I do find it very strange that I start to notice input lag (not many people do, but I've trained my senses to notice these things) when my framerate dips below 110FPS.
Riiight. Show me the double-blind test results and then we can continue this discussion.
If your monitor can't display the frame, it can still be a lot smoother regarding the inputs, and have less lag. In some games you can even gain speed/aiming/movement/physics advantages.
It's not because you don't/can't feel it, that it does not exists.
I don't know how to phrase this any differently. Do you understand my point or are you just trying to start an argument? I feel like nothing warrants NS2 requiring that much out of a CPU when NO other game in the world requires it. LMK if you misunderstood anything else. I love UWE and want to play this game.
Pffft. Play Arma3 with a few A.I. armys... than we can talk about bad FPS and slide show gaming.
Some things are just quirky, I have a i7 2.66, with a GTX 460v2 - I visually don't notice much "lag" but I am sure I'm not pushing anything above 80FPS. I'm generally playing well into the late game heavy builds and I can't say I notice that much difference between the start and the end. I play on a LCD TV so I don't play much above 1280X720 or I can't read the screen. I agree there is a performance issue with the game, but It seems so random between systems.
I really wish they could get performance a bit better, I have a pretty garbage computer but I'm not spending any money on it or on a new computer, it gets really unbearable after 5-10 minutes. I play on everything off/lowest settings, etc. I don't go into games expecting my computer to perform well but I've never experienced a game with sort of framey lag I get in this.
Very nice overclock OP. I have not tried running the game on my 1440p monitor yet. Might have to give it a go so I can compare. I am running a i7-990x @ 4.6 currently with a GTX 580 OC. I currently get between 130 and 160 frames out of combat and 75-110 in combat at 1080p with adjusted settings.
Metal ManJoin Date: 2011-11-13Member: 132717Members
I realize I sounded a little hostile and douchey before so I apologize. And I also realize that NS2 IS also very complex and detailed despite being from an indie company.
That being said, maybe some of you can explain to me why NS2 requires so much? In all honesty I would really like to learn this. From Crazy Eddie:
Visual settings aren't the only thing. Your rig is more than sufficient to get good performance from NS2 in the visual department, but that's not all that's going on. NS2's gameplay logic is as demanding as its graphics processing, far more so than most other games out there - including those that are well-known as requiring "high performance", because those games only tax the graphics card.
No other game in the world does what NS2 does.
Okay so the gameplay logic demands more. Is this a result of the infestation? Also what does NS2 exactly do that sets it apart from every other game in the world? I can't see anything else in the game being that much more complex than any other game I played. Turning infestation to minimal doesn't seem to ease any issues. But if you could explain this to me, honestly I would appreciate it.
Some of you also said I only mentioned offline games, but I noted ffxiv online. That was a vast and beautiful game that had no problems running on my PC. I also can play other online FPS like battlefield3 and planetside2 with no performance problems. Additionally, the performance issues in NS2 aren't limited to lower FPS. There are also frequent strutters, jumps and tears during gameplay. If it stayed a smooth 40 the whole time that would be much better. But i am frequently dealing with minor stops during each game that really really break the pace of combat.
So my last question is why does NS2 require so much more for gameplay logic from the CPU (compared to some of the ones I mentioned before... actually compared to every other game known from my experience). Also why is NS2 required to use more from the CPU than the GPU? One of you mentioned the discrepancies seem to vary oddly from system to system. I guess my original point is there is some flaw in how the game is coded and its combined usage of the cpu and graphics card. Everyone seemed to jump at me and bash my computer (probably because I was a little hostile initially) without really offering a clear explanation. I understand it is a very demanding game, and rightly so. But why to such an extent? And more specifically, why to such an extent from only the CPU? Couldn't it have been coded differently. Thank you for reading this and sorry for being pretentious before.
It's really really hard to say - maybe we can get hugh (with any luck) to do something like APB did - I LOVED this chart- it really explained the internal workings and why things were they way they were and what was done to "optimize" how it was running.
We hear "optimization" and "optimize" this all the time, but APB really broke down just how they did it.
I'm not an expert. The following is a very poorly educated guess, but it might be kind of right and it might be helpful.
=======
It's basically the difference between physics and geometry.
