Performance analysis to help devs increase performance

shonan

If you have any specific things in the game that show a clear bottleneck for your system go ahead and say it here, hopefully we can help the devs see what kind of problems different people are experiencing on their systems to identify bottlenecks.

For me a couple things are the fire and smoke when your exo is damaged, it gives me massive lag, also other similar effects are a problem.

I made a few videos showing the r_stats 1 to show where I have bottlenecks regarding performance. Something interesting to note is that almost never does my waiting for GPU go above 0ms. Also due to the fraps overhead, a 2 FPS difference could really be 25 and 30FPS could be 100.
Made some annotations to the first few to explain a little what I am experiencing, the rest are pretty straightforward.

Be sure to watch them on youtube to see the fps counter text etc.











Intel Ivy Bridge Core i5 (quad-core) 3570K @ 4.2GHz
AMD/ATI Radeon HD 4870x2 custom overclocked (GPU 775MHz, memory 960MHz)
16GB DDR3 1600MHz
Latest Catalyst 13.1 legacy drivers, all other system drivers installed.

ScardyBob

What would be more useful is if you turned on the profiler (type profile in console) while doing these things. It gives much more detailed info.

Mindstorm

That FPS seems rather low for your system specs. What resolution are you running?

IronHorse

You can also enable p_logall. To record a log that captures every frame and what exactly consumes the most performance. Viewable with python folder in your install directory.

But using the profiler for screenshots works just fine too for most things.you can find instructions on both these commands from myself in these forums. Feel free to email me these things too, I love finding performance killers, ironhorse@unknownworlds.com

shonan

Another thing came to my mind which is lower quality models, I reckon it is not currently possible to define the quality of the models in-game? High quality models can be very resource heavy in other games.

Also here's another couple screenshots of what I found causing lag unnecessarily much:

Mindstorm wrote: »

That FPS seems rather low for your system specs. What resolution are you running?

I am running a 1280x1024 resolution as my desktop resolution is too much for the game to handle. And yes, the game performs strangely poorly on my system which is why I made this thread

IronHorse wrote: »

You can also enable p_logall. To record a log that captures every frame and what exactly consumes the most performance. Viewable with python folder in your install directory.

But using the profiler for screenshots works just fine too for most things.you can find instructions on both these commands from myself in these forums. Feel free to email me these things too, I love finding performance killers, ironhorse@unknownworlds.com

If you want anything specific just tell me, I can submit logs and/or profiler screenshots.

DC_Darkling

There is no way a I5 on 4ghz+ plus those vids cards and mem on that resolution should produce such low fps.

I have a i7, which with turboboost singlecores ir at 3ghz+ + 6MB tripplechannel + a 570 phantom from gainward.
I rarely get below 60fps, and I have to do effort to even get near 30fps.
Asuming ambient occlusion is off as that is a huuuuuuuge fps loss.
Running native in Full hd resolution, and you are running in a much lower resolution. How the hell.


* does your cpu actually clock at 4ghz when playing NS2. Did you check? use intels own turboboost tool, to be sure the info is accurate.
* dualchannel / tripplechannel memory? What we looking at?
* disable, preferably uninstall all addons. Yes I said all. You shall be surprised how much that sometimes matters. Atleast test if it matters.
* are your GPUs overheating and undercloking?
* which windows? Seeing the hardware, surely windows 7 64bit?
* windowed or fullscreen? (I use windowed in full)
* pagefile is placed where? SSD? Mechanic drive? (doubt it matters on that ram)
* which graphic options are you playing on?

shonan

DC_Darkling wrote: »

There is no way a I5 on 4ghz+ plus those vids cards and mem on that resolution should produce such low fps.

I have a i7, which with turboboost singlecores ir at 3ghz+ + 6MB tripplechannel + a 570 phantom from gainward.
I rarely get below 60fps, and I have to do effort to even get near 30fps.
Asuming ambient occlusion is off as that is a huuuuuuuge fps loss.
Running native in Full hd resolution, and you are running in a much lower resolution. How the hell.


