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Low FPS (esp. looking certain ways)


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#1 Chronojam

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Posted 29 October 2012 - 06:42 PM

There are three causes for slowdown in the recent version of Mechwarrior Online.

One is due to how your video card reacts to the game engine. This causes catastrophic framerate drops.
One is due to new lighting effects that have been added recently. This causes a small hit on weaker cards.
One is due to corruption in cache files. This causes a notable performance hit, but is not frequent.

First, the big one:
To solve the number one biggest problem, where your framerate plummets far below what your video card and settings would generally give, you need to prevent your video card from downclocking itself.

First, get MSI Afterburner or an equivalent. Some video cards ship with their own custom software to do what we need, but MSI is a trusted brand that will work across most chipsets and serves as a good "control" to avoid inconsistant behavior.

Second, make a note of your current settings. Save a new profile to mimic your current clockspeeds etc. so if your main clock speed is shown as 900mhz, have your profile at 900mhz. Some users have had better success by adding five megahertz to this value; so in the example above they would instead create a profile at 905mhz. This incredibly minor overclock can coax certain chipsets into a certain tier of performance.

Third, go to profile management, and apply your saved profile to both 2D and 3D modes. Your video card needs to be forced to keep its performance high even if it thinks it detects a 2D scene; we don't want it downclocking itself needlessly, which appears to be the problem with the recent patch.

Don't forget to apply your changes. Optionally, force your fan speed to 100% if you suspect you have a heat related issue. Take a glance at your GPU core temperatures while idle and while playing to see if anything looks off.

The second issue:
Use your video card control panel to disable Ambient Occlusion either globally (for all applications) or for the Mechwarrior Online executable. The framerate savings may be negligible depending on the relative power of your graphics card.

Ambient occlusion settings can be taxing on a system, especially if video card drivers don't efficiently embrace AO. Forest Colony in particular has a lot of overlapping trees and terrain that looks great with AO, but it certainly uses GPU power to get the shading to look right.

The third issue:
Some users apparently have issues with corrupt shader cache files. Not all users have this problem.
Delete those cache files from MechWarrior Online\USER\Shaders
This step does not need to be repeated often, and doing so often will cause slowdown at the start of a map as cache files are rebuilt.

Edited by Chronojam, 30 October 2012 - 01:33 PM.


#2 GioAvanti

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Posted 29 October 2012 - 06:49 PM

It happens after I've played awhile and I need to restart the client.

#3 leptoon

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Posted 29 October 2012 - 08:31 PM

If it starts to lag after you've played a while, chances are this is related to memory and not shaders... To fix it, just download a freeware program called Memory Cleaner. Install it, open it up, and go to the Options tab. Select "Trim processes' working set every 5 minutes". You will no longer experience lag while playing for long periods of time.

NOTE: You must run Memory Cleaner before you run the game, every time.

Edited by leptoon, 29 October 2012 - 08:32 PM.


#4 Buzz313th

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Posted 29 October 2012 - 09:19 PM

Can the devs please comment on the above two solutions. I don't mind finding a fix, but I also don't wanna chase a wild goose..

View PostChronojam, on 29 October 2012 - 06:42 PM, said:

Get MSI Afterburner or an equivalent

Create a new profile identical to your current clockspeeds etc. so if it's 900mhz, have your profile at 900mhz.

Apply this saved profile to both 2D and 3D profiles.

Some users apparently have issues with corrupt shader cache files.
Delete those files from MechWarrior Online\USER\Shaders



So your saying that assigning a profile to a video card overclock utility to force 2d and 3d speeds will fix the issue?

#5 Chronojam

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Posted 29 October 2012 - 09:20 PM

This fix was found after the Word of Lowtax experienced much frustration and spent days searching for a solution. It has been confirmed to fix the mysterious slowdowns.

#6 Buzz313th

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Posted 29 October 2012 - 09:36 PM

View PostChronojam, on 29 October 2012 - 09:20 PM, said:

This fix was found after the Word of Lowtax experienced much frustration and spent days searching for a solution. It has been confirmed to fix the mysterious slowdowns.



Would you mind posting this over here... http://mwomercs.com/...20#entry1306570

So that others with this issue can test your solution?

I would do it myself, but I haven't tried your solution yet and wont be able till tomorrow.

#7 tsk

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Posted 30 October 2012 - 01:46 AM

Tired both solution.
MSI Afterburner doesn't seem to make any difference to me.
Memory Cleaner dose delay the issue for 2 matches or so but then breaks most of the graphic in game.