Graphics cards are very good at doing a certain limited set of operations in large scale. Mostly these involve taking geometric entities (points in space, lines, curves, and polygons) and various associated values and then transforming them into a 2-D matrix of colored dots which gets painted onto your screen. Then doing the same thing again one sixtieth of a second later after the entities and values have been altered very slightly. This is called "rendering", and it requires a modest amount of work by the CPU to coordinate things and a huge amount of work by the GPU to do all the actual calculation.
But figuring out what changes need to be made to those entities and values involves physics. Not necessarily actual physics, but whatever version of physics the game engine has implemented. A gorge spits a bile bomb from location X at time T moving in direction D with velocity V, and then every fraction of a second its position gets updated according to the game's version of physics. But it can't be evaluated in isolation; you have to also evaluate everything that it could interact with, which includes everything that it might collide with (like walls and players and other projectiles).
All that work has to be done by the CPU. The GPU doesn't have the kind of instruction set that would let it do that kind of calculation.
The same is true of essentially anything that moves, or anything that changes, or anything that affects anything that moves or changes. It all has to be processed by the CPU, so that the CPU can tell the GPU what the new 3-D geometry looks like, so that the GPU can figure out what to paint on the 2-D display.
NS2 environments are very dynamic. They have lots of things that move and change - mainly lighting and animation. That means there's a lot of work for the CPU to do. The rendering, on the other hand, is not especially more taxing than you'd find in other modern games. For a given screen size and a given level of detail it's going to take a certain amount of raw GPU power, and that's pretty much that.
---
And then there's Lua.
The third major component besides physics and rendering is game logic. Physics determines how the bile bomb projectile moves given its physical parameters; game logic determines what those parameters are and what happens when the physics determines that it's collided with something.
In NS2 all game logic is implemented in Lua, which is an interpreted language. In many other games some or all of the logic is implemented in a compiled language like C++. Compiled languages are in general faster than interpreted languages. There is a definite performance penalty that UWE has to live with in NS2 because the entire game logic is in Lua. I think it's not as bad as people on the forums make it out to be - Lua is actually very very fast for an interpreted language - but it unquestionably is there.
NS2 benefits from the use of Lua in two ways. First, it makes it much easier for modders to mod. Second, and much more importantly, it makes it much easier for UWE to develop. It means that NS2 was released sooner and cheaper, and that updates and fixes are larger, better, and more frequent.
That's not necessarily good news for someone who's getting bad performance to know that the underperforming game was cheap. But for everyone with a rig that can run it well - and every year there are more and more such people - the use of Lua is a godsend, whether we realize it or not, because without it there would be no game.
=======
There you have it. Hope this helped. I welcome better explanations from people who actually know what they're talking about.
I'd contest that Planetside 2 runs well. I'll also note that NS2 isn't the only game that's CPU limited.
Planetside 2 is a whole other ball game. I'd say it runs pretty fuckin' well for what it does. I was in the tech tests too, so I know how far it's come.
Planetside 2 is a whole other ball game. I'd say it runs pretty fuckin' well for what it does. I was in the tech tests too, so I know how far it's come.
NS2's performance has come quite a long way from where it was, and I think it will continue to improve. However there is still real input delay and inaccuracies that are very noticeable, and it would be really nice to see them fixed. Some of it may be due to microstuttering in frame times (i havent profiled frametimes, but some of the quick glances I did previously showed some frames could be upwards of 5ms slower on average).
IronHorseDeveloper, QA Manager, Technical Support & contributorJoin Date: 2010-05-08Member: 71669Members, Super Administrators, Forum Admins, Forum Moderators, NS2 Developer, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Subnautica Playtester, Subnautica PT Lead, Pistachionauts
edited March 2013
@CrazyEddie nailed it. But i would've stressed the LUA portion.
Which has received a lot of optimization lately, and will continue to.
One of the recent blog's from Hugh mentioned every programmer working on performance.
As of today that's still occurring.
So with any luck the downsides of LUA can slowly be washed away with each patch.
And thank you @Metalman for the changed tone and understanding.
