Hi donpost Good to see you are still hanging on the forums, I must admit I haven't checked into the game since beta because I was discouraged when I saw the same problems with fps output now as we did during the beta. It's encouraging to see that the debate is no longer about whether or not the AMD cpu is good or bad, but about how come PS2 utilize so little of the available resources when it appears to be a CPU bound game. I remember back in the beta we compared results between my phenom II x4 B50, your 1090T and a FX-8150. In a different thread I attempted to reconstruct (from memory) our findings, they where roughly as follows; Quad-Core (Phenom II X4 B50): ·Core 1-2 loaded ~~ 70% ·Core 3-4 loaded ~~ 60% ·Total efficiency ~~ 65%, with 4 cores that equals (0,65x4) = 2,6 cores running at 100% Hexa-Core (Phenom II X6 1100T): ·Core 1-2 loaded ~~ 60% ·Core 3-4 loaded ~~ 50% ·Core 4-6 loaded ~~ 20% Total efficiency ~~ 43%, with 6 cores that equals (0,43x6) = 2,6 cores running at 100% Octa-Core (FX-8150): ·Core 1-2 loaded ~~ 50% ·Core 3-4 loaded ~~ 50% ·Core 4-6 loaded ~~ 20% ·Core 7-8 loaded ~~ 10% Total efficiency ~~ 33%, with 8 cores that equals (0,33x8) = 2,6 cores running at 100% It seems not much has changed since then. I haven't seen any results for the FX-8320/FX-8350 yet. Maybe I will give it a try later now that I have one of my own. The whole problem with PS2 is that it neither spend all of your GPU resources nor all of your CPU resources, so if you want good framerate you will have to upgrade to the most extreme hardware out there. That is a very unattractive solution, especially when you consider that the game performance increase by upgrading from a 2600K to a 3770K is somwhere between 0-10% depending on whether you play a GPU-bound game like BF3 or a CPU-bound game like Civ 5 (no render mode). Source: BF3 - 3770K - http://techreport.com/review/22835/review-intel-core-i7-3770k-ivy-bridge-processor/9 Civ V - 3770K - http://techreport.com/review/22835/review-intel-core-i7-3770k-ivy-bridge-processor/11 Those two graphs show that in BF3 you will actually drop a frame or two by going from a 2600K to the 3770K or the 3960X for that matter. In Civ V with "no render mode" on, making it heavily CPU-bound the difference is 8% betwen a 2600K and the 3770K. So by upgrading your CPU to a top of the line mainstream/enthusiast cpu, the 3770K - you might (a big might) get a whopping 8% fps increase. At the same time the HD7950 which I use is considered among the top 5 videocards depending on the game title, should I upgrade to crossfire / SLI? My point at the end is; why go for dx9 and target every pc out there when they don't stand a chance at getting decent fps output anyway? off topic: since my native language is not English, could one of you fine forum users explain to me the difference between wether, whether and weather, and how to use it correctly?
Your post is very good, with one point I need to address. This comes up occasionally, and it's misleading to say something in this way. When the CPU code takes too long in one core, the game will slow down. Sometimes this means that the CPU takes longer than the GPU to do work. After a frame or two of this happening, the GPU runs out of work to do. It's not that the game isn't "using all the GPU" - it's that the CPU cannot feed the frame to the GPU faster that it can draw them. This is what we mean by "CPU" bound. As we are well aware and you have shown above, more than four cores don't get a significant improvement yet. wether - this is not an english word. I'm not sure where you got this from. wither - shrunken, shriveled, dried - it is often used to describe dying leaves and plants whether - this is used when there are choices to make. I must choose *whether* or not to wear shorts on some days. It can also be said I can *either* choose to wear short, or I can choose not to. weather - this is used to describe atmospheric conditions. Rain, Snow, Cold, Hot - these are *weather* conditions. The *weather* is cold, the *weather* is terrible because it's raining.
