[Question] FPS dropping massively over time

[misterX]

Originally Posted by Ducky

[...] CPU/GPU performance goes down when the memory usage goes up?

I will check that. (After lunch )
Guess I'll just use AIDA to log all system parameters during the next run, so maybe we can see some sort of "this changes right before it happens" relation.

[misterX]

Ok, did a test on Spartanovka, ~30 people.

This time, it happened inbetween two rounds, during the "game starts in" countdown.

item				before		inbetween 	after	

Time				16:48:24	16:48:34	16:48:44
CPU usage %			53%		56%		47%				
GPU usage %			98%		81%		44%
GPU memory (MB)			598		626		643
RAM used (MB)			3359		3389		3397
SWAP used (MB)			4200		4247		4269

TEMPS (°C)
Motherboard			43		43		43
Northbridge			64		64		64
Southbridge			55		55		55
CPU				41		40		40
GPU				67		65		63

Sadly, none of the logged values show any major change - except for GPU usage, which (as usual) just drops a lot, making the framerate plummet. The slight increase in memory usage (both RAM and VRAM) shouldn't cause problems like this, so that seems to be a dead end as well.
Voltages were stable, nothing peaked or dropped, so that probably has nothing to do with any of this either..

Damn.. I'm really looking forward to the day when I can (hopefully) finally enjoy this game in its full glory - all the time, not just for a few minutes at a time.. As it is now, there isn't much point in playing at all, since sooner or later I'll become 25FPS cannonfodder and have to keep hopping in and out of games.

Any other ideas would be greatly appreciated, as I am currently fresh out..

[Floyd]

Ok, waaaayyy out of my league here.... and just making uneducated banter at this point, but here goes nothing.

I know that the RO2 server files don't multi-thread(?) well (at least not with a particular version of WinServer). As you are obviously tech savvy, do you perhaps have something that is forcing RO2 to be used across multiple cores? iirc, the system requirements for RO2 are dual core, so I'm not sure if my thought even holds water.

[misterX]

As far as I know, the threading model of the windows multicore kernel (they used to be seperate under XP, not sure about how W7 handles this) takes care of this - meaning even a "traditional" singlecore application will never just use one core, as the load gets distributed between available logical cores.

Just for fun (since I'm out of ideas as well) I just tried limiting RO2 to only two cores. Didn't make a lot of difference on a 60 people server, except for a more choppy startup until all models and textures were loaded, and more severe framerate drops under heavy loads. When limiting the game to a single core, the game would be really choppy in the beginning, and suffer from massive performance drops anytime anything "happened" around me.

Again, going by my AIDA log, when the drop happened this time, nothing really changed, apart from the GPU usage going from ~90% to ~35%.

Another thing I tried on a whim was changing the audio quality from High to Low - trying to retrace my steps back a few nights ago, when I miraculously played a number of games without the drop happening at all. Sadly, this made no difference as well. Perhaps that one night was just a fluke - but then again, it shows that it is at least theoretically possible to play for extended amounts of time without suffering from this annoying problem.

What still strikes me as odd is the fact that this same thing keeps happening in Alien Breed - a completely unrelated game, which uses UnrealEngine 3 as well. While this would point towards a general problem with UE, Killing Floor (another game by TripWire, using UE2.5 afaik) does not show any of these signs, despite using a similarly modified UE engine by TW interactive (and even sharing quite a bit of RO data, as there are lots of RO1 "leftovers" in the texture datafiles)..

"The mind, it boggles" still..

[Floyd]

This is a post where Ramm was discussing a server command line switch to manually set the affinity for an RO2 server. Thus my wondering if perhaps you weren't doing something out of the ordinary from everyone else with regards to the way the game uses the cores available to it. If you aren't, then my thought was moot.

http://forums.tripwireinteractive.co...0&postcount=10


And speaking of sound....
What do you use for sound? On board sound or a sound card? or both? If onboard, what is it (realtec)?

[misterX]

Hmm.. Might be worth experimenting with. If this parameter works with the client as well (and not just the server) I'll give it a whirl.
Running a dedicated server and running a game client is a big difference though, so I'm not expecting miracles..
I used Process Explorer (part of the SysInternals tools) to limit the ROGame process to certain cores in my experiment, as that gives me complete control over core affinity and process priority.