The game and how it's engine operates is a grand canyon of a difference from games like BF3, from engine design to staffing. They had over 100 employees and an EA budget that rivaled AAA movies. I get that the consumer only cares about the end product and result, discarding the factors involved like quick iteration for a small team, easy modding, and trusting the server so you dont need a fulltime 12 man team dedicated to catching hackers (BF3), but at least the price of NS2 being $25 (and $12 over the weekend) compared to those other $60 games and free content patches should at least factor in/ give some leeway.
But again, the developers are very hard at work, even as i type this, (sees Max's status) to improve this. The strides made lately are an indication of such, so I hope you stick around to enjoy it
Metal ManJoin Date: 2011-11-13Member: 132717Members
ScardyBob both are great games. But Planetside 2 runs much better than NS2, period. Both games start around 60 fps, actually planetside2 closer to 70. However, NS2 fps ALWAYS drops throughout the game where Planetside does not. Additionally, NS2 features frequent jerks and struts throughout the game. Planetside2 does not. So contest all you want, that isn't an argument; and for the point of this thread, please don't speculate that the things I say are false or exaggerated. I wholeheartedly support this game but the performance issues I experience are real and baffling to me, and more importantly, almost completely unique to this one game.
Crazy Eddie and Massasster, much appreciated. I got most of what you were saying and that does make logical sense. I do agree there are a lot of things moving and changing size and shape and it is all beautifully done. All players are moving fast and frequently. It makes so much sense. Plus, with everything on lowest settings there is almost NO change in performance for me. So it makes sense that the GPU is doing all that it can.
Now I don't know enough about programming in general to explain anything.. but I will say I am under the impression that NS2 requires way too much CPU for said physics. Is there that much going on in NS2 that excuses such hiccups, even with every setting set to the lowest (everything but the resolution is at the minimum setting). This is an awesome game and I understand that it should be taxing on the CPU, but I am standing firm that it requires WAY TOO MUCH CPU than it should.
It would be very nice to see something like that APB simplified game loop. Hopefully they can figure out how to send and receive network traffic more efficiently.
I might try overclocking after all of you explained things to me. Thanks again. I was being a bit stubborn before, "meh wah wah I shouldn't have to overclock so I won't." I'll probably give it a try now, I know it isn't too hard with mine.
At the end of the day I do know that in the somewhat near future this game will run as smooth as butter and I will probably play daily when that time comes. There is nothing but hope and love on my side. GL UWE!
Well, you certainly don't HAVE to overclock, but almost certainly your framerates will improve if you do. With NS2, every extra bit of core speed will give you an extra bit of performance.
Also - turning off Ambient Occlusion, Bloom, and Atmospherics (if you haven't already) should help your framerate, since those particular visual effects use the CPU to some extent. Other settings (like resolution!) are mostly dependent on your GPU, so changing them probably won't help.
the performance issues I experience are real and baffling to me, and more importantly, almost completely unique to this one game.
There's always the possibility that there's Just Something Funny Going On. The engine isn't perfect (not by a long shot!) and systems can have all kinds of hardware and software quirks, so it's entirely possible that you're seeing performance problems that other people with comparable (but different) systems aren't having. If so, those problems will probably go away when some particular bug in the engine gets fixed, or the engine implements a workaround for some particular bug in your system.
Planetside 2 is a whole other ball game. I'd say it runs pretty fuckin' well for what it does. I was in the tech tests too, so I know how far it's come.
Same could be said for NS2.
No, it can't. **I NEED TO BE NICER**. NS2 runs like garbage compared to Planetside 2. I don't even play Planetside 2 because their payment model is fucking bullshit but it definitely runs better than NS2.
Planetside 2 is a whole other ball game. I'd say it runs pretty fuckin' well for what it does. I was in the tech tests too, so I know how far it's come.
Same could be said for NS2.
No, it can't. **I NEED TO BE NICER** NS2 runs like garbage compared to Planetside 2. I don't even play Planetside 2 because their payment model is fucking bullshit but it definitely runs better than NS2.
I get better fps in ns2 than I do in ps2. That is with both having everything on though.
I don't think I read it in this thread yet, but I remember a dev saying the game uses 2.2 cores.
Amd's processors are not bad but just lack in single threaded performance which ns2 craves.
I would go so far as to say the game probably wouldn't have been released yet if they went full C++. And that would be a problem since I don't think they would've actually had money to develop it for many more months/years.
