Langnasen

After my posts in another thread, concerning poor FPS results in A2, I thought to try an experiment. These are my alarming findings. System: Maximus Formula II mobo. E8400 CPU @ 4ghz GTX 285 OCX graphics card. 2gb PC8500 RAM. xFi sound card. OS, pagefile and game on three seperate SATA drives. A pretty decent system, by any accounts, and mega frames in all the other games I play at very high settings. I turned all the video-settings in the game to their lowest possible: Visibility: 500m. Texture detail: Low. Video memory: Default (allows latest cards to find best performance). Aniso: Disabled. FSAA: Disabled. Terrain detail: Very low. Objects detail: Very low. Shadow detail: Disabled. Interface resolution: 640 x 480 (seriously). 3D resolution: 640 x 480 (again, seriously). Post processing: Disabled. V-Sync: Disabled. Campaign Harvest Red, mission of same name, standing on the roof looking over the city towards the tower-block, my FPS...? 55fps. Yes, that's right, fifty five frames per second. Graphics drivers: 191.07 (the latest). I have a screenie, with the FRAPS readout if anyone doubts me. It looks like...well, how can I best put this...crap. But with crap one might have expected insane FPS. I could run CoD5 aW at high settings with 1920 x 1200 res, x4 FSAA on my GTX8800 and get an approx average of around 40 to 50 fps. Haven't tried it with this new card, but...you know... No, it's not AI routines...I can now play OFF (a WW1 air-combat simulator mod for CFS3) absolutely maxed out and get 50+ fps. That's at 2560 x 1600 res. And that has over 300 AI planes in the air over a full-scale western front (more landmass than A2), with the view-distance measured in tens of kilometers. But these claims could be viewed as subjective, and you guys all know what your rigs can achieve in other games at given settings. So you probably set A2 to similar settings, then backed off a bit because the game is 'particularly demanding'. Well, go and try it with my settings and see if you can make any sense of the results. Or tell me I'm wrong and something is badly porked with my install. If it's not, something is very badly wrong with A1. Most of us have monster systems, some upgraded specifically for this game, and we're getting what...55fps with every single setting on Pong mode?! Please try this and post your results here.

I suggest you go read his comments to me in this thread. Without the fan-boi tinted spectacles. His provocation is blatant. Subtle, but blatant. One example: "Oh, and have an infraction.... You see what he did there? That little "Oh... Subtle, but a snide provocation. Then the facetious comments about joining BI as a coder. From another member I'd take that in my stride, absolutely no issue at all. But from a moderator? One who can't deal with the thrust and parry that kind of comment deserves but runs to hide behind the rules? Sorry, not having it. I see a coward and a bully like that, I call him out.

Comparing them in what way? In so far that one is rock-solid, stable, and does what it says on the tin, whereas the other is a buggy, staggering, hard-ware-wasting cockup? Yes, I'm fully aware of the technical differences. But they pale into insignificance against the fact one can jump onto a huge map and have hours of un-interrupted high-quality play with DH. No CTDs, no lock-ups, no stuttering, no lag. And it looks almost as good as the BI series. Less features...but hey, what use all those bloody features when the game runs like shit! Eh? I expected it to be sub-par on a GTX8800...but on a GTX285? Sorry, not having it mate.

Who mentioned "deleted"? :confused: If you read through this thread you'll see w0lle not just impartially doing his job but adding snide little provocative trailers and facetious comments. And when he gets pulled up on it he runs to the rules and claims they're being broken. Then follows up with more of the same via PM. What he wants is the right to talk to anybody just as he pleases, in a wholly un-professional and role-abusing manner, and not have to take back any of what he so clearly loves to dish out. A bully and a coward. Forums are staffed by his kind all over the net, and those forums are largely populated by sycophants all singing from the same hymn-sheet. He's 41 years old...ever stopped to think what kind of adult male devotes so much of his time to doing a 'job' like this? Yes, you might have guessed the answer to that question...a sad individual with so little real life he has plenty of it going spare to invest in something as sad and pathetic as 'moderating' an internet forum. Day in and day out. His entire ego devoted to the little rushes he gets from imposing 'infractions' on faceless strangers. :D:D It don't take no genius of psychology to recognize a person like that for what he is. Go on, take a long hard look at him. He's the king of his little castle. As Shakespeare so elequently put it: "...proud man, drest in a little brief authority, most ignorant of what he's most assur'd, his glassy essence like an angry ape..."

