Super sampilng, Smoke and clouds (FPS killers)

[6./ZG26_Gielow]

I started to fly ROF after reading here that BoS would be based on that Engine.

 

After a lot of flying and testing later, I am worried how smoke and clouds drain like hell FPS in game.

 

You really get slower when you are close to clouds or inside them in ROF.  A WW2 simulator will have planes flying in all kinds of weather all the time and it will not be confortable losing 50% of your FPS due to clouds or smoke from engines

 

How developers are dealing with this issue ??? Because in a WW1 simulator like ROF you can handle that besides it seems that those graphic effects processing for clouds and smoke are not optimized.

 

 

Other subject is super sampling. You only can get perfect graphics quality if SS is on. And boy that really drains power from graphics card. It seems like you have twice the load when you turn SS on.

Are you guys working in a better solution or modification on the game engine to reduce the penalty on those effects or working in alternatives like simple clouds options to make it smooth ???

 

I just want to see a enviroment thing like clouds killing FPS. Remember: Speed is life !!!

 

 

PS.: i7, 6990 (2 gpus).

Edited September 24, 2013 by JG62Gielow

[FuriousMeow]

I've never had an issue with clouds or smoke. Had a 470, 580 and now a 770 through my time with RoF and those never dented my FPS.

 

SuperSampling, if you require that - you need a better GPU. There is no other way around that one. Even when I played at 1920x1080 I only never needed 2xFSAA. Now I just use SweetFX SMAA.

 

I see you have a 6990 - I'd suggest a config issue.

Edited September 24, 2013 by FuriousMeow

[FuriousMeow]

Here's a few pictures I just took on the English Channel map with heavy clouds, which causes a significant performance drop in comparison to the western front map. Fraps FPS counter in upper left. 2560*1600 res. Anisotropic set to 16x through nVidia CP.

Edited September 24, 2013 by FuriousMeow

[LukeFF]

Never an issue here with smoke and clouds on either map in ROF.

Other subject is super sampling. You only can get perfect graphics quality if SS is on. 

 

Nah, that's not the case at all with ROF. Yeah, it does make the game look good, but it's not a requirement for "perfect" graphics (and it is a framerate hog). I suggest asking for tips over at the ROF forums to get the best out of your hardware.

Edited September 24, 2013 by LukeFF

[hiro]

yeah that's a nice video card for it to be choking . . .  

 

but ever since AMD took ATI, some ATI drivers are weird especially if the mobo and cpu are intel based. 

 

At my last job the ATI cards kept having numerous weird issues like on the beast graphics machines, I could play CLOD, Crysis 2, and skyrim all at once, no choking on the intel machines. on the amd ones less issues until I got the right driver (sometimes I had had to roll back to a prior one). 

 

But as soon as I fired up maya, photoshop, and lighwave or some other rendering program, the ATI gpu ground to a halt (I did exit the games). Sometimes blue screen. And forget about playing games with a graphics program.

 

Then I got the first driver, an older version,  for the year of the card release . . . and it worked for both . . . could even run graphics proggies and games, but slow but not as bad as the latest n greatest driver.

 

So I did an experiment, popped in a 2 g 256 nvidea, and worked fine (windows driver, old version and the latest one) for both tests . . . 

 

 

Another issue is running non gaming stuff like forgetting to turn off code compliers or renderings or internet heavy sites like face book / pirate bay with tons of IE or chrome / FF tabs open. 

 

They say win 7 can multi task good but sometimes its a no go. Oh and win 8 with games . . . win 8 just has issues in general, its close to the windows Millenium of today . . .

Edited September 24, 2013 by hiro

[71st_AH_Mastiff]

all that works fine for me I have turned all high and up GTX680 4gb card. EVGA. you pay for what ya get. ATI guys.

[VeryOldMan]

I started to fly ROF after reading here that BoS would be based on that Engine.

 

After a lot of flying and testing later, I am worried how smoke and clouds drain like hell FPS in game.

 

You really get slower when you are close to clouds or inside them in ROF.  A WW2 simulator will have planes flying in all kinds of weather all the time and it will not be confortable losing 50% of your FPS due to clouds or smoke from engines

 

How developers are dealing with this issue ??? Because in a WW1 simulator like ROF you can handle that besides it seems that those graphic effects processing for clouds and smoke are not optimized.

 

 

Other subject is super sampling. You only can get perfect graphics quality if SS is on. And boy that really drains power from graphics card. It seems like you have twice the load when you turn SS on.

Are you guys working in a better solution or modification on the game engine to reduce the penalty on those effects or working in alternatives like simple clouds options to make it smooth ???

 

I just want to see a enviroment thing like clouds killing FPS. Remember: Speed is life !!!

