0.5.0 Performnce Drop?

[Snow Gibbon]

I am getting INFURIATED by CtDs. I have tallied up 10 in a row. 10! Where's my stability gone!?

[LordHack]

Deleting shaders does help a bit.  Some of it is the server, at the one most played so far.  I have like 22 ping to it and was lagging hard at times.  I think it was just too full.

I had one hiccup.  Cleared cache, reloaded, all good so far.

[Nakor]

Well, in a non-dedicated server SA ran fairly smoothly with less than 8 people. More than that started causing disconnect errors, punctuated by the game freezing every time one of Duncan's messages played. I'm guessing 12-14 ppl is going to be the functional max player limit for dedicated SA servers.. However, the game actually runs much more smoothly on all the non-SA maps i've played so far.

[[CW]Aresye]

I too, noticed some sub-30 FPS drops multiple times in Solaris Arena.  While most noticeable there, I have noticed an overall performance drop in all game modes and configurations when compared to 0.4.9.

System:
Intel i7 2600k
8GB RAM
GeForce GTX 580

[Spooky]

I also notice intermittent "lags" (as in the game pauses for half a second or so) during the game. It sometimes happens when Duncan says something (but not in every case where he says something) but it also happens a lot during fights. i.e. when I am attacked by a SRM chain fires every 3 or 4 seconds the game hangs for half a second. Also happens in other heavy/rapid fire situations unfortunately.

[Cygma]

Try wether adding s_PrecacheData = 1 to your autoexec makes a difference.

[thEClaw]

For me the performance seems to be a lot better than in 0.4.9. DeathValley was playable without any slowdowns and SA ran like a charm, probably due to the smaller maps/lower amount of players.

[Spooky]

Try wether adding s_PrecacheData = 1 to your autoexec makes a difference.

Unfortunately that didn't have any effect. Stutter still occurs sometimes when Duncan talks, and the stutters in battles occur as well. Basically my performance troubles in 0.5.0 consist of these things:

• Occassional stutter when Duncan talks.
• Significant amount of stutter during fights (see also Psychasthenia post here).
  
• Generally much, much lower FPS during heavy fights.
• Lower FPS overall, depending on the map at least. Had a game on TC_ThunderRift earlier and my FPS were quite low the whole time and during fights it became pretty much unplayable

My machine is a AMD Phenom II X3 3.1 GHz with 4 GB RAM and only a Radeon HD 5750 512 MB. I used to use LVL-2 from CCC without problems prior to 0.5.0. Switching back to LVL-1 did not influence the stutter issue.

Ingrater said somewhere, that you guys already found out the cause of the stutter, for Duncan at least?

[Snyp3r]

I was getting a little bit of stuttering in combat even back in 0.4, my card only has 896mb of VRAM. If you haven't already, try setting the texture quality to Low. MWLL is a major VRAM hog, and Low textures almost uses all my VRAM. Anyway, that fixed the not-sound-related stuttering I was getting back in 0.4.x, and I haven't seen it in 0.5 either.

[howlrunner]

Well now I have much better performance.  Played a game on Sandblasted and then Death Valley.  Virtually no stutters and none of the freezing I was having before.

I cleared my shaders cache and installed CCC Lvl. 3.  So not sure which helped, or maybe it was a combination of the two.

[Seraph]

Well now I have much better performance.  Played a game on Sandblasted and then Death Valley.  Virtually no stutters and none of the freezing I was having before.

The mappers had been working over hours to squeeze more performance out of maps, especially Death Valley since it's a commonly played map for TC. All praise Wilson and his team!

[thEClaw]

Well now I have much better performance.  Played a game on Sandblasted and then Death Valley.  Virtually no stutters and none of the freezing I was having before.

The mappers had been working over hours to squeeze more performance out of maps, especially Death Valley since it's a commonly played map for TC. All praise Wilson and his team!

May i ask how that works? I never built a map for anything but in my simple mind there is no room to enhance the performance of a map. Did they have to reduce the graphical quality at some points? Remove stuff that nobody would notice?

@ Steelbarrage below: Sorry for the "spam" then. I won't post here again (unless i encounter performance-issues).

@ Eyeklops below that: Thanks for the information .

[Steelbarrage]

If you did not have an original performance drop from .4 to .5 do not post in this thread.
The purpose of this discussion is to let the devs know of a problem some players are having with this patch.
I am worried the few of us having the problem will have the same problem that mouse smoothing had in getting people to realize there is a problem.

[Eyeklops]

Well now I have much better performance.  Played a game on Sandblasted and then Death Valley.  Virtually no stutters and none of the freezing I was having before.

The mappers had been working over hours to squeeze more performance out of maps, especially Death Valley since it's a commonly played map for TC. All praise Wilson and his team!

May i ask how that works? I never built a map for anything but in my simple mind there is no room to enhance the performance of a map. Did they have to reduce the graphical quality at some points? Remove stuff that nobody would notice?

To optimize a map you could:

• Repaint the terrain using a lower resolution, and/or less textures.
• Add properly placed occluders.
• Change the terrain to promote many smaller battles vs one large battle.
• Fix places that put the engine into "triangle overload."
• Rework level sound and visual effects.
• Correct terrain "holes" that cause mechs to trip or get stuck.
• Make ELRM & LRM common camping spots less desireable to use.

And lots of other stuff.

[Millpoint]

i also had a performance drop from 60fps down to like 20-30 fps on certain maps

Core i7 920 4.0ghz
evga gt580 over clocked
12gb ddr3 1600 ram
600gb velcioraptor drive