29 replies to this topic

[Ps10n1C]

Dear forum readers...

I was playing this game when it first came out, then made a loooong break. I am here again. It was fun to mess with the user.cfg and stuff back then, but today - the game seems mature and I think it should be cured of some small bugs which bugged the game from back then - we shouldn't modify the game .cfg anymore IMHO...

It's about 30Hz vsync. Yes, I like good visuals and was very dissapointed when I ran this game on my I7 6700K @ 5GHz with the AMD R9 290x only to see unplayable lag and 30Hz frame rate on maxed settings. I thought that the game became demanding and didn't investigate any further. I was dying due to the fact that game lags as if I had Pentium Celeron @ 1.6 GHz and integrated GPU. I was about to abandon, when I remembered you can tweak the cfg file. I figured out something was wrong, when I tried to get settings down, only to see no improvement.

Then I found this line : sys_MaxFPS = 30

My question: Why ? Does it have to be there ? Why is that line put in, so to ruin the game completely for someone who wants to try it for the first time and doesn't want to dig deep into forums on how to mod the game ? Totally crazy... Like - "let's slow down this wonderful game, let's make it look demanding so ppl just drop playing" That one line of code, my gents, might have cost you way too much $$$

What it should be is sys_MaxFPS = 60 (or the refresh freq of your display)

Today, most of the gamers have top tier GPUs, no need to cripple the game like that

From unplayable, game became AWESOME !

Playing it in full screen, DX 11 mode, VSYNC ON, EYE CANDY = ULTRA MEGA HIGH GIGA QUAD

Edited by Ps10n1C, 27 April 2017 - 01:09 PM.

[Vxheous]

Default user.cfg is blank so you must hava manually entered that line at some point in the past (or copy/pasted someone's config off the forum without scanning all the settings)

[Ps10n1C]

Vxheous Kerensky, on 27 April 2017 - 01:09 PM, said:

Default user.cfg is blank so you must hava manually entered that line at some point in the past (or copy/pasted someone's config off the forum without scanning all the settings)

No, it is a fresh installation on a fresh system, I have made a new user.cfg with the line sys_MaxFPS = 60 in it... The system defaults to 30HZ if you do not override it with 60 hz

This is the first time I was installing this game on this hard drive, I was playing the game way back and made a break, got a new computer in the meanwhile, new SSD...

Edited by Ps10n1C, 27 April 2017 - 01:27 PM.

[Heffay]

Ps10n1C, on 27 April 2017 - 01:26 PM, said:

No, it is a fresh installation on a fresh system, I have made a new user.cfg with the line sys_MaxFPS = 60 in it... The system defaults to 30HZ if you do not override it with 60 hz

This is the first time I was installing this game on this hard drive, I was playing the game way back and made a break, got a new computer in the meanwhile, new SSD...

Default user.cfg is blank.

[Ps10n1C]

Heffay, on 27 April 2017 - 01:29 PM, said:

Default user.cfg is blank.

default user.cfg is actually non-existing

I wasn't clear enough in my original post:
I have installed the game. Ran it - for the first time on this computer/hdd/everything else after 2-3 years. I was devastated with the 30 FPS. When I wanted to abandon the game, I remembered that you can mess with the config. I came to forum, ran some searches, because I knew what to look for - a line about Max_FPS. Then I found some. Made it 60 and - there it was. The game in it's full glory...

So to be more clear - if you DO NOT override the default 30hz which is there when you first install the game (IDK where exactly the default settings are kept, I guess in some defaults.cfg, didn't even go to look for it) you will get a messy performance. I have figured out that if the default is limited to 30Hz, somewhere in the default config lines, there's a line Max_FPS = 30. So I've made a new user.cfg with just one line of text : Max_FPS = 60

[Heffay]

Ps10n1C, on 27 April 2017 - 01:38 PM, said:

default user.cfg is actually non-existing

I wasn't clear enough in my original post:
I have installed the game. Ran it - for the first time on this computer/hdd/everything else after 2-3 years. I was devastated with the 30 FPS. When I wanted to abandon the game, I remembered that you can mess with the config. I came to forum, ran some searches, because I knew what to look for - a line about Max_FPS. Then I found some. Made it 60 and - there it was. The game in it's full glory...

