Performance - 60 - 13 fps

[Destraex]

In the demo performance is acceptable at between 60 and 13 when the action is heavy. However these are relatively small maps?

Anyone who has the full game care to comment on their rig and frame rates.

I am kinda haunted by the first cmsf game where even a good computer seemed to have performance problems.

Hoping the game has matured enough that even big maps are nice and smooth...

my rig:

q6600

8800gt

4gig ram

vista 32

[MikeyD]

A 'movie' standard framerate is 24 fps, a 'cartoon' (Scooby Doo) framerate is 12 fps. Someone mentioned elsewhere that watching framerate numbers is counterproductive. Programs like Fraps cause a measurable framerate hit. Not knowing the number would be best - you won't fixate on them and you won't be slowing the game down generating them.

[Destraex]

i know fraps take a hit, but its usually only in the vicinity of 1fps

I do not fixate on framerates as long as the game runs smoothly. The first one had many problems in this regard that got somewhat better with patches.

30fps is supposed to be the most the human eya can process. however framerate for me also indicates not only the video performance but can be a measure of how well the computer handles the game in general.

those drops in framerates when the fighting starts are when i used to bfind the game un-responsive and unplayable. not because of graphics grunt but because the computer just was not handling the game overall.

I'm just asking as an indicator who gets 24fps throughout a mission basically. Especially on the bigger ones.

[Pandur]

i see you have a Nvidia card, possibly try auto threading "off" if you have set it to on or auto(default). this had the biggest impact on my nvidia cards so far.

[Destraex1]

thanks but I did not say I had problems with the current demo.

I was wondering about the full "current" game and peoples frame rates.

[Pandur]

well when you say that your frames drop down to 13 at times i consider that a problem. but yes, you did not say so.

PS.: if you downloaded the 1.20 CMSF+Marines+British Demo it got the same performance as the full game patched to 1.20 in my eyes. if you got an outdated demo, it will be worse.

[Battlefront.com]

Demo uses the same code as the full game, so the rates will be identical for both given the same exact scenario.

The main killers of framerates are the density of the map's terrain, the size of the map, the number of units in play at any one time, and how much shooting is going on at the same time. Most decent computers can handle a couple of these pushed to extremes without much of a problem. But a game which has dense, big maps with lots of units and tons of concurrent fighting... that's when the rates tend to drop.

We've identified some terrain stuff which produces bottlenecks more than other things, so we'll be changing that stuff as we can as soon as we can. Until then, reducing the model and terrain details within the game can help out a lot. Turning off special effects features also tends to produce good results. Playing with 1024 or so screen size can also help.

At the end of the day Combat Mission "suffers" because of the quantity of data it's moving around. Abstracted terrain, "hit points" for armor, etc. are all nice tricks to keep the game's impact on the framerate low while still having really detailed graphics. We figured this wasn't the right direction for Combat Mission

Oh, and one really good piece of info. We're not going to keep increasing the polygon counts of our units. Since this sucks up a big chunk of the processing power, keeping units at current polygon counts (which are MUCH higher than most FPS/RTS games) should free up processing and video card power for other things as computers and cards get faster.

Steve

[MikeyD]

Things that clog framerate count are accumulative. You can be sailing along happy as a clam, then pan the camera a couple degrees to include the dense forest and the office towers and cliffs and the full company of speeding tanks, and the processor gasps! Another couple degrees of panning and its good as new. The "shift-{" hotkey is especially useful for dropping poly count on the objects when there's too much going on. An especially gasp-worthy moment for framerate is when you include all of the above then an F15 decides to drop a 2000lb bomb in the middle of it all!

[Cpl Steiner]

Another thing that I find helps a lot is to switch to turn-based play instead of real-time on the larger maps. The game then does all its ballistic and LOS calculations in advance so that in playback mode your PC is pretty much just doing graphics.

[Destraex1]

i'll prolly buy it anyway.... but thats good to know

[teeps]

I've got a seven year old PC, and I'm perfectly happy with framerates, hope that helps your thinking.

[afreu]

Is it true that CMSF still doesn't use dual cores?

[Battlefront.com]

Correct, it doesn't use dual cores. When the game engine was being programmed these were very uncommon in home PCs, so designing a game that required a additional processors to function correctly was a very bad idea. We do not want the game to fraction customers into "haves" and "have nots". In other words, we have to make sure the game works very well with a single processor. If that happens then additional processors are not very useful. Remember, we have a lot of people like Teeps using very old hardware

The engineering to take advantage of additional cores is not trivial. At some point we will overhaul the engine to take advantage of the extra processing power. Until the, we will purposefully improve the game code to work well on single core processors.

