Command Room lag on GWX 2.0

[Turm]

Originally Posted by Abd_von_Mumit

This is low, you say? :hmm: So mine is stone-era one.

It's not the slowest PC ever, but these days it's rather far behind. Until recently I only had 768MB; minimal for running SH3 + GWX and rather painful. It's about 3 years old now.

I'm a bit of an eye-candy addict, so I can't bear to turn down the particle density or the anti-aliasing.

I'm curious - how well does the game run on your machine & what is it? If it's a lot worse than mine how do you manage to play? :hmm:

For me, the framerate goes from smooth (60-80fps) to very sluggish (<20). The thing is, when other games run at around 20fps they are a little jerky but still playable (Flight Simulator would be one example), but when SH3 gets down to 20fps it's incredibly laggy, sluggish and rather unplayable. Quite different! I don't quite understand what causes it or how to fix it. But I will try lowering the texture resolution of the crew when I get time.

[snwcrsh]

Turm, that's interesting what you say. I have a *very* slow spec system, A 1,7 MHz Pentium M with 2 Gigabyte RAM (only 1 being cached!) with a crappy onboard Radeon Mobility M.

In almost all 3D screens the frame rate is displayed as being below 20. But I dont believe it. Actually it's pretty smooth (I can move the view on the bridge with no bothersome lag, even with ships & smoke in view).

I remember that in Enemy Territory a framerate of below 20 was not playable at all. The only thing which is kinda annoying is that mouse lag: If the mouse is a pointer it really behaves like it's framelagged. That's especially bad when you try to set up the whiz wheel in OLC GUI).

But apart from that SH3/GWX is very playable for me on my low spec notebook.

[danlisa]

Firstly, GWX's graphics are as optimised as we can make them while keeping image clarity. Ship skins are at 512x512, Aircraft are 512x512, the player boats are 1024x1024. So, you could try to reduce them further but you will lose quality.

The biggest FPS killer in SH3 is AA & AF. AA = The smoothing of jaggies & AF = Quality at distance. Now, if you don't like jaggies, your only option is to reduce the AF which will help alot.

On most GFX cards there is 4 stages of AF and if you imagine breaking the SH3 visible environment into 4 distinct stages, close, close medium, far medium & far, can you understand the rendering GPU usage with AA turned up and AF on full. Effectively meaning no jaggies & best texture quality on all objects viewed/rendered at the furthest distance you can see. So, pull it back a bit on the AF. The effects of reducing AF are most noticable when using the F12 view and at high altitude, however it's hardly noticable on the bridge view.

Now, just to throw this into the mix, there is a very strange occurance in SH3 that when looking (even in open sea, with no other vessels) at a certain bearing (in U-Boat or not) there is a very noticable FPS hit. For example, I can run at full AA & AF with 100-120 FPS but if I look to the horizon on this specific bearing, my FPS will drop by 20-30. It's even worse when rendering 15m/s winds & high waves. Many people have tried to track the reason down but nothing has ever been found.

[Turm]

Thanks for the post, danlisa. I don't care much for AF - only helps when looking along the length of the boat so the holes in the side of the casing don't become a blur - but 2x AA is nearly essential for me. It makes a huge graphical improvement with little difference to performance in practically all games. 4x on the other hand is quite a killer and not worthwhile on my card.

To be honest, the only reason I haven't well-tested different settings is due to the time it takes to load SH3. I don't mind the load times at all (just 1 min to the menu + 2-3 minutes to campaign), but for graphics testing it's a bit of a nuisance. That said... I think I can change settings on the go with Alt-Tabbing :hmm:

I don't want to reduce the ship/aircraft/U-boat texture quality. After all there's only one U-boat and convoys don't pose such a problem for me either (maybe a little slow down, but no view/mouse lag). The command room is the main problem and no ships are rendered there. Due to the 'specific bearing causing lower frame rates' issue you mentioned, I feel the crew might be responsible. They're the only consistent thing through all the scenes. Ah, must be Bernard

I'll try to do a little testing later and post back if I find anything useful - don't hold your breath

[snwcrsh]

Excuse my ignorance, but what is AF & AA (anti aliasing?) and where do I change that?

[Turm]

Originally Posted by snwcrsh

Excuse my ignorance, but what is AF & AA (anti aliasing?) and where do I change that?

They are normally changed in the advanced section of your graphics drivers, or sometimes from the icon in your system tray near the clock if there is one, but basically in a non-technical sense:

AA = anti-aliasing = smoothing of pixels on the screen around [usually] 3D objects, to remove the 'stepped' appearance
AF = anisotropic filtering = improves the clarity of textures on a surface when viewed from shallow angles, preventing it becoming too blurry

For more details and some example images check here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti_aliasing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anisotropic_filtering


Right, now all the chores are done I'm off to tinker with SH3 and graphics settings.

[Sirkam]

Thanks Jimbuna .