94 replies to this topic

[Dauq]

My system is:
Athlon II x3 450 3.1Ghz
4Gb RAM
AMD Radeon 6670 1Gb
Windows 7 32bit

I get this bug every 4-5 matches usually, i suspect a memory leak. I know my system is not much above minimum specs, but normally i can play on 1280x800, High settings with reasonable FPS for an hour or so and then bam.

Edited by Dauq, 31 October 2012 - 01:39 PM.

[ZaehtSorn]

TigaShark, on 31 October 2012 - 02:00 AM, said:

I see the issue after several hours and maybe 10-12 matches, after the bug kicks in I see intermittent slideshow//unplayable framerates when enemy mechs are on screen, this happens on maps which were previously fine....restarting the game tends to fix it..

...the same... (since last patch)


System specs:
Windows 7 Pro 64bit
Intel Core i7 920 (slightly oc'ed to 3200MHz)
ASUS P6T DELUXE V2
6Gb RAM Triple-channel mushkin 1600(O.C.)
GTX 550 Ti @1280x1024

[IceGryphon]

They have known about this issues since they updated the CryEngine they were using.
If you look at the Omicron.log you will see tons of these errors: [Error] Runaway thread.
As well as other errors that might be due to your USER.CFG, Things still locked, Or bad Dev work.
This issue has been pointed out numerous times by numerous people.
I am sure there are even fans willing to ofter support.
They seem to be headstrong and hellbent on sinking this project.

Beginning with v1.9.1.6 of DotNetZip, this property is obsolete. It will be removed in a future version of the library.
Oh Really PGI? Is there a Reason why you aren't using v1.9.1.8?
I will even give you a link. http://dotnetzip.codeplex.com/

Also check your Code and clean it up when you port it to another version of an SDK/IDE.
Lord know I have to all the time when a new version on netbeans and JDK come outs.

[Grease Monkey]

I don't have time arm to read the whole thread so apologies if this has been mentioned.

To all seeing the 4fps bug CONSTANTLY (not you intermittent folks). I was seeing this bug and was running XP 32 bit. Upgrading to windows 8 and therefore being able to use more memory solved not only this bug but also another I had. My conclusion is that with the current build there is a memory leak and 4 gigs is not enough to run the game. If you run a 32 bit os you will NEVER MEET THE SYSYTEM REQUIREMENTS. A 32bit os assigns memory addresses to graphics card and other buffer memory first before the RAM on the board. So if you have 4 gigs of memory and a 1 gig memory video card your os will only use 3 gig of your RAM.

Temporary fix! In my testing before going with win8 it seemed the leak was with the "texturing" graphics setting. In my case i could run everything on high EXCEPT texturing, I set this on low and got 15-25 fps in a furball. Although it's not as pretty it makes it playable.

[Jace11]

Could this damage graphics cards?

[Erasus Magnus]

I have the same issue. the interesting thing that i noticed: if it spasms out, the fps drops to EXACTLY 4.0 fps, not lower, not higher which is quite odd. i hit f9 to see the fps ingame, perhaps the ingame fps counter borks out, too. but this is what i found interesting (yet annoying). Happens after about 5 matches and needs a restart of the game. No suspicious behaviour on the memory side while this occours. I will however try out gpu-z, too


my specs:

CPU: AMD Phenom X4 955BE overclocked to 3,6ghz

Graphics: Sapphire Radeon 5770 Vapor X with 1Gb DDR5 VRAM; GPU overclocked to 930mhz and VRAM to 1300 (2600)mhz.

Memory: 4GB OCZ Black Edition CL7 DDR3 with 7-7-7-16-23 lat. @ 1333mhz

Mainboard: MSI 770-C45 at stock speeds and voltages

HDD: Barracuda 500GB, i think its only a 7200rpm thingy, as my system and game drive. No SSD yet.

PSU: LC Power 650 Watts (makes funny noises, i think it will break down soon).

