[Kolgena]

Using the latest nightly (May 12), playing BP2.

Any missions with flak are essentially unplayable, as flak explosions will cut my fps from 70-100 to 20-40 for half a second every time. Effects seem cumulative, as flak spam will drop my fps to as low as 15. It doesn't have to be visible on screen to cause a framedrop. Naturally, with framedrop comes wonkiness (lag and loss of sensitivity) with mouse input, so it's impossible to aim if there's any flak being shot around.

Removing the adv-bp.vp doesn't help (this contains the flak animations)
Turning off soft particles raises my average FPS, but the frame drops are just as bad.
Turning off all sound helps quite a bit, such that flak only drops the framerate to 45-50. (I'm using creative's OpenAL 1.1. Can't switch to oal-soft because it refuses to work with wxlauncher on my computer)

I'm not sure what else I should try to attempt to figure out the problem. Is anyone else experiencing this?

Log attached. Also forcing 16x AF in CCC. The GPu is an 8870 with 2GB GDDR5, despite what the debug log says.

As an aside, ever since getting this new laptop, I've never yet managed to get stable 60 fps in any of the nightly builds of FSO. Is something wrong on my end, or is FSO just getting extremely demanding on hardware? For comparison, I'm holding a stable 90 fps in cs:go maxed out with 8xAA, and 40+fps in 4v4s in SC2. Mind, none of those are OpenGl, but I don't have any other games that use it.


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[General Battuta]

I have been unable to get a stable framerate on my quite decent gaming rig for some time now. I just assumed our game was badly optimized.

This might be a BP specific problem (in particular I am suspicious of the scripts). Test on Diaspora and see if you can get steady framerates. I'll do the same.

[Phantom Hoover]

20-40 seems an odd threshold for 'unplayability' to me

[General Battuta]

A steady 30 would be a lot better than a choppy 20-40 even.

[Kolgena]

I haven't gotten around to installing Diaspora, so testing that might take me a few days. I'll post here if/when I do.

Battuta is exactly right. Even though the FPS counter reads 20-40, what I'm experiencing is almost more like microstutters. It feels a lot more like sporadic 3-5 fps rather than a steady 20-30 fps. Trust me, I know how smooth even 25 fps can feel if it's rock steady (movies are 24 fps, and Crysis is notorious for running like butter as soon as you break 30 fps), but this is definitely not what I'm getting with FSO.

[pecenipicek]

I haven't gotten around to installing Diaspora, so testing that might take me a few days. I'll post here if/when I do.

Battuta is exactly right. Even though the FPS counter reads 20-40, what I'm experiencing is almost more like microstutters. It feels a lot more like sporadic 3-5 fps rather than a steady 20-30 fps. Trust me, I know how smooth even 25 fps can feel if it's rock steady (movies are 24 fps, and Crysis is notorious for running like butter as soon as you break 30 fps), but this is definitely not what I'm getting with FSO.

do you have any cpu/gpu monitoring tools or such running in the background on your pc? also, do these happen on any Source engine based games? (ala TF2)

this is just an anecdotal guess, but i remember that sometimes being the cause of stutters in fso for me.

[Kolgena]

No stutters in L4D2, HL2, or CS:GO.

No monitoring software.

[pecenipicek]

No stutters in L4D2, HL2, or CS:GO.

No monitoring software.

then no fix, sorry, probably something with the engine...  (other than the obligatory AMD OGL support sucks, but not as hard as Intel)

maybe, just maybe, check the performance option for the game profile, sometimes the gpu's dont switch from "adaptive performance" or however its called at the moment to max perf when actually loaded...
(happened to me with GW2 recently. was wtf'd why the new gpu was slower in some scenes than the old one and went derp when i realized the game was running with the gpu in the lowest possible performance mode...)


also, one other thing that just popped into my head, try playing a bit with sound disabled, just in case.

[General Battuta]

Really want to know if this is an MVPs or BP specific issue as it may be related to scripts.

[Kolgena]

Well, I didn't get around to installing diaspora, but I did get a chance to try that MVP2014 mission where lysander/actium first encounter the Ravanna. The first part has quite a bit of flak spam, which was good enough with testing. Here's what I found:

Active mod BP2: Framedrops.
Active mod BP1: Framedrops.
Activemod MVP2014 only: Framedrops.

Within MVP: Removing MVP Advanced: Framedrops. (upgraded flak)
Within MVP: Removing MVP Advanced and MVP Effects: No more Framedrops. (retail flak)
Within MVP: Removing only MVP Effects: No more Framedrops. (retail flak)

So, whatever it is, it has something to do with the flak weapon effect. I don't know how to tell if it's purely related to the sprite animation or if it's somehow tied to a new effect script.

As an aside, the performance loss is significant and ridiculous. I could understand if Delenda este-sized missions cut my framerates down, but there's no reason why the first engagement in The Great Hunt (with all of like, 10 fighters and 2 corvettes) should drop my FPS to the 20s and 30s. The severity of the framedrops is identical between BP2 and MVP 2014.

[General Battuta]

I will see if I can repro this.