ScardyBob both are great games. But Planetside 2 runs much better than NS2, period. Both games start around 60 fps, actually planetside2 closer to 70. However, NS2 fps ALWAYS drops throughout the game where Planetside does not. Additionally, NS2 features frequent jerks and struts throughout the game.
Actually NS2 runs a lot better for me currently than Planetside 2 which occasionally drops to 20-25 fps in not-that-big fights. I don't remember it being that bad in January (haven't played for a while), I hear they've been having some performance problems with some of the new patches. But you can always bring Planetside to its knees, you just have to find a large enough battle. It really is a small miracle it even works as good as it does, but they do have probably 50+ coders working on it constantly. NS2 on the other hand -- I just benchmarked a match the other day with max settings:
Now 43 fps might be unacceptable to some but I don't really notice it. I usually play with everything maxed out except decal times and ambient occlusion since it seems to run good enough for me (i5-3570k stock & GTX 660).
Now I don't know enough about programming in general to explain anything.. but I will say I am under the impression that NS2 requires way too much CPU for said physics. Is there that much going on in NS2 that excuses such hiccups, even with every setting set to the lowest (everything but the resolution is at the minimum setting).
Yeah, I think the two different questions you were asking were: 1) Is it reasonable to except for NS2 to be more demanding on the CPU than your average shooter? and 2) Considering that, is it still reasonable to except it to run better than it currently does? The answer to both of those questions is yes.
The reason why a game like Max Payne 3 isn't a good comparison is that the multi-platform games are always restricted on the CPU side by the limitations of the consoles. You can always make the PC port look better by adding stuff like resolution, high-res textures, anti-aliasing, AF, better shadows, more particles etc. These are all fully on the GPU and require little or no effort for the devs to implement. But they're not gonna patch in better AI, more complex game mechanics or more realistic physics for the PC version (caveat: games with PhysX support). That would be unfeasible.
That's why the games tend to be on-the-rails corridor shooters with just a few enemies on the screen simultaneously and not much reactivity or dynamism (is that a word?) in the game world. Not that it means they're bad games, just saying.
Single-player games also don't have to care about hit registration, movement prediction, lag compensation, interpolation and whatever other black magic is going on between the client and the server in a multiplayer shooter. In a single-player game, no one cares if your bullets register on the target 500 ms later than they should. In NS2 that would mean the lerk is already five meters away from your crosshairs.
Of course there are multiplayer games that are better comparisons and even run on the consoles, like Battlefield 3. They have servers with lots of players and projectile-based bullets and they probably handle hit registration just fine (though it helps that the players don't actually move at the speed of a celerity lerk). But then we just come back to the budget. I'm gonna guess the amount of man-hours spent making that game is 200 times more than what NS2 had.
NS2 runs like garbage compared to Planetside 2. I don't even play Planetside 2 because their payment model is fucking bullshit but it definitely runs better than NS2.
Are you sure you are not hitting VRAM limit? I have seen the game allocate more than 2GB of VRAM on max details.
The game shouldn't be allocating that much. There is something wrong there.
Why should there be something wrong? I perceive it as a good sign, and I encourage the game - come on, make use of all my fast, expensive VRAM, so that you don't have to shuffle textures from the relatively slower RAM. Games are starting to hit 2GB limit very fast today, on 1080p and high res, I tried Bioshock Infinite on Ultra, and it uses 1.8GB of VRAM.
I'd actually be interested in some NS2 vs PS2 benchmarks. The games are certainly different, but it'd be nice to know how NS2 compares to other recently released fpses (Tribes Ascend might be another good one to bench).
NS2 runs like arse for 99% of people because they don't OC their CPU and when they do, they turn everything high especially features like occlusion and their GPU gets dumped on because they aren't 7970 master race.
Metal ManJoin Date: 2011-11-13Member: 132717Members
Snaga I hear what you are saying. And, really, I am not trying to argue just for kicks. But it is ridiculous how we are on complete opposite ends. I stated (I have both games) that Planetside2 runs much better than NS2. Even in large teamfights the FPS dips to 40-50 at the lowest but it is never jerky or tearing (this is KEY for any online shooter). NS2, no matter what, has a fairly large drop in performance by the end of the game. It feels this way no matter where I am, even if it is a small 1v1 or 2v2 skirmish... often when there is noone near. It is very stuttery for me... It almost feels like I am playing with many torrents in the background (I've checked... I'm not). Combat on both sides is agonizing at times.
