54 replies to this topic

[Kain Demos]

Are these unavoidable?

Usually if I'm just moving around the map and a 'mech or two is visible I stay strong at 60 FPS (my monitor has a 60hz refresh rate so I always keep vsync on to prevent "tearing") but if I get 6 or more 'mechs in my FOV or take a ton of incoming fire it can easily drop to the 30-40 range. Sometimes if lots of ballistics or missiles are hitting me and I was zoomed in with advanced zoom it can get real ugly.

I run everything on very high, DX9 mode (I've put this on auto and DX11 before and don't know if there is any difference) 1080p, and post-AA. I tried MSAA once but that caused HORRENDOUS framerates even on the testing grounds.

My CPU is an i7-3930k that I have running a very, very mild overclock to 4.0ghz.

[Summon3r]

Kain Thul, on 02 October 2014 - 07:27 AM, said:

Are these unavoidable?

Usually if I'm just moving around the map and a 'mech or two is visible I stay strong at 60 FPS (my monitor has a 60hz refresh rate so I always keep vsync on to prevent "tearing") but if I get 6 or more 'mechs in my FOV or take a ton of incoming fire it can easily drop to the 30-40 range. Sometimes if lots of ballistics or missiles are hitting me and I was zoomed in with advanced zoom it can get real ugly.

I run everything on very high, DX9 mode (I've put this on auto and DX11 before and don't know if there is any difference) 1080p, and post-AA. I tried MSAA once but that caused HORRENDOUS framerates even on the testing grounds.

My CPU is an i7-3930k that I have running a very, very mild overclock to 4.0ghz.

gpu? ... even some of the monster rigs have issues once the smoke and particles start to fly seems to be a MWO issue. personally i run on dx11 with everything on very high except particles object detail and shadows on high... fyi for mwo standards a drop to 30-40 is not bad at all lol even with a solid cpu like yours.

seeing as your cpu is far superior to mine (see sig) i would just try turning particles to high.

[Catamount]

Yep, particles will kill your fps. I can run 40+fps all day long, and usually 50-120 depending on what's going on, but the more fraps runs I've done and the more I've looked at my fps as it's been discussed here, the more I've noted that heavy smoke is where I drop into the 30s, and heavy particle sprays (lasers against nearby terrain, especially) have put me down into the 20s on the rare occasions I encounter them.

I haven't tested lowering that setting, but plan to today. 30s is unacceptable for my rig, 20s far more so, rare or not.

[Kain Demos]

Summon3r, on 02 October 2014 - 07:42 AM, said:

gpu? ... even some of the monster rigs have issues once the smoke and particles start to fly seems to be a MWO issue. personally i run on dx11 with everything on very high except particles object detail and shadows on high... fyi for mwo standards a drop to 30-40 is not bad at all lol even with a solid cpu like yours.

seeing as your cpu is far superior to mine (see sig) i would just try turning particles to high.

I have two 7970s not that it matters since there is no Xfire support.

This is disappointing, I'm used to being capable of holding in excess of 100fps in games but capping it at 60 due to my monitor's refresh rate.

What is up with software these days? This is now the third game I've played extensively since building this computer a little over a year ago that having high-end hardware does nothing for you because their optimization is ****.

[Sadist Cain]

see I've long thought there something a bit odd with the performance in mwo.

I can run far cry 3 pretty much topped out, few things you can expect to be set down a notch or two.

Now without the load on my cpu from other players I can totter around testing maps with an easy 100fps

drop into a game and that becomes 50-60 ... then the hud kicks in.. hellooooo world of 30fps whenever I look towards the team, firing or not... and also if I ever look at the cave area from back near the dropship on frozen city, same deal.

Old rig too q6700, 275gtx, 4gb ram.
just seems like a really really wide spread for the amount of frames even for my antique.

Edited by Sadist Cain, 02 October 2014 - 08:24 AM.

