Reported frame rate hit on Damned stairs

(Lekdevil.NL) #1

Hi all,

I’ve started a topic on the PlanetWolfenstein forums about a problem many people seem to have: a huge frame rate hit on the stairs of The Damned when pleying on populated servers. You can find this topic here:

http://www.forumplanet.com/planetwolfenstein/topic.asp?fid=1692&tid=685761

Is it possible that any of the Splash people throw their light on this one?

Thanks!

(Wils) #2

Hmm. I’ll look into it - we had a few vis issues where hint brushes weren’t splitting stuff up properly. I can see it’s drawing a fair amount outside, but it shouldn’t be an issue because the tri count is still under reasonable levels, and I can see a similar FPS drop across the range of picmip settings, so it’s not a card bandwidth thing either (although I’m not getting much of an FPS drop at all here at work).

Cheers for the feedback.

(Falcon) #3

Hi,

I was lurking in the planetRTCW forums, and when I saw this topic I was happpy that I wasn’t the only one this prob, so here’s my feedback.

I experience a major FPS drop in the stair wells on this map, as well. I have a GeForce 4 Ti4400 and average 60-150 fps, howver in the staircase my fps drops to 10. I have no tweaks set.

Thanks,

PS Rocket is the just the sweetest map ever!

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: falcon on 2002-06-18 16:03 ]</font>

(Lekdevil.NL) #4

Wils,

Thanks for the reply, and good luck finding the problem. I have to say that the effect is most noticable when playing with a populated server (16 players or so), when most of them are in or near the stairways.

At that moment, the top lagometer line will show sharp yellow pikes and triangles (the bottom ping line stays at normal values), and the framerate drops to as low as 1 fps.

This isn’t as apparent when just playing the map alone, so I’d suggest you try it with the entire team :smile:.

Cheers.

PS, (my specs):

AMD Athlon XP 1700+
MSI MS-6380 (KT266A) mobo
512 MB DDR PC-2100 RAM
Leadtek Geforce4 Ti4400
SB Live! Value soundcard
3Com 3C905C-TX NIC
IBM IC35L040 hard drive
Windows 2000 Pro
ADSL 512/128 Internet

com_hunkmegs 160

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Lekdevil.NL on 2002-06-18 22:30 ]</font>

(Lekdevil.NL) #5

Hi there!

Any progress on this one yet? The thread in PlanetWolfenstein I mentioned in the original post is still very much alive, with lots of theories (some better than others) floating around.

Do any of the Splash Damage people care to comment on it there? We’d appreciate it!

Thanks.

(Wils) #6

Sorry for the delay replying - I had a quick chat with our coders and it looks like the main reason for the FPS drop is the visible stuff outside, but with a slight twist.

The main problem isn’t actually the number of surfaces you can see using r_showtris 1; your cpu is also culling the back faces of a whole load of other tris as well, which is what’s accounting for the drop in FPS.

Because it’s CPU limited, you won’t see an improvement by lowering your graphics settings - there’s no way to reduce the number of faces your CPU is having to cull without a recompile of the level. Anyone using a fast CPU (P4, Athlon XP 2000+ etc.) shouldn’t see much of a difference either way.

I’ll ask if we can get Activision to allow us to release an updated .bsp with the next patch to fix this.

[insert stupid sig here]

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Wils on 2002-06-26 14:26 ]</font>

(RivrStyx) #7

Its seems when the door is blown and whats on the other side is then drawn.

(SCDS_reyalP) #8

I’ll ask if we can get Activision to allow us to release an updated .bsp with the next patch to fix this.

I guess not ? :sad: