PPPPPPPPPPAAAAATTTTTTTTIIIIIIIIIAAAAAAAAAAANNNNNTTTLLLLLLLLLLLLLYYYYYYY WWWaitinGGGG with only 10 DAYS left to test the game or not..!!!!! ive been very ecited to play it then for it to be on my computer waiting for me to play it but it wont let me because a black screen pops up after i click on low graphics and as i keep saying the description says it will run better this way than on default graphics so i HONESTLY DONT KNOW the PROBLEM..!!!!!:( PLZ HELP........
Hey guys, we know that it's frustrating when you have performance issues and can't play the game as it's intended. I want to let you know that it's not happening to everyone thankfully, but we ARE actively researching the cause so that we can fix it as soon as possible.
Thanks again for being so patient.
PLZZZ LET me know when its fixed..!:( cause ive been waiting to play this for couple years now so i feel pretty mad that its teasing me by sitting on the computer not working as it loads just to say cryptic error SORRY!!!:mad: JUST WOULD LIKE HELP, thats ALL i ask..?plz...plz.....plz
Guys I'm sure yelling at Cryptic isn't going to get you anywhere. -_-
I feel the same about not being able to play and such and yes, I have been looking forward to this game for a while...but you really cant complain that your getting crapy fps on a beta...now if you where paying that's a different story. its like you going and yelling at a customer service rep. at a store for something they have no control over, it gets you no where and you look stupid in the end.
Just trust them in what they are doing, they don't know how to fix the problem...but they are trying to help us out.
I was messing with the options under "troubleshooting" in Video a bit and turned off multi-core and enabled GPU. All of a sudden I can play the highest setting without (almost) no hitches... In Canada even, which had slideshow-framerate a lot.
Hope this helps.
I was messing with the options under "troubleshooting" in Video a bit and turned off multi-core and enabled GPU. All of a sudden I can play the highest setting without (almost) no hitches... In Canada even, which had slideshow-framerate a lot.
Hope this helps.
Sir if this works i might just have to hug you...non gay ofcourse
Guys I'm sure yelling at Cryptic isn't going to get you anywhere. -_-
I feel the same about not being able to play and such and yes, I have been looking forward to this game for a while...but you really cant complain that your getting crapy fps on a beta...now if you where paying that's a different story. its like you going and yelling at a customer service rep. at a store for something they have no control over, it gets you no where and you look stupid in the end.
Just trust them in what they are doing, they don't know how to fix the problem...but they are trying to help us out.
I just hate it when people b**ch -_-
First of all, I don't think anyone has been overly aggressive; at least not many. They've established these forums for us to communicate problems with their "beta". That's what we're doing. It's not like we're crashing someone's birthday party to ***** at them. We're doing exactly what is expected, finding problems, reporting them and discussing them (on a discussion forum).
There's a lot of flaws with your additional reasoning. I agree that yelling at a customer service rep regarding a product they don't have control over is a waste of time in most cases. They may not have direct control over the product they're selling, etc. I'm not advocating being rude - but you don't have to be rude to have realistic expectations regarding a paid product.
This however has nothing to do with addressing this performance issue with Cryptic employees regarding a game developed by Cryptic. While the forum moderators are not the game developers, they have direct lines of communication with management in their company to get answers to these issues and open up some meaningful dialog regarding them.
The second issue, is this game is *days* away from release/early access. I guess I'm old fashioned but I believe in getting what you pay for. If Cryptic wants me to spend my hard earned money on their product (and it's recurring fees/micro transactions) it needs to be a quality product FIRST. Note: Quality product does not mean perfect and bug free. Just quality. You can say "don't judge a beta becaues it's a beta" all you want but this game is 10 days from release. This is VERY close to the final product and regarding performance on many people's PC's well above the recommended requirements - it is not a quality product. I don't buy products on some company's word that they will deliver a quality product "someday" if I just pay for it now.
(I know it's likely there's a debugger running in the background that can cause fps loss, but if it's impacting the game this much - a word from the devs regarding it should be made and the debugger has to be removed before launch so people can see if that's the cause of the performance problems)
I was messing with the options under "troubleshooting" in Video a bit and turned off multi-core and enabled GPU. All of a sudden I can play the highest setting without (almost) no hitches... In Canada even, which had slideshow-framerate a lot.
Hope this helps.
Well, this is interesting...
