FPS Shattering BUG Discovered & Examined! - Environmental Effects...
 

Environmental Effects FPS Killer BUG aka. the killer Polygon!

I have read how number of people complained about bad fps even on good spec PC's, I havent experienced it until friday...and ever since I noticed something and reason why this occurs! Below I will present you with my findings.

First, this is confirmed on SH4 ver 1.1. Second, this bug revolves around using of Environmental Effects option which is responsible for clouds shadows and volumetric fog, in addition you can see parts of ships through the water to a certain depth etc...

Now let's get to business:

1. I start a training mission and right off the bat as I look around the horizon I encounter terrible fps drop in one spot. It's so bad my fps drops to 1-5fps, everywhere else its basically 60fps(vsync on). I discover its this mysteriously looking rectangle polygon sticking out of water:
http://www.cuih.net/sh4/env/env1.jpg
Notice on left side you can see a rectangle polygon that differs in brightness, notice my fps of 1, I can barely click to switch to another station to regain normal fps.

2. I go into Free Camera mode and get close to this entity. I play around with graphical options and narrow this bug is tied to Environmental Effects:
http://www.cuih.net/sh4/env/env2.jpg
Notice Environmental Effects is turned on and I am up close to this mysterious polygon, fps is 5 in the picture. Btw, this polygon is very small about 1/10 of a submarine length, I just got very close to it in this picture.

3. Now I click off Environmental Effects and bam look what happens! The polygon dissapears and look at my fps it maxes out again at 60:
http://www.cuih.net/sh4/env/env3.jpg

4. Here are 2 more pictures of this bug:
http://www.cuih.net/sh4/env/env4.jpg
http://www.cuih.net/sh4/env/env5.jpg

NOTES:

This polygon can always be found near your submarine or at least within 1000meters on beginning of tutorials and other scripted missions, however it reappears in other places and you never know when you can run into this. Assuming of course you play with Environmental Effects on.

* I haven't seen this in 1.0 version, only in 1.1. However, I only played 1.0 for few minutes, where 1.1 many hours.

CONCLUSION: Do not play with Environmental Effects on to avoid this, last night I played online with my friend and during deck gun fight where me and him ganged up on 1 destroyer he ran into this bug point blank range while using deck gun and it killed his fps to the point where it killed entire multiplayer session(he was the server).

My computer is adequate btw, here are the specs:

Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU E6700, 2GB (4x512MB) DDR2 800mhz RAM, ATI Radeon X1950 XTX @ Catalyst 7.1, SB Audigy 2 ZS Audio, Windows XP Professional SP2.

I hope this helps people who had bad fps due to this, as they now know how to avoid it. But turning this effect on removes the beautiful look of submarine in shalow waters...

Doesn't turning some Debugging feature in some obscure cfg file also turn this off?

Nice write-up anyhow.

I have fps improvement by this settings in the Main cfg ...

[DEVELOPING]
DevDebugEnable=No
DevEditEnable=No
MiniDump=No

But fps jumping from 1 to 30 in freecam while zooming in and returning to normal when going back to bridge.

Mud

I have a feeling he's correct and that it's related to 'Enviromental Effects' being turned on. I don't think the DevDebug/Minidump stuff makes any difference one way or the other, although I'm not 100% certain.

I will try those settings, however this bug is not related to overall fps problem. This is a bug with Environmental Effects and random polygon in random surface places that when closely viewed will nearly freeze your rendering device...

I've not noticed the rectangle of slowness, but tried Environmental effects yesterday which slowed my system way down. I have a 3.4 P4, 2 Gig Ram, GE Force 6800. I cannot cannot use the EE option at all. Just becomes too unplayable.

I have not seen the mysteroius poly yet? could htis just be an ATI problem? as i have an 8800GTX?


No real slowdowns on enviro either, just that on Enviro the crew turn into see- though ghosts when on deck lol :(



Simon

What I did was with Enviromental Effects turned on and it does effect fps , at least on my system.
When I have the debug stuff on "Yes" I have a solid 5 fps :doh:

Mud

I will try to investigate this with debug things off but environmental effects on and see if I can find the polygon around still and get the cripple effect.

The polygon doesn't occur often, usually best chance to catch it is on beginning of missions, usually best to use periscope view zoomed in and slowly look around if you find it you will know cause the fps will die in one area. It does occur in missions afterwards but its occurence is random at this point from what I could find out.

As for video cards, its too early to tell if any specific brand is affected, I will get few answers from ubi forums from people who confirmed this, if they can confirm it on range of cards then we can eliminate specific brand.

When I was going throug the Navigational part of sub school yesterday I notice that when I looked over to port, my system nearly froze. To startboard everything was fine and speedy. I wonder if one of these things was sitting in the water abeam to port.

Probably, I wouldn't doubt it at all.

Everyone that has some input on the meat of this matter please list your...

System Specs

I have seen this FPS robbing bug with EE on and here are my System Specs. Video Card is an ATI Radeon X800 XT Platinum Edition with Catalyst 7.2 drivers.


System Specs:

Intel P4 3.4C Northwood Core with Hyperthreading on Asus P4C800-E Deluxe(Intel 875P + ICH5R Chipset), Zalman 7000a-Cu HS/Fan, Enermax EG651P-VE 550W PSU, 2 GB Mushkin eXtreme Performance(2-2-2) Dual Channel PC3200 RAM, Samsung 214T MultiSync 21" Digital LCD Monitor, Sapphire Radeon X800XT PE AGP Videocard with Catalyst v7.2 Driver, DirectX 9.0c (February 2007 update), Creative Audigy2 Platinum Soundcard with Driver version 02.09.0016, Logitech Z-5500 5.1 Speakers, Western Digital 250 GB w/8 MB Cache 7200 RPM Parallel ATA HDD, WinXP Pro SP2, Norton SystemWorks and Personal Firewall 2006

If you had Environmental Effects turned on then yes thats most likely the reason. Its not easy to notice this polygon sometimes especially if you dont zoon in on it or the sky color is darker matching other water colors.

Btw what video card do you have?

its the 50$ box from hell--:rotfl: --lol

I get this monolith on occasion also. First time I saw it, it was about 1000m away, sitting on a beach. It was like a scene from 2001 Space Odyssey. It looked pretty solid from afar but became transparent as I got closer.

Environmental Effects does cause this for me also (only the polygon appearance), my FPS is unaffected. I play the game maxed out, but have turned of EE, now I know what problems is causes.

Thx guys

I ran into this bug in a big way yesterday while engaging a large convoy. I didn't see any polygons, but I did have a layer of fog about 100 feet off the water. In a nutshell, I reached a point where any external view would basically slam the game down to 1 FPS (game is normally 60+ FPS) and eventually cause the video to fail (according to Vista's error reporting).

I reloaded my save from just before this incident and turned EE off, butter smooth throughout. Having EE off DEFINITELY solved any stutters and the above problem for me. I don't think it's the water doing it; I think it's the volumetric fog that's the root of the problem.

Specs:
Everything is maxed out in the graphics options, running at 1900x1200.
Dell M1710
Core2Duo T7200 2.0GHZ
2gb RAM
Vista 32-bit
GeForce Go 7950 GTX 512mb w/driver 7.15.11.141 (3/2/2007 Vista driver)