My old i7 950 and my 2 GTX 570s barely even break a sweat with this game, yet I only get 30-60 FPS while playing, but 80-120 in the warpgate. I should be able to play this game at 60+ with no problem, but it's so poorly optimized. You know, I played perfect world, and it had this exact same problem where it didn't even bother using the CPU enough. It seems this is a problem with any MMO type game.
My 3770k @ 4.6 GHz and 2 x 670's in sli with 32 gb of ram gets 50-60 frames in big fights, sounds legit.
Thanks for posting. I'll try to address your points. Point 1: I have intentionally set the graphics low and turned of vsync and any other kind of framerate limiter. Pressing alt-f in game confirmed that I am always CPU bound. This means that the game is ALWAYS waiting for the CPU - therefore we should expect it to be at 100%. Anything under 100% indicates that the cores are waiting for each other due to unoptimised code. Point 2: I think the above answers this. Point 3: At the end of the day it is framerate and lag that matters I agree, but there is no way for me to objectively measure this. I'm not sure if you were around in the beta but it was discovered that a vast majority of us are CPU bound. You would have to have either a terrible graphics card, or have the graphics turned up to ultra for GPU to be your limiting factor in medium to large battles in this game as it stands. Personally, even if I am in the middle of nowhere on the map getting 70fps, I am still CPU bound.
I may be wrong about this as I can't check the original thread made during beta, but I'm pretty sure a dev confirmed to me that those spikes correlate to dying and respawning in the game.
Uh, it does not matter if I play high or low settings, my frames show CPU everytime and my videocard is alot stronger than my CPU.
That is a typical reason for the large spikes. There are others. The CPU work going on is pretty "bursty" so the CPU usage tracking usually lies because it's averaging over time. Our internal monitoring tools show us nanosecond resolution data so we have a much better view of what's going on. There are times several CPU's are used 100%, but sometimes only for a short time and then they go idle again. In the above graphics, the super-spiky graph hints at this. For most FPS players, this seems rather wrong but try this to see how it helps. Turn *UP* your graphics options, since "graphics options" affect the GPU mostly (that's why they are listed under graphics options). If you turn your graphics settings super low its kind of like having a 600 HP car you drive by either flooring the accelerator, or letting off completely. Seriously. It sounds silly, but really that's what can happen. The ideal point *RIGHT NOW* is to adjust your settings at the warp gate so that the CPU/GPU indicator flips back and forth as you are looking in different directions and then tweak it up just a little bit so the GPU is fairly steadily the limit.
Just curious- but do you have any advice for those of us who have already been playing on high graphics? I have an i7920 and a Geforce 560 GTX. I get 40-50 at the warpgate [CPU], and 10-20 in heavy combat [Also CPU]. I've been trawling around for various recommendations for what might be going on- but as near as I can tell, PS2 is only working off of one processor and one virtual processor. I see people here posting significantly better framerates on i7950s (see: iKickz), so I was wondering if there are any tips that the PS2 team would approve of for boosting CPU performance?
Yeah my logging software resolution is once every 5 seconds so it'll miss that! So is the graph misleading? Is it worth me doing more test as optimisation goes on?
So in short, my GPU is only eye candy and not performance if I max out the settings or find a point in which my GPU is being used more than my CPU? I thought the "CPU" next to it meant the game was being mostly handled by the CPU and that at some point switching to high settings, the "CPU" would convert to "GPU" because that was being stressed the most. I have gone all the way up on graphics and still the alt-F shows CPU right next to the frames, I have a Radeon 7970 and a core 2 quad 9550.