I disabled multi core and noticed no change in performance. It was exactly the same. But I was checking the game's CPU usage, and it's exactly the same with multi core off as it is on, a little over 50%. And yes, I have a dual core processor
Hmmm... is multi-core not working? Could this explain why performance is so miserable?
The new patch that came out boosted my performance a bit. I can finally play the game on recommended settings with around 20-30 FPS most of the time. I really hope this problem can get fixed a lot more before release, but at least the game is playable and doesn't look like crap anymore.
Here is what I don't understand. I'm monitoring my GPU and CPU usage, and neither is maxed out, yet I'm getting at best 40 FPS. What else could be the bottleneck?
The new patch that came out boosted my performance a bit. I can finally play the game on recommended settings with around 20-30 FPS most of the time. I really hope this problem can get fixed a lot more before release, but at least the game is playable and doesn't look like crap anymore.
I noticed an improvement too. I thought it was because I'm now in Millennium City instead of Canada. I'll have to head back to CA and see what it's like there.
First off, many thanks to all of you who have sent in performance profiles, they have helped a lot! From what I can tell it looks like there are two separate performance issues going on here (I'm not going to address crashes or graphics glitches in this post, since those are separate issues unrelated to this; they are being looked at by other programmers, I assure you!).
The first problem is that some people with high end NVIDIA graphics cards (9800s and 280s) are GPU fill bound running at a much lower than expected framerate (25 to 35 on the default settings). You can tell if you fall into this category because reducing the resolution (easiest way is to turn on the half resolution rendering option) dramatically increases your framerate. The good news with this problem is that we have been able to reproduce it here and are having NVIDIA look at it.
The other problem some of you are having is getting really low FPS (like 5 to 15) regardless of graphics settings. This indicates that you are CPU bound, which is very strange because most of you have great processors. From looking at the profiles you guys sent in it looks like something is stealing CPU time from our main thread, which could be from one of our other threads or from other processes running on your machines. I'm not sure which of those it is yet, and we have been completely unable to reproduce this in house, so I would like to ask the more technically minded of you who are having THIS problem (not the first one) to PM me so I can have you run a couple other tests.
I really appreciate all your help tracking these issues down, I know how frustrating it is when your game won't run smoothly!
Is it possible that something isn't accepting say video cards that have less then 512 megs of ram properly and instead of evenly handling power it pushes it all onto the PC? I pretty much turn everything in the background off and play for maybe 30 mins and then boom i lose 15 to 20 frames.
Is it possible that something isn't accepting say video cards that have less then 512 megs of ram properly and instead of evenly handling power it pushes it all onto the PC? I pretty much turn everything in the background off and play for maybe 30 mins and then boom i lose 15 to 20 frames.
This could be your CPU or GPU overheating and automatically underclocking itself. You might want to make sure your all the fans are working and not clogged up.
Is it possible that something isn't accepting say video cards that have less then 512 megs of ram properly and instead of evenly handling power it pushes it all onto the PC? I pretty much turn everything in the background off and play for maybe 30 mins and then boom i lose 15 to 20 frames.
My video card has 1 GB of RAM on it so I don't think so.
The other problem some of you are having is getting really low FPS (like 5 to 15) regardless of graphics settings. This indicates that you are CPU bound, which is very strange because most of you have great processors. From looking at the profiles you guys sent in it looks like something is stealing CPU time from our main thread, which could be from one of our other threads or from other processes running on your machines. I'm not sure which of those it is yet, and we have been completely unable to reproduce this in house, so I would like to ask the more technically minded of you who are having THIS problem (not the first one) to PM me so I can have you run a couple other tests.
I really appreciate all your help tracking these issues down, I know how frustrating it is when your game won't run smoothly!
this is EXACTLY my issue and thanks for acknowledging it. I am not a tech wiz but I'll toss out a theory. A lot of us had issues downloading the client. Some of us, myself included, moved our files around manually. Could we have caused a problem when we did this. I don't really want to reinstall the client from scratch(takes forever) but maybe it's worth doing. Anyone with CPU at 100% usage try reinstalling the "clean" client?
this is EXACTLY my issue and thanks for acknowledging it. I am not a tech wiz but I'll toss out a theory. A lot of us had issues downloading the client. Some of us, myself included, moved our files around manually. Could we have caused a problem when we did this. I don't really want to reinstall the client from scratch(takes forever) but maybe it's worth doing. Anyone with CPU at 100% usage try reinstalling the "clean" client?