Snaga.... "Yeah, except no." Come on man let's try to keep this thing rational. I feel like this is one of the few threads I've read where people are listening to eachother. If you want to have a logical discussion you have to assume people are speaking truthfully. I know I am and I believe you are as well.
I think the possibility that "something funny is going on" could hold some real truth. And damn I wish I never typed those single player games in my first post (I was a little ignorant on CPU vs GPU). But the fact that I can handle Planetside2 pretty fine and NS2 gives me constant headaches... man I just don't know what's up but I really want to figure this out. I will overclock in the next day or two and post any differences.
Comments
It's not because you don't/can't feel it, that it does not exists.
Pffft. Play Arma3 with a few A.I. armys... than we can talk about bad FPS and slide show gaming.
Some things are just quirky, I have a i7 2.66, with a GTX 460v2 - I visually don't notice much "lag" but I am sure I'm not pushing anything above 80FPS. I'm generally playing well into the late game heavy builds and I can't say I notice that much difference between the start and the end. I play on a LCD TV so I don't play much above 1280X720 or I can't read the screen. I agree there is a performance issue with the game, but It seems so random between systems.
AMD's problem is that their processors are slower than Intel Processors. Much slower.
Not their only problem, but yes, deff a big one.
*benchmark pending
That being said, maybe some of you can explain to me why NS2 requires so much? In all honesty I would really like to learn this. From Crazy Eddie:
Visual settings aren't the only thing. Your rig is more than sufficient to get good performance from NS2 in the visual department, but that's not all that's going on. NS2's gameplay logic is as demanding as its graphics processing, far more so than most other games out there - including those that are well-known as requiring "high performance", because those games only tax the graphics card.
No other game in the world does what NS2 does.
Okay so the gameplay logic demands more. Is this a result of the infestation? Also what does NS2 exactly do that sets it apart from every other game in the world? I can't see anything else in the game being that much more complex than any other game I played. Turning infestation to minimal doesn't seem to ease any issues. But if you could explain this to me, honestly I would appreciate it.
Some of you also said I only mentioned offline games, but I noted ffxiv online. That was a vast and beautiful game that had no problems running on my PC. I also can play other online FPS like battlefield3 and planetside2 with no performance problems. Additionally, the performance issues in NS2 aren't limited to lower FPS. There are also frequent strutters, jumps and tears during gameplay. If it stayed a smooth 40 the whole time that would be much better. But i am frequently dealing with minor stops during each game that really really break the pace of combat.
So my last question is why does NS2 require so much more for gameplay logic from the CPU (compared to some of the ones I mentioned before... actually compared to every other game known from my experience). Also why is NS2 required to use more from the CPU than the GPU? One of you mentioned the discrepancies seem to vary oddly from system to system. I guess my original point is there is some flaw in how the game is coded and its combined usage of the cpu and graphics card. Everyone seemed to jump at me and bash my computer (probably because I was a little hostile initially) without really offering a clear explanation. I understand it is a very demanding game, and rightly so. But why to such an extent? And more specifically, why to such an extent from only the CPU? Couldn't it have been coded differently. Thank you for reading this and sorry for being pretentious before.
We hear "optimization" and "optimize" this all the time, but APB really broke down just how they did it.
=======
It's basically the difference between physics and geometry.
Graphics cards are very good at doing a certain limited set of operations in large scale. Mostly these involve taking geometric entities (points in space, lines, curves, and polygons) and various associated values and then transforming them into a 2-D matrix of colored dots which gets painted onto your screen. Then doing the same thing again one sixtieth of a second later after the entities and values have been altered very slightly. This is called "rendering", and it requires a modest amount of work by the CPU to coordinate things and a huge amount of work by the GPU to do all the actual calculation.
But figuring out what changes need to be made to those entities and values involves physics. Not necessarily actual physics, but whatever version of physics the game engine has implemented. A gorge spits a bile bomb from location X at time T moving in direction D with velocity V, and then every fraction of a second its position gets updated according to the game's version of physics. But it can't be evaluated in isolation; you have to also evaluate everything that it could interact with, which includes everything that it might collide with (like walls and players and other projectiles).
