0957 - Performance drops hard

[Astromici]

Ah. That's interesting. Perhaps you could try adjusting some settings in your graphics driver software? I know Nvidia provides the Nforce thing, and ATI gives the Catalyst Control Center.

[Garack]

of course i have done all this, lod or aa or af vsync option...tranparent aa is off. occlusion off, tried some with prerendered frames. but this is all witouht influence of the framerate.

[Atkinson]

I have the same "bug". FPS drops to around 20-30 when looking North at Fallujah west. This is not the only map. My rig is: e6750, hd4890, 4gig, win7. Cpu usage on 1 core is about 50% and 90ish% on the other. Gpu is basically resting...

I suppose there was no solution for this problem? ( no, i dont count buying Sandy Bridge a solution)

[Atkinson]

I kinda did try that, cos i didnt set the compatibility mode in the first place when i tried PR.
Thanks anyway.

[Sgt. Mahi]

Never a single answer from someone who actually knows about this stuff

[Blargh.o]

I am expreriencing exactly the same thing as Garack. Settings dont make a huge difference and it happens on all maps, some worse than others (Falluja), Its like playing on a low end rig. Its not an optimisation problem as it happens no matter what assets are involved. Something must have changed in this last patch affecting the whole engine.

Im on an e8400 @ 3.0Ghz and 5850 here.

[Garack]

So i wanna give my solution out cause finally i found it.

Bad news: It cost me 400 €

My [email protected] simply was the bottleneck of PR. With a new [email protected] Ghz i got 60 frames stock vsync in almost every situation. Some times frames drop to 40 but 95% in all maps it is running perfect@highest settings.

SO PR is VERY CPU INTENSIVE. My GPU is most times on idel mode (GTX470)

Edit: Got 20-25 frames more from [email protected] to 4.5 Ghz.

And 40 FPS more from [email protected] to [email protected]

[Blargh.o]

This doesnt explain why this has only started happening since the last patch.

Getting a Faster CPU and seeing increased FPS just means you are getting over the problem using shear processing power. It doesn't explain where all this power is going . It does however tell us that this is most likely a problem in the code side of things and not a part of the graphical engine (wont be fixed by the next patches optimisations). Mabe theres a piece of code executing too frequently in one of the python scripts or something along those lines. Although, this doesnt explain why it only affects certain systems (is this even confirmed or are people just in denial? ).

It would be good to hear from more "core 2" Users to find out if it's working correctly for any of them. There really isn't much in this engine to tax a cpu, no general prop physics or particularly advanced particle physics.

[Sgt. Mahi]

Getting a Faster CPU and seeing increased FPS just means you are getting over the problem using shear processing power

Exactly.. so would people with i7 computers stop saying there's nothing wrong.

[sylent/shooter]

I use a Core 2 processor and I rarely get more than 30 FPS on maps. If I recall correctly, I was reading somewhere that when DICE patched to the v1.5 version something went out of wack with some codes for the game which causes a memory leak. Which I think could lead to getting low FPS. People with a higher cpu and more RAM should be able to overcome the problem. But if this is true then there isn't really a fix

[Atkinson]

I am expreriencing exactly the same thing as Garack. Settings dont make a huge difference and it happens on all maps, some worse than others (Falluja), Its like playing on a low end rig. Its not an optimisation problem as it happens no matter what assets are involved. Something must have changed in this last patch affecting the whole engine.

Im on an e8400 @ 3.0Ghz and 5850 here.

Wow, If e8400 and HD 5850 can't handle a game that works on 2004ish engine there must be something wrong in the code.

Garack: Sandy bridge is not the solution for most of us.


How much PR should eat RAM? I've been checking that for me it eats almost 2 gigs, which seems a bit much. I wonder if that is causing the FPS drop when facing some particular direction in some maps?

[Psyrus]

How much PR should eat RAM? I've been checking that for me it eats almost 2 gigs, which seems a bit much. I wonder if that is causing the FPS drop when facing some particular direction in some maps?

