NS2 seems to be underutilizing system resources
RickDeckard
Join Date: 2012-06-18 Member: 153413Members
Join Date: 2012-06-18 Member: 153413Members
<b>EDIT:</b> Resolved. Issue was mostly due to my stupidity. Protip: If you're having trouble and your computer has been on for a while, perhaps having gone to sleep or hibernated at some point, try restarting before anything else or you'll waste hours of your life and look like a jackass on the internet.
Before I start, here are my specs. I just built this machine a week ago and it runs Skyrim and modded S.T.A.L.K.E.R on highest settings with no problems. It is more than adequate for NS2, especially considering that I was able to play before with a decent frame rate on a Core 2 Duo with an 8800 GT.
I5-3550 3.3 GHz
8 GB DDR3 1600
Geforce GTX 560 Ti (the 2gb version with 384 cores)
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
Before you link me to one of the many existing "low fps" threads, allow me to explain why I think this is a different problem.
First of all, I get around 5 fps regardless of what settings I enable or disable, the graphics quality level, or the screen resolution. There was one point when I was in the server browser where I got a perfect 100 fps, but I did nothing to trigger it other than returning from having alt-tabbed out. After futzing about with quality settings that I knew had nothing to do with it, I figured I'd see if my graphics card was burning up trying to render the game. No. My graphics card was at idle temperatures (~33C). Was my CPU struggling then? Nope. My CPU had throttled down to its idle 50% clock frequency and all cores were nearly at room temperature (~25C). My computer is acting like NS2 isn't even running. So I fired up STALKER and had a playable FPS in that WHILE NS2 was running in the background. My GPU warmed up as expected and my CPU went to 100% frequency. I've tried changing the affinity and priority of the NS2 process.
My computer is obviously not even breaking a sweat trying to run NS2 and yet it is getting a terrible frame rate. What does that lead me to suspect? I think it takes a few milliseconds to perform game logic and render a frame, and then the game threads sit by idly waiting for a lock to be released from somewhere. I'd guess it has something to do with either flash or Lua. I've had very similar problems with flash games (The Binding of Isaac most notably) in the past that I couldn't solve.
I don't mean to sound too cocky, but please don't treat me like a child in your responses. I am a software engineer by trade, so I know a thing or two at least.
Before I start, here are my specs. I just built this machine a week ago and it runs Skyrim and modded S.T.A.L.K.E.R on highest settings with no problems. It is more than adequate for NS2, especially considering that I was able to play before with a decent frame rate on a Core 2 Duo with an 8800 GT.
I5-3550 3.3 GHz
8 GB DDR3 1600
Geforce GTX 560 Ti (the 2gb version with 384 cores)
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
Before you link me to one of the many existing "low fps" threads, allow me to explain why I think this is a different problem.
First of all, I get around 5 fps regardless of what settings I enable or disable, the graphics quality level, or the screen resolution. There was one point when I was in the server browser where I got a perfect 100 fps, but I did nothing to trigger it other than returning from having alt-tabbed out. After futzing about with quality settings that I knew had nothing to do with it, I figured I'd see if my graphics card was burning up trying to render the game. No. My graphics card was at idle temperatures (~33C). Was my CPU struggling then? Nope. My CPU had throttled down to its idle 50% clock frequency and all cores were nearly at room temperature (~25C). My computer is acting like NS2 isn't even running. So I fired up STALKER and had a playable FPS in that WHILE NS2 was running in the background. My GPU warmed up as expected and my CPU went to 100% frequency. I've tried changing the affinity and priority of the NS2 process.
My computer is obviously not even breaking a sweat trying to run NS2 and yet it is getting a terrible frame rate. What does that lead me to suspect? I think it takes a few milliseconds to perform game logic and render a frame, and then the game threads sit by idly waiting for a lock to be released from somewhere. I'd guess it has something to do with either flash or Lua. I've had very similar problems with flash games (The Binding of Isaac most notably) in the past that I couldn't solve.
I don't mean to sound too cocky, but please don't treat me like a child in your responses. I am a software engineer by trade, so I know a thing or two at least.
Comments
Nevermind. Treat me like a child all you want. A simple restart was the solution. Sorry for being snappy with that last paragraph. I had spent several hours trying to fix this problem and restarting never crossed my mind. I literally never had to restart my old computer, even when having issues with games. I don't think I've had to ever restart a computer to solve a problem since I've started using Windows 7. It's fairly reliable. So it doesn't even occur to me as a possible solution anymore. I still have no idea WHY a restart was necessary though. It doesn't seem like it should be. Maybe it's some strange issue with my graphics card/drivers (yes, they're up to date) or perhaps it has something to do with the fact that my computer sleeps now.
Moral of the story:
Troubleshooting Step 1: Restart
Go stand in the corner Rick! And you're not getting any dinner this evening! :P
On a more serious note:
This was indeed quite an odd read, next time this happens could you post up the log.txt found in %appdata%\Natural Selection 2 ?