 

 

PS.: i7, 6990 (2 gpus).

 

 

Super sampling uses 4 times at LEAST of the  fill rate of your card.  It measn the  scene is rendered at twice the resolution  and scaled down  when sent to your screen.

THere is NOTHIGN developers cna do about that, its a brute force technique, applied in the GPU itself to   get a full scene anti aliasing.

[Foobar]

Here's a few pictures I just took on the English Channel map with heavy clouds, which causes a significant performance drop in comparison to the western front map. Fraps FPS counter in upper left. 2560*1600 res. Anisotropic set to 16x through nVidia CP.

VSync has been activated and attached to the monitor's fps setting. So you will never know if game's fps outside the clouds won't go up much higher

[FuriousMeow]

It does, up to 300fps. But it's a torn up mess.

[M4rgaux]

Everything come to a cost. Since we don't really know how the graphic engine has been done, we can only configure by trial and error.

Try not to enable things that sound fancy like SS and put a little more anisotropic filtering for a better rendering.

If the cloud kill your fps, you might want to lower the shadow quality, ain't like they're being raytraced but it might help.

 

More important, ask yourself, considering my current hardware, do I want a beautiful or a playable game?

[Bearcat]

Take a look in this thread in Hardware Software  & Controllers. It helped me because I really didn't pay too much attention to my settings because I was getting OK frames before.. but after reading this and doing some tweaking I am now getting great frames..

 

BoS 1920x1080 High Settings Hardware

 

This thread will also wind up being a benchmark of sorts oncve BoS comes out in the pre orders.. we will post our specs and settings here so that when it is released those who did not pre order or newcomers will have a handy place to go to to help them with settings.

[Bearcat]

all that works fine for me I have turned all high and up GTX680 4gb card. EVGA. you pay for what ya get. ATI guys.

 

 

My ATI card and my 8350 are great! I am averaging 50-80 with heavy clouds or rain.. I have yet to get online though.

 

My Specs:

AMD Fx-8350|ASUS M5A99X|OCZ ZT 750W PS | ASUS VE248 Monitor|Seagate 1 TB Barracuda 7200RPM HDD|SB X-Fi XtremeGamer

Corsair Force 3 240G SSD|32G Corsair Vengance DDR3 1600|XFX DD FX-HD 7870 2GB 256-bit GDDR5|Win 7 Ultimate|COOLER MASTER Gemini II S524|TIR4|MSFFB2|Modded Saitek X-52|Saitek ProFlight Pedals

[steppenwolf]

I've not noticed too much of an issue with clouds in ROF, but the particle effects can kill FPS in certain situations in my game. For example, when I take off in an SE5 and look backwards through the ground dust and exhaust effects my 60fps becomes 40fps...and that's on a solo flight. There are MODS to quasi-disable certain effects over at ROF, but they end up unintentionally disabling others too. Also, zooming in and zooming out through an effect seems to affect performance.

i7-2600k

GTX660 Ti

TrackIR 5

8 Gb RAM

850w PSU

[SYN_Vander]

The heavy clouds in RoF are made up of a huge amount of particles. One cloud model has over 2500 particles! If you get close to that cloud than your fps will drop even on a good system.

For our online server I have created some other weather modes that use clouds with fewer particles (<1000) and this really helps. Never had slow-downs with those.

So it can (and should) be tweaked.

[6./ZG26_Gielow]

The heavy clouds in RoF are made up of a huge amount of particles. One cloud model has over 2500 particles! If you get close to that cloud than your fps will drop even on a good system.

For our online server I have created some other weather modes that use clouds with fewer particles (<1000) and this really helps. Never had slow-downs with those.

So it can (and should) be tweaked.

That is what I am talking about !!!

 

I can go easily over 100 fps with everything turned on. But when you get close to clouds for instance you can have 50 fps for a while. I am worried about optmization.

[VeryOldMan]

That is what I am talking about !!!

 

I can go easily over 100 fps with everything turned on. But when you get close to clouds for instance you can have 50 fps for a while. I am worried about optmization.

 

 

Not much you can do,  The coulds cover more of your screen than the other objects, and in several layers, they tend to  use up a lot of fill rate of the  GPU, a resource that  can be easily strained (contrary to popular belief, polygons are no where near a problematic resource level).

 

 

Unfortunately there are not many good ways to do it.  Basically all methods  to achieve good looking clouds that can partially obscure planes  and ground use a lot of fill rate or would require a  multi pass deferred render (that usually would be a crappy Idea for a flight sim) with very complex pixel shaders.

 

 

So you will have to live with less FPS inside clouds than outside.

[DD_Arthur]

That is what I am talking about !!!

 

I can go easily over 100 fps with everything turned on. But when you get close to clouds for instance you can have 50 fps for a while. I am worried about optmization.

