Optimizing for FPS

[DaMaGe007]

Well I have been playing a bit with the settings and I cant seem to find anyway of increasing the FPS.
All testing was done in Dock at pearl career mode (Bridge view).

Im getting about 14-15 fps max, and I really want to sacrifice some detail or graphic niceties to get a little more.

Setting Low, Medium or High makes no difference to my framerate, so Im running everything maxed except I have enviro effects turned off, as its the only option that affects my framerate greatly.

The Sliders can be all the way left (all of them) or all the way right (all of them) and it makes no difference. The tickboxes in the graphics page, make a 1fps difference. Is this a bug perhaps ? are the sliders working, I cant seem to notice a difference with them all left or all right graphics wize.

I did manage to get a 2 extra fps by dropping the 3d sounds slider in the sound menu. This brought me to 16~fps, Im looking for a little more.

Overclocking my cpu and graphics card didnt make a difference either...Im not sure where this bottleneck is or why the game settings make such little difference.

I noticed someone in the bug thread mention the main.cfg...
Developers section has 3 options set to yes, setting them to No is supposed to help.
It didnt make any difference when I tried it, but your experience may be different so I thought I would mention that change.

If anyone has any other ways of increasing the fps, please post to this thread, it will be handy to have the tweaks in the one spot.

Patch 1.1 did not help or hurt my fps. When testing bear in mind that time of day seems to affect fps a bit too, Dusk seems to be slighly lower fps for me.

[daft]

Make sure your vide card has the Anti-aliasing and Anisotropic filtering options set to "Application Controlled". That helped with my frame rates.

[DaMaGe007]

Mine are both at application controlled, but thats a good addition to the thread.

I also noticed a performance setting in that area, I was at quality, so I switched to performance, no difference to the framerate.

[wetwarev7]

A couple of things that helped me was to turn off sun glare and post-filtering in the options menu. Since I was getting fair fps after that, I didn't tweak it anymore.

If your pagefile is fragmented, it can cause a drop in frame rates, as well as running a lot of apps in the background.

If memory is an issue, you can try (along with getting rid of all the other non-essential background progs) turning off explorer. Go into your task manager, select explorer, and end task. This will make your desktop disappear, and free up a good bit of memory. To get it back, go back to the task manager, select file, run, then type in explorer, or just reboot.

I've noticed some oddball network programs can sometimes eat up cpu usage and/or cause pc slowdowns by constantly querying the network connection. This is another good area to look at when trying to get a bit more speed.

I THINK SH3 used to run better for me if I told it to run on one cpu instead of both. I'll let someone else test this for SH4(cause I just wanna go sink ships right now :) ). I'm not going to post instructions, cause if you don't allready know how, you probably shouldn't be trying it :P

[DaMaGe007]

Ive got 2gig of ram and the PEAK usage when playing the game is 1.4gig so it shouldnt be ram related slowdowns. Users should note that 1.5gb is really the min ram you want for this game mabe even 2gig if your OS is hungry or you have other apps running.
Turning off my virus scanner didnt affect my framerate either.

Post filtering and sunglare dont affect my framerate at all, I think it would depend on your card.

So those options do perhaps provide some scaleability for the game across a range of cards.
I also get 7fps in the pre mission room, so perhaps there are still some optimisations due to come in a future patch, it seems a bit silly for that room to be more of a recource hog than pearl harbour.

[Kapitan_Phillips]

Try using this (http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/FileAndDisk/PageDefrag.mspx) to defrag your page file, see if it helps.

[DaMaGe007]

I defrag my page file by setting a fixed page file to d:, defragmenting c: fully, then creating a fresh c: pagefile (fixed size)

The hdd light isnt flashing at all sitting at the dock in pearl, Im not using all my physical ram, so it shouldnt be page file related anyway.

Keep the suggestions comming tho, we will find some stuff to get those precious frames :)

I did notice someone saying that the removed the rocks and sea plants, by deleting a vegitation file...a few other posters mentioned it didnt work tho...
I will give it a try and post the results.

EDIT: ok data\library dir

undersea.dat file removed, and there are no plants and rocks..
didnt affect my fps, but on oldercards mabe it will help.

vegitation.dat was the file mentioned in the other thread but it was the wrong file.

[Hartmann]

Very strange if moving slides not makes any difference in framerates, perhaps is something wrong, like the hidden monolith, or the game engine ignore the settings .
With a lot of bugs and issues it could be everything :hmm:


perhaps removing with modding the seafloor, seagulls, placton, and make the water less transparent could help in framerates. i don´t know:roll:

Framerates is always related with graphics hardware/drivers, game engine, and cpu,whereas memory help with load times and stutter.

[DaMaGe007]

If you see my post above yours I mention how to remove the rocks and weed, it didnt help on my graphics card but might help others with lower cards, have to wait for them to try it.
Someone in another thread mentioned faster FPS with them removed, dont know what card he was using though.

[Kresge]

I played around with the settings last night and the only thing that made a huge difference on my system was unchecking the environmental effects (I believe that was what it is called) which turns off the transparent water. Under all other conditions I was sitting at around 18-24 fps but that one option took me up to about 35-40.

Test was sitting on the bridge, bright, sunny day, a few ships around.
P4 2.8GHz
2GB RAM
GF6800 128MB video

[DaMaGe007]

Yep, I have a similar system and I get decent rates out in the open sea, try starting a career in pearl and see how fast it is while at dock, you will probably find it in the low 20s or high teens from the sounds of things.

Ive found it varies alot

I run the enviro off due to the performance hit too

Edit:
I just upgraded my monitor driver so I can run higher then 1024x768 rez, so I bumped the game up to 1280x1024 80hz, I still get exactly the same frame rate...this is the strangest game I have experienced in this regard