Yes, hello! This is a case where I would need to know what kind of system you have and a better description of what you mean by frozen. Some people consider "frozen" to mean that absolutely nothing on the screen changes at all other have used this to describe network lag spikes where the objects on the screen don't MOVE but some may animate and you can occasionally even bring up the UI or move the mouse.
An English lesson! Is there anything you CAN'T do, Cycles? There is something I need to ask you that I havn't seen answered. Sorry if you have already. I use an i7 2600k. Should I turn Hyperthreading on or off for PS2? Thanks!!!
That link - it is awesome. And whether or not you found the second part of that post interesting, I happened to notice the question at the end of the post I was answering already - figured I would help out, even if my degree isn't in English studies.
I meant "what the heck is this link". I decided to write out that poem as an aside, googled for the right form, and found... that.
In this case I mean frozen in the sense that *nothing* on the screen updates. No models moving or animating, no particles, absolutely nothing. It's as if you are suddenly admiring a beautiful screenshot. But now that I think about it, I do not think I have had it occur after the latest server fixes, so it could very well be latest patches fixed it (yay). I'll keep my eye on it for the next week or so and let you know if it occurs again.
First of all; thank you for the English lesson, I even received a PM from another user explaining it. On more than one occasion I've seen native English use those words wrong, could just be typos, anyway it had me confused. On topic: Couldn't this problem technically be solved by splitting the heaviest processes thus increasing the amount of threads/cores utilized? Since 1 core appears to be significantly loaded compared to the others, it might seem like that core is the one slowing down the GPU's feed. I must say that on a code/programming level I have little experience though and I guess if it was that easy to solve it would already have been done. On the other hand if this is not doable, how do you hope to fix the issue?
That's exactly what we have been doing, and are continuing to do. There are a large number of systems (of varying complexity) in a game of this scale and sometimes these changes go quickly and work well, and times they go slowly or do terrible things. The people who played (and sometimes suffered terribly) through Beta can probably relate some of the stories of crash-fest builds, flying players everywhere,and other crazy things going on as we tested and experimented.
UPDATE: 4th December 2012 Exciting news! For the first time since I've been measuring CPU usage I think there has been a small improvement. I'm talking about an increase of about 3 percentage points so thats an overall increase in performance of 8% seeing as CPU usage averaged 37% in the intial test versus 40% this time. By the looks of things, it appears the usage of core 1 has fallen while the others have increased. This suggests that Cores 2 - 6 are not waiting on Core 1 so much. However, as this is only one set of data it proves nothing. Could just be a fluke.
Pretty sure this is what he's describing, or a variant of it: http://forums.station.sony.com/ps2/index.php?threads/intermittent-freezing.54304/ Personally, I've had a lot of experience with this (though my freezes are never as long as 30 seconds, but very frequent). And it really is just the world visuals that are frozen: the game's cursor still moves, Would definitely appreciate some sort of "yup, we're working on this" confirmation. Haven't been able to play the game properly since beta, despite having smooth framerates...
I deff. appreciate the frequent fixes, however it seems like every time they patch I have to waste an entire night just getting my computer stable again, on launch, all I did was beta drivers and screen res. now I have had to add voltage to my card, and over clock it (via flashed GPU bios) lol, also on launch my freeze ups where very few and far between (maybe once an hour for about 2 seconds where the frame rate would drop to 0-1) but it seems with each patch they happen faster and faster, now it happens about every 15-30 seconds, it gets really hard to play haha. I guess if anything I am quickly learning more and more about overclocking and optimizing my own computer so it is not a complete waste also I gotta say, the 2x weekend was an awesome way to reward us for sticking around LOL, I think when all things are said and done, it would be amazing if once they got everything working stable and optimized, as a thank you everyone playing from launch up until that point got a free cert respec or something (also that would be an amazing addition to the depot just fyi, I know I can never make my mind up and would prolly end up spending a lot of money on them hahaha)
Nice to see a dev respond. I just want to point out this thread about optimization (it's stickied): http://forums.station.sony.com/ps2/index.php?threads/quick-note-on-optimization.49152/
