firing tank gun=lag?

[::Major_Baker::]

Is it just me? the game in general runs very smoothly, but after firing the tank main gun i sometimes get about 7 seconds fo bad lag. anyone else experience this?

[bosco_]

Maybe your computer has problems with handling the smoke effect?
I don't have that lag.

[El_Vikingo]

Thats the smoke effect after the shooting, happens to me too.

[Vaiski]

Yea it has something to do with the dust effect. Some testers reported lag after firing tanks turret during 0.5 betas.
Some graphic cards don't seem to like particle effects close to camera others run it just fine. Number of particles doesn't seem to affect it. Its more like how close they are. It might need to be toned down or removed in the future.

Out of curiosity, do you lag when you run through medic's smoke effect? Does it lag if you're watching it from, say, 20 meters away?

[::Major_Baker::]

Vaiski']Yea it has something to do with that dust effect. Some testers reported lag after firing tanks turret during 0.5 betas.
Some graphic cards don't seem to like particle effects close to camera. Number of particles doesn't seem to affect it. Its more like how close they are. It might need to be toned down or removed in the future.

Out of curiosity, do you lag when you run through medic's smoke effect?

Negative, smoke grenades are much better. The only time is when there are several smoke grenades at once...and it still runs fairly smoothly even in this situation.

[Vaiski]

Heh thats what testers experienced too...

Its wierd because the smoke grenade effect has like 4x more particles and 10x larger particle size but they lag much less than the turret dust effect.

[TII]

I get the same thing with the tanks main gun and when looking at the kicked up dust behind the tank from the gunner's view. Smoke grenades and everything else is fine though.

[[-=IDSF=-]SykloAG]

Its to do with fill rate (I believe). For some reason low end Geforce cards choke to death on effects like this... I know. I remember my GF6200 yikes. I had a simmilar issue with a 7600GS when playing at 1280x1024 4xAA, without AA it was silky smooth, but some smoke effects bogged it down.

[77SiCaRiO77]

and BTW i have the same lag as the smoke of the turret when atank is moving infront of me in the sand .

[El_Vikingo]

SykloAG']Its to do with fill rate (I believe). For some reason low end Geforce cards choke to death on effects like this... I know. I remember my GF6200 yikes. I had a simmilar issue with a 7600GS when playing at 1280x1024 4xAA, without AA it was silky smooth, but some smoke effects bogged it down.

Would you like to expand on this please?!

Fill Rate?

[[-=IDSF=-]SykloAG]

Would you like to expand on this please?!
Fill Rate?

Sure.

Fillrate is the number of pixels a video card can generate and display on the screen in a second.

Now when there are a large number of large polygons so close to the camera, the surface area of the filled polygon is much greater than when it is far away. The particle effects that make up the smoke utilize many large semi-transparent polygons that create a nice effect and cause no slowdown when far away, but when they are being rendered at say 1280x1024, and several overlap, then your card is going to be working overtime trying to render them all. Normally, all the textures on the screen will be rendered once (or however many X antialiasing you have set), but transparency means that several layers will be rendered.

So if your Geforce 6600GT has a theoretical max Fill Rate of 4.0 billion texels/sec. (textured pixels), then lets do the math:

4,000,000,000 texels/sec max fill rate.
Each frame contains 1,310,720 pixels (1280x1024).
That means that theoretically, a single polygon face covering the screen could render 3051 times per second with bilinear filtering only.

So, what if you have to render the regular scene with all its intricacies, and then say just 50 transparent particle polys that are covering most of your screen?

3051/50 = 61fps. Now turn on anistropic filtering, say 8xAF. Add antialising x4.
61fps - 25% for 8xAA, divided by 4 for AA

11 frames per second. Lots of (edit)large particles = instant crazy slowdown.

Its a great over-simplification, but that is basically what is happening.
You've got the fill-rate blues.

[El_Vikingo]

SykloAG']Sure.

Fillrate is the number of pixels a video card can generate and display on the screen in a second.

...

11 frames per second. Lots of particles = instant crazy slowdown.

Its a great over-simplification, but that is basically what is happening.
You've got the fill-rate blues.

Amazing, You nailed it.
You calculated the amount of FPS I get when my own team spam the flag area with Smoke Nades!

hope this will teach everyone about the flag area smoke nading. It doesn't help at all.

[Deadmonkiefart]

Lag?
Just a bit for me.