OS: Win 7 64bit Home Premium

everything with newest patches, drivers, flashes and updates.

whole system is prime stable even if i stress test it for several days.

Edited by Erasus Magnus, 31 October 2012 - 04:43 PM.

[Buzz313th]

Two days ago I sent in a ticket for this "Intermitant 4 fps bug", and by the way I am not the first person to report this, I am just the OP. Anyway, I finally recieved a reply from the devs regarding my ticket. Since I am getting ready to take the family out for Halloween, I wont have the time to try these suggestions tonight. Maybe some of you might wanna give these a try. Heres my ticket and the Devs reply...


My ticket :

I am having two problems...

here's my specs

I5 at 3.3
GTX 560TI with 1 gig mem stock speeds
8 gigs ram
win XP64bit
DX9

1st problem I have been having since I joined as a legendary founder roughly 1.5 months ago...


Everytime I start the client I get this message...

[color="#0066cc"]http://dl.dropbox.com/u/85195138/Vidcard.jpg[/color]

Up until the last patch the game ran fine for me, with no problems...


Then after the last patch about one week ago...I got the following problem

Every third game after a client restart, if I pan my view to the center of the map where all the mechs are, my frames will drop from 60 FPS to 2-4 FPS. If I pan away my FOV then FPS will come back up like nothing happened.

My solution so far is to restart the client, then I get another 3 matches till I need to restart...

Please reply once you get this mail..

Thanks


The Devs Reply :
Magius (MechWarrior® Online™)
Oct 31 14:12 (PDT)
Hello Buzz313th,
If you're running on a laptop, sometimes it won't detect a game application such as MWO as being a 3D application, and will use the generic video card. You can manually open up the video card control panel, (By right-clicking on your desktop) and manually add the application MWOClient.exe by explicitly tell it to use the 'high-performance processor' as the preferred graphics processor for the program. (Instead of using global settings and letting the software auto-select which GPU to use.)
If you play on a desktop, I have a few workarounds that you can try, it has worked for a lot of users.
In addition to keeping your drivers up to date, click on those links to update those as well:
.NET [color="#0066cc"]http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=22[/color]
C++ [color="#0066cc"]http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=5555[/color]
DirectX [color="#0066cc"]http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=35[/color]
*** After this, reboot your computer and install all available Windows updates
*** Start MechWarrior Online see how your performance is in-game.
*** If the problem still persist, create yourself another account with no admin privileges.
*** Go to: Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\User Accounts
*** Create yourself a new user account (with no admin privileges)
*** Log off the current account you're in, then log back with the new account you created
*** Now run the game "As Administrator". (Right-click on the MWO icon to make this option appear)
If that doesn't cut it, you can clear the shaders in your shader folder. Click on the hard drive where you installed the game, then go to: Program files(x86)/MechWarriorOnline/USER/ From there, delete the "shaders" folder. It will generate new shaders in your next game and may solve your graphic glitch. Repeat this operation if need be, until we find a permanent fix.
You can also modify the Anti-aliasing handling setup of your graphic driver to "application controlled".
** Right click on your desktop to bring up your video card folder and click on it
*** Click on catalyst control center
*** Click on "gaming"
*** Click on "3D application settings"
*** Selection Mech Warrior Online in the drop down (If you don't see it, select new application, save then select the Mech Warrior Online application.) Default folder: C:\Games\Piranha Games\MechWarrior Online\Bin32
*** Make sure that you're using the same screen resolution on your desktop and in-game. Don't use full screen mode either, as the game works better in windowed mode.
Let me know how you're faring after trying those solutions!

Regards,
Magius
GameMaster
MechWarrior® Online™


And FYI, I have tried most of these suggestion with no luck... The following did not work.

1. Using MSI Afterburner, a video driver control utility to force the card to stay at a certain performance level.

2. If the devs bothered to look at my system specs in the original ticket, then they would know I was running a desktop. So I did not try the laptop fix.

