16 replies to this topic

[Jiffy]

So I'm currently running the following:

EVGA GTX 970 4GB
Intel Xeon E3-1231 v3 @3.4 GHz (3.7 GHz turbo)
16 GB DDR3-1600 RAM
256 GB SSD
2 TB WD HDD


Running most settings on medium and particles on low, I'm getting about 20 FPS minimum on Solaris city, and about 50 maximum. Most other maps are a bit better but not an awful lot. The game seemed to run considerably better about a year or two ago, but it seems that with each new patch I lose a bit more performance. I know this game is needlessly CPU intensive, but I really can't imagine that it's so poorly optimized that my CPU can't keep up. It's kind of absurd.

Before anybody asks, yes, my power profile is set to high performance. And yes, I've eliminated as many background services and processes as possible.

[NARC BAIT]

I'd say that your problem probably relates to CPU single threaded performance, and being a Xeon, your going to have trouble increasing it .... so ... in terms of options ...

1) mess with threading settings in a user.cfg file
2) hope you have a magical bios that lets you overclock things that wont do it

in theory, assuming your bios isnt super restrictive, you might have options to increase the base clock ... which generally wont provide a massive increase on its own, as your likely to be able to increase it by less than 5%, you may have an option to mess with the CPU ratio, but it will probably max out at the turbo frequency, but you can probably do the turbo frequency on all cores, on a decent cooler ... another bios possibility is that you can mess with the CPU/RAM ratio .... to do that, you will probably need to lower the frequency of the RAM, to have it come back up to its normal speeds anyway ... really just depends on which bios you have on what board ... in theory, if you were able to use both overclocking options, you might be able to get it near 4ghz ... yeah, could be alot of work / stability issues, for not alot of benefit ...

so, thread configuration ... will it help ? maybe ... normally, cryengine has the ability to do 6 threads, with 6 secondaries ... using the job system ( normal / default ) makes an extra layer of hoops to jump through, for very little benefit on CPU's pushing more than 2ghz, and generally it will try to avoid loading much onto hyperthreaded cores ... so generally, by default, the normal configuration, is attempting to manage 12 threads on your four actual cores, and they are probably not organised efficiently for you ... for instance, you might end up having the particles thread be assigned a number higher than your core count, which wraps back around, and ends up giving you particles, waters and the main thread, all on one core .... if one thread falls behind in its workload, things will stall until that task completes ....

and in terms of optimization ... well, its not a done thing at PGI ... the engine needed to be updated ... oh what, about 4 years ago, like it seriously needed to be updated so that we had a decent feature set, instead of an orphan abomination somewhere between crysis 1 and crysis 2 ... but they seem to be unable to port their code to a newer version of the engine ... any time they 'add' a feature, it bloats code that was already not optimized to the best conditions for the underlying engine ... the situation is beyond absurd, its almost a precautionary tale on why code should be written as insertable / ignorable modules, instead of hard coded hacks

[Nightbird]

My guess is heat or drivers. The CPU and GPU should be good for 60fps on 1080 resolution. Just don't tell us you're running a 4k monitor or something.

Install HWmonitor (free @ https://www.cpuid.co.../hwmonitor.html) or other temp monitoring software of your choice, and tell us your maximum CPU and GPU temperature after 1 hr of MWO gaming.

[Jiffy]

I don't believe it's heat or drivers. I've already tried running HWmonitor and my peak CPU temps are usually around 68 C. I also just updated my video card drivers today, no difference. I'm only trying to run the game at 1080P, nothing crazy. All settings are medium to low. This is driving me insane. I used to be able to run the game at a very consistent 60 FPS with all settings on high. It just seems that with each new patch I lose a bit more performance. One more patch and the game will be completely unplayable.

Edited by Jiffy, 26 June 2018 - 05:24 PM.

[Nightbird]

Try running the repair tool then, and if it doesn't work completely uninstall the game and then delete the game folder (saving your config)

[Jiffy]

I tried the repair tool as well. Also tried running both the Steam and standalone versions of MWO. Both run like utter trash.

[Nightbird]

Peak video card temperature? The tolerance is usually 10-15C less than CPU before throttling.