 

Er.....what discernible difference is there between 50fps and 100fps?  Gielow, post your RoF settings and we'll see what can be done. There are many options and combinations and you certainly don't need SS on for a decent rendering of the game. 

[FuriousMeow]

That is what I am talking about !!!

 

I can go easily over 100 fps with everything turned on. But when you get close to clouds for instance you can have 50 fps for a while. I am worried about optmization.

 

Well, my post above is heavy clouds on the Channel map.

Edited September 24, 2013 by FuriousMeow

[VeryOldMan]

Er.....what discernible difference is there between 50fps and 100fps?  Gielow, post your RoF settings and we'll see what can be done. There are many options and combinations and you certainly don't need SS on for a decent rendering of the game. 

 

 

Stable 50 fps is very different from   fast switchign between 100 and 50.  Abrupt variance of FPS  is easily  discernible. That is why VSync is a cool stuff.

[LukeFF]

Abrupt variance between 50 and 100 FPS? Video, or it didn't happen. 

[Fifi]

Getting 100 FPS is completely useless imo. Even 60 FPS!

Movies are very fluent around 50 FPS, but plenty are still around 25/30 FPS without major issue.

I tend to try to keep 35/40 FPS (i.e with ROF) average on my rig in any situation, adjusting video settings (ingame and Nvidias) to get best eye candy/FPS ratio, and i'm very satisfied with "only" 35/40 FPS  

 

Anyway my eyes can't discern more... 

Edited September 25, 2013 by Fifi

[FuriousMeow]

I don't know about that one. The old go to of videos playing at 23fps just doesn't work. When you watch a video that is actually filmed at a much higher framerate - people report it feels too fake and like you are at the set rather than a movie because it's too fluid.

 

I certainly can tell the difference between a consistent 30fps and a consistent 60fps, and I much prefer the consistent 60fps.

 

But it comes down to personal preference. However, using the cinema standard of 23fps isn't a good gauge for if the display is fluid and responsive enough - it's just a standard that was agreed upon due to the initial technologies of the time for recording and playback, and the media it was stored on was limited so data storage was limited.

Edited September 25, 2013 by FuriousMeow

[Rigsby]

I have found the sweet spot to be around 53 Fps, 100 Fps is a total waste of time. Use VSync and you will have a much smoother ride for the most part.

[von_Tom]

Getting 100 FPS is completely useless imo. Even 60 FPS!

Movies are very fluent around 50 FPS, but plenty are still around 25/30 FPS without major issue.

I tend to try to keep 35/40 FPS (i.e with ROF) average on my rig in any situation, adjusting video settings (ingame and Nvidias) to get best eye candy/FPS ratio, and i'm very satisfied with "only" 35/40 FPS

 

Anyway my eyes can't discern more... 

 

 

It depends on the individual.  Movies at 23 frames per second are fine because some frames are purposively blurred so as to provide a visually seamless transition.  Games are very different as each frame is rendered exactly and depending how good your eyes are you'll see it.  For me if I get less than 50 fps it makes me uncomfortable as it doesn't look right,  I can sense a difference between 50 and 60fps (my limit with vsync on).  I'm half tempted to got to a 120mhz screen for twitch shooters.

 

Hood

[Dakpilot]

I posted in the suggestions thread

 

Type of improvement: Some sort of benchmarking track or feature

 

 

Explanation of proposals:  In original IL-2 there was the "Black Death " track that was used as a benchmark to see how computer performance related to FPS, depending on graphic settings or hardware, while not perfect it enabled an instant comparison between 2 persons setups with a constant. As far as I know this is not possible or as easily repeatable in ROF, 

My proposal is some form of track or mission that can be flown on autopilot that is consistently repeatable, and is reasonably taxing on system recources to give an apples versus apples benchmark so you can see FPS changes with various computer systems and graphic settings. In IL-2 this allowed me to test options and hardware, and not spend hours chasing settings/hardware settup that had little or no real world effect

 

Benefits: An easy and simple to use method of graphic and hardware optimization that is the same for every user. Time saving, to see if changes you have made are real or perceived  and all on a level playing field. Also a real world benchmark to show people what is achievable and to help get the best experience/performance from their system/game. This could also help with bugs/troubleshooting in the Beta phase of developement

 

In IL-2 I found this very useful as a way of tracking down issues and pinpointing troublespots, and being able to compare results with similar machines to see if it is hardware optimization or in fact game limitations, this takes the guess work out of what is achievable 

 

Cheers Dakpilot

 

Cheers Dakpilot

[dburne]

I posted in the suggestions thread

 

Type of improvement: Some sort of benchmarking track or feature

 

 

 

That would certainly be very nice to have.

I do hope they can consider this at some point.

