50 Bomber Flight Benchmark Mission

[sevenless]

On ‎2‎/‎15‎/‎2019 at 6:20 PM, Blitzen said:

Am I doomed to fight this slow moving yet impressive aerial armada all by myself??

I guess so, because I never saw the Fw190 flight in the air..

[ACS777]

 

Here you go

Alienware Aurora R6:  Intel i5-7400 CPU @ 3.00GHz, 3000 Mhz, 4 Core : 16GB  settings attached

[Urra]

Has this mission been tested for comparisons sake when using Dserver, and then connecting to it online? Having both game and dserver running on same computer is ok.

Edited February 24, 2019 by TunaEatsLion

[IckyATLAS]

On 2/15/2019 at 6:20 PM, Blitzen said:

Am I doomed to fight this slow moving yet impressive aerial armada all by myself??

Not at all. The FW190 will fly and counter the bombers but only after the bombers have been detected. So if you want to fly with the FW190 you have to wait until the base is on alert with Sirens howling and flare gon off. Fly with the FW190 squadron and you will intercept  the bombers as they arrive in view in the direction of the airfield over the sea. 

 

You can fly earlier and try to intercept the bombers alone. As I mentioned you can also when launching the mission configure your FW190 for bombing and go bomb a destroyer.

 

I am working on improving this whole scenario and make it work a little better optimizing a few things.

 

If you are interested in performance tests check the following post:

 

https://forum.il2sturmovik.com/topic/42951-how-many-bombers-in-one-mission-what-framerate/?tab=comments#comment-733611

 

[AtomicP]

On 2/12/2019 at 3:23 PM, Flashy said:

Well, first of all  i just wanted to say well done on making a great single player mission Icky - this is what every mission in the SP experience should be like and the devs should use it as a benchmark for optimizing the engine to be able to handle missions exactly like this with ease. Having said that, it also shows that a lot of work has already been done by the devs in improving the engine since the RoF days because a mission like this in RoF would probably just have crashed the game, or been a slide show, so well done to the devs there!

 

Secondly, I dont think FPS is a good measure of performance in this case because high FPS doesnt seem to correlate to a smooth gameplay experience as we have seen from some of the other responses above, and which my experience also seems to suggest. Speaking of which, here it is:

 

Since I am running one of the weakest CPU's in the community (i7-920), I was interested to see just what kind of performance I would get and while the results are somewhat predictable and largely consistent with the rest of your results, they are also quite interesting. At stock speeds (2.8ghz boosting to 3.1ghz) the mission ran pretty poorly (although not terribly) although FPS was still fairly decent: between 40-60 FPS in most cases, with lows of 25 FPS when looking at the big flights of bombers. However, the actual game play was very slow despite the FPS being quite high and everything seemed to be moving at a much slower rate than it should be as Icky mentioned above, so something was definitely struggling. Looking at my CPU usage showed high usage on one core (about 80-95%) and about 20-50% on the others. RAM usage was quite interesting as well with 4.6gb being used, which is higher than I have ever seen in the game, but still not too bad. GPU and VRAM usage was quite low and the card was not struggling except obviously during scenes with lots of explosions and particles.

 

I then overclocked the CPU to 3.8ghz and re-ran the test, and this made a big difference. Even though FPS were about the same (with the exception of looking at the big bomber flights which went up to 37FPS - 12FPS faster!), the game play was much smoother and there was far less slow down when looking around and objects seemed to be moving closer to their proper speed. CPU usage also came down on the heavily loaded core to about 70%. These  results seem to show that CPU speed is indeed a big factor in the actual game play experience in the game, which the feedback of other testers above seems to support - very fast CPU's seem to be getting very playable results. It also seems that CPU clock speed is more important than number of cores here, and it would be interesting to see if pure clock speed can "cure" the slowdown completely - does anyone in the community have a 6ghz liquid Nitrogen cooled CPU? ? 

 

FPS seems to be less relevant for the most part because you can have good FPS even when the CPU is struggling and the game play is slowing down. Its still useful to check FPS to make sure that its not sitting at low FPS all the time, but unless you have a very old graphics card, its probably not going to bottleneck you (except maybe when there are tons of particle effects like smoke and explosions on screen). 

 

Results after CPU overclock:

 

I haven't tested this scenario but I've been trying to suss out why I was getting the weird slow-motion effect in the Achtung Spitfire campaign. Not all the time, but first noticeable on the fifth mission as I approached the ground targets. Frame rate stays above 50 most of the time but the game feels like it's running at half speed and controls are laggy. I'm running an AMD FX-8350, 16 GB RAM and a GTX 1060 6 GB. CPU is stock 4.0 GHz with 4.2 GHz boost. Not a great CPU for single core heavy games unfortunately

 

I'm curious as to why we don't get low frames if the CPU can't keep up. It's my understanding that if the CPU is limited and can't send the GPU enough frames, you'd usually see low overall frame rates. But here it looks like the GPU is rendering frames perfectly fine. Maybe the game logic and world rendering are run on different threads such that the former gets swamped with a lot going on but the latter is less dependent on world complexity. As others have mentioned, it'd be good to get a developer to explain why this happens. 