Ya. Sure. You keep telling yourself all that jazz. Then go check out how many people are playing this game online. No, really, go on. Fill your boots. Then tell yourself the same jazz all over again. Say it loud enough and long enough...gee, you might convince yourself it's true. Oh, it appears you already have. Another happy camper, lucky you. :D

That wasn't "disagreement with forum moderation", that was taking issue with blatant provocation and disrespect. What we have is a forum moderator mixing it up with the members as if he was just another one of the lads, then crawling behind the rules when he gets spoken to as an equal. Likes to dish it out, then hides behind the rules and abuses them like the despicable coward he is. But I've learned that's how certain companies work. They 'hire' the lowest of the low to keep the forums clear of those who speak the truth, and any dirty tactics are allowed. You can take this as a 24-carat prediction...BI's days as a game-developer are numbered. With each new iteration of this series of games and expansions the number of purchasers becomes exponentially less. You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but never all of the people all of the time. I'm going back to DH. Yes, it may be old, it may have less fancy graphics and features, but at least it works 100%, and it hits the spot. This BI stuff, nothing but frustration and disappointment.

"Typically dumber AI"?! Are you pulling my leg? I've rarely seen dumber AI than that which I see in both A1 and A2. Or it goes from dumb to superman and can see you in the pitch dark at 100m, while you're laying down in knee-high grass. Sure, it's the "most ambitious game to date". And what does that count for when the AI is brain-dead and the game runs overall on high-spec hardware like a car with flat tyres? Ambition isn't an end unto itself, nor a reason to defend the game and it's developers, as if they were doing us some kind of monumental favour. I've just spent the last three hours playing A1 with the group to which I belong. It took us almost an hour to get into the server after multiple re-boots and re-connects. I finally asked over TS "Is this like a really old server?" I was replied to with a bunch of replies saying "No, the game's netcode is shit." And these are guys who know what they're talking about. I then endured 30 minutes of lagging hell, and my game locked-up on the next mission barely after I'd spawned in. This is A1, the last one, you know? The one that's supposed to be fine and dandy by now, after years of patches. But not only are we here with A2, BI are already working on an expansion for it. And you guys jump all over me like I'm out of line? W...T...F...?! The blind fanatical defence by a tiny minority of gamers for companies like BI and games like OFP, A1 and A2 absolutely bedazzles me. I can think of no rational explanation, other than it's a group mindset that gets more pleasure from just being part of a fanatical niche group than having and playing a good stable solid game. The general response seems to go along the lines of "BI never dump a game, they give it solid support, a steady stream of patches, they're the best!" Er...the A1 netcode...? Amongst many other as yet un-fixed issues. But you never catch on, do you. And that's the very definition of fanaticism. Incredible loyalty and blind devotion to the very thing that's taking you for the long ride. It's taken me a while (a couple of weeks) to realise that absolutely nothing has changed since OFP. The same buggy engine, the same abysmal performance. And you do nothing to encourage BI to change their ways and maybe, just possibly, do something about it. You shout everyone down, the moderators employ their infraction-tactics to drive dissenters off the board...so you can claim "Hey, it's all happy families here, the complainers are in the minority..." Yeah...the majority of them have given up, or been banned. And the servers hosting BI games become ever fewer, reflecting the ever-dwindling numbers of BI-game players. But still you persist..."The emperor IS wearing clothes!" You have got the game you deserve, and that's the plain truth. So keep telling yourselves "It's all ok, BI will fix it up good, given enough time!" Yeah, just like they did with OFP and A1. Eh lads? If it wasn't so god-awefully tragic one would have to laugh.

I look to the common denominator. My rig played all my other games very well even before I upgraded my card from a GTX8800 to a GTX285. Including CoD5 at high settings at 1600 x 1200. The idea of buying more RAM to get around BI's 3rd-rate coding (which is what it is, in my opinion, and many others') is ludicrous. It's companies like BI that are helping to seal the fate of PC gaming. Yes, there will always be a hard-core of fanatical supporters who will tolerate any kind of failing in a game, but their numbers are fast dwindling to the point there will no longer be enough to fund the market. Take a good long hard look at the number of people playing A2 on the servers on any given night. I remember the days when 30,000 online players for a game wasn't unusual. Yes, A2 has incredible scope...but it's performance is a disaster, and when people have lavished so much money on their hardware it leaves a very bitter taste. ---------- Post added at 10:09 PM ---------- Previous post was at 10:08 PM ---------- I'll do that later, thanks for the suggestion. :)

The sheer number of entities in OFF at least matches, if not out-weighs, those in A2. And you're forgetting that OFF also has numerous ground-based entities. That do a far better job of handling staying on a road, I might add. And given the performance of A2's AI entities in some regards, I have to wonder how their overhead can be even remotely justified. It's become pretty clear to me, from reading other far more knowledgeable posts than any I could formulate, that far from A2's engine being 'new' it's nothing more, in fact, than a re-hashed version of OFP's.