Steve

[Pandur]

by now i would say its the opposite. if you get a new rig for gaming you have a dual or quad core in it since quiet some time.

if someone still plays with a PC powered by coal and steam would you support it? sure it has to work with single cores, but to use "time" to further improve single CPU support is a waste of time in 2009 i think.

[TheVulture]

It's worth noting that, within reason, changes in frame rate have a greater psychological impact than absolute frame rates. Dropping from 30 to 15 fps is a pretty noticeable lag spike. Playing at a completely consistent 10 fps on the other hand is quite serviceable and often won't be problematic.

It is also possible to write code that can work one one or multiple processors. Not necessarily easy (and can be a veritable sod to debug)

[Destraex]

Is it better then to set affinity to only one core?

[Ricochet67]

Is it better then to set affinity to only one core?

Not since patch 1.04.

--v1.04 Patch Features--

* CM:SF is multi-processor/multi-core friendly. Workarounds like "setting affinity" to single-processor are no longer needed.

[Skinnedpuppy]

I have the following system

AMP XP+6400 Dual Core

Nvidia 8800 Ultra

2GB Ram

OS - XP SP3

I run it maxed out with excellent frame rates, only time I ever noticed some slow down was with some of the obscene sized maps a couple of people have made. As I generally don’t play maps that size I’m perfectly happy, all the stock campaigns and scenarios run fine.

[Apocalypse 31]

I'm getting horrible FPS with the Brit game. Marines and US run just fine.

[Battlefront.com]

We don't foresee overhauling the code to multi-processor for some time. It is always the case that the people with the current, fastest, hardware presume that they are in the majority. That has never been the case and never will be the case. Most people do not upgrade their computers every couple of years. Especially guys prone to playing wargames.

Now, it is true that since CM:SF first came out there are fewer and fewer single processor computers out there. But even if the number is 20%, that's still far too large a number for us to abandon.

My guess is that we'll support multi-processors about 2 years from now. Currently it's the video cards that are the bottleneck so going to multi-processor support now wouldn't change framerates for most people.

The code that governs framerates is identical for all versions of the game. The only reason why British may be giving you lower FPS, Lt. Mike, is perhaps due to denser maps or more vehicle heavy forces. There's no other reason since the polygon counts are about the same for each thing depicted and the terrain is identical.

Steve

[Wengart]

___________Jun______ July

1 CPU______ 26.18%__ 23.42_______-2.76%

2 CPU ______56.76%__ 53.73%_____-3.03%

4 CPU______ 16.46%___16.65%_____+0.19%

Unspecified__0.01%____5.58%______+5.57%

Relating to CPU cores, here's an excerpt from the Steam Hardware Survey. I would post the link, but I am pretty sure it would be counted as commercial. (links to the steam store)

[Battlefront.com]

Cool, thanks! And this is from a site which caters to more "bleeding edge" games than wargames, therefore the numbers should be skewed in favor of more cores.

BTW, it's OK to link to an outside website, even a game one, when it's directly relevant to an on-topic discussion. Well, as long as it doesn't seem like the intention of the link is to push a particular product. Yeah, we know this is a gray area topic... but we try to be reasonable

Steve

[Wengart]

In that case, here is a much nicer version. Complete with adoption trends, and pretty colors! http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/

[Battlefront.com]

Pretty colors Hmmm... it says "CPU Adoption", which to me indicates that this is tracking new purchases and not current installed base. Those are two different things. However, going on the assumption that it is tracking installed base then my point still stands. If it is tracking new purchases then my point only gets stronger

Interesting details in there about video cards. That's pretty much expected.

Steve

[Starlight]

I found that the final battle in the original Shock Force and the final battle in the Marines expansion both gave significant frame rate drops during playback (I use WEGO). I guess there was just so much going on and a lot of units on the map, still I was a little surprised by such a drop, less than 10 fps definitely and that was with a powerful new system.

But I was just happy a a pig in mud to be playing such an excellent game

I will be even happier when we get 8km x 16km maps or even Tacops size 31km x31km maps for in game large force tactical deployment and manoeuvre.

Obviously we will need supercomputers running quantum cores or something similar