I'm going to try right now. The new file for Open Beta on File Planet has that three gig patch thrown in to it already so it shouldn't take me long.
Ok! I'll throw in my bit of info so it hopefully helps.
I have a..
Processor: AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 5200+
RAM: 4 GB
Vista 32
G-Card: Geforce GTX 260
Res: 1360 x 768 (On a HDTV just testing something out.)
(Post-Processing on, but no effects under it are on. Bloom, Shadows, ect.. off)
Also running Game Booster to shut down all services that aren't needed.
Now I've been testing and found out something strange.
Like many here I have a particular issue. No matter turning it on or off multi-cpu under
the trouble shooting options in the video section... no change. It is stuck somewhere
between 8-30, mainly tanking to 10 when moving or with many on screen.
Average FPS is around 13-18.
Now I can run some much more resource and graphic resource hungry games much
easier. It might be that it isn' handling dual cores properly, or NVIDIA has an issue with
it's drivers?
UPDATE!!:
Ok! Here's 'out of character' video behavior CO is also doing. I will tilt the camera to
look down on the character, so I only see him and the ground only.
Now...
Most games have their FPS shoot up when not processing on screen stuff, and it
my FPS did shoot up to 38. BUT I clicked on the UI a bit and it tanked back to around
10 again. That is pretty funny behavior.
I can run Crysis, the Cryostasis Tech-Demo, and Fallout well over 40 in all on-screen
situations. (Many mobs, moving, complicated architecture. And in normal gameplay my
fps in those games with high settings is 60's to capped.) It seems that there is something
eating, bogging, or throttling the engine somehow. It's quite odd.
This could be your CPU or GPU overheating and automatically underclocking itself. You might want to make sure your all the fans are working and not clogged up.
Uh No its not an over heating issue I play more graphically intense games then this on my machine without a problem. This is the only game that causes me to lose 20 frames after 30 mins of play time. Not to mention after logging out for a few hours ad coming back it remains borked.
Basically I log on and after 30 mins or so when it hits top prime time hours is when I get hit.
The first problem is that some people with high end NVIDIA graphics cards (9800s and 280s) are GPU fill bound running at a much lower than expected framerate (25 to 35 on the default settings). You can tell if you fall into this category because reducing the resolution (easiest way is to turn on the half resolution rendering option) dramatically increases your framerate. The good news with this problem is that we have been able to reproduce it here and are having NVIDIA look at it.
The other problem some of you are having is getting really low FPS (like 5 to 15) regardless of graphics settings. This indicates that you are CPU bound, which is very strange because most of you have great processors. From looking at the profiles you guys sent in it looks like something is stealing CPU time from our main thread, which could be from one of our other threads or from other processes running on your machines. I'm not sure which of those it is yet, and we have been completely unable to reproduce this in house, so I would like to ask the more technically minded of you who are having THIS problem (not the first one) to PM me so I can have you run a couple other tests.
My Stuff-
BFG Nvidia Geforce GTX285 1GB - Driver version: 8.15.11.9038
Intel Core 2 DUO 6420 - OC 3.2/ 4 GB
Windows Vista 64 SP 1
Recommended settings except for (no comic oulining, no cinematic field, low shadows, No bloom, 4x AA, 1600x900, max char detail)
I would like to start off by saying that todays patch does seem to have helped out for me. I seem to be averaging a stable 25-35 FPS at present. Yesterday I was getting about 15-25 FPS with it dropping as low as 5FPS sometimes in town. However, I am not sure which of these above categories I fall into as with the first option, lowering resolutions or reducing AA to none seems to give only very small increases in FR or no noticable FR difference at all. I read that someone had increased performance by turning off the GUI. I laughed when I read that, but I tried it in game and sure enough I was getting no less then 10 FPS and as high as 30 FPS faster.
These were taken today after the patch. FrameRate is in the upper right corner (Game FPS counter and FRAPS in Yellow) The boost in FPS with the GUI off is stable and constant. The GUI is bottlenecking and sucking up FR for me. While on an indoor mission today I was averaging 38 FPS with the GUI on, which was great but I turned it off and it shot up to 70 FPS and remained stable between 70-74 FPS. Which is what I should be getting.