As for sound - I'm using a Creative Soundblaster Audigy2, which has probably been in (and outlived) the last 2-3 generations of PCs I built. Oldest piece of hardware in my system by far.

[Floyd]

I don't expect -preferprocessor to work clientside. I was just using the post to illustrate what I was talking about (as I failed so miserably).

Do you have onboard sound? And are you sure its completely dis-abled?

[misterX]

Originally Posted by Floyd

Do you have onboard sound? And are you sure its completely dis-abled?

Yes, and yes.

The ASUS Rampage Formula board I have comes with a little PCI-E x1 sound card, which is just a fancy way of saying "we put the cheap onboard sound chip every board has nowadays on a seperate card to make it seem more hardcore and 1337. Republic of Gamers! Hooaa!".
As my stoneage soundblaster totally satisfies my need for surround sound, I never even put the card into my computer, and disabling the integrated sound option in the BIOS was one of the first things done, along with disabling the pointless (and ugly) POST animation. I buy "gaming" hardware for performance and tweaking/tuning reasons, not for the fancy/shiny stuff..

[edit]
Just finished another round of testing after fiddling around with the INI settings a bit. Disabling "One Frame Thread Lag" did not change a thing, nor did any of the other (desperate attempts at) changes..
80+ FPS -> 24 on apartments in a couple of minutes... ~30-35 % of usage on both CPU and GPU after the drop... this is becoming really annoying. I really love the game, but this problem is keeping me from being able to enjoy it for more than a few minutes at a time. Try being a rifleman with that sort of framerate..
After the drop happens, even the MAIN MENU framerate will be low (<40), complete with choppy mouse movement and everything, until I close the game.

[Floyd]

Originally Posted by misterX

Yes, and yes.

Well there goes all I had......

[ZantuS]

What an odd problem... I hope you can fix it!

PS. I really like your English, it very much pleases this Grammar Nazi

[Ducky]

Just a wild go, but maybe worth a shot to make a test with crossfire disabled. I know in the early RO2 days people had better FPS with crossfire disabled, though I believe that should be fixed by now. But still it won't hurt to test it out.

[misterX]

Originally Posted by Floyd

Well there goes all I had......

Thanks for the suggestions / trying to help.. As I'm out of ideas myself I'll gladly take any hint which could maybe fix the problem.
Guess I'll have to keep stabbing at the dark and/or hope that somehow, this gets magically fixed in a soon-to-come update

Originally Posted by ZantuS

What an odd problem... I hope you can fix it!

PS. I really like your English, it very much pleases this Grammar Nazi

Thanks.. and thanks. Might give the beta version a shot, maybe there is - at least - something different, which might offer some sort of insight..

Originally Posted by Ducky

Just a wild go, but maybe worth a shot to make a test with crossfire disabled. I know in the early RO2 days people had better FPS with crossfire disabled, though I believe that should be fixed by now. But still it won't hurt to test it out.

Thanks for the suggestion. I've read about crossfire problems too, and that some people found solutions to that, while others still struggle with dual+ card setups.
Sadly, I am only using a single GPU, so no crossfiring is involved..


What I find interesting is the fact that something seems to limit my GPU to pretty much exactly "about a third" of its potential any time this happens.
Going from 90+% usage @80 FPS to ~30% usage @~26 FPS in the game seems pretty linear to going from ~100-120 FPS to ~35-40 in the main menu.
Looking for a logical explanation, my GPU core clock springs to mind.
300 MHz without load ("2D mode") and 920MHz under load (stock 3D mode speeds).
You really don't need a maths degree to see the similarity between these two.
The easy explanation would be that the card (for whatever reasons) switches back to un-accelerated 2D mode at some point.
That can/should not be the case though - as I've closely monitored my core speeds, and none of the logs I've taken indicate some sort of shifting back to idle clock speeds at any time.

Looking at the perfdump logs I took ingame, it seems like something is just not giving the GPU any instructions most of the time. "Render Thread Idle Time" values are higher than actual render thread times once the "droppage" has set in. Maybe the big 1/3 performance and 1/3 clock speed figures are just a coincidence after all.