[VeryOldMan]

Abrupt variance between 50 and 100 FPS? Video, or it didn't happen. 

 

 

That can EASIly happen in any game. In fact most of time spent developing game engines is   trying to avoid that to happen. WHen you  insert large  ammount of ne render rtargets, liek explosions,   new light sources, cast shadows that appear abruptly, those can easily stall the GPU pipeline and cause abrupt varainaces of FPS.

 

 

 

If you have never seen  such variances, then it means you are not even looking at your monitor or you do not play games.

[Picchio]

If you have never seen  such variances, then it means you are not even looking at your monitor or you do not play ga

 

Not all graphics engine behave the same way, you know.

[Matt]

I have found the sweet spot to be around 53 Fps, 100 Fps is a total waste of time. Use VSync and you will have a much smoother ride for the most part.

Well, if you use VSync with a 60 Hz screen, you won't see any difference between 30 and 59 FPS, because the screen will always display 30 FPS.

 

So if you try to get 53 FPS now, you should crank the settings up as long as you stay above 30 FPS and enjoy the better graphics without performance loss.

[6./ZG26_Emil]

If you have never seen  such variances, then it means you are not even looking at your monitor or you do not play games.

 

I use VSINC so I'll never see such variances of 50-100fps....

 

on the other hand 50 down to 8 fps...well I played CLOD didn't I

[6./ZG26_Gielow]

I posted in the suggestions thread

 

Type of improvement: Some sort of benchmarking track or feature

 

 

Explanation of proposals:  In original IL-2 there was the "Black Death " track that was used as a benchmark to see how computer performance related to FPS, depending on graphic settings or hardware, while not perfect it enabled an instant comparison between 2 persons setups with a constant. As far as I know this is not possible or as easily repeatable in ROF, 

My proposal is some form of track or mission that can be flown on autopilot that is consistently repeatable, and is reasonably taxing on system recources to give an apples versus apples benchmark so you can see FPS changes with various computer systems and graphic settings. In IL-2 this allowed me to test options and hardware, and not spend hours chasing settings/hardware settup that had little or no real world effect

 

Benefits: An easy and simple to use method of graphic and hardware optimization that is the same for every user. Time saving, to see if changes you have made are real or perceived  and all on a level playing field. Also a real world benchmark to show people what is achievable and to help get the best experience/performance from their system/game. This could also help with bugs/troubleshooting in the Beta phase of developement

 

In IL-2 I found this very useful as a way of tracking down issues and pinpointing troublespots, and being able to compare results with similar machines to see if it is hardware optimization or in fact game limitations, this takes the guess work out of what is achievable 

 

Cheers Dakpilot

 

Cheers Dakpilot

 

It is a nice idea to have a track benchmark.  So we can find out how our systems are performing and try to tweak graphics.

 

It is very important to see also how the game engine really run on the hardware available. The videos so far are very smooth and clean. I really hope that developers can keep it fast and efficient

Edited September 25, 2013 by JG62Gielow

[VeryOldMan]

I use VSINC so I'll never see such variances of 50-100fps....

 

on the other hand 50 down to 8 fps...well I played CLOD didn't I

 

 

Efetivelly the same thing ....

Not all graphics engine behave the same way, you know.

 

And where in my statement  is a restriction to a single  engine or game?

[Picchio]

And where in my statement  is a restriction to a single engine or game?

 

Exactly. There is quite a lot of them. So it's a bit too simplistic to say "then it means you are not even looking at your monitor or you do not play games".

Edited September 25, 2013 by Picchio

[VeryOldMan]

Exactly. There is quite a lot of them. So it's a bit too generic to say "then it means you are not even looking at your monitor or you do not play games".

 

 

My statement is correct, if you play gameS  you will have noticed it. Its quite a bit implicit  that I am not talking about playing  pac men on a modern PC...

[FuriousMeow]

Well, if you use VSync with a 60 Hz screen, you won't see any difference between 30 and 59 FPS, because the screen will always display 30 FPS.

 

So if you try to get 53 FPS now, you should crank the settings up as long as you stay above 30 FPS and enjoy the better graphics without performance loss.

 

Triple buffering is there to prevent that framerate halving.

[Matt]

Yes, but most games don't support it and it needs to be enforced by D3D overrider or other third party software.

[VeryOldMan]

Yes, but most games don't support it and it needs to be enforced by D3D overrider or other third party software.

 

Moslty  because  would be  incredbly awkward to  handle it application side (unless your render is a  deferred render).  Its something that is solveable much more easily by the API, be it OpenGL or D3D.

[LukeFF]

If you have never seen  such variances, then it means you are not even looking at your monitor or you do not play games.

 

 

OK, I can tell it's pointless continuing this discussion with you.