So to be more clear - if you DO NOT override the default 30hz which is there when you first install the game (IDK where exactly the default settings are kept, I guess in some defaults.cfg, didn't even go to look for it) you will get a messy performance. I have figured out that if the default is limited to 30Hz, somewhere in the default config lines, there's a line Max_FPS = 30. So I've made a new user.cfg with just one line of text : Max_FPS = 60

I'd love to know where that user.cfg file came from, because it's not anything the game would have done. Very interesting mystery!

[Ps10n1C]

OMG, you're messing with me now

There is no such file when you do fresh installation. The game ran at 30 hz here - out of the box.
I have made user.cfg with the text editor and put that one line which made the game override the default settings...

I mean - why would I even make this post if that wasn't the case ? I wanted to share my experience with the first time users. I know you have installed the game like bazillion times till now, I did that too back then, leaving traces from the previous installs so you might have never ran into that issue. Also not many ppl turn on that VSYNC at all...

Edited by Ps10n1C, 27 April 2017 - 01:48 PM.

[Shifty McSwift]

Ps10n1C, on 27 April 2017 - 01:44 PM, said:

OMG, you're messing with me now

There is no such file when you do fresh installation. The game ran at 30 hz here - out of the box.
I have made user.cfg with the text editor and put that one line which made the game override the default settings...

I mean - why would I even make this post if that wasn't the case ? I wanted to share my experience with the first time users. I know you have installed the game like bazillion times till now, I did that too back then, leaving traces from the previous installs so you might have never ran into that issue. Also not many ppl turn on that VSYNC at all...

I have no such setting in my user.cfg and I can go above 30 with no issues. Perhaps your graphics card has limiting default settings?

[Heffay]

Ps10n1C, on 27 April 2017 - 01:44 PM, said:

OMG, you're messing with me now

There is no such file when you do fresh installation. The game ran at 30 hz here - out of the box.
I have made user.cfg with the text editor and put that one line which made the game override the default settings...

I mean - why would I even make this post if that wasn't the case ? I wanted to share my experience with the first time users. I know you have installed the game like bazillion times till now, I did that too back then, leaving traces from the previous installs so you might have never ran into that issue. Also not many ppl turn on that VSYNC at all...

It's good advice for people to check in case performance is crappy. I'm just saying that the 30 FPS limit isn't a default setting or something that the game sets. There must have been some legacy stuff, or maybe NVidia Experience did some "optimizations" based on your system settings.

That's why I'm saying it would be interesting to know where it came from. This is definitely an unusual edge case.

[Tier5 Kerensky]

Well, I have over 30 FPS on my recetly upgraded computer so definetly no, there's no such artificial limit, by stock.

If you have, it's something you have.

Actually recently I heard someone saying Fallout 4 has FPS limit, half of screen refresh rate. He had 120 Hz monitor, but it was accidentally set to 60 and thus he had fixed 30 FPS. But, the game doesn't have that kind of limit, it does have FPS cap of 60 because game engine can't handle more. But not half of refresh rate, because obviously majority of players have 60 Hz monitors so we would have a silly cap of 30.

Now incidentally the guy talked about AMD Chill. He said it was disabled but I think it was not, because effect like that could easily be caused by it.


Sooooo, do you by any chance have installed AMD Chill?

Another thing comes to my mind, do you have Steam install? Because Steam has this feature called cloud save. It makes more sense for offline singleplayer games, but it might also work on online games, and it might had saved up some ancient file from ancient MWO, and then restored it as you reinstalled.

Edited by Teer Kerensky, 27 April 2017 - 02:04 PM.

[Tarl Cabot]

Quote

There is no such file when you do fresh installation. The game ran at 30 hz here - out of the box.

The games does not default to 30 out of the box. It is a combination of your system settings, both power options and GPU options combined with game settings.

Disable Vsync, in both game and GPU then use the user.cfg w/FPS set at 60. Vsync enabled can cause the game to drop from 60fps to 30fps when the game FPS drops below 60fps limit, iirc that how VSYNC works on a LCD monitor. There are clearer details to that but that is the gist of it.

Also, make sure Control Panel, Power Options it is set to high performance. If a person is not gaming balanced setting is okay but with gaming it can make park cores and lower overall CPU speed. When AMD released their new CPU that is the major thing they were telling people, to change their power setting to high performance while noting why it was needed. Remember, MS did not make the default OS settings w/gamers in mind, just the regular plebs.

Edited by Tarl Cabot, 27 April 2017 - 02:21 PM.