[Summon3r]

Kain Thul, on 02 October 2014 - 08:04 AM, said:

I have two 7970s not that it matters since there is no Xfire support.

This is disappointing, I'm used to being capable of holding in excess of 100fps in games but capping it at 60 due to my monitor's refresh rate.

What is up with software these days? This is now the third game I've played extensively since building this computer a little over a year ago that having high-end hardware does nothing for you because their optimization is ****.

MWO is an oddity for sure, extremely poorly optimized, crushes CPU cycles doesnt like to take advantage of GPU (no xfire/sli = ridiculous) .... from all the testing that has been done here i bet if you OC'd a little more say 4.4 if your chip will do it which it should, will likely help with your drop in fps in those situations.

[Kain Demos]

Summon3r, on 02 October 2014 - 10:29 AM, said:

MWO is an oddity for sure, extremely poorly optimized, crushes CPU cycles doesnt like to take advantage of GPU (no xfire/sli = ridiculous) .... from all the testing that has been done here i bet if you OC'd a little more say 4.4 if your chip will do it which it should, will likely help with your drop in fps in those situations.

CPU limited is about the last thing I thought I'd ever be. I think my CPU should be easily stable to 4.8 so I think I'll look into it.

I monitor my CPU temps and have noticed that MWO does push it harder than most games. Usually it never gets out of the 50s but Cryengine games can see short term spikes into the low 60s and MWO has produced the highest numbers I've ever seen gaming--65-67 on rare occasions.

When I run a stress test that maxes all cores to 100% and holds them there the most I've ever seen is 68-71.

[Summon3r]

Kain Thul, on 02 October 2014 - 10:33 AM, said:

CPU limited is about the last thing I thought I'd ever be. I think my CPU should be easily stable to 4.8 so I think I'll look into it.

I monitor my CPU temps and have noticed that MWO does push it harder than most games. Usually it never gets out of the 50s but Cryengine games can see short term spikes into the low 60s and MWO has produced the highest numbers I've ever seen gaming--65-67 on rare occasions.

When I run a stress test that maxes all cores to 100% and holds them there the most I've ever seen is 68-71.

dood you cannot look at MWO like any other game.... it only cares about CPU its F***ed for lack of a better word.. so consider yourself cpu limited and try it out at 4.8 id love to hear the results!.... that being said 30fps is absolutely fine our petty human eyes cant detect anything over that so ive been told anyway lol

[xWiredx]

Haswell-E master race reporting in: this game loves CPU cycles, and it'll take 'em as fast as you can give 'em. Having said that, your GPU is probably part of the problem, too. Try everything at High instead of Very High, willing to bet you get a better frame rate. Then you can start toying with pushing individual settings to Very High. Though, tbh, your frame rate is considered normal or good by most people playing MWO.

[Kain Demos]

xWiredx, on 02 October 2014 - 10:51 AM, said:

Haswell-E master race reporting in: this game loves CPU cycles, and it'll take 'em as fast as you can give 'em. Having said that, your GPU is probably part of the problem, too. Try everything at High instead of Very High, willing to bet you get a better frame rate. Then you can start toying with pushing individual settings to Very High. Though, tbh, your frame rate is considered normal or good by most people playing MWO.

I know this isn't last summer when I built this thing but two 7970s with a total of 6GB of video ram should handle everything. Hell, when I ran Tomb Raider's in game benchmarks my FPS were in the 150s.

I guess without Xfire support I'm only running this game on 1/2 of my GPUs though. I guess I'll mess with it more tonight but in past experience with "non-optimized" games no matter what I change the settings to I'm sure FPS will still have dips.

Man I hate the motion blur in this game too.

Summon3r, on 02 October 2014 - 10:35 AM, said:

dood you cannot look at MWO like any other game.... it only cares about CPU its F***ed for lack of a better word.. so consider yourself cpu limited and try it out at 4.8 id love to hear the results!.... that being said 30fps is absolutely fine our petty human eyes cant detect anything over that so ive been told anyway lol

Correct, but it isn't a "smooth" 30fps. When those dips occur it seems there is some "chopping" or jumping around.