3. My .Net, DirectX and video drivers are all up to date. So thats not the problem.

4. I am running XP not Win7 or Vista, so I have not tried the administrator launch from a non admin account. Not sure how this is gonna help, but when I get time I will do a hail mary and try that..

5. I have tried the, "Delete shaders" suggestion and it did not change anything.

6. I have been running the game in fullscreen mode only and in 1920 1200. My native desktop resolution is 1920x1280, so when I get some time I will try to run in windowed mode and match the res... Hope that helps...

Now here is my feeling about all this...

Most, if not all the suggestions above that came from the devs are actually suggestions that came from users on the forum who have been trying to fix this problem. This is the main reason why I have already tried all of the above... I am getting the feeling that the DEVS don't really know what is going on and about now they are just fishing.

Hopefully if the Devs can't figure this out, somebody else will.. Please lemme know..

Post your results.,..

Edited by Buzz313th, 31 October 2012 - 04:55 PM.

[Buzz313th]

Grease Monkey, on 31 October 2012 - 03:22 PM, said:

I don't have time arm to read the whole thread so apologies if this has been mentioned.

To all seeing the 4fps bug CONSTANTLY (not you intermittent folks). I was seeing this bug and was running XP 32 bit. Upgrading to windows 8 and therefore being able to use more memory solved not only this bug but also another I had. My conclusion is that with the current build there is a memory leak and 4 gigs is not enough to run the game. If you run a 32 bit os you will NEVER MEET THE SYSYTEM REQUIREMENTS. A 32bit os assigns memory addresses to graphics card and other buffer memory first before the RAM on the board. So if you have 4 gigs of memory and a 1 gig memory video card your os will only use 3 gig of your RAM.

Temporary fix! In my testing before going with win8 it seemed the leak was with the "texturing" graphics setting. In my case i could run everything on high EXCEPT texturing, I set this on low and got 15-25 fps in a furball. Although it's not as pretty it makes it playable.

Its not a memory leak... It is that the video memory is not being cleared between matches...

If you don't believe it... google "GPUZ", download it, install it and let it monitor your vid memory durring a MWO session. You will see that the vid memory gets saturated and never gets released. Only way to release the memory is to restart the MWO client.

[GL Chozo4]

Grease Monkey, on 31 October 2012 - 03:22 PM, said:

I don't have time arm to read the whole thread so apologies if this has been mentioned.

To all seeing the 4fps bug CONSTANTLY (not you intermittent folks). I was seeing this bug and was running XP 32 bit. Upgrading to windows 8 and therefore being able to use more memory solved not only this bug but also another I had. My conclusion is that with the current build there is a memory leak and 4 gigs is not enough to run the game. If you run a 32 bit os you will NEVER MEET THE SYSYTEM REQUIREMENTS. A 32bit os assigns memory addresses to graphics card and other buffer memory first before the RAM on the board. So if you have 4 gigs of memory and a 1 gig memory video card your os will only use 3 gig of your RAM.

Temporary fix! In my testing before going with win8 it seemed the leak was with the "texturing" graphics setting. In my case i could run everything on high EXCEPT texturing, I set this on low and got 15-25 fps in a furball. Although it's not as pretty it makes it playable.

Quite the contrary, all 32bit systems meet the requirements as they can actually access 64gb-128gb of ram (not the 4gb max FUD people are pushing) with up to 3gb ram per thread. Many whom are having it are also running 64-bit builds of windows as well so your argument is effectively invalid. The main reason being it isn't exactly a system ram issue at all but rather limited to lack of graphics ram (with GFX ram leak) on the card itself which is independent of system ram. Those with less system ram are experiencing it worse when under vista/7 it uses as much system ram as shared GFX memory (on top of whatever is on their dedicated gfx card) as it needs and thus takes up the rest of a users system memory as well till the client is closed. Simply having more system ram only prolongs the inevitable.

