Poor performance/FPS

[jas39]

Ati cards have problems with AA AF, especially when in crossfire mode...

[walrusbomb]

are you using onboard audio?

I recently disabled my onboard audio and installed a Soundblaster card and noticed a nice bump in framerate. It's rather indirect, but after looking deeper, the onboard audio was causing my northbridge and southbridge to run too hot. which hurt performance.

[jdkbph]

Another thing you might want to try is removing 1GB of RAM. Yeah... REmoving so that you're left with an even number of identical DIMMs installed totalling 2GB.

Is he crazy? Is he nuts?

Maybe not. Depending on the configuration (eg, 2 x 1GB and 2 x 512MB, or 1x 2Gb and 2 x 512MB) you may have disabled or degraded your ability to run in dual channel mode. I honestly don't know for a fact what impact that would have on SH4, but I do know that, in theory, it could be significant.

If that helps, you then might want to consider upgrading to 4GB by adding 2 more DIMMs identical to the first 2.

And yeah, yeah, I know about the 32bit memory address limitation... but for a few bucks "wasted" you get the RAM you need without giving up dual channel.

JD

[Fishie]

Are you trying to run antiostopic (sp?) filtering at 4x or above? If so, tune it back to 2X, and all will be well.

Thanks for the suggestions guys, I have found out what my problem is..

my video cards are not going into thier 3D clocks (848/828), and are playing the game in 2D clocks only (506/513)..I havnt had this problem with any other games..even if I disable crossfire the same thing happens...

I have found that if i open ATI tool if forces the first card to run at 3D clocks all the time, so atm I am playing with 1 card and leaving ATI tool open while i play.

1 card runs the game great (when its in 3D clocks ) at 4xaa and 4xaf 1680x1050 and vsync on..sits on 60 fps so ill just play with 1 card for now and spam ATI support..


and jdkbph about the 3GB ram thing, yes the 3GB run in dual channel mode in a 2x1GB and 2x512mb config on a ga-x38-dq6 mobo. iv run bandwidth tests etc which are fine and cpu-z, windows, everest and the mobo all report the ram is indeed running in dual channel.

anyway thanks for ur help guys, Im off to sink some Japs!

[maerean_m]

VSync ON can hit FPS really hard.

Depending on what the game does at the moment, the updating gets done in X milliseconds and the rendering in Y milliseconds. The FPS you get is 1000/(X+Y).
If your FPS is 50, X+Y equals 20.

When VerticalSync is activated, the card won't start displaying the image until a new screen refresh starts. So when in 60Hz, on average, the render takes a 1000/60/2=8.3 milliseconds longer so your new FPS will be 1000/(X+Y+8.3).
Starting from 50 frames per second, you get 35 with VerticalSync.
That's on the average. In the worst case scenario, your FPS will drop to 27.

It's a big hit on FPS without any real visual improvements.

As seen from the formula, it helps a little if the refresh is set to 75Hz. The 8.3 milliseconds delay takes only 6.6 milliseconds and the FPS drops only to 38.

This low FPS can be the cause of your video card running in "2D" frequencies. The video card driver may say "this game is very CPU bound, instead of GPU bound, so the card will do great even with the 2D frequencies and the player will notice the reduced fan noise".

In Silent Hunter, switching the VerticalSync requires you to restart the executable (to reinitialize the Direct3D engine).

you just need to make sure you get more fps than your screens refresh rate, then you wont have such problems.

my screen is 60hz and my fps stay at 60 all the time with vsync enabled.

and yes vsync does a lot, it gets rid of tearing, but if your frame rate is lower than your refresh rate there is no need for vsync as it chops your fps in half and you dont get much screen tearing with low fps anyway.

screen tearing is generaly more noticable when your frame rate is higher than your screens refresh rate.

[jdkbph]

Originally Posted by demowhc

and jdkbph about the 3GB ram thing, yes the 3GB run in dual channel mode in a 2x1GB and 2x512mb config on a ga-x38-dq6 mobo. iv run bandwidth tests etc which are fine and cpu-z, windows, everest and the mobo all report the ram is indeed running in dual channel.

Indeed it is. So long as you have paired chips (ie, an even number) it will run in dual channel mode. However, if the chips are not the same size, you'll only be "dual channeling" an ammount of RAM, equal to the smaller of the DIMMs.

Prolly not a big deal in practice, but theoretically, it could make a difference. Or at least that's what Sandra says

yer i have the 2 1gb sticks paired up in their colour coded slots and the 2 512mb sticks in their slots, everything reports 3gb and dual channel mode, tests show the same