I posted earlier, my issue with only 5-15 FPS still isn't fixed in the new patch.
WIndows XP service pack 3, 32 bit. 1gb ddr5 ram, 1000mhz clock speed RADEON (NOT NVIDIA!) 4800 HD video card. 2gb DDR2 memory. 3.0ghz dual core processor, intel e8400. Sata 1 hard drive. No background programs, drivers up to date. Champions uses up to 400mb of my ram, and up to 70% of my processor. It averages 150mb and 30%. I run on minimum settings with auto FPS smoother options off and GPU processing on, 1680/1050 fullscreen. It runs at 30 FPS when i first log in, but that quickly degrades after some combat.
The new patch did make my initial FPS smoothness last longer, but still runs out. It gets smoother if I restart the game. DEFINATELY some sort of memory leak.
I was having the same issue everyone is having I have:
C2D E6600
4GB of RAM
Geforce 9800 GTX
Windows Vista Ultimate
I play at 1920 X 1080
I was getting between 7-20 FPS which was killing me. My computer isnt the fastest but I was hoping to at least get 20-30 fps. I started fudging around and have now gotten it to 20-40 frames with some dipping into the teens when there are 10 people or more around, much better than when I started this.
1. Go to your NVIDIA control Panel and Disable PhysX
2. When you run the game check to see if you have a wmnetwk.exe (I found this using up 30% of my CPU)
If you see this, then go to services.msc on your run bar and stop the Windows media Player Network Sharing service.
In Game I turned off Anti-Aliasing, set my shadows to low, bloom to low and max physics debris objects to the lowest setting.
I hope this helps you guys out! Feel free to PM me if you have questions.
We would like a little more data from those of you who are getting poor performance on high-end systems. Specifically, if you are on a Core 2 Duo or Core 2 Quad, and have a GF9800 or Radeon 48xx HD or higher, and are consistently getting 20fps or less, please do the following for us:
In the Champions launcher/patcher, click Options, and under "Advanced Command Line", enter the following:
-SetTestingMode -threadPerf -showfps
Then start the game normally (you should see a bunch of debugging information in the lower left part of the screen), enter a zone where the performance is bad, and run this command to generate a screenshot:
/screenshot_ui_jpg
And email the screenshot (saved to Champions installation folder\Champions Online\Live\screenshots) to profiler@crypticstudios.com
Then exit, go back to the Options in the launcher, and remove these options from the "advanced command line".
If you have not already done so, please also follow the instructions here to send us a timerRecord profile at the same time.
We would like a little more data from those of you who are getting poor performance on high-end systems. Specifically, if you are on a Core 2 Duo or Core 2 Quad, and have a GF9800 or Radeon 48xx HD or higher, and are consistently getting 20fps or less, please do the following for us:
In the Champions launcher/patcher, click Options, and under "Advanced Command Line", enter the following:
-SetTestingMode -threadPerf -showfps
Then start the game normally (you should see a bunch of debugging information in the lower left part of the screen), enter a zone where the performance is bad, and run this command to generate a screenshot:
/screenshot_ui_jpg
And email the screenshot (saved to Champions installation folder\Champions Online\Live\screenshots) to profiler@crypticstudios.com
Then exit, go back to the Options in the launcher, and remove these options from the "advanced command line".
If you have not already done so, please also follow the instructions here to send us a timerRecord profile at the same time.
We would like a little more data from those of you who are getting poor performance on high-end systems. Specifically, if you are on a Core 2 Duo or Core 2 Quad, and have a GF9800 or Radeon 48xx HD or higher, and are consistently getting 20fps or less, please do the following for us:
In the Champions launcher/patcher, click Options, and under "Advanced Command Line", enter the following:
-SetTestingMode -threadPerf -showfps
Then start the game normally (you should see a bunch of debugging information in the lower left part of the screen), enter a zone where the performance is bad, and run this command to generate a screenshot:
/screenshot_ui_jpg
And email the screenshot (saved to Champions installation folder\Champions Online\Live\screenshots) to profiler@crypticstudios.com
Then exit, go back to the Options in the launcher, and remove these options from the "advanced command line".
If you have not already done so, please also follow the instructions here to send us a timerRecord profile at the same time.
WuXia requested I do this a few minutes ago, but I didn't know the screen shot command. So I used Fraps and sent a .bmp file. If this is a problem please let me know and I will redo it and use the screen shot command then send you the .jpeg.