* does your cpu actually clock at 4ghz when playing NS2. Did you check? use intels own turboboost tool, to be sure the info is accurate.
* dualchannel / tripplechannel memory? What we looking at?
* disable, preferably uninstall all addons. Yes I said all. You shall be surprised how much that sometimes matters. Atleast test if it matters.
* are your GPUs overheating and undercloking?
* which windows? Seeing the hardware, surely windows 7 64bit?
* windowed or fullscreen? (I use windowed in full)
* pagefile is placed where? SSD? Mechanic drive? (doubt it matters on that ram)
* which graphic options are you playing on?

* checked with cpu-z that my cpu is at 4200MHz while playing
* dual channel
* Yeah, I know some can cause lag, but the ones I have currently enabled have impacted my performance minimally, it was poor to begin with
* GPUs arent overheating
* Windows 8 x64
* fullscreen
* pagefile on normal harddrive but with my RAM the game shouldnt even touch it
* i am playing on lowest graphic options (with barely playable performance), only in the videos above i put everything on highest to take it to the extreme

YMICrazy

^I think he stated fraps is causing that low framerate. He is just showing the drops in frames at that level when doing stuff like shooting a gun and explosive effects. But it is known that a bunch of marines shooting weapons at the same time does tank frames.

shonan

YMICrazy502 wrote: »

^I think he stated fraps is causing that low framerate. He is just showing the drops in frames at that level when doing stuff like shooting a gun and explosive effects. But it is known that a bunch of marines shooting weapons at the same time does tank frames.

Yeah, as said fraps does a massive overhead when recording but it still shows what I am experiencing

shonan

Well, decided to make a plog that spans one 20 minute match on ns2_veil on marines. Attached into this post.

The settings I used while making it are shown in the following image:

DC_Darkling

ok let me try to grasp this for second.
Are you having drops while playing below 30 fps or just with fraps for recording? Because if fps drops a tad, but the minimum you still have then is ok I do not see the problem.

Also.. I understood your earlier post as having 2 cards? You do know some drivers & games arent optimized for dual cards and perform a lot more suck with it enabled?

shonan

shonan wrote: »

Well, decided to make a plog that spans one 20 minute match on ns2_veil on marines. Attached into this post.

The settings I used while making it are shown in the following image:

Another plog, this time a 20 minute match on ns2_refinery on aliens. Same settings as above.

DC_Darkling wrote: »

ok let me try to grasp this for second.
Are you having drops while playing below 30 fps or just with fraps for recording? Because if fps drops a tad, but the minimum you still have then is ok I do not see the problem.

Also.. I understood your earlier post as having 2 cards? You do know some drivers & games arent optimized for dual cards and perform a lot more suck with it enabled?

I am having performance not good enough, I wanted to show where I get severe drops. I have a dual GPU card, my drivers have a crossfire profile for NS2 and without crossfire, performance is worse.

DC_Darkling

odd. I ran my initial recording with fraps when I checked performance for my graphics tweaks runs and it seemed fine.
I simply can not fathom why you can not play in a higher resolution even with fraps.

2012-12-30 22:26:24 - ns2
Frames: 54222 - Time: 754358ms - Avg: 71.878 - Min: 15 - Max: 113

The minimum happened perhaps.. once, twice. All during going from ingame to readyroom at endmap.
on the whole match I had 3 dives to around 25fps, and they lasted very very short.

will be interesting to see what they can pull from your log.

Rich_

i run at a higher resolution than that, 1366x768, and have a worse graphics card, but an i73770k @ 4.5 - my fps is tripple what you get, at it's low point of about 80~, usually its above 100. Are you running all the graphics settings maxed out?

shonan

Looked at how much NS2.exe uses my processor while playing and it seems it uses only 50%

Rich_ wrote: »

i run at a higher resolution than that, 1366x768, and have a worse graphics card, but an i73770k @ 4.5 - my fps is tripple what you get, at it's low point of about 80~, usually its above 100. Are you running all the graphics settings maxed out?

Please read the thread.