Edited by Kain Thul, 02 October 2014 - 11:19 AM.

[Kain Demos]

Well like other games I've run into with poor optimization whether I run it on max settings or minimum settings the frame rates behave exactly the same.

Too bad, some of those dips are unbearable.

[Catamount]

Kain Thul, on 02 October 2014 - 11:20 AM, said:

I know this isn't last summer when I built this thing but two 7970s with a total of 6GB of video ram should handle everything. Hell, when I ran Tomb Raider's in game benchmarks my FPS were in the 150s.

I guess without Xfire support I'm only running this game on 1/2 of my GPUs though. I guess I'll mess with it more tonight but in past experience with "non-optimized" games no matter what I change the settings to I'm sure FPS will still have dips.

Keep in mind SLI and Crossfire don't work that way with VRAM. The frame buffer data is basically cloned across the master and slave card(s), so two 3GB 7970s in Crossfire will have a total effective VRAM of... 3GB.

As for settings, it depends on your CPU setup, and the game. A poorly optimized game may vary greatly, or not at all from settings changed depending on what's bottlenecking what. Battlefield Bad Company 2 was a horribly optimized game, but settings made an enormous difference, because the problem was that things like ambient occlusion were too GPU-taxing. As soon as you turned off HBAO, the game doubled in fps. Battlefield 3 fixed the poorly optimized graphics largely, and one of the results was that HBAO caused an almost insignificant performance hit.

MWO is, of course, entirely CPU-bound, so your 7970s don't matter. One 7970 is enough to drive this game at well over 100fps on max settings at 1080P. It's your CPU that will drag you down. Still, there are graphical settings you can mess with and other things you can do to help reduce that load. Some graphical settings actually are CPU-intensive. There are also some bugs that can tank FPS, like I've heard turning off hardware accelaration in flash can really help sometimes too, because apparently the different vision modes make heavy use of flash.

There are always things you can do to improve fps, at least to a point.

Edited by Catamount, 03 October 2014 - 07:08 AM.

[Kain Demos]

Catamount, on 03 October 2014 - 07:08 AM, said:

Keep in mind SLI and Crossfire don't work that way with VRAM. The frame buffer data is basically cloned across the master and slave card(s), so two 3GB 7970s in Crossfire will have a total effective VRAM of... 3GB.

As for settings, it depends on your CPU setup, and the game. A poorly optimized game may vary greatly, or not at all from settings changed depending on what's bottlenecking what. Battlefield Bad Company 2 was a horribly optimized game, but settings made an enormous difference, because the problem was that things like ambient occlusion were too GPU-taxing. As soon as you turned off HBAO, the game doubled in fps. Battlefield 3 fixed the poorly optimized graphics largely, and one of the results was that HBAO caused an almost insignificant performance hit.

MWO is, of course, entirely CPU-bound, so your 7970s don't matter. One 7970 is enough to drive this game at well over 100fps on max settings at 1080P. It's your CPU that will drag you down. Still, there are graphical settings you can mess with and other things you can do to help reduce that load. Some graphical settings actually are CPU-intensive. There are also some bugs that can tank FPS, like I've heard turning off hardware accelaration in flash can really help sometimes too, because apparently the different vision modes make heavy use of flash.

There are always things you can do to improve fps, at least to a point.

Yes but my CPU is no slouch either. I honestly never thought I'd be "cpu limited" in any game this quickly.

I'm going to look into moving from the mild 4.0ghz overclock settings that are part of the BIOS and see if I can find something stable in the 4.6-4.8 range.

I experimented with DX11 mode and MSAA mode and both of those drop FPS by 10-20 each....terrible. All I want is to run everything on very high in 1080p with just "postAA" and eliminate any of the horrible FPS dips that make the screen seem choppy.