You should already have my previous profiler log, but I included another that goes along with the screenshot. The system information hasn't changed from my last ticket submission.
Just wanted to throw this in... already sent in profiler information but I have two other observations.
Turning off the UI gives an immediate 20 FPS increase. I remember City of Heroes had this issue as well, so you might want to have people go back and look at what the solution for that was.
Second observation... the game client seems to only use around 500 MB of memory on average, this seems exceedingly low. I mean, I might be missing something here, but web browsers use that much memory.
Well I am one of the people who feels that the video performance from my setup hasn't been very impressive (10-22 FPS with a Geforce GTS250) but after playing with multiple computers both here at my home and at friend's houses I have noticed a very strong trend.
The trend I saw in all of this is that the computers with the faster processors perform much better than the ones with slower CPUs even when the machine with the slower CPU has a much better video card installed.
I then started running the Nvidea System Monitor while playing and my suspicions were confirmed. In all cases, on all machines the CPU was being pushed to 90-100% while the temps on the GPU barely changed at all during gameplay.
This means that the game currently is not utilizing the graphics card to any real degree and is instead putting most of the graphics load onto the CPU, meaning that even if you had a Geforce GTS285, if you have a lower end CPU you will see poor graphics performance in Champions Online.
The only point in playing where I saw any serious workload being pushed to the graphics card is in the Character Creator menu. In that part of the game, the GPU temps spike up 15-25 degrees indicating that the code in that subprogram does put the majority of the workload onto the graphics card there, but in the rest of the game the code hasn't been optimized yet to take advantage of the higher end video cards.
The programmers probably didn't have enough time to optimize the graphics code for the entire game before launch and instead left the bulk of the performance issues running through the CPU in order to have the game quickly ready for launch. However, since the Character Creator is basically a seperate program (and one that they probably worked on first) the code for that program did get tweaked to use the graphics cards.
Swapping the CPUs in the Gaming and HTPC rigs essentially swapped the FPS in each machine.
Gaming machine with Athlon 64 X2 5000 - 10-20 FPS
Gaming machine with Athlon 64 X2 7850 - 25-40 FPS
HTPC machine with Athlon 64 X2 5000 - 10-20 FPS
HTPC machine with Athlon 64 X2 7850 - 25-40 FPS
This basically confirms that with an Nvidea baced system, the graphics processing load is being placed on the CPU and NOT the video card.
It's funny, cause I have an ATI card and noticed something quite the opposite. Watching a CPU and GPU monitor while playing my CPU usage never got that high, about 65-70%. With post-processing on my GPU was maxed out at 100%; with it off I was around 50%. And my FPS on average was between 20-40 depending upon whether post-processing was on or off.
The part that baffles me in my case is that with post-processing off neither my CPU or GPU is maxing out, yet I still only get about 40 FPS. Where the heck is the bottleneck??
My 2 cents, and I have a high end conputer (quad core, Radeon 3870 512Mb... getting 30 fps most of time except flying): the running / flying issues are always for me related to loading environments. For example, let's say I'm flying very high in the sky: fps is high. Now I go down to ground: fps will go down to 1-5 as the ground environment is "loaded".
This is an example. It actually happens on all the maps, anytime a "new" environment is loaded.
I know the xbox and other consoles have some challenges with that mechanism. Could it be linked to an xbox / console code optimization?
Is it linked to the GPU memory? or GPU speed? or GPU memory speed? Something else?
The game is definitely not optimized for more than 1 core at the moment. Single, Dual or quads makes no difference. There is some coding gone astray here regarding multiple core CPU's.
if I keep still even with lots of people on screen I get 45-50fps with every graphic option maxed in the Burning Sands, on low I get 60+fps .. but as soon as I move on either settings I get less than 5fps then as soon as I stop moving they jump back up to the above fps.
ATI 4890HD 1GB
Q8200 Quad Core
4GB Ram
[EDIT]
Never mind.. fixed mine.. un-installed the first client and re-downloaded the updated one from fileplanet (the one where you don't have to move any files and only downloads a 168mb patch), now I get 50+fps both still or moving
The game is definitely not optimized for more than 1 core at the moment. Single, Dual or quads makes no difference. There is some coding gone astray here regarding multiple core CPU's.