Quote

So if you have 4 gigs of memory and a 1 gig memory video card your os will only use 3 gig of your RAM.

(*)Bios setting "Memory Hole Remapping" resolves that and is also required under 64bit. Memory limits have been enforced under 32bit since Windows SP2 to lower system ram to less than 4gb as stated by the following Microsoft Knowledge Base Article. Windows XP SP1 was actually accessing all 4gb and more without any tweaks or changes with PAE enabled.

The less than 4gb limit for 32bit windows is an artificial limit enforced by Microsoft on client machines since then to push 64-bit windows and not a limitation of windows itself as drivers handle the memory space properly. There are fixes and methods to enable beyond 4gb without limitation under 32bit on the web which bypasses the 4gbMAX artificial limitation without detrimental effects to both in speed and function. Keep in mind, MechWarrior Online is also compiled as a 32bit game and NOT 64bit and thus is still limited to the same memory allocation limits as it would have under 32bit windows.

Your issue may have been fixed because of a reinstall of windows itself overall rather than being 32bit. Bad install of 32bit windows + reinstall of another form of windows as 64bit + reinstall of MechWarrior Online= "32bit wont handle MWO requirements" makes absolutely no sense. Getting 15-25fps on the lowest settings under windows XP compared to Windows 8 indicated a severe problem with your previous windows install using the same hardware excluding the 'extra ram. >.>

I can run lowest settings and peg at a constant 60fps or highest at 32fps(avg) at 2560x1920 resolution using XP SP2 32bit (currently using server 2003 SP2-32bit which is the equivalent and supposedly 'bad for gaming') with 4gb ram. Testing it under my partners PC which is Win7-64bit (with 12gb ram) exhibits the same issue with a GFX RAM leak occurring and thus causing poor performance over several matches (and hers has gtx 570 compared to my gtx260). Both systems are using an NVIDIA-Based GFX solution with the newest driver set.


* = Fun fact: Back in the days of 16bit windows there was a memory limit of 16mb which was then bypassed. Both were done using the 15-16mb Memory Hole Remap option in bios' at the time. The option has since been added internally as a permanent unchangeable fix to newer bios' as will the current memory hole remap option eventually be over time.

Edited by GL Chozo4, 31 October 2012 - 05:31 PM.

[GL Chozo4]

Buzz313th, on 31 October 2012 - 04:43 PM, said:

4. I am running XP not Win7 or Vista, so I have not tried the administrator launch from a non admin account. Not sure how this is gonna help, but when I get time I will do a hail mary and try that..

Administrator launch won't have any effect if you are already running as administrator under Windows XP or an account with administrator rights. The only reason it may help under vista/7/8 is because even as administrator the account rights are still limited.

I can confirm that all the points they made for you is not a valid solution as well as most of those I already had done or set. As for admin rights... I'm running as an escalated system account which has a few extra rights beyond the normal administrator account.

[Flapdrol]

yeah, this memory leak thing has been around for ages.

on win7x64 and lowest settings it takes a long time to show up but if you play long enough it always happens, you get either the "blocky graphics", where you cant read any of the text and can hardly see anything and low fps, or just very low fps (4 or something) or you get a black screen.

I've seen all 3 variants in one single game, blocky first, turn toward middle of map and screen went black, alttabbed out to start afterburner then it was just the low fps thing. I also had a game where it was there but not so bad, only if I turned to the middle of the map fps was bad, like 12 or so, turning toward the edge of the map and it was high (50-ish) fps agian. normally I get ~40 fps when a lot is going on on screen.

[GL Chozo4]

I thought I woudl toss this up for comparisons sake to show others what they are expected to see when they look at their mem use during a game. The program I'm using is Rivatuner 2.24 to monitor the stats.