All that work has to be done by the CPU. The GPU doesn't have the kind of instruction set that would let it do that kind of calculation.
The same is true of essentially anything that moves, or anything that changes, or anything that affects anything that moves or changes. It all has to be processed by the CPU, so that the CPU can tell the GPU what the new 3-D geometry looks like, so that the GPU can figure out what to paint on the 2-D display.
NS2 environments are very dynamic. They have lots of things that move and change - mainly lighting and animation. That means there's a lot of work for the CPU to do. The rendering, on the other hand, is not especially more taxing than you'd find in other modern games. For a given screen size and a given level of detail it's going to take a certain amount of raw GPU power, and that's pretty much that.
---
And then there's Lua.
The third major component besides physics and rendering is game logic. Physics determines how the bile bomb projectile moves given its physical parameters; game logic determines what those parameters are and what happens when the physics determines that it's collided with something.
In NS2 all game logic is implemented in Lua, which is an interpreted language. In many other games some or all of the logic is implemented in a compiled language like C++. Compiled languages are in general faster than interpreted languages. There is a definite performance penalty that UWE has to live with in NS2 because the entire game logic is in Lua. I think it's not as bad as people on the forums make it out to be - Lua is actually very very fast for an interpreted language - but it unquestionably is there.
NS2 benefits from the use of Lua in two ways. First, it makes it much easier for modders to mod. Second, and much more importantly, it makes it much easier for UWE to develop. It means that NS2 was released sooner and cheaper, and that updates and fixes are larger, better, and more frequent.
That's not necessarily good news for someone who's getting bad performance to know that the underperforming game was cheap. But for everyone with a rig that can run it well - and every year there are more and more such people - the use of Lua is a godsend, whether we realize it or not, because without it there would be no game.
=======
There you have it. Hope this helped. I welcome better explanations from people who actually know what they're talking about.
I'd contest that Planetside 2 runs well. I'll also note that NS2 isn't the only game that's CPU limited.
Planetside 2 is a whole other ball game. I'd say it runs pretty fuckin' well for what it does. I was in the tech tests too, so I know how far it's come.
Which has received a lot of optimization lately, and will continue to.
One of the recent blog's from Hugh mentioned every programmer working on performance.
As of today that's still occurring.
So with any luck the downsides of LUA can slowly be washed away with each patch.
And thank you @Metalman for the changed tone and understanding.
The game and how it's engine operates is a grand canyon of a difference from games like BF3, from engine design to staffing. They had over 100 employees and an EA budget that rivaled AAA movies. I get that the consumer only cares about the end product and result, discarding the factors involved like quick iteration for a small team, easy modding, and trusting the server so you dont need a fulltime 12 man team dedicated to catching hackers (BF3), but at least the price of NS2 being $25 (and $12 over the weekend) compared to those other $60 games and free content patches should at least factor in/ give some leeway.
But again, the developers are very hard at work, even as i type this, (sees Max's status) to improve this. The strides made lately are an indication of such, so I hope you stick around to enjoy it
Crazy Eddie and Massasster, much appreciated. I got most of what you were saying and that does make logical sense. I do agree there are a lot of things moving and changing size and shape and it is all beautifully done. All players are moving fast and frequently. It makes so much sense. Plus, with everything on lowest settings there is almost NO change in performance for me. So it makes sense that the GPU is doing all that it can.
Now I don't know enough about programming in general to explain anything.. but I will say I am under the impression that NS2 requires way too much CPU for said physics. Is there that much going on in NS2 that excuses such hiccups, even with every setting set to the lowest (everything but the resolution is at the minimum setting). This is an awesome game and I understand that it should be taxing on the CPU, but I am standing firm that it requires WAY TOO MUCH CPU than it should.
It would be very nice to see something like that APB simplified game loop. Hopefully they can figure out how to send and receive network traffic more efficiently.
I might try overclocking after all of you explained things to me. Thanks again. I was being a bit stubborn before, "meh wah wah I shouldn't have to overclock so I won't." I'll probably give it a try now, I know it isn't too hard with mine.
At the end of the day I do know that in the somewhat near future this game will run as smooth as butter and I will probably play daily when that time comes. There is nothing but hope and love on my side. GL UWE!
