Please read all the complaints and rants in that first megathread. I'm not sure how I can spell it out any easier for you... I think these are questions you should be asking SOE, not me.
Again, I'm not denying the fact the issue exists. You're preaching to the choir on that one. All I'm saying is that there appears to be other variables behind the problem, otherwise everyone would be suffering.
Call it like you want guys but I agree with Larvans regarding SLI. I would rather disable it in Planetside.
The issue isn't that SLI doesn't work properly, it's that the menus and ui don't work properly. And a lot of people DO have performance issues with the ui. Just look at the general tech support section of the forum.
There's a number of things that doesn't work properly, but that doesn't mean we should allow performance issues to be compounded by not troubleshooting. Personally, the only time the UI cuts into my performance or GPU usage is when I'm loaded into a menu. During normal use, I see no performance hit with the UI on. There is a reason for that, and rather than arguing between each other, we should be looking to find the reason behind the 20 FPS hit, when there are people who only have a 0-2 FPS hit.
He has a mobile CPU that's probably reducing his clock speed or performance significantly, because of the TDP issues that the ui causes, both for CPUs and GPU's. That's my guess anyway.
No, my CPU is not throttling at all. You can check the OSD in the screenshots I've posted: please get rid of the scaleform ui menus! All cores stay at constant 3.2 GHz under load. None of the 8 threads ever sees above 85% usage. Total CPU usage never goes above 50% in this game, usually hovering around 30%. CPU Package Power never goes above 30W in PS2. The i7-3630QM is a 45W TDP chip, but I've increased the power limit to 56W in the modded BIOS so it can run Prime95 and LINPACK, which are much more heavy than PS2 and run the CPU over TDP, at full clock speed indefinitely without running into the power limit. Temperatures stay around 70C in PlanetSide. Ivy Bridge won't downclock until 105C. So yeah, this game isn't even remotely close to stressing my CPU or causing it to reach thermal/power limits despite the poor performance. HUD actually decreases hardware utilization along with FPS: please get rid of the scaleform ui menus!
https://forums.station.sony.com/ps2/index.php?threads/fps-issues.190439/#post-2770940 Then maybe it's related to the issues I linked to there.
Yep, we all know the poorly optimized Scaleform UI is the culprit here. Reading those threads, it's pretty scary just how perfectly they describe my experience in this game.
I sincerely doubt it has anything to do with throttling. Judging by his specs, his laptop is significantly better built than mine, but my laptop has virtually no FPS hit when disabling the UI. http://i.imgur.com/WqM8wU6.jpg - UI on, 42 FPS full GPU load http://i.imgur.com/9z6UYad.jpg - UI off, 41 FPS full GPU load
Yeah, check the posts in the link I responded to Octiceps with. Tell me what you think of those. It sounds a lot like what people experience in this game.
Reading the posts in the linked thread and looking at the symptoms that Octiceps is describing, in addition to the other low FPS and suttering threads, there's obviously an incompatibility somewhere between PS2, the OS, and system's drivers. Echoing what Korrii stated in the FPS issues thread, he claims the issue is resolved for him by using the 32-bit client. So, the performance issues in general people have been experiencing as of late could be due to the 64-bit version not working optimally. However, other things can attribute to performance related issues, Scaleform or no Scaleform. Drivers, background elements, background processes, temperatures, OS components, computer components, and incorrect settings are all possible causes for poor performance. Without a doubt there are performance issues with some rigs and PS2, but that doesn't mean the sole issue comes from Scaleform. Scaleform could possibly compound the issue depending on the rig, but I believe there are other things that we need to start considering if we want to do our best to contribute further possible optimizations to the viewers of these threads, be it player or SoE devs. We already have a thread with developer acknowledgement that reducing Pre-Rendered Frames (Nvidia) and Flip Queue Size (AMD) potentially helps improve performance with some people, and that's a good thing. The more hypothesis we can prove to be true through trial, the more we contribute to the community and developers. Simply blaming XYZ for *insert issue here* doesn't do anyone any good.
I get what you're saying, but if it was the 64bit client, it wouldn't have been doing this since launch. The The issues with the ui are definitely only part of the problem. The fact that the game requires such high single core performance is another one. This is probably at least partially related to how the game engine handles the overlay. The CPU utilization has been poor in this game for a long time. It's gotten a little bit better, but you basically need a 4GHz i5, and even then you won't always be getting 60fps. If fixing the ui helps that, then it would probably make it playable on systems that can't currently play it. The game runs worse than it ever has for me, and I'm still using the 314.22 drivers. I haven't changed anything else either.