Pay attention to how the System Memory usage stays constant and low (allocated for the client shown at bottom of each reading) to crop the data together. Further keep in mind that the page-file reading is the swap-file(pagefile,etc) plus physical memory total (I have a 1gb swap on a 1gb ramdrive, so the values are nearly identical and explains the extra 1gb physical memory use). Then notice how with each match (3 on the same map) the GFX/GPU Memory use kept climbing. The second match was 'ehhh' and bearable considering the bulk of the memory use was still on the GFX card. The third match was unplayable while looking at certain areas of the map due to most of the activity now being put on system shared memory for GPU -Texture swapping (capping at 256mb shared causing 1fps slowdowns). At this point I ended my test/comparisons.

These were done with medium/high graphic settings to be able to push at least 3 matches.

Edited by GL Chozo4, 31 October 2012 - 08:34 PM.

[tsk]

I had similar experience with VRAM running out around the time the problem occurs.
Can we force the game not to load textures? If so it should be easy enough to confirm.
The only other cause I can think of is excessive hard drive usage.

[Grease Monkey]

Buzz313th, on 31 October 2012 - 05:01 PM, said:

Its not a memory leak... It is that the video memory is not being cleared between matches...

If you don't believe it... google "GPUZ", download it, install it and let it monitor your vid memory durring a MWO session. You will see that the vid memory gets saturated and never gets released. Only way to release the memory is to restart the MWO client.

Im not a programmer, so I don't really know whats causing it. But I have been around this beta for a long time and there was another memory leak bug a while back that had the same symptoms. Im only here to relay me experiences on what works and what doesn't. My experience is having more memory available fixed my problem completely. Restarting my client and alt tabbing never fixed this for me, both of which are supposed to clear the memory. I bet there are two separate bugs, one for those who see a progressive bug, and those who see a constant bug. Again, this is only my experience

GL Chozo4, on 31 October 2012 - 05:06 PM, said:

snip

Wow nice write up. Heres the facts, I was DENIED customer service because of my dxdiag file showing less than 4gig. Whether or not I had a corrupted install of XP or MWO (MWO ran fine with the old engine version, same as now actually...hmmm....) and whether or not a 32 bit OS can read off 4+gigs of ram is irrelevant. I wasn't going to say anything but you will be denied any assistance from PGI if you have a 32bit system unless you can get that extra ram working through whatever black magic you can find on the internet.

Edited by Grease Monkey, 31 October 2012 - 09:09 PM.

[Buzz313th]

GL Chozo4, on 31 October 2012 - 07:54 PM, said:

I thought I woudl toss this up for comparisons sake to show others what they are expected to see when they look at their mem use during a game. The program I'm using is Rivatuner 2.24 to monitor the stats.

Pay attention to how the System Memory usage stays constant and low (allocated for the client shown at bottom of each reading) to crop the data together. Further keep in mind that the page-file reading is the swap-file(pagefile,etc) plus physical memory total (I have a 1gb swap on a 1gb ramdrive, so the values are nearly identical and explains the extra 1gb physical memory use). Then notice how with each match (3 on the same map) the GFX/GPU Memory use kept climbing. The second match was 'ehhh' and bearable considering the bulk of the memory use was still on the GFX card. The third match was unplayable while looking at certain areas of the map due to most of the activity now being put on system shared memory for GPU -Texture swapping (capping at 256mb shared causing 1fps slowdowns). At this point I ended my test/comparisons.

These were done with medium/high graphic settings to be able to push at least 3 matches.

Nicely done Chozo...

I guess that about wraps up what is probably causing the bug.

Whats the solution? Can the code be given a routine to refresh the GPU ram after you exit a match and enter the mech lab? And then for ***** and giggles do it once more going from the lab to the game environment?

[GL Chozo4]

Buzz313th, on 31 October 2012 - 10:39 PM, said:

Nicely done Chozo...

I guess that about wraps up what is probably causing the bug.

Whats the solution? Can the code be given a routine to refresh the GPU ram after you exit a match and enter the mech lab? And then for ***** and giggles do it once more going from the lab to the game environment?

