. Problem is, they don't care about weird behaviour in one particular branch of a weird niche game engine.

EDIT: Also, these issues go back way before AMD unveiled Mantle. Beware of conspiracy theories.

[Fury]

Oh, wonder why AMD is making sub-optimal drivers these days, mainly for GCN based cards and for older titles, maybe 'cuz of mantle? Btw, I don't know about matters regarding this stuff

AMD has historically had flakey OpenGL support. Things break, get fixed, break again, get fixed, rinse and repeat. NVIDIA has much better track record in OpenGL, but not even NVIDIA has been without its problems. Like Kolgena mentioned, OpenGL is not getting much love these days because hardly anything (on desktop) uses it.

Almost none of the commercial game engines use OpenGL, one big name exception has been iD Tech that has been used to run games like Doom, Quake and some others. In the indie world Unigine is also one such game engine, but it also supports DirectX. OpenGL is really limited to Linux, BSD and OS X. None of these operating systems have been on GPU manufacturers priority list when it comes to OpenGL beyond basic functionality and performance.

Microsoft's Xbox consoles use DirectX, whereas PlayStations 3 mainly used PSGL, a variation of OpenGL ES 1.0. PS4 uses very low-level API called GNM and a higher-level wrapper to GNM, called GNMX. I couldn't find definite details of whether they are completely home-grown or based on some other API.

For a little while now things have begun to look better after Valve announced Steam Machines and that they will be running on Debian. This happened roughly at same timeframe as when Linus Torvalds flipped his middle finger at NVIDIA for not supporting linux driver development the Linux Way, like AMD has done for quite a while now. Not too long after NVIDIA announced they will be contributing to the Nouveau open-source NVIDIA driver project. It remains to be seen what and how exactly they will be contributing. NVIDIA has always had better proprietary binary drivers than AMD though, so NVIDIA still has overall best experience on Linux.

Here's hoping Valve will be successful with their Steam Machines, as they would definitely be a boon to PC gaming and generally benefit everyone from developers to end-users. Developers like Crytek have already begun hiring people to work on OpenGL, so things are looking good. Of course it helps that Khronos has apparently gotten its **** together and OpenGL should be now on-par with DirectX 11.2 in terms of graphics features. There's SDL, SFML and Allegro among others to handle the rest of DirectX feature set.

Now if only Creative would follow the suit and finally bother supporting Linux properly. My Sound Blaster Z doesn't work in Linux. But that said, discrete sound card support in Linux generally sucks, so its not just Creative. Onboard audio chipsets generally work decently out of necessity. If Steam Machines can pull this stunt off, driver support in Linux should receive a huge boon and it won't be limited to just GPU's.

isn't there a way to voice the weird stuff in the drivers to AMD?

http://www.amd.com/report
Chances of AMD giving a **** about FSO though? Not very high.

[Crybertrance]

Hmm, this makes more sense now, thanks!