The thing that bothers me is that you are solely focused on the UI when I know you have the technical understanding to determine that performance issues are caused by more than hardware accelerated 2d elements. Hardware accelerated 2d elements generally have a good performance hit because of alpha channels. That's why devs usually try to minimize the hud as much as possible, to reduce load and overhead. Let's take a step back from PS2 and Scaleform for a second. I mentioned earlier that Battlefield 4's UI cuts into performance, yet it doesn't use scaleform. http://i.imgur.com/GntK2Oj.jpg - Let this serve as the base. 54 FPS and 84% GPU load with no menus loaded. http://i.imgur.com/3H613bW.jpg - The main game menu drops my frame rate by more than 10 FPS. GPU load remains the same http://i.imgur.com/cqACvOh.jpg - This is where it gets interesting. In the loadout screen, the only 3d elements being drawn is the player model. However, my framerates dropped to 48 FPS, and my GPU usage increased from 84% to 98%. As a result, in less than 30 seconds, my GPU temp spiked from 75c to 79c. Doesn't this sound quite a lot like PS2's character login screen? There are other games that have similar hits and spikes in usage as well. If you launch Champions Online and go into the Millennium City Power House with your UI fully enabled and talk to a trainer, your FPS will drastically drop and your GPU usage will spike. That drop in FPS and spike in GPU usage will go away as soon as you stop talking to the trainer, and be further reduced by disabling player names. Yet, Champions Online does not make use of Scaleform. Scaleform is an easy scapegoat and it's easy to reference Scaleform UI issues, but I suspect that's more because it's easier to Google "Scaleform UI FPS Issues" than googling "*Game XYX* UI FPS Issues". Scaleform may be "unoptimized" and could possibly have more overhead than other UIs, but as I mentioned earlier, games (especially large multiplayer games) that have a strong menu and/or UI system will suffer from the same problem as most games that make use of Scaleform.
@ BlackDove - Please disregard this part of my previous post. I was in the process of getting ready for work, and as a result, rushed to read through some of your post and misunderstood you as a consequence. The overlay shouldn't be related to CPU usage though. However, switching to a DX11 API could help remove the demand for high single core performance, but how much is yet to be determined. The biggest problem with PS2's general performance is the net code, which is not a rendering process, and might not be improved when changing rendering APIs It's an optimistic thought, but I sincerely doubt that fixing the UI would help CPU utilization. Octiceps has already shown us that the UI hits his FPS when he is GPU bound, which means that it is bringing him below any sort of CPU bottleneck. Enabling/disabling the UI on my system had very very little impact on GPU usage when CPU bound, and the differences in FPS could be attributed to differences in CPU processing. While I don't exactly know what kind of performance you are experiencing, have you tried changing drivers? Forceware 332.21 is also a pretty solid set of drivers. It couldn't hurt using a driver cleaner and doing a fresh driver install. Also, deleting the useroptions.ini file could help improve performance in some areas. There are some people who have reported back stating deleting the .ini helped to improve load times and frame rates.
I tried with the UI on and off and there was no difference at all, cpu&gpu usage was still low and the power consumption did not change with the low fps. In my case I also didn't see that PS2 would use any excessive power. Character load-out screen does consume more power (+26Watt) together with gpu load, but that's because the menu is a over-hyped piece of apples, same as the Starcraft's 2 menu where you better not leave your PC for far to long or forget about it! Furmark gpu only = 365 Watt Intel burn test = 150 Watt Both combined gpu&cpu 100% load = 446 Watt max. http://i.imgur.com/skAvgCD.jpg http://i.imgur.com/Qkh6SiO.jpg
S7rudl Furmark and OCCT are throttled by Nvidia and AMD GPU's since the 580. IDK if that's a good test. Lavans The performance issues I get are mostly the excess load in the menus, and low FPS(down to the 20's), which is CPU limited in big fights. I have clean installed the drivers several times, tried new ones, and end up reverting to 314.22 and getting rid of Geforce Experience. I've got it configured to look the best it can, since changing detail doesn't do too much. It gets better and worse between different patches. Sometimes a patch will make it stutter and play like ****, and then it'll play perfectly smooth after another.
Yeah, the CPU bound battles isn't anything we can do a whole lot to improve. Changing Pre-Rendered Frames to 1 and enabling Threaded Optimization is about as good as you can get. Mileage may vary, but a lot of users reported back saying that it helps the smoothness of the game.
Its probably not, but it serves its purpose. 2600k is 95W 2x GTX 560 is 150W Motherboard is 80W = 475W 2x 150W + 69W Idle = 369W, which is about right for what it shows. What I still don't understand is why turning UI off makes such a difference for some, why I get low fps in some cases despite the game not fully utilizing while at the same time its showing me that im neither bound by cpu or gpu,..
I'd recomment MSI Kombustor, if you really want to do stuff like this. I used it recently to see how GPU Boost behaves on my new GTX 670. As long as I didn't toggle "Xtreme burn-in" the boost worked and the GPU didn't throttle.