The only perspective I'm getting that's worth a candle is from the countless other people who have already voiced concerns similar to mine. You appear to be an exception...all I can say to that is "lucky you."

But as we already appear to have established, it's not the terrain causing the appallingly bad performance in A2, the problem lays elsewhere. The terrain affects FPS only where it's visible on the monitor anyway, and we know from games like Crysis that far better quality terrain and flora than A2's give better FPS at far higher settings. All I'm hearing for A2 is one lame excuse after another, when in fact you should all be justifiably concerned with a company that is already devoting resources for an expansion while the original game runs like crap on top-level hardware. Which is why this is the third game with which they're pulling this stunt.

And what goes on exactly? AI entities doing their thing. How many entities are doing their thing in OFF's world? The entire western front. Not just the 300+ aircraft...also tanks, trucks, infantry, AA positions. How many in A2's hugely smaller area? And are those entities actually present when the player isn't there to see them? No, they're not. In an SP tank-sabotage mission I saw AI infantry spawning in front of me when the klaxon went off. So what we have in A2 is a bubble of AI entities within a close range of the player, whereas in OFF we have the entire western front populated with AI entities interacting with each other in real time. Think about that. :)

OFF (Over Flanders Field), a mod for CFS3. And note that it's world-size (a factor you mention above) is the entire WW1 western front, an area considerably bigger than A2's. Populated with...well, I'm sure you can imagine. And a view-distance measured in tens of kilometers, not hundreds of meters. Much more of which is seen from high up, as opposed to A2's ground-level advantages. JW Custom, you aren't getting the point. In a benchmark the same conditions must be met if results on different hardware are to be valid. What you're saying is that a car-test comparison between a Porche and a Ferrari, where we're trying to establish which is the faster car, is valid if the Porsche is tested on one track in the dry and the Ferrari is tested on another track in the wet. I don't think you've posted your hardware either? My apologies if you did. Which would be irrelevant anyway, if all you've done is overcome A2's shockingly bad code by technological brute-force. Meanwhile the rest of us would like to see a performance from the game befitting our hardware. ---------- Post added at 09:18 PM ---------- Previous post was at 09:11 PM ---------- Thank you, I know enough of how computers work to make a living dealing with them. I also know enough to recognize when a company is taking the piss by making an expansion for a game they haven't yet got to work as it should.

Quoted for truth? Which is it, optimized for Core-Duo or Quad? Either way, people using Core-Duo or Quad are getting the same lousy performance. This game should be flying on some of the hardware owned around here, but instead it's staggering.

You're splitting hairs. A 4ghz Duo-Core is the equal of a Quad at 2.66ghz all day long. In fact it out-performs it in most cases. Mainly because the four cores don't even come close to maximum utilisation, even in a game supposedly optimised for them. This is a code issue, period. By turning the view-distance down to 500m in A2. Other than that you have A2's AI running, and as I've already noted I have at least one game I currently play that has massively greater numbers of AI routines and physics-calculations going on than A2's. Which runs at 50+ fps maxed out across the board. ---------- Post added at 08:39 PM ---------- Previous post was at 08:35 PM ---------- You need to run the exact same conditions as me, using anything different completely invalidates your findings. How many AI entities are running in your home-made mission? How many are running in the mission I use to test? And so on and so forth.

Are you really so asinine as you think this is some kind of 'e-penis' thing going on? Are you serious? Grow up and behave with due consideration for your position as moderator, instead of making deliberately provocative comments better suited to a troll. I am posting legitimate findings and voicing legitimate concerns, in a legitimate manner (over-sized pics not withstanding, that was an error born of ignorance of the apparent rule...but boy, you sure did jump on that excuse to hand out an 'infraction', didn't you. A polite heads-up would have sufficed, don't you think?). ---------- Post added at 08:26 PM ---------- Previous post was at 08:20 PM ---------- My knowledge is experiential...hundreds of games played since 1993, on just about every hardware combination known to man. Your facetious comments are entirely uncalled for. How the hell you've kept your job as 'moderator' bemuses me, you are clearly unfit for it. Give yourself an infraction, you deserve one.