Essentially that's all that should do it but it isn't all that simple. Simply one would need to release the cached map resources such as textures, mech model meshes, etc from GFX memory which it 'mostly' already does. Much of this is already preloaded on launch while waiting for players so there is no rhyme nor reason to keep it in memory post launch. Releasing lobby resources upon launch could also help with in-game memory of course but would increase load time upon return. If anything, a user should be able to toggle the functionality through the config panel.

... but though resources could be released... the nature of a memory leak of any sort are resources not only unreleased but also 'lost' with no hooks to them due to an error in coding resulting in orphaned resources. Such as hooking resources in it, releasing the hook but not the resource, and then recreating the resource with another unique hook effectively just stacking on the usage. If the program no longer knows about that resource still in memory - how can it effectively release it without terminating the process (itself) that had them allocated to begin with?

Bah, I'm babbling and can only pitch info based on experience from other lesser forms of coding. One can only speculate at this point if it is simply orphaned resources or extended data caching. If caching.. it should be moved into system memory instead rather than GFX until needed again. If a memory leak.. need to patch the code to correct the resource allocation stack and properly release them after a match but this is likely a fault of CryEngine itself rather than the fault of PDI. This issue seemed to have cropped up since the recent update of CryEngine but eIther way... this is making us all 'cry' >.>

EDITED:
Tossing in one more stats clip, this time after a 3rd match. Didn't close the client this time around. Again, first marker is ingame, second is in lobby.

Edited by GL Chozo4, 01 November 2012 - 01:20 AM.

[Fooooo]

Interesting.

Nice work looking into all this stuff.......



However, why wouldn't this effect everyone (with less than say 1gb vram) ?


I finally took the plunge and upgraded to a new pc last night. (i7 3770k + sabretooth z77) However did not upgrade the GPU, so am still using the 275GTX. (btw its like night and day going from how the game played b4 I upgraded.)

The new chip has no problems on all the maps (40 - 60 fps) except frozen city, which it will drop to 20fps looking sorta towards the crashed ship.

So far I have not encountered the 4fps bug on this new rig, which ATM is running on a copy of win 7 32bit instead of 64bit, so can't even use all my memory yet. (maybe 64bit windows is causing issues as well ?? )

I also have never had this huge increase in vram usage or memory usage even on the old setup (Pentium D EE running win7 64bit) , however it got the 4fps bug every match, or at least, it lagged to all hell near enemys.......

When I watch the memory stats, after the match finishes, it seems to clear it normally for me.... (goes from 1.5gb used in match, to 400mb used once leaving match, then back to 700mb once it loads up mechlab, the VRAM does a similar thing)

Edited by Fooooo, 31 October 2012 - 11:40 PM.

[Akhael]

Some progress here... remember I have 4-6 fps in mechlab as soon as my profile is loaded and GPU-Z tells me my GPU is loaded to 100%, no wonder i have such low fps BUT my vram is not overloaded all the time like it was yesterday. I only have 256 mo of it so in-game it goes high but after a game is goes down normally. Remeber also that before open beta I could play the game with 25/30fps. I only did a few windows updates since yesterday, don't know if it's related. It seems to me that I don't have the memory leak issue but they changed something last monday that's driving my GPU crazy...

[LennStar]

After testing I found out that:

It definitely is graphics related (memory) bug because:
If I play on very high I have "memory allocation error" every second match in average.
On medium it occurs but not very often (and never before 3rd match). But I get the 4FPS bug with following graphic errors and then bluescreen of death in the 6th match.
On the lowest setting I played I think 7 matches before the FPS started to go down (didn't reach 4FPS, more 6-7).

[Akhael]

I am not stuck at 4 fps too but rather 5/6 with peaks at 9 fps - WaOw close that window It's getting cold ! - I don't get the error message since my vram is not affected, only GPU load (100% all the time) there must be two different problems involved...