Hell, I could live with constant 40-45fps as long as there were no dips....its those fraction of a second drops from 60-30 or 60-25 that make it look like you're jumping around that drive me crazy.

[Catamount]

Turn off hardware accelaration in flash, try dropping particles down, and see if you can get that CPU to at least 4.5. Those will each help. Stick to DX9 since DX11 is still a botched up mess.

Your CPU is pretty darn good, but keep in mind MWO is uniquely murderous on CPUs. It's not the first time a game has exceeded reasonable CPU requirements, either. I understand it was almost a decade before CPUs came out that could run EQ2 at 60fps, and a few other games have been similarly bad here or there.

Edited by Catamount, 03 October 2014 - 07:41 AM.

[Kain Demos]

Catamount, on 03 October 2014 - 07:40 AM, said:

Turn off hardware accelaration in flash, try dropping particles down, and see if you can get that CPU to at least 4.5. Those will each help. Stick to DX9 since DX11 is still a botched up mess.

Your CPU is pretty darn good, but keep in mind MWO is uniquely murderous on CPUs. It's not the first time a game has exceeded reasonable CPU requirements, either. I understand it was almost a decade before CPUs came out that could run EQ2 at 60fps, and a few other games have been similarly bad here or there.

What throws me off though is that my CPU is never running under and serious load while playing MWO.

I suppose this is just because so many cores are idle due to the fact that games aren't even using 4, 6, or 8 cores yet?

Edited by Kain Thul, 03 October 2014 - 07:46 AM.

[Catamount]

MWO is very funny in this regard. I've done little testing myself, but from the results and descriptions of those who have my understanding is that MWO basically works like this: It has a couple absurdly, ridiculously intensive threads. If you don't feed those enough per-core performance, it holds up the whole game. If you do feed them enough, it's better, but then other threads all start wanting their own core (and FPU in particular).

So basically, MWO will take advantage of multicore CPUs pretty well, if you can get past running the most intensive threads so that everything else running isn't sitting around waiting. If you have a fast CPU, but not enough cores, you'll still bottleneck. A super fast quad core is about the minimum to run the game well, while hex and octa core CPUs do do somewhat better, but only if they're very high clocked. So you need both, lots of cores and lots of clockspeed and IPC.

In short, MWO needs ALL THE CPU

Edited by Catamount, 03 October 2014 - 08:05 AM.

[Flapdrol]

Dunno, my 4.6 GHz G3258 dualcore runs this game quite well in comparison to what I've seen on this forum.

My guess is the gamecode, like lasers and bullets hitting, damage, crits etc isn't really multithreaded, the rendering probably is, but I've got most settings on low and medium, so the directx and driver load is very low anyway.

Of course an overclockable i5 would perform a bit better, but it's also over 3x as expensive.

Edited by Flapdrol, 03 October 2014 - 09:17 AM.

[Summon3r]

Flapdrol, on 03 October 2014 - 09:15 AM, said:

Dunno, my 4.6 GHz G3258 dualcore runs this game quite well in comparison to what I've seen on this forum.

My guess is the gamecode, like lasers and bullets hitting, damage, crits etc isn't really multithreaded, the rendering probably is, but I've got most settings on low and medium, so the directx and driver load is very low anyway.

Of course an overclockable i5 would perform a bit better, but it's also over 3x as expensive.

Exactly your on low to med settings because u have a g3258. The op is on very high as he should be with his cpu. Looking forward to his results with a more aggressive oc

[Catamount]

Well he's also at 4.6ghz, and probably still gets low drops. The G3258 is an extraordinary little chip, but it's not some $70 i5. It's not even an i3. It is what it is, and while I wouldn't' hesitate to put it into a build, it's also not going to brilliantly succeed where $200+ chips fail, and struggle even with OCing.

[Flapdrol]

Well, it does brilliantly succeed where the 8350 fails