So it looks like we might be seeing an explanation...the game's code is seriously screwed. Because NO game routines justify an outrageous CPU overhead like this (if that is indeed what's causing this).

Yes, and a Duo-Core E8400 @ 4ghz should be chewing this game up and spitting it out. Period. If it's not it's because the game's coding has very serious issues. The AI in A2 is nothing special. In fact I'd say it's pretty damn poor. Anyone else played other games where there are SERIOUS AI routines running, accounting for massively greater numbers of entities? That perform hugely better than A2's? Guys, quit desperately trying to make excuses for this and see it for what it is. We've got members running around like headless chickens, recommending purchases of expensive hardware and esoteric programs to try and get this game running right (RAM drives?!), in the belief the game is somehow especially demanding and it's their fault it runs so crap because they have inadequate rigs. Let's put this issue firmly where it belongs, in BI's hands.

I'm running XP-Pro 32. And please Tim, don't even TRY to excuse this on some BS "Oh gee, this uber-sophisticated game is running incredible schizzle in the back-ground, what do you expect?" Not when I run a game that has 300+ AI planes in the air, at max settings across the board, FSAA at x4, res at 2560 x 1600, and get a consistent 50+ fps. Screenies: http://i499.photobucket.com/albums/rr356/Langnasen7/a2screenies.gif Tell me of ANY other game that performs this badly at such diabolically crap settings? Absolute minimum settings, 640 x 480 res, and 55fps?! Are you frickin' kidding me? With the rig I'm running? I'd expect that with a P3 at 2ghz and a TNT maybe. And don't be fooled by the pics above not looking too bad...trust me, on a 30" monitor that has a native res of 2560 x 1600 it looks like puke on a pavement. Well, try it on whatever monitor each of you has, you'll see what I mean. BI, if this isn't a major issue with my hardware I'd say you have some serious explaining to do, because this apparent expose of 3rd-rate shonky coding is not acceptable. Sorry if that sounds harsh, but people don't spend hard-earned cash on the game AND expensive hardware upgrades to be cheated of performance like this. ---------- Post added at 07:54 PM ---------- Previous post was at 07:51 PM ---------- No, try the exact same mission as me, THAT is the benchmark. I too can get far higher frames if I go stand in the desert, looking at my feet (for example). Try looking at the sky, with nothing else at all showing...you get the card's max fps do you? No, I thought not. That should give you pause for thought. And if it doesn't, go try that experiment in any other game you own. http://i499.photobucket.com/albums/rr356/Langnasen7/a2sky.gif

I believe the proof of the pudding is in getting 200+ fps looking at the sky in A1 and getting no more than 65fps looking at the sky in A2. In any game I have ever played, looking at the sky obtains the maximum FPS the card can render, and that figure has always been pretty uniform per card. Something is badly wrong with A2's graphics code, and resorting to tortuous solutions like RAM-drives is treating the symptom, not the illness.

And $200. x4, that's $800 (£500). Five hundred quid, for the benefit of one game? I should coa-coa. :D

Fastest stick I've been able to find is 25mb/s read, 18mb/s write. I don't think that's up to the job.

I agree with this. The variable performance is the biggest issue in terms of general playability. Going from 24fps to 60+ (v-sync off) somewhat indicates how poorly coded/optimized some parts of this game are, especially when making drastic changes in the graphics settings don't make huge differences (going from silly high to stupidly low takes me from around 22fps to 35fps on one view-point I use for testing). In comparison I get a silky-smooth solid average of around 40fps in A1 with similar settings. I have a good rig now: E8400 @ 4ghz. GTX 285 OCX. 2gb RAM. xFi soundcard. OS, pagefile and game spread over three SATA drives. In-game settings: Everything on normal, except v-RAM on default, PP off, 1600x1200 on both res, view-distance on 2500. I seem to average around 28fps most of the time. Looking at the sky in A1 I get over 200fps; in A2 I can get no more than 65fps...WTF is going on with that? A screen full of nothing but empty sky and I can't get more than 65fps (v-sync disabled remember)?! Something is clearly screwed.

Judging by my experience with the campaign in A2, patch 1.04, I wouldn't touch an expansion with a pole. "One of your 4-man team has died, mission failed" (and terminated). Solution: Order team to stay at base and do the mission alone. I watched one of them walk around a corner, spot an enemy APC and just stand there for over ten seconds until it noticed him and shot him dead. I can't be dealing with AI like that, not when it kills missions dead.

I bought a GTX285OCX instead, it was far more gratifying. :D