IronHorse

50 % is not accurate it's just sharing the load across multiple cores. Disable all but one and you'd see 100%. The most demanding thing the logic thread is not multi threaded.
(Limitation of lua. You can make VMs though, like what happened with on process move)

Also does the console show the correct render device when you first load into the game? I.e confirm it's not using integrated graphics.
You always have vsync disabled right?
Have you tried disabling one gpu?
What's your catalyst control center settings look like for ns2?
Have you played around with afr per the sli thread that's stickied?

shonan

IronHorse wrote: »

50 % is not accurate it's just sharing the load across multiple cores. Disable all but one and you'd see 100%. The most demanding thing the logic thread is not multi threaded.
(Limitation of lua. You can make VMs though, like what happened with on process move)

Also does the console show the correct render device when you first load into the game? I.e confirm it's not using integrated graphics.
You always have vsync disabled right?
Have you tried disabling one gpu?
What's your catalyst control center settings look like for ns2?
Have you played around with afr per the sli thread that's stickied?

Yes, its showing ATI Radeon HD 4870x2 as the render device.
Always v-sync disabled.
I have tried that and performance got a lot worse.
My CCC settings are attached as an image.
Since that thread is nvidia specific I havent looked at it much, also since my drivers already include a profile for NS2 I havent tried playing around otherwise than disabling crossfire completely.

shonan

Did some playing around very quickly:

Changing Crossfire mode from default (ns2.exe) to AFR friendly or 1x1 optimized didnt seem to change a thing.

Setting Catalyst AI to normal seemed to improve fps when theres not much happening on screen, but when theres a lot action advanced gave better fps.

I still dont understand why on my desktop resolution something like cyst goo or smoke filling up my screen gives the worst lag spikes, particle quality doesnt seem to affect it at all.

DC_Darkling

I wonder how much of physx is involved in this.
last i checked all physx which ns2 uses runs on the cpu instead of on a possible nvidia card, but still.

Curve

DC_Darkling wrote: »

I wonder how much of physx is involved in this.
last i checked all physx which ns2 uses runs on the cpu instead of on a possible nvidia card, but still.

Why does it do that?

shonan

Another thing that gives me a massive lag spike is getting bile on my screen after a gorge has spat on me, not very nice.

Also apparently the main thing I can do is just play on low resolution, it doesnt matter what settings I use, only resolution seems to matter for me which is a shame since I really dont enjoy playing on a low resolution instead of my desktop one.

Mindstorm

Install MSI afterburner and check your clockrates while ingame:

http://event.msi.com/vga/afterburner/

I have this annoything issue (AMD/ATI card), if I don't enable MSI afterburner my VGA clock rates stay on "Power safe" mode. Enabling/Disabling powerplay tends to help. But just to be sure I set my clockrates in MSI and since I'm doing that all my problems are gone.

shonan

Mindstorm wrote: »

Install MSI afterburner and check your clockrates while ingame:

http://event.msi.com/vga/afterburner/

I have this annoything issue (AMD/ATI card), if I don't enable MSI afterburner my VGA clock rates stay on "Power safe" mode. Enabling/Disabling powerplay tends to help. But just to be sure I set my clockrates in MSI and since I'm doing that all my problems are gone.

I checked with GPU-Z and my clocks are the correct ones while playing, also my both GPU's are correctly in use.

However something interesting I noticed is that it isnt using 100% of my GPU's all the time, only occasionally.

Mindstorm

Also I noticed you have texture streaming set to "ON". Texture streaming is for systems with low video memory so it instantly loads models from your harddrive when they are needed. If you run fraps, which uses a lot of your harddrive and have texture streaming enabled you will experience major FPS drops because the engine wants to load a model from your hdd which is occupied by fraps. Thereby creating fps drops.

So set texture streaming off. Then make some plogs on highest settings and check the "low fps" areas.

shonan

Mindstorm wrote: »

Also I noticed you have texture streaming set to "ON". Texture streaming is for systems with low video memory so it instantly loads models from your harddrive when they are needed. If you run fraps, which uses a lot of your harddrive and have texture streaming enabled you will experience major FPS drops because the engine wants to load a model from your hdd which is occupied by fraps. Thereby creating fps drops.

So set texture streaming off. Then make some plogs on highest settings and check the "low fps" areas.

I dont run fraps while playing, I just wanted to show where I get drops in the videos.