Also - turning off Ambient Occlusion, Bloom, and Atmospherics (if you haven't already) should help your framerate, since those particular visual effects use the CPU to some extent. Other settings (like resolution!) are mostly dependent on your GPU, so changing them probably won't help.
And finally:
There's always the possibility that there's Just Something Funny Going On. The engine isn't perfect (not by a long shot!) and systems can have all kinds of hardware and software quirks, so it's entirely possible that you're seeing performance problems that other people with comparable (but different) systems aren't having. If so, those problems will probably go away when some particular bug in the engine gets fixed, or the engine implements a workaround for some particular bug in your system.
Keep the faith!
No, it can't. **I NEED TO BE NICER**. NS2 runs like garbage compared to Planetside 2. I don't even play Planetside 2 because their payment model is fucking bullshit but it definitely runs better than NS2.
Because there are no 120hz IPS panels.
NS2 has indeed come a very long way since the engine test so please get your facts straight.
Actually NS2 runs a lot better for me currently than Planetside 2 which occasionally drops to 20-25 fps in not-that-big fights. I don't remember it being that bad in January (haven't played for a while), I hear they've been having some performance problems with some of the new patches. But you can always bring Planetside to its knees, you just have to find a large enough battle. It really is a small miracle it even works as good as it does, but they do have probably 50+ coders working on it constantly. NS2 on the other hand -- I just benchmarked a match the other day with max settings:
Frames, Time (ms), Min, Max, Avg
74870, 1200000, 43, 102, 62.392
Now 43 fps might be unacceptable to some but I don't really notice it. I usually play with everything maxed out except decal times and ambient occlusion since it seems to run good enough for me (i5-3570k stock & GTX 660).
Yeah, I think the two different questions you were asking were: 1) Is it reasonable to except for NS2 to be more demanding on the CPU than your average shooter? and 2) Considering that, is it still reasonable to except it to run better than it currently does? The answer to both of those questions is yes.
The reason why a game like Max Payne 3 isn't a good comparison is that the multi-platform games are always restricted on the CPU side by the limitations of the consoles. You can always make the PC port look better by adding stuff like resolution, high-res textures, anti-aliasing, AF, better shadows, more particles etc. These are all fully on the GPU and require little or no effort for the devs to implement. But they're not gonna patch in better AI, more complex game mechanics or more realistic physics for the PC version (caveat: games with PhysX support). That would be unfeasible.
That's why the games tend to be on-the-rails corridor shooters with just a few enemies on the screen simultaneously and not much reactivity or dynamism (is that a word?) in the game world. Not that it means they're bad games, just saying.
Single-player games also don't have to care about hit registration, movement prediction, lag compensation, interpolation and whatever other black magic is going on between the client and the server in a multiplayer shooter. In a single-player game, no one cares if your bullets register on the target 500 ms later than they should. In NS2 that would mean the lerk is already five meters away from your crosshairs.
Of course there are multiplayer games that are better comparisons and even run on the consoles, like Battlefield 3. They have servers with lots of players and projectile-based bullets and they probably handle hit registration just fine (though it helps that the players don't actually move at the speed of a celerity lerk). But then we just come back to the budget. I'm gonna guess the amount of man-hours spent making that game is 200 times more than what NS2 had.
Yeah, except no. Want me to Fraps it for you?
Why should there be something wrong? I perceive it as a good sign, and I encourage the game - come on, make use of all my fast, expensive VRAM, so that you don't have to shuffle textures from the relatively slower RAM. Games are starting to hit 2GB limit very fast today, on 1080p and high res, I tried Bioshock Infinite on Ultra, and it uses 1.8GB of VRAM.
Having a 7970 makes one part of the master race?
Snaga.... "Yeah, except no." Come on man let's try to keep this thing rational. I feel like this is one of the few threads I've read where people are listening to eachother. If you want to have a logical discussion you have to assume people are speaking truthfully. I know I am and I believe you are as well.
I think the possibility that "something funny is going on" could hold some real truth. And damn I wish I never typed those single player games in my first post (I was a little ignorant on CPU vs GPU). But the fact that I can handle Planetside2 pretty fine and NS2 gives me constant headaches... man I just don't know what's up but I really want to figure this out. I will overclock in the next day or two and post any differences.
The Crown!