New & serious performance-troubles with resistance

[marcusm 0]

Hi,

First of all, i wan't to excuse me for my bad English(I'm from Germany...)! Thank you!

My problem is, that Resistance (v. 1.91) runs much, much slower than original Flashpoint (v. 1.46)

under the SAME conditions. When i played Resistance for the first time(s), i mentioned that some missions

, especially "Battlefields", ran slower and stuttered more than before. The game-"feeling" wasn't as smooth

and "fast"as before...

I decided to look at my problem closer so i searched for it in the forum and Avon Lady's great FAQ. Both

said that i should decrease my landscape detail and my range of sight. I did so...! As i tried it again,

nothing, really nothing changed!

Now i wanted to know it exactly! I started fraps 99( a small tool that shows you your actual fps) and played

the first part of "Battlefields"(...where you run down the hill with hundreds of your comrads) for several times

in Flashpoint(v.1.46) and Resistance(v.1.91). I gave them exactly the same settings ... :

- max. Memory: 256 ( I tried 512 for Resitance too), Geo-Perf. set to 2275

- all textures set to 256x256, except for landscape(128x128)  and sfx(64x64)

- in game: frames set to "20 - 40", detail to "7 - 19"

additionally in Resistance: terrain detail set to very low (should be the same as in original OFP)

                                  ... and range of sight to 900m (")

... and got the following "scores" : ~

Flashpoint(1.46):  min fps: 19, appr. fps: 30, max fps: 37

Resistance(1.91): min fps:  7, appr. fps: 16 , max fps: 24

why that?!

As you can see, i get two absolutely different fps with exactly the same detail-settings...! :o(???

My system:

-----------------

AMD Athlon XP 1600+ (1,4 GHz)

512MB DDR-RAM

Geforce3 (Detonator 40.72)

WinXP Prof.

If anybody can give me a hint and/or has the same problem, it would be very great if he/she could post it here!

Thank you very much for your attention!!

Greetings.

[Guest BratZ]

Only thing I can think of is prolly the new features in Res ,obviously there are more checks going on in a Resistance game.(Better collison detection and such)

Has to sacrifice somewheres.

But have you tried ver 1.90?

[marcusm 0]

thx for fast reply!...

no.

A few days ago, i sold my old OFP and bought the GOTY-Edition(1.85). Before i started playing it, I installed the

1.91-patch...

[marcusm 0]

hmm, bad news...

today, i uninstalled 1.91 and tried both 1.85 and 1.90, but

the problem still exists!

Please help, i want to play Resistance...

Thank you!

[Greg 0]

I think I know what you mean. I used to play a few missions that are unplayable now, 'Beach Landings' comes to mind. The slowdown appeas to be related to A.I. maybe the new enemies are smarter, yet slower at the same time

Another thing to note, when you press ESC and bring up the menu. The game is now drawing more graphics than before, the original scene, plus the menu, yet it runs 3x faster, so that means updating the game itself is real slow. It is a memory and CPU hog.

Sorry I don't have any suggestions, but I believe your stats, infact I had a few of my own a while back while trying to optimize performance.

[marcusm 0]

Thank you for posting your experience with this problem!

...If this topic grows, maybe an OFP-programmer

will look after it...

Greetings !

[Guest BratZ]

So you saying that it is unplayable? You dont run fraps everytime I hope? Also could depend on what else is running on your system

[marcusm 0]

Hi & thx for reply!

saying "absolutely unplayable" would oversize it. The problem is that i'm getting under the

same conditions in the same mission(...) in 1.46 an average of 35 fps(for example) and

in 1.85/1.9x only around 20 fps! Of course, 20 fps average aren't unplayable but they feel slower

and stutter more often than 35! I'm just wondering about that huge difference between 1.46 and 1.9x

with exaclty the same settings...

I only run fraps to benchmark or to get sure that my feeling isn't only subjective, not the whole time

I'm not running any background applications(disabled nearly all of them in msconfig)

(but even if, why is 1.46 running fast while 1.9x isn't?)

Thank you!

[Greg 0]

For me "unplayable" just means "unenjoyable to play". For example, I used to play a user mission The Beach Landings on my Athlon 1.2ghz with Geforce2mx. It ran fine and the only annoyance was the smoke from crashed choppers which slowed the poor Geforce2mx down every time I looked in that direction. My current system is a Athlon xp2100+ with Geforce3, but with latest OFP, that mission is literally like a slide show. The mission itself was to control a mass of US troops and prevent a huge beach invasion force arriving by air and sea. Obviosly the mission hasn't changed, only the OFP version.

[toadlife 3]

It's the number of troops cauing the slowdown. The AI takes a bunch of CPU time.

You can tell that the AI was obviously upgraded in resistance.

Try switching from 32bit graphics to 16bit. The testures may look a bit different - like they have lines in them, but it can make a big FPS difference. Also you can allways try 800x600 graphics. Again, it will look weird at first, but you can get used to it.

[theavonlady 2]

It would be a pity to digress to 16 bit mode.

Try this:

1. Rename file Flashpoint.cfg in your OFP directory to Flashpoint.cfg.old.

2. Rename file Userinfo.cfg in your OFP\Users\your_player_name directory to Userinfo.cfg.old.

3. Run the OFP Resistance Preferences Program and click on AUTODETECT.

Then run OFP and see if anything is better. If not, we'll take it another step from there.

[berghoff 11]

Yes I noticed It to when I played resistance for the first time.

It's not as 'smooth' as it was used to be.

I upgraded my cpu from 1400mhz+Agp4x to 2000mhz+Agp 8x

It ran better,but then I noticed a slowdown when a VULCAN or Shilka where shooting. I turned of Hardware sound and the problem was gone Well mostly...

Maybe a sound bug...

[marcusm 0]

hi,

@theavonlady:

Thank you, i'll try it tonight and post the result!

@BergHoff:

I'm not playing with hardware-sound.

What soundcard do you have?

thank you both for your suggestions

Greetings

[marcusm 0]

@theavonlady:

Thank you, but using autodetect didn't help. The difference between v.1.46 and 1.91 even increased a little bit.

Is there anything else i could try or is this just a bug/feature

of Resistance i have to live with?

Thank you all !!

[theavonlady 2]

</span><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td>Quote (marcusm @ 30 April 2003,23:19)</td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE">@theavonlady:

Thank you, but using autodetect didn't help. The difference between v.1.46 and 1.91 even increased a little bit.<span id='postcolor'>

Did you rename the 2 files I mentioned?

Also in the preferences program, what is your DISPLAY DEVICE and RESOLUTION, as shown there on the opening screen?

[Guba 0]

I had a similar problem with a sistem with equal specs to yours when upgrading to resistance marcus. The only way I managed to solve it was to sacrifice some visual efects in order to increase ferformance. Basically what I did was change some in game options:

- Disabe vehicle and objects shadows

- Move the frame rate bar to the right

- Move the visual quality and visibility bars to the left

- Set the terrain detail to very low

This allowed me to have some rather good framerates.

But if you want to get more info about what does every setting do and how can u increase performance check this site: OFP Tweak Guide, by Thomas McGuire (Thx to the Avon Lady for that)

Hope you manage to solve the problem

[marcusm 0]

yes, i renamed them and OFP created new ones with

the default settings.

i'm playing(and that's it what i'm getting with autodetect too)

with 1024x768x32 and Hardware T&L.

Changing the res. didn't help and switching T&L off dropped

my framerate, especially with high terrain detail.

by the way, thank you vm for your support !!

Greetings

-edit-

@Guba: Thank you for your suggestions and posting your

experience!

Due the fact that many people have the same problem,

i begin thinking that this is a bug/feature of Resistance.

It would be great if a developer could tell us/me sth. more

about it.

[sanctuary 19]

In every video game , AI take CPU usage , some developpers can tweak this CPU usage better than other

BIS was incredible with that , as in 1.46 i could put lot and lot of AI units in the field without having an unplayable game (of course with some video tweaks)

But in Resistance, the AI has new function, so new function leads into more CPU usage than in 1.46 , so it is normal now that you find Battlefield played in Resistance to be less smooth that Battlefield played in 1.46.

Now be sure that Resistance needs more power from a PC than 1.46 , if you play with "auto detection" setting , especially with the Geometry that can go ultra high and make your game a slide show

[Greg 0]

On the bright side, careful level design appears to get around this problem, and apart from a couple of 'intense' official levels, it's mainly user missions that suffer from severe slow downs.

Since I don't do any level editing in OFP, I am working on assumptions here (yes, those dangerous things). It appears that enemy units can be effectively idle until certain evens happen to start them up, so a mission may involve lots of enemy units, but the AI won't grind the computer if they are placed and scripted properly as only a smaller number are relevant at different times during the gameplay.

Beyond this illumination, I still hope BIS might optimise code, fix a few more bugs and make another version before we see a sequel.

One final suggestion to improve the game. Shadows do slow the game down a lot, but they are useful for judging things like the height of your chopper from the ground. It's a pity we can't have shadows ONLY on the players character/vehicle, and even a 'blob' shadow as a low performance option.

[canukausiuka 1]

I'm glad I'm not the only one with this problem. For me, most of the newest missions and addons are unplayable, b/c Resistance is so much slower that CWC. I can't even run a blank Nogova island... it's a slide show.

