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I have always had some performance issues with this game, but recently it has gone from bad to unplayable. The stuttering and frame rate craters are so pronounced that even with artemis I will sometimes lose lock on a painted enemy since I can`t keep the reticle aligned with their target box.
Seriously, it is this bad over periods of up to 7 or 8 seconds, then it goes back to smooth as can be.
My hardware is:
core i7 2.8 GHz (4 hyperthreaded cores - 8 virtual cores)
ram 16GB
video card radeon HD6990M 2GB
HDD dual 7200 rpm laptop disks in RAID0
Not a monster machine, but good for a laptop, and more than capable of handling other games at much higher detail and resolution.
I originally treated this as a graphics performance issue by turning everything down to `low` one at a time, then by reducing resolution to the minimum. This did raise the maximum framerate when nothing was going on, but as soon as things started to happen it still all goes to hell. This indicates that the framerate/performance problems are not at all related to hardware.
What seems to happen is that as enemies come within a certain range my computer stops everything to load their assets (framerate craters are accompanied by something getting loaded from the HDD). This suspicion is reinforced by the observation that I don`t have to see the enemy for this to happen. I can be staring at the side of a hill 10m away and the framerate will still dive (I believe that z culling should prevent the system from trying to render anything past what blocks LOS).
So, what would cause framerate to crater when you are staring at a brown wall that normally renders at the refresh rate?
My suspicion is that enemy mech assets are not being properly cached at match start, and are dynamically done as those enemies come into range. Since the performance issues seem to align with when camo and paint schemes came out, it might be that old assets were being cached but that new ones are not.
Another possibility is that since I am in Europe, my connection is fast but the latency to the game servers is high (180 ms usually), if rendering is not properly decoupled from network tasks, then this would also be consistent with fps craters when something interesting happens.
P.S. I have check temperatures and am not overheating, and have also completely scrubbed then reinstalled video drivers just to be sure. Tonight I will check to see if the game is properly using the multicore CPU as other users have indicated this to be `the problem`.
Edited by Tolkien, 04 December 2012 - 12:03 AM.