Also texture streaming should load only textures, right, like the name implies? And btw I have texture streaming enabled as per this post, as it gives me less hitches while playing that cause me to die:

IronHorse wrote: »

In the meantime, in the options, be sure to:
Enable multi core rendering
and texture streaming
But disable any vsync.

It won't solve the issue you're experiencing but it'd cut out some of those texture loading hitches.

And anyway on an unrelated note I have fraps working folder on a different hard drive than NS2 so it wouldnt even make any difference regarding that.

Mindstorm

My bad it indeed only loads textures.

Well I suppose the devs can find what they are looking for in the plogs.

shonan

Now for some more plog fun.

I would be glad if the game would run fine even on these settings, as I dont think its too much asked.



This time a ~20 minute match on aliens on ns2_veil, with the settings shown in the image above.

The second one is a couple short matches on marines on the map ns2_mineshaft, due to the fact I didnt get to use anything like jetpacks and flamethrowers in the first one, it was very short.

Again the file attachment function doesnt seem to work, so I uploaded them here:

client-0225-145317.plog.7z (10.5 MB)
https://mega.co.nz/#!YYZyCBba!BvDdeT7Qu7o-CGj_1qyEUl05Jjlu90CRYR23KMY7myU
client-0225-153240.plog.7z (7.1 MB)
https://mega.co.nz/#!tYJTVLhK!fH-S-HS49nUcYttE5bG-2QUyBBBa0PUvCQIqNYD--aA

DC_Darkling

weird.. I just run a a higher resolution then you, and i am fine.

about the physx.. aparently its a part which is 'easily' put on the cpu or something. Depends on the kind of physx, dev is better of explaining then I am.

I am very much in doubt though, why you can not stable run in native resolution. So as a side note, what do you find stable? 60fps?
try windowed fullscreen? I play in nothing else.

shonan

DC_Darkling wrote: »

weird.. I just run a a higher resolution then you, and i am fine.

about the physx.. aparently its a part which is 'easily' put on the cpu or something. Depends on the kind of physx, dev is better of explaining then I am.

I am very much in doubt though, why you can not stable run in native resolution. So as a side note, what do you find stable? 60fps?
try windowed fullscreen? I play in nothing else.

I find stable a situation where I wont die only due to input lag, i.e. when I can actually aim properly with my mouse, and the aiming reticule points where it should when it should.

Interesting that windowed would run better than fullscreen, I am used to play games fullscreen instead of windowed, as from my personal experience, most players.

IronHorse

Something weird is going on for you..
While I get this thread is to help optimize things your performance dictates having it's own thread, really..

Hard to say what's causing it..personally I'd do either a dual boot or fresh OS install and start from scratch (non of that bloat ware, just the essentials) to rule out some misbehaving driver or something.
I'd also try that msi after burner trick just in case..
I have a feeling your oc for either cpu or gpu is causing this somehow. How are you verifying gpu and cpu clocks during play if you are not using full screen widowed? Two monitors? Often alt tabbing will produce inaccurate clocks.

shonan

IronHorse wrote: »

Something weird is going on for you..
While I get this thread is to help optimize things your performance dictates having it's own thread, really..

Hard to say what's causing it..personally I'd do either a dual boot or fresh OS install and start from scratch (non of that bloat ware, just the essentials) to rule out some misbehaving driver or something.
I'd also try that msi after burner trick just in case..
I have a feeling your oc for either cpu or gpu is causing this somehow. How are you verifying gpu and cpu clocks during play if you are not using full screen widowed? Two monitors? Often alt tabbing will produce inaccurate clocks.

I have just freshly installed windows 8 a while ago, I dont have anything significant running in the background except for my AV and I have already excluded both the NS2 steam install folder and %appdata%/NS2 from its real time scanning. Also IIRC I tried playing NS2 before I even installed my AV with similar results.

The MSI afterburner trick wont do anything as my GPU's are already running on proper clockspeed, GPU-z has the option of continuing updating in the background and graphs for showing history. Also since my CPU is constantly on 4200MHz while playing when I am not in the game I hardly think it would stop running at full clockspeed when in the game especially since the game is actively using it.

For the record, the latest patch increased performance for me noticeably.