Hoping to maybe draw the attention of RO2 tweaking/analyzing veterans, I posted in the stickied "Perfdump & You" thread in the support section. If you're interested, here's a link:
http://forums.tripwireinteractive.co...42#post1090342

[Floyd]

You know, I don't remember exactly what it was about, but I remember zetsumei making a post about flash or some other program causing amd/ati card to no longer being accelerated.... I don't know how to search for it with such little info. Perhaps a PM to him?

[misterX]

Originally Posted by Floyd

You know, I don't remember exactly what it was about, but I remember zetsumei making a post about flash or some other program causing amd/ati card to no longer being accelerated.... I don't know how to search for it with such little info. Perhaps a PM to him?

Thanks for the hint!

I did a little searching - perhaps you meant this thread?
http://forums.tripwireinteractive.com/showthread.php?t=78591

It seems there really is/was a problem concerning flash usage.
I'm using a VM for all my internet stuff, so I pretty much never run any browser/etc on my physical main machine. When gaming, I suspend the virtual machine to free up RAM and CPU power. Nothing even remotely web-ish should be running on my machine, except for Steam and the occasional TeamSpeak - plus the game of course.
Also, this type of problem should cause the GPU clock speed to never go to performance mode in the first place. Mine does, and doesn't drop when the big FPS hit comes. If it did, I'd at least have a logical explanation (1/3 clock speed, 1/3 performance) for what's happening. Sadly, there seems to be nothing logical about the problem, which makes finding a solution.. well... "challenging" /


[addition]
Did some more testing. Disabling the Steam Community (overlay thingy) did not change anything essential. The framerate after the drop seemed to be a tad higher than before, but think in terms of putting a band-aid on a severed limb.. Might've been my imagination (or wishful thinking) as well..
Running the game on a freshly booted PC makes no difference to my usual week-long uptime, nor does the amount of background processes (usually next to nothing anyways)..
My install of Windows is customized and stripped for performance reasons already, so there weren't many non-critical processes/services left to temporarily disable. Aaand - as expected - nothing changed anything ..

[misterX]

Small update:

The patch deployed last night (Steam downloaded an update of ~6.3MB for RO2) did - lo and behold - not fix my problems..
I didn't expect it to, but well.. a man can dream, right?

A good friend and hardware buff (also crossfire user, so he's used to GPU troubles ) suggested to create an application profile for RO2 in the Catalyst tool, in case some sort of driver feature/bug keeps pulling the handbrake on my GPU..
I will give that a shot and report back with the results.

Since I'm on the slow end of "the internetz", I haven't had the chance to download and try the RO2 Beta yet, but that will be my next step - to see if there is any change to what I'm experiencing at the moment.

[Floyd]

As far as I know, there is no active beta at this time, so save your valuable time and bandwidth. You could download it but there would be no servers to play on.

(unless I've missed a post or haven't gotten there yet).

[r5cya]

Originally Posted by Floyd

As far as I know, there is no active beta at this time, so save your valuable time and bandwidth. You could download it but there would be no servers to play on.

(unless I've missed a post or haven't gotten there yet).

there doesn't appear to be any servers at all for the beta now. don't bother downloading it, misterX.

[RedStarRx]

Just to bring this thread up again...I too has almost the same exact problem. But the strange thing is, when I first started playing this game, I didn't really notice this drop in FPS after a certain time (I surely would have). But seems like in the past 2 or 3 weeks, it has been occurring. I start in any server with 65 FPS (limited by framerate smoothing) which occupationally drops to the mid 50s when a lot is occurring. After some time playing, FPS seems to drop down to the 30s, sometimes when a lot is going on, other times seems almost random, like running through spawn. FPS does go back to the 60s at times, but drops down more and more frequently as I play.

I have played around with all types of settings and commands with no luck. No CPU or GPU heat issues, but like the OP, I notice that my GPU usage goes down form almost 100% to around 30-50 after some time. I even went out and bought a new card with the same exact issue. (GTX275 to GTX560).

Really hope someone comes up with something else...

[shank]

Sorry to resurrect again, but I just recently installed an MSI 7850 and I am now seeing this exact issue. I have everything on high and over time my FPS drops from 61-ish to 30-ish. Has anyone found a fix?