The three things I've seen affect the CPU the most consistently are: Audio channels (lower channel count can sometimes help), Shadows (lower quality can help some CPU's), and Texture Quality/Resolution (whaaaaaaaaaaaat?). Other things that affect CPU performance are straight-up bugs (and we've got a list of them to fix). This includes the performance drop for some when inside vehicles with HUDs. Pixels are a strange beast. If you have less than 1 GB of VRAM, watch out for using too high resolution or render quality. Using high-quality textures takes a large amount of memory for the CPU and GPU. If you have closer to the minimum amount of VRAM, this is not the option for you. The same goes for resolution. The way rendering works, you've got lots of pixels and lots of buffers. 2560x1600 is TWICE the number of pixels as 1920x1200, and twice the memory usage. This is why sometimes reducing the render quality on high-end cards with smaller amounts of memory helps. I recommend starting at 100%, noting the FPS, dropping to 50% and watching for a change. If you see a change, see if you can adjust it and find that tipping point. Render Quality is one of the few settings that changes instantly. Some of the others options really do require you to completely exit the game and restart from the launcher (not the server/character screen). I wouldn't say it's not helpful or even misleading as an average, people just have to know that it's not the whole story. Averages smooth out spikes. Right now those "idle" CPU's are actually doing huge amounts of burst work at times, keeping the frame rate fairly smooth instead of bouncing all over the place. What I am trying to say is simply this: Watch the CPU/GPU meter. If it's flipping back and forth, you're pretty close to optimal graphics and frame rate. Tweak a setting or two and see if you can get it to just flip over without a significant change in FPS and then you're at the best looking game at the best frame rate. As we patch, you may want to fiddle with settings every now and again to make sure you're on the edge. As time goes by, we'll have better automatic settings as well (we hope) or at least better tools for helping you adjust things.
you guys look at that fps option in game i noticed the fps keeps jumpoing up and down and when this happens it switches and says GPU or CPU needless to say i found in large battles it switch almost nonstop to CPU and i would get low fps and if i stoped in a corner and not moved it swithch back to GPU and i would get great fps as soon as i started moving again it start switching back and forth as i moved and my fps would drop each time
If you gals really want to see 100% CPU usage. Here's how: Go to your bios, disable all but one or two cores. Launch PS2 and see that lovely 100% usage. Warning: this may cause stuttering and longer load times.
I track mine live constatly for CPU, Memory and both GPUs (crossfire). I get about the same was what your showing give or take. I'll record my next session and post some of it.
I've double-checked that code several times. It's correct. What you're seeing is that the performance changes as you do different things in the game.
CyclesMcHurtz I am very curious about what threads are taking the most cpu time in large battles? It almost seems that its not the actual amaunt of details on screen but other things the game is calculating.
I would like to know how to see that scpu/gpu log in real time like that with graph and all, I have aida 64bit extreme (registered) and only thing I can find is the update freq in which it shoots out a text based log :/ any hel with that OP? also I get 30-40 fps GPU at warpgate, pretty steady at 40-45 if im just standing, but running around shooting and basically just acting like im in a fight it ranges from 28-40 but I never noticed any lag at all, and it is ALL GPU never once switches to cpu the only thing I get is momentary hick ups, where the screen will just lock up for about 2 seconds, then its eh okay again, about ever 30-45 minutes, it seems random, but I have always had that in every game I have ever played with this video card, so I know that that is not PS2 but my own computer what I am wondering is everyone else seems to be hung on CPU FPS where mine never even gets CPU just GPU, now I do play on all lowest settings, with render quality and field of view at 100% and 1280x720 res (do to not being able to read anything at higher res lol, but even at 1920x1080 I still see very little lag even in bigger fights, so I think my CPU is handling PS2 fine, I honestly think that I am GPU bound due to the lower end card.... I dunno
Just chiming in to say that it's awesome when a programmer chimes in directly. Glad to see it happening =) Keep up the monkey business.
^ same here, was just bragging to a friend that I think that is the first time I have ever seem that without the smugness and general disdain for all humanity ROFL money is freakin awesome in my book +1 banana to money LOL
Cycles, one weird behaviour I have seen on my rig is that the game can run perfectly (well, more performance always welcome of course) and then suddenly the game totally collapses. With this I mean that the graphics totally stop rendering, in effect the game appears frozen, yet the VoIP continues. At some point, if I allow it to wait for a bit (30 seconds or more) it will get unstuck. To me this points that something in the main update loop for rendering is getting stuck (especially since the network aspects work and incoming VoIP also still works). Have you seen this reported before?