[Tier5 Kerensky]

Tarl Cabot, on 27 April 2017 - 02:15 PM, said:

Disable Vsync, in both game and GPU then use the user.cfg w/FPS set at 60. Vsync enabled can cause the game to drop from 60fps to 30fps when the game FPS drops below 60fps limit, iirc that how VSYNC works on a LCD monitor. There are clearer details to that but that is the gist of it.

Pretty sure nothing in vsync is related to what kind of monitor you have.

I have vsync on, because the game continues to draw graphics at full speed even when not visible. This is particular when I have the game on background in mechlab, it limits the GPU power a bit. Some better games stop drawing when they are not visible so that fans don't have to blow in vain and electricity is not wasted.

In battle the FPS goes mostly 20-40.

[Heffay]

G4LV4TR0N, on 27 April 2017 - 04:39 PM, said:

Stop posting immediately.

Hey, that's not nice! Be nice. We're nice here, dammit!

[Ps10n1C]

Ok guys, I think I have a clue to what was going on:

The game detected that my GPU can't run full details with 60FPS VSync on for some reason, so instead of VSync-ing it to 60 Hz, the game - or rather - the DX engine, decided to use half-frame rate vsync - so it defaulted to 30Hz. It might not even be related to the game, but to the either Unreal engine or the DX api itself. By adding a statement in the user.cfg - I've made the game to enforce the 60 Hz (full vsync mode), no matter what. The thing is - my GPU can run the game just fine, but maybe there was something going on first time I've started... I can even delete the user.cfg completely, game will still run fine (60hz)

Anyway - I was just sharing my first time experience with (probably) completely rewritten game engine from when I was last playing this game (DX 9) I think that many games - starting with NFS way back in time, should leave the players decide on such settings, by exposing a switch or a setting in the video settings... Some games have it, some do not. It's just a suggestion... First time I saw how the game performs, and after I did that user.cfg, I thought it runs like that out of the box - which would be really bad IMHO, that's why this entire topic. But I guess I was wrong, if the game doesn't have the default "set the vsync to half refresh", then it's API's or Unreal engine's fault. But still...

@Teer Kerensky

About the vsync - it's actually completely dependent of the refresh rate of your screen. Vsync means that the frame will wait for the screen to get drawn completely before it switches the buffer in the video memory. If it doesn't wait for the screen draw period to finish, it will cause switch to the next frame in the middle of the screen - leading it to tearing, but since there is no wait time - the things have less lag. It's like turning pages in a book - you turn one page then the other page. If you turn one page and in the middle of turning, you start turning the other - you'll have "page tearing", half of the page will remain in your right hand

Sorry for second post - just to add, that fan blowing like mad is driver's fault, I don't get why AMD doesn't FIX that issue - what happens is that vsync gets broken and fires frames @ max freq (I suppose the message about completed screen drawing, which is done by the interrupt most often, gets fired repeatedly since frame buffer is empty) Did I mention I am an embedded developer ?

Edited by Ps10n1C, 28 April 2017 - 09:57 AM.

[Mechteric]

Ps10n1C, on 28 April 2017 - 09:54 AM, said:

It might not even be related to the game, but to the either Unreal engine or the DX api itself.

btw, this is a CryEngine based game, not Unreal

[Ps10n1C]

ups...

[Ps10n1C]

I think I've missed to answer to Heffay's question:

The system is not "optimized", fresh gpu driver installation, I've set the max frame rate (frame rate target ctrl) to 60 - but I never saw it actually works and this is not related to vsync, it should only cap the max frames, nothing more. I've set VSync in the driver's config as "On, unless the application specifies otherwise", had power settings to 0% in the "Wattman" but I have sapphire tri-x and good cooling, so there shouldn't be any thermal throttling going on, and that's it. Yes - it's AMD card, Win10, i7 6700 with 16 GB of DDR4.

Maybe I have blamed the game wrongly, maybe it's even AMD's fault (wouldn't be the first time it happens), last time I was playing games was about a year ago

[G4LV4TR0N]

No, it's video card driver setting.

[Ps10n1C]

I do not understand what did I set wrongly, can you elaborate a bit on your conclusion ? I can't drop it under 60 now with all @ max, except for some crazy funky AA, so...

[Vxheous]

It's your setting of vsync on in driver setting, leave it as off or application to control.