And my settings are absolute minimum, too. 64x64 textures on everything, 32x32 on sfx, 0.20 object and 1.0 shadow lods, max 10 lights, very low terrain, 600m viewdistance, and even in 16bit mode, Nogova is a no-go (as are all islands that use Resistance buildings), and any "large" mission crawls as well. My max. frame rate for the normal islands these days is about 20, I think I'm usually playing at 15 or so, and it doesn't take much to bring it to 2 or 3 fps

My computer is a 1GHz PIII, has 512 MB SDRAM, a 32 MB RADEON 7200, and runs WindowsXP. Does anyone have any suggestions about how to get my game playable again (I've tried the autodetect thing, it sets my settings so high that everything is unplayable). I'd really like to be able to play the Resistance campaign, but for now just getting the same settings as I used to have in CWC to work again would be so amazingly great.

[marcusm 0]

Hi,

I now really think that we should get a developer to read this topic...

BIS should think about adding an option to disable one or more RES.-feature(s) so that we get our old 1.46-performance back!

Greetings

[marcusm 0]

i bought a new CPU today, an Athlon XP 2400+ (2 GHz)

and started playing the redhammer-campaign in 1.91 for the first time. The gameplay was anything but smooth & fast!...

I won't comment this any longer, but i wan't to say that

i was a big fan of OFP till i bought the GOTY-edition.

Greetings

[toadlife 3]

</span><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td>Quote (marcusm @ 03 May 2003,17)</td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE"><!--emo&

i bought a new CPU today, an Athlon XP 2400+ (2 GHz)

and started playing the redhammer-campaign in 1.91 for the first time. The gameplay was anything but smooth & fast!...

I won't comment this any longer, but i wan't to say that

i was a big fan of OFP till i bought the GOTY-edition.

Greetings<span id='postcolor'>

I don't know what the big issue with your pc is, but here are the specs of my lowly machine...

AthlonXP 2100+ (1.7Ghz)

512MB DDR (PC2700)

Visiontek GeForce3 (your standard GF3 Card)

...and Resistance runs perfectly fine on my machine.

I run the game at 1024x768/32bit and viewdistance at around 1400, and get 25-30Fps, even on nogova. I set my texture detail to LOW, and leave athe shadow/Blood effects on.

Edit - Removed: oops thought you were the one with an ATI card

Edit2: What is your defenition of "anything but smooth & fast!". Are you expecting to get 99fps, like in halflife?That is not going to happen, no matter what graphics card or processor you have.

What is an acceptable framerate for you? Around 20 seems to be perfectly fine for me in OFP.

[Greg 0]

I have almost exactly the same system as toadlife:

Athlon xp2100 (1.7)

Geforce3ti 200 (OC'ed)

512mb DDR PC2100

WinXP

I consider OFP:R to be quite playable as is, but I use these settings:

1024x768x32

No shadows

900m view distance

sliders set to max frame rate and max detail

My system has been considerably less than this during my OFP playing. With Geforce2mx, you should be using 800x600x16 + w-buffer. With < 384mb RAM, you will get very regular and annoying pauses throughtout play. With < 700mhz CPU, you will get really slow frame rates and frustrating play.

What concerns the people here is that the original OFP (and earlier OFP:R) runs way faster, thus providing a (often) more enjoyable experience, but we can't go back to that due to compatability issues, features and bugs.

I think the critical HW issue with OFP is memory. You really need 512mb to play without pauses. I think the biggest compatability problem is sound, with Sound Blaster Live series cards. I thing the biggest problem with gameplay is just a multitude of tiny bugs due to the massive scope of gameplay provided from infantry to flight sim.

[marcusm 0]

Hi,

Thank you all for your replies!

I'm sorry but yesterday, i was i little bit angry because my new & expensive CPU didn't help as much as i expected it.

My system now looks like this:

Athlon XP 2400+

VIA KT333 Mobo (4in1 4.46)

512 MB DDR (PC2100)

Geforce3 Ti200 (oc'ed to 200/460) Deto 40.72

WinXP SP1

While my PC runs nearly everything very fine(incl. UT 2003 etc.), Resistance stutters, especially when i'm near

a forest. My fps are with around 20-30 ok but, as mentioned above, the problem is the suttering and the slow

game feeling i didn't have with CWC.

My settings:

1024x768x32 (HW T&L)

Vehicle shadows (Object shadows OFF)

900m view distance

terrain-detail to "low"

sliders set to max fps and medium detail (20...40 and 6...18)

I also noticed that it makes no difference if i play in 640x480 or in 1280x960, fps are the same.

It also seems to be unimportant whether the terrain-detail is set to low or medium, fps are the same, too!

Only very high is slower than the other settings!

As you can see, i can tweak what i want, my fps are ok but Resistance keeps having a slower feeling than

CWC.´(hope that was correctly translated by me )

Thank you!