Yeah, i've heard this as well. What I don't get is, how could they let this happen? Tons of people have 2 cores now etc, I'd understand is having dual cores was a rarity..but it's not.
I mean my specs are :
Intel Core 2 Duo E8400
Radeon 4870 x2
3 gigs of ram
XP
And I gotta put most stuff too before even the half way point, and a few of the other options off...and even then I only get 30s-40s.
Well at the moment the only way I can squeeze out a good framerate is to turn on AMD fusion for gaming. If you have an AMD system I recommend trying it out it may help you in the long run until the optimization is better.Without it i linger between 15-25 fps. Doesn't matter what I do with the settings it always remains in that general area of performance.
Running on:
AMD Phenom 9600 quad-core 2.3 GHz
512mb Ati Radeon HD 4670
4 GB ram
Vista home premium 64-bit
I found turning pre-rendered frames to 0 in the Nvidia control panel helped my framerate. Went from hovering at around 20-25 FPS to 30-35.
I'l have to try this and see if it helps.
While I thank the DEV's for this thread...has there been any progress on this? We are getting close to a week of these problems and its really becoming annoying to play this @ 5-30 FPS ..my god its just a MMO..they are typically less taxing on systems then say FPS (first person shooters). OK now stop reading this and get back to work optimizing ...I'm done with my mini rant:D
The game is definitely not optimized for more than 1 core at the moment. Single, Dual or quads makes no difference. There is some coding gone astray here regarding multiple core CPU's.
How about SLI? Because I have a quadcore cpu (@ 3GHz) and 2 NVIDIA 285 GTXs in SLI and I get worse performance than with Age of Conan on absolutely max settings. The FPS is still between 25-50 about 95% of the time, but the stuttering the other 5% of the time is annoying nonetheless...
game ist almost impossible to play. on my machine i can run other games like crysis, prototype, fear 2 on highest settings, but CO simply fails. the first regions are acceptable, but millenium city is annoying, even in the small instances. the games freezes for up to 6 seconds completely, with my flying travel power i think almost all of the time i am teleporting ^^.
core 2 quad @ 2,3 gh, 4 gb ddr 2 ram, geforce 9600 gt, win 7 in win xp mode, game settings at zero performance, max speed, and i think too, the game is running on one processor...
Comments
PLZZZ LET me know when its fixed..!:( cause ive been waiting to play this for couple years now so i feel pretty mad that its teasing me by sitting on the computer not working as it loads just to say cryptic error SORRY!!!:mad: JUST WOULD LIKE HELP, thats ALL i ask..?plz...plz.....plz
Thanks.
I feel the same about not being able to play and such and yes, I have been looking forward to this game for a while...but you really cant complain that your getting crapy fps on a beta...now if you where paying that's a different story. its like you going and yelling at a customer service rep. at a store for something they have no control over, it gets you no where and you look stupid in the end.
Just trust them in what they are doing, they don't know how to fix the problem...but they are trying to help us out.
I just hate it when people b**ch -_-
I was messing with the options under "troubleshooting" in Video a bit and turned off multi-core and enabled GPU. All of a sudden I can play the highest setting without (almost) no hitches... In Canada even, which had slideshow-framerate a lot.
Hope this helps.
Sir if this works i might just have to hug you...non gay ofcourse
First of all, I don't think anyone has been overly aggressive; at least not many. They've established these forums for us to communicate problems with their "beta". That's what we're doing. It's not like we're crashing someone's birthday party to ***** at them. We're doing exactly what is expected, finding problems, reporting them and discussing them (on a discussion forum).
There's a lot of flaws with your additional reasoning. I agree that yelling at a customer service rep regarding a product they don't have control over is a waste of time in most cases. They may not have direct control over the product they're selling, etc. I'm not advocating being rude - but you don't have to be rude to have realistic expectations regarding a paid product.
This however has nothing to do with addressing this performance issue with Cryptic employees regarding a game developed by Cryptic. While the forum moderators are not the game developers, they have direct lines of communication with management in their company to get answers to these issues and open up some meaningful dialog regarding them.