#8 Sarevos

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Posted 30 October 2012 - 03:59 AM

View Posttsk, on 30 October 2012 - 01:46 AM, said:

Tired both solution.
MSI Afterburner doesn't seem to make any difference to me.
Memory Cleaner dose delay the issue for 2 matches or so but then breaks most of the graphic in game.


in C:\Games\Piranha Games\MechWarrior Online\USER\Shaders\cache delete the whole cache folder this should solve it for your next ~ 30 or 40 matches try it and lemme know how it goes worked for me

#9 tsk

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Posted 30 October 2012 - 06:44 AM

View PostSarevos, on 30 October 2012 - 03:59 AM, said:


in C:\Games\Piranha Games\MechWarrior Online\USER\Shaders\cache delete the whole cache folder this should solve it for your next ~ 30 or 40 matches try it and lemme know how it goes worked for me

That never worked for me.
I still think some sort of memory leak is occurring as memory usage grows at least 100mb for every map I play.

#10 Kaputnik

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Posted 30 October 2012 - 09:35 AM

Edited and i am sorry for misleading:

I have postet a workaround for the Third kind of error here:

http://mwomercs.com/...udden-fps-drop/

the first two problems are solved by the OP of this topic!

Edited by Kaputnik, 30 October 2012 - 02:09 PM.


#11 Frosted

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Posted 30 October 2012 - 10:10 AM

The MSI after burner profile fix has fixed it for me. My fps don't drop under 20 anymore like it used to especially on forest. Every thing is more smooth.

It's a really weird bug I had acceptable performance before this patch. After trying this fix it's back at that level. I didn't change anything on my end between the patches.

#12 Chronojam

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Posted 30 October 2012 - 12:48 PM

View PostFrosted, on 30 October 2012 - 10:10 AM, said:

The MSI after burner profile fix has fixed it for me. My fps don't drop under 20 anymore like it used to especially on forest. Every thing is more smooth.

It's a really weird bug I had acceptable performance before this patch. After trying this fix it's back at that level. I didn't change anything on my end between the patches.

Essentially, rendering changes have broken the hints that graphics cards try to use to determine their mode of operation.

The most recent iterations of nVidia drivers actually contain performance increasing changes for Mechwarrior Online, so you should definitely keep your drivers updated. A few people were having slowdown related to the recent implementation of Ambient Occlusion, so you could optionally disable that for the Mechwarrior Online executable (or globally), but I would imagine the next round of driver updates will improve that.

#13 Cest7

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Posted 31 October 2012 - 04:37 AM

Quote

306.97
  • Added NVIDIA Control Panel ambient occlusion support MechWarrior Online


Time to update my drivers!

#14 darknothing

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Posted 31 October 2012 - 02:01 PM

sapphire 6950 2gb ( msi afterburner is far better then sapphires Trixxs )
THANK YOU THANK YOU!!!!!! i was getting 20 fps looking at my team.
with MSI afterburner im not 50 FPS all the time!!!!!!
you sir are great.

edit, worked great for 3 games, shut game off, deleted Shaders, back to the same old FPS issue.
i think i give up and will wait for a proper fix from the devs. this should have been top priority.

i have seen lots of people give this game a small chance and then leave due to these issue.
frustrating.

Edited by darknothing, 31 October 2012 - 04:14 PM.


#15 Chronojam

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Posted 31 October 2012 - 04:22 PM

Glad I could help! I was stunned that they would release without patching this issue, or at least including a readme.txt on how to get around it, because I just know they've got to be losing potential fans over this. I've run into the same issue before developing a small game, and while players will tolerate a lot of glitches, imbalance, and even exploits, crippling framerate will gut your playerbase faster than anything.

So please direct people to this thread if you see them complaining, don't let them write off MWO as a lost cause.

#16 GL Chozo4

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Posted 01 November 2012 - 12:17 AM

View PostCest7, on 31 October 2012 - 04:37 AM, said:

Quote

306.97
  • Added NVIDIA Control Panel ambient occlusion support MechWarrior Online
Time to update my drivers!
You may need to edit the profile path using 'Nvidia Inspector' with the newer drivers to get the profile properly working and detecting the game. The profile supplied points to the old 'launcher.exe' executable and 'adding' the game using the Nvidia Control Panel will not enable ambient occlusion support.

#17 nameresu

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Posted 01 November 2012 - 12:25 AM

I has "4 fps when looking towards mechs" bug after game client was on about 5 hours in a row, without exiting. When I quit the game, a and started again, bug disappeared.

#18 LennStar

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Posted 01 November 2012 - 12:34 AM

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).

#19 TheCyberwolfe

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Posted 01 November 2012 - 07:35 PM

Unfortunately, I'm still seeing ridiculously low frame rates - like 22FPS standing completely still with no mechs in view, and down to 5 or 6 FPS in combat. I have tried these solutions and others, and even running with all graphics settings at minimum, it stinks.

Stats: Windows 7 Ultimate x64 on AMD Athlon X2 4400+ with 6GB of RAM. Video being handled by a GeForce GT 440 on GF108 GPU w/1GB dedicated memory.

#20 DisasterTheory

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Posted 01 November 2012 - 09:45 PM

Yesterday I piloted my mech behind the waterfall inside the cave on Forest Colony and suddenly my 8-core, GTX580 8GB DDR3 system studdered to a rediculous 4 frames per-second. As soon as I managed to remove myself from behind the waterwall my frames went back to normal.





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