[Flashy]

6 minutes ago, AtomicP said:

 

I haven't tested this scenario but I've been trying to suss out why I was getting the weird slow-motion effect in the Achtung Spitfire campaign. Not all the time, but first noticeable on the fifth mission as I approached the ground targets. Frame rate stays above 50 most of the time but the game feels like it's running at half speed and controls are laggy. I'm running an AMD FX-8350, 16 GB RAM and a GTX 1060 6 GB. CPU is stock 4.0 GHz with 4.2 GHz boost. Not a great CPU for single core heavy games unfortunately

 

I'm curious as to why we don't get low frames if the CPU can't keep up. It's my understanding that if the CPU is limited and can't send the GPU enough frames, you'd usually see low overall frame rates. But here it looks like the GPU is rendering frames perfectly fine. Maybe the game logic and world rendering are run on different threads such that the former gets swamped with a lot going on but the latter is less dependent on world complexity. As others have mentioned, it'd be good to get a developer to explain why this happens. 

 

I think the issue is the game engine itself not being able to keep up with all that is happening in the mission. I presume the engine has its own internal "clock speed" that it tries to run at all the time, and this speed is consistent with reality (i.e 1 second in game is 1 second in real life), but when it cant keep up with the demands of the mission it slows itself down to ensure that all the stuff that needs to be processed is actually processed. This gives the impression of the game running at half speed because its no longer in sync with real time (this seems to be shown in the in-game clock reading a different amount of time passed to a real life clock as some have mentioned). Throwing more raw CPU speed at the problem seems to help to an extent, but I doesnt seem to cure the issue (nobody who tried the mission got good playable results regardless of hardware IIRC) because the core problem is the game engine struggling, not necessarily the hardware..

[AtomicP]

14 minutes ago, Flashy said:

 

I think the issue is the game engine itself not being able to keep up with all that is happening in the mission. I presume the engine has its own internal "clock speed" that it tries to run at all the time, and this speed is consistent with reality (i.e 1 second in game is 1 second in real life), but when it cant keep up with the demands of the mission it slows itself down to ensure that all the stuff that needs to be processed is actually processed. This gives the impression of the game running at half speed because its no longer in sync with real time (this seems to be shown in the in-game clock reading a different amount of time passed to a real life clock as some have mentioned). Throwing more raw CPU speed at the problem seems to help to an extent, but I doesnt seem to cure the issue (nobody who tried the mission got good playable results regardless of hardware IIRC) because the core problem is the game engine struggling, not necessarily the hardware..

I've only encountered this with old games where the AI and game logic was tied to the CPU frequency. For example, Deus Ex on a modern CPU runs too quickly unless you use one of the user-made patches. And Saints Row 2 on PC was badly ported from the Xbox 360 so running it on a CPU that doesn't run at exactly 3.2 GHz means that the game logic runs too fast. Again, there's a patch that fixes this. But you don't expect this to happen in 2020 with a regularly updated game.

 

What BoX needs is a warning or hard limit on what can spawn in the world if it causes so many problems. Or better optimization, but I suspect this is a fundamental issue with the game engine and there won't be a trivial fix.

[Crew-27]

I am trying to run this scenario but when I click the Start button, it just sends me back to the selection of Mission folders. Any ideas?

[AtomicP]

15 hours ago, crew27 said:

I am trying to run this scenario but when I click the Start button, it just sends me back to the selection of Mission folders. Any ideas?

Make sure you have both the mission file and the folder in the same directory. I missed out the folder from the .zip and it produced the same problem you have.

[Crew-27]

Hmm not sure I follow. I extracted the .zip to its own folder "Massive Attack V1-0". I then pasted that folder to /data/missions/ like I have other downloadable missions such as the Interactive Playgrounds. That folder contains .list, .mission, and .msnbin files as well as a file for each language. So the path to the mission file is \IL-2 Sturmovik Battle of Stalingrad\data\Missions\Massive Attack V1-0\Massive Attack V1-0 - Backup.Mission.

 

I did wonder if the file name differing from the folder name mattered but the other missions are structured that way as well.

[AtomicP]

On 4/4/2020 at 8:19 AM, crew27 said:

Hmm not sure I follow. I extracted the .zip to its own folder "Massive Attack V1-0". I then pasted that folder to /data/missions/ like I have other downloadable missions such as the Interactive Playgrounds. That folder contains .list, .mission, and .msnbin files as well as a file for each language. So the path to the mission file is \IL-2 Sturmovik Battle of Stalingrad\data\Missions\Massive Attack V1-0\Massive Attack V1-0 - Backup.Mission.

 

I did wonder if the file name differing from the folder name mattered but the other missions are structured that way as well.

 

Sorry, I was talking rubbish (there is no separate folder)! I have all my missions flat (no folders) in the \Missions folder so try removing the files from the Massive Attack folder and put them in the root of the \Missions folder.

[Crew-27]

On 4/10/2020 at 6:53 AM, AtomicP said:

 

Sorry, I was talking rubbish (there is no separate folder)! I have all my missions flat (no folders) in the \Missions folder so try removing the files from the Massive Attack folder and put them in the root of the \Missions folder.

Thanks. That didn't work either. I'll try re-saving it in the Mission Editor as I've seen mentioned elsewhere. I had thought I was missing a map or plane but I have all of the maps and the A20 and FW190A5.

[Eduard_Neumann]

Seems like the link is offline or something, would love to test this

[jollyjack]

Link worked in 2022, you gotta resave it. BTW runs OK on my i7 9700K, 3080ti PC but no time scale speeding.