The second issue, is this game is *days* away from release/early access. I guess I'm old fashioned but I believe in getting what you pay for. If Cryptic wants me to spend my hard earned money on their product (and it's recurring fees/micro transactions) it needs to be a quality product FIRST. Note: Quality product does not mean perfect and bug free. Just quality. You can say "don't judge a beta becaues it's a beta" all you want but this game is 10 days from release. This is VERY close to the final product and regarding performance on many people's PC's well above the recommended requirements - it is not a quality product. I don't buy products on some company's word that they will deliver a quality product "someday" if I just pay for it now.
(I know it's likely there's a debugger running in the background that can cause fps loss, but if it's impacting the game this much - a word from the devs regarding it should be made and the debugger has to be removed before launch so people can see if that's the cause of the performance problems)
Well, this is interesting...
I disabled multi core and noticed no change in performance. It was exactly the same. But I was checking the game's CPU usage, and it's exactly the same with multi core off as it is on, a little over 50%. And yes, I have a dual core processor
Hmmm... is multi-core not working? Could this explain why performance is so miserable?
With min settings this rig should be able to pull off a nice 25-30 FPS. and that's my lowest expectation.
I noticed an improvement too. I thought it was because I'm now in Millennium City instead of Canada. I'll have to head back to CA and see what it's like there.
Rig
Athlon 64 x2 Dual Core 4000
2 GB RAM
Nvidea GeForce 9800GT 512MB
Fully updated/tweaked windows vista
No running spyware or antivirus software
The PC is clean of spyware and antivirus problems
At 800x600 with video settings on min - 10 - 30 fps
At Reccomended Settings ( 1400x900 w/ sliders set to 100 and all other settings maxed ) - 6-20fps
The video settings themselves seem to have negligable bearing on the performance.
The first problem is that some people with high end NVIDIA graphics cards (9800s and 280s) are GPU fill bound running at a much lower than expected framerate (25 to 35 on the default settings). You can tell if you fall into this category because reducing the resolution (easiest way is to turn on the half resolution rendering option) dramatically increases your framerate. The good news with this problem is that we have been able to reproduce it here and are having NVIDIA look at it.
The other problem some of you are having is getting really low FPS (like 5 to 15) regardless of graphics settings. This indicates that you are CPU bound, which is very strange because most of you have great processors. From looking at the profiles you guys sent in it looks like something is stealing CPU time from our main thread, which could be from one of our other threads or from other processes running on your machines. I'm not sure which of those it is yet, and we have been completely unable to reproduce this in house, so I would like to ask the more technically minded of you who are having THIS problem (not the first one) to PM me so I can have you run a couple other tests.
I really appreciate all your help tracking these issues down, I know how frustrating it is when your game won't run smoothly!
This could be your CPU or GPU overheating and automatically underclocking itself. You might want to make sure your all the fans are working and not clogged up.
My video card has 1 GB of RAM on it so I don't think so.
this is EXACTLY my issue and thanks for acknowledging it. I am not a tech wiz but I'll toss out a theory. A lot of us had issues downloading the client. Some of us, myself included, moved our files around manually. Could we have caused a problem when we did this. I don't really want to reinstall the client from scratch(takes forever) but maybe it's worth doing. Anyone with CPU at 100% usage try reinstalling the "clean" client?
I'm going to try right now. The new file for Open Beta on File Planet has that three gig patch thrown in to it already so it shouldn't take me long.
I have a..
Processor: AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 5200+
RAM: 4 GB
Vista 32
G-Card: Geforce GTX 260
Res: 1360 x 768 (On a HDTV just testing something out.)
(Post-Processing on, but no effects under it are on. Bloom, Shadows, ect.. off)
Also running Game Booster to shut down all services that aren't needed.
Now I've been testing and found out something strange.
Like many here I have a particular issue. No matter turning it on or off multi-cpu under
the trouble shooting options in the video section... no change. It is stuck somewhere
between 8-30, mainly tanking to 10 when moving or with many on screen.
Average FPS is around 13-18.
Now I can run some much more resource and graphic resource hungry games much
easier. It might be that it isn' handling dual cores properly, or NVIDIA has an issue with
it's drivers?
UPDATE!!:
Ok! Here's 'out of character' video behavior CO is also doing. I will tilt the camera to
look down on the character, so I only see him and the ground only.
Now...
Most games have their FPS shoot up when not processing on screen stuff, and it
my FPS did shoot up to 38. BUT I clicked on the UI a bit and it tanked back to around
10 again. That is pretty funny behavior.
I can run Crysis, the Cryostasis Tech-Demo, and Fallout