Odd FPS issue

bonage

I have noticed a small performance quirk with the latest patch. Randomly from time to time now I will get a weird stutter that will drop fps significantly (down to 30-40) and i will get spike in the waiting for GPU line. Not sure if it is caused by the same issue as the man in this thread as we have the same GPU.

See video below for example with r_stats

My system usually averages about 140-150fps, so this drop/stutter is quite unusual for me.

Specs:

i5 2500k 4.5GHz
7970 Ghz edition
Samsung Evo 250 gb SSD
16gb ram

All settings on low or off, DX9 on, and texture quality set to high, running latest catalyst driers too.

Doesn't appear to be happening in any other games and have not noticed any artifacts. Have run net_stats at time of stutter and nothing out of the ordinary there either.

Can provide more detail on request, but at the moment I can't pinpoint a time when it happens, because it occurs at random. It seems to occur more frequently after I have played several instances of NS2, but that's just speculation that I cannot back up atm.

Yojimbo

I experienced the same issue but mine happened everytime I ran around water production in Kodiak, someone mentioned at the time it being related to hidden files maybe @matso‌ can confirm this?

Can you enable verbose 1 in console then run to water production and check it out?

I know the problem is not specific to certain areas but its worth a try

bonage

Yojimbo wrote: »

I experienced the same issue but mine happened everytime I ran around water production in Kodiak, someone mentioned at the time it being related to hidden files maybe @matso‌ can confirm this?

Can you enable verbose 1 in console then run to water production and check it out?

I know the problem is not specific to certain areas but its worth a try

Seems fine on my end - no stuttering like i get in vid above. I believe that issue was addressed in the latest build anyway:

Added occlusion geo to the ice pillar in water production to improve FPS
fixed .model. error in water production (had been causing fps drops)

Yojimbo

Oh yeah I knew loki fixed it but this happened 2 days ago, maybe our issues are the same but mine just happened to of happened in that area. meh, hope they get to the bottom of it soon!

EDIT @bonage‌ Stupid me I confused water production with access alpha on eclipse! I get a horrible fps drop there, Im going to raise an tech support with that instead!

IronHorse

Can you recreate that video above but this time with p_logall typed into the console?
Then zip up your *.plog file that you'll find in your hidden appdata/ns2 folder and upload it here.
It should show what is doing this.
Thanks!

rkfg

You have non-zero "waiting for GPU" stat. it means you're GPU-bound. Check your cooling, GPU/VRAM frequency and such. You may also try to lower graphic settings. This line should be zero all the time if you want to have smooth FPS.

IronHorse

rkfg wrote: »

This line should be zero all the time if you want to have smooth FPS.

Not to be pedantic, but this specific part isn't entirely accurate.

There will _always_ be a bottleneck, and it will either be your CPU or GPU.
This means that just because you may be slightly bottlenecked by either CPU or GPU , it does not imply you will receive more or less consistent FPS.
However, making sure the ratio of difference between them is as small as possible is the best method to ensure less frame variance.

rkfg

Yeah, that's not entirely true, it's only based on my own experience. GPU bottleneck is much more critical because the number of visible objects and "graphic primitives" (like triangles, textures, shaders) vary A LOT from frame to frame. Just because you're constantly moving around and seeing many parts of map and different characters. On the other hand, CPU bottleneck is often just a fixed slowdown, it could be affected by lots of physical interactions happening nearby or, in the worst case, some bug in the code/map (like the dreaded FileOpen in the render thread) that result in hitching or FPS drop. It's more "natural" for our brain, many objects moving on little FPS is an understandable situation though sudden hitches in an empty room are annoying as hell.

Anyway, escaping a CPU bottleneck is almost impossible but GPU bottleneck can and should be avoided. For example, I had serious FPS drops on 560Ti after huge battles that didn't go away even after respawning on the base. I suspect it happened because of GPU throttling. Lowering textures to medium helped a lot.

bonage

can't reproduce it - it's very strange. Probably my GPU chucking a fit. I had the issue for around 3 days at random intervals, and now it seems to have disappeared all together (fingers crossed). Hopefully it stays that way.

Thank you for your suggestions - if it does surface again, I'll be sure to post a .plog

IronHorse

Awesome.
Yea could be time to clean the bugger out