Otherwise, run the game in full windowed mode and make sure the game is using up 95%+ of system resources.

Newer versions of windows separate out CPU and GPU % usage so that can be helpful.

[Jiffy]

I'm 100% certain I'm not getting GPU throttling. Peak GPU temps are usually about 65 C, but the GTX 970 will go above 80 C before thermal throttling begins.

[Nightbird]

Disable all power saving modes for your CPU in the BIOS, all C-states

Other than this, if you have the HD space, dual boot another installation of windows with just drivers and MWO installed. < My last suggestion that's slightly better than a complete install in that you can identify whether the problem is hardware or software

[Jiffy]

Thanks Nightbird, I'll try that out. I don't believe it's hardware related. I mean, all my other games run like nothing is wrong, and my temperatures all appear to be in normal operating ranges. Am I crazy for believing my computer should be able to run this game just fine?

[Alreech]

Jiffy, on 25 June 2018 - 07:39 PM, said:

So I'm currently running the following:

EVGA GTX 970 4GB
Intel Xeon E3-1231 v3 @3.4 GHz (3.7 GHz turbo)
16 GB DDR3-1600 RAM
256 GB SSD
2 TB WD HDD

Thats weird.

My specs:
AMD R9 280 (weaker than the 970)
Intel Xeon E3-1231 v3 @3.4 GHz (3.7 GHz turbo)
16 GB DDR3-1600 RAM
256 GB SSD

I have some low FPS (22) on Solaris at the start of the match, but mostly it will run with 40 - 50 fps.

[Jiffy]

Well, I tried to upload screenshots of maximum CPU / GPU usage and temperatures from a match where I experienced sub 25 FPS frame rates, but the MWO forum hates every image uploading site that is available. Still, I can relay to you guys that the most usage any single core of my CPU got during the match was 82%, and the rest were below 67%. GPU wasn't stressed at all, and temperatures for both the CPU and GPU stayed below 60 C. I'm out of ideas at this point.

[Nightbird]

Try every setting on low/off, exit, run repair tool, clear shaders, run a match. If you get better frames, then increase settings one by one until you find out what to not increase (shadows, AA)

If you don't see any improvement, dual boot to eliminate all softwarre issues.

I use Imgur for images, free and works well

[Alreech]

Try also to force some settings in the driver directly.
nVidea should have some options to force game specific settings via a profile.

[Jiffy]

I've tried forcing settings through the driver but it doesn't seem to help anything. I tried doing a clean driver install and everything, and it actually seems like MWO is messing with my drivers somehow. Every 3D application that I run is capped at 60 FPS (even with vsync disabled both in game and forced off through the nvidia control panel). After doing a clean driver reinstall, I was able to run everything except MWO at uncapped frame rates, but after booting up and closing MWO, everything is capped at 60 again, regardless of my settings in games and through the nvidia control panel. This game simply hates my PC.

[visionGT4]

Make sure your running dx9 as the in game renderer. For whatever reason dx11 is absolutely terrible with this version of cryengine and it also caps refresh at 60hz.

[Tarl Cabot]

Jiffy, on 28 June 2018 - 03:03 PM, said:

I've tried forcing settings through the driver but it doesn't seem to help anything. I tried doing a clean driver install and everything, and it actually seems like MWO is messing with my drivers somehow. Every 3D application that I run is capped at 60 FPS (even with vsync disabled both in game and forced off through the nvidia control panel). After doing a clean driver reinstall, I was able to run everything except MWO at uncapped frame rates, but after booting up and closing MWO, everything is capped at 60 again, regardless of my settings in games and through the nvidia control panel. This game simply hates my PC.

You may want to look the programs that are running in the background. You may not locate the issue though simply by ensuring the OS is starting up with a clean boot. You would not be the first person who had a graphics program running which affected the system after running MWO. One poster figured his out by reinstalling the OS, then installing 1-2 programs at a time then starting up MWO 2x. The issue was that MWO would run only at 720p instead of 1080p after logging in the 2nd time. I believe this player performed a clean boot but no change, likely due to the graphic program installing its own driver that stayed loaded up.

Edited by Tarl Cabot, 29 June 2018 - 02:56 AM.