Terrible performance

LtDrebin

I love this game, but I really can't get acceptable performance from it without turning down ALL graphics and making it look like a hideous mess.

My system:
Intel Core i7 920
EVGA GTX 285 OC
6GB RAM
Regular ole' HDD
Windows 7

I did have an SSD a while ago, but it failed after only 1 year, so I'm not too eager to burn the money on another one right now.

I'm thinking of building a new system when Intel's new Haswell line is released later this year. Do you guys think I should upgrade my video card right now? Is NS2 heavily GPU-reliant? Otherwise I'll probably just upgrade everything at once.

IronHorse

I have your exact processor.
What clock speed are you running at?
I average over 60 fps @ 4 ghz

Ironsoul

You didn't mention the performance. Anyway, I tested ns2 recently with a gtx 295 and my i5 2500 (3.3GHZ) and 8GB of ram.

I had to turn some settings down, I turned ambient occlusion off, anti aliasing off, atmospherics off, decals off, but I left everything on (of course vsync was OFF).

I was getting about 60+fps most of the time (in sli mode of course).

On top of that, Build 244 for me has been an awesome experience performance wise. Framerates aren't exactly up significantly (they are more stable though), but input lag is way way down, I haven't noticed it. It's like the unreal engine 3 which is amazing.

Anyway. The game should be more than playable for you, the GTX 285 is kinda old and sluggish but should still handle the game on decent settings at a decent framerate. If you're getting below 40 on that thing, I would guess there's a driver issue.

As for your question about upgrading your video card, I would recommend a 7870 or better to be a significant upgrade from a 285.

LtDrebin

Performance... I have a 1920x1200 monitor, but I have to decrease the ingame resolution two notches. In explore mode with the graphics turned up pretty high, my FPS are decent, but it really drops when in a real game.

I've heard that NS2 is more of a CPU hog than graphics card-dependent. Is that true?

DC_Darkling

@LtDrebin
yes it is. NS2 will slurp up every % of your cpu is possibly can.

IronHorse

You didn't give your clock speed though :-\

Ironsoul

NS2 is mainly bottlenecked by CPU, in the sense that a slow CPU will result in bad performance, but what game doesn't do that?

NS2 will make full use of both CPU and GPU, maxing both out if given the chance.

LtDrebin

2.66 GHz, pretty close to stock speed. I can easily overclock it, but if my video card is too clunky right now there's not much point.

ezekel

DC_Darkling wrote: »

@LtDrebin
yes it is. NS2 will slurp up every % of your cpu is possibly can.

I thought it only uses a lot of like 1-1/2 cores, not the entire cpu

DC_Darkling

@Ezekel
which in most cases will result in every % IT CAN.
So if it can only use half the cores, that line is still true.

Also some intel CPUs sort of overclock themselves on some cores by temporarily disabling the other cores thus truly pushing 100%.

Confused

@LtDrebin

the easiest way to check if you are CPU vs GPU bound is as follows:
open console(`)
type r_stats 1
press enter

You should see something like the following:


As you can see above the red line, I am waiting on my GPU 27ms per frame. At 21.6 fps that is 58 percent of my total time spent waiting for my GPU ( 21.6 * 27ms /1000)


If you aren't waiting for you GPU, you are gonna be waiting for your CPU. See that second red line.

Basically, if you aren't waiting for GPU a lot, you are gonna get more out of overclocking than you are from reducing graphics options. If you are waiting for GPU a lot you need to turn the graphics down a bit.