Why would it cause an FPS drop?

[Atkinson]

Idk. I am just throwing ideas in the air here, hoping some dev would share some light on this issues.

[Blargh.o]

Just to clarify, I have 4 gigs of 800mhz DDR2 Ram and it seems to be running with a fair bit to spare. From what I've seen PR needs about ~1.5 - 2gigs alone to run happily on high settings. But, the Ram shouldn't ever cause low FPS unless it had very low read - write speeds. You would notice a lot of stuttering if you were running out of Ram and not just straight forward slowness. I assume it would be the same with a memory leak but I dont know much about them.

[Sinbe]

Same problem for me too. I have my C2D running at 3GHz and on some maps the fps drops below 20 at some points of the game on maps like Fallujah and Gaza Beach. With standard 1,8GHz clocks, the cpu is able to run the game barely above the 20fps even on Muttrah, so it's definitely the cpu that's running out of juice and not the gpu (HD4850 overclocked in my case). As others have said, It didn't happen in previous versions, but can't quite remember if it was .95 or .9 after which I started to have problems.

Hopefully the devs have time to look into it, because a 6 year old game requiring a high end cpu to even be playable (20fps in Fallujah is not).

System specs, if there's something that others having problems have in common:
Win7 x64
E4300 C2D @ 3GHz
ATI HD4850
4Gb DDR2 @ 1000MHz
Creative X-Fi

Large maps like Kashan, Quinling, Iron Eagle (that's the RUS vs IDF?) and so on seem to work fine and most of the 2km maps work ok too (Muttrah has some drops every now and then). 1km maps though run very badly, the extreme cases being Fallujah West and Gaza Beach. Of which Fallujah used to run just fine in previous versions. Lowering the graphics doesn't do much more than make the game look bad without no real gain in fps.

[Atkinson]

I did some testing and I noticed that on those maps where I get a FPS drop when looking specific direction I also get every 5 secs a lag/stutter/jitter/choppy/warp-thingy as in the game skips few frames and according to fraps there is usually a 10 fps drop in that instance.

On those maps where the fps is constantly around 60, there is no warp-skip-jump-thingy either. And because there are maps where the fps seems to be constant and high, i would guess that maps like Fallujah West has something f*cked up.

Checked vBF2 and i get rock solid 60 fps all the time and everywhere no matter what i do and it uses both cores about max 60%. vBF2 eats only 1-1.2Gigs of RAM while PR 1.8-2.0 Gigs and uses cores unevenly 50% and 90%. Naturally vBF2 should be less demanding.

Tried OCing my C2D to 3.1Ghz but it didnt remove the warping nor didnt affect on the FPS.

Tried changing affinity to just 1 core which made the FPS drop even more and the game stuttered naturally more.

I tried all kind of tweaks with Ati Tray Tool w/o any luck. The game seems to be unaffected by the graphics setting and my HD4890 usage hovers around 20-40% only.
So Gpu should not be an issue.

I am running Win7 64bit with 4 gigs of 667Mhz Ram.

[karambaitos]

are you running in compatability mode, it caused performance drop in PR when i turned it off it was normal again, also the newest drivers from AMD are screwed up, you might want to revert to 10.9 drivers and try

[Garack]

its mostly a cpu not gpu not ram problem.

[Atkinson]

are you running in compatability mode, it caused performance drop in PR when i turned it off it was normal again, also the newest drivers from AMD are screwed up, you might want to revert to 10.9 drivers and try

I've tried with and w/o compatibility mode and what not. Seems to have no effect.
I am not sure about the amd drivers, I as well think this is not gpu related.
I think this is just specific map related. I tried with [email protected] and with GTX 460 and there was noticeable drop in FPS at Fallujah West (from 100-->40). PR is not even using 100% of the cores. I would bet that map needs optimization of some sort.