Performance-screen resolution trumps all?
bp2008
Join Date: 2012-11-28 Member: 173581Members, Reinforced - Shadow, WC 2013 - Gold
Join Date: 2012-11-28 Member: 173581Members, Reinforced - Shadow, WC 2013 - Gold
On my system (i7 3770k not overclocked + one GTX 680), the only graphics setting that makes a big difference is screen resolution. Ambient Occlusion makes a small difference (I keep AO OFF), and Shadows also make a measurable (though very small) difference (I keep shadows ON). Nothing else really touches the frame rate in my experience, so all the other settings are at max.
Normally I run at 2560x1440 with a playable but not excellent frame rate, but yesterday (Build 248) I started noticing some really sad performance just standing in pipeworks (Refinery), looking toward lava falls. I turned on the FRAPS counter and noticed I get ~33 FPS. Early game, no combat within earshot. Unacceptable.
So I tried 1440x900 and my fps more than doubled to ~75 in the same place. In the least demanding situations, my fps increased from ~70 at high res to ~200 at this low res.
I haven't really paid much attention to NS2 performance until now because I personally didn't have a problem with playing at 30fps until I tried it at 75. It is so much easier to aim and hit things. I don't want to go back to 30fps, but I also don't want to play on a small screen or at low res. NS2 looks great at 2560x1440, damit!
I'm no 3d graphics expert but this seems like a clear GPU bottleneck that would be helped a lot by running SLI. Is this true, or am I barking up the wrong tree?
Normally I run at 2560x1440 with a playable but not excellent frame rate, but yesterday (Build 248) I started noticing some really sad performance just standing in pipeworks (Refinery), looking toward lava falls. I turned on the FRAPS counter and noticed I get ~33 FPS. Early game, no combat within earshot. Unacceptable.
So I tried 1440x900 and my fps more than doubled to ~75 in the same place. In the least demanding situations, my fps increased from ~70 at high res to ~200 at this low res.
I haven't really paid much attention to NS2 performance until now because I personally didn't have a problem with playing at 30fps until I tried it at 75. It is so much easier to aim and hit things. I don't want to go back to 30fps, but I also don't want to play on a small screen or at low res. NS2 looks great at 2560x1440, damit!
I'm no 3d graphics expert but this seems like a clear GPU bottleneck that would be helped a lot by running SLI. Is this true, or am I barking up the wrong tree?
Comments
As you've discovered, if you're GPU limited, changing graphics quality settings (like ambient occlusion and shadows) will give you small improvements, while changing your resolution will give you big improvements. That's because the amount of work the GPU has to do per frame is roughly proportional to the number of pixels it has to display. There are nearly three times as many pixels at 2560x1440 than at 1440x900, so lowering your resolution lets your GPU do its work nearly three times as fast.
But due to the way that NS2 is designed, you will probably only be GPU limited in (as you put it) the least demanding situations: the ready room, in the early game, and out of combat. Late game in combat with lots of players and lots of entities (including cysts, MACs, ARCs, and projectiles like bile bombs and grenades) then you will be limited by the game's logic code. The amount of work the logic code has to do is roughly proportional to the number of game entities in the nearby vicinity, and is unaffected by your graphics quality or resolution. And once you're CPU limited, the only thing that will make it better is a faster CPU.
In the case of NS2 I think it's less of "I want to be good at playing an ugly game" and more along the lines of "I can't accept having a fps handicap (aka skill handicap) for a pretty looking game". It's not the type of game that is fun when you are bad at it.
Well my current PC isn't suitable for SLI for a whole slew of reasons and it would be an unwise investment to try to upgrade it now of all times. So I guess I will learn to love the smoothed out blocky pixels that come from playing at a non native resolution on an LCD monitor.
2560x1440: 3,686,400 pixels
1920x1080: 2,073,600 pixels
1440x900: 1,296,000 pixels
Good old 1024x768: 786,432 pixels
Ambient Occlusion is a screen effect, so it will be more stressful the higher the resolution.
2560x1440: 30-70
1920x1080: 50-100
1440x900: 70-200
That is more-or-less the expected result in a GPU limited situation. What surprises me is the relatively minimal effect of all the other graphics settings (even antialiasing). The fact that those other settings make such little difference suggests that the CPU is the limiting factor. Or maybe I am oversimplifying the problem.
I don't care about any of the graphics settings really EXCEPT resolution. Resolution MUST be native or it looks like shit (and stops windowed borderless working, AND re arranges my windos
Forgot about infestation, I do care about graphic settings that affect gameplay. Wish they'd fix minimal infest back to how it was in b235.
Some people think I'm weird for that.
Maybe you are getting noticably more input lag at the higher resolution.
Just an observation.
Felt better also even if I thought it was a placebo.
on a gtx 460 / i7 2600, resolution is the only graphics setting that seems to have any big effect
Rofl maybe because unless you have the best hardware on the market (with overclock) you get sub-optimal FPS?
Once the game progresses past 10 minutes and there are ~50 cysts on the map you get gg'd by the CPU bottleneck.
If you don't nail the gameplay and performance, nothing else matters. That's why I'm still playing NS1.
If you don't nail the aesthetic, technical quality is also irrelevant. Crysis is boring, bland and uninspired; I don't like the aesthetic, in a lot of ways I find DOOM prettier, inspite of 320x240 lighting, nearest filtering and sector lighting. Quake 1 and NS is almost running on the same engine; technical quality is very similar, just a few more polygons and coloured lightmaps; quake is brown sludge and NS is amazing and in many ways still more interesting and stylized than NS2.