Re: [New for 2011!] Which level of graphics settings do you play?
Posted: 2011-10-09 23:55
^ This. Its not a graphics card problem on the consumer end, its an optimization either on the development end, or possibly its an unforeseen server-side problem that no one has caught yet. Either way, even dropping all settings down to the bare bones on low, I still get what I believe is occlusion induced lag, theres simply too many polygons being processed and the occlusion settings probably aren't tweaked right. If I'm in an alley way, surrounded by buildings, my card shouldn't be rendering and keeping track of buildings and vehicles that I cannot see on the next block over.PFunk wrote:Its been my experience that even dropping my settings has done little to change the lag problems I've sporadically experienced.
Settings all high here and have been for the last 3 years.
Intl E8400 OC'd to 3.3 Ghz
EVGA Nvidia 8800 GT Superclocked edition
4 gigs Mushkin Ram
ASUS P5K-E
I believe WurmOnline is the place I learned about this, they had an option to enable/disable "occlusion culling". I think in one of the patches to that game during its Alpha phase was to fix the sporadic skipping/frame drop when you looked into a huge forest or heavily populated area by lowering the circle around you that your card rendered based on line-of-sight.
What I noticed in that game is that when I stepped into a mineshaft or a building and I couldn't see the surrounding environment, my frame-rates dramatically increased.
Also, I believe it has the ability to work on the Field of View function as well, as in, anything outside of a certain cone of vision (it extends past your monitor, like overscan on a TV) isn't rendered either, so if you're looking north in the middle of the city, the city behind you isn't rendered/kept track of in video-memory client-side to free up resources for rendering the scene you are actually looking at.
Sorry if that makes no sense, it was a loooooooong time ago that I Alpha-tested that game and I'm sure I messed some of the details up, but Occlusion Culling is definitely the right term.
EDIT: Forgot to relate this to my PR:BF2 experience. It seems like the entire map is rendered and loaded into memory at once and everything is static more or less, and no matter where you are in a map, say like Fallujah, if you look towards the city part of the map with all the buildings from ANYWHERE on the map, it seems to slow your frame-rate down, even if you're well outside the "foggy" view-distance limiter, which doesn't actually stop the polygons from being rendered and loaded into my video memory.
Maybe bring the occlusion diameter down the the view-distance diameter, so basically if you can't see it, it doesn't exist (as far as visual rendering goes) and then additionally, when you transition from out-doors to in-doors your occlusion diameter should drop as well, unless you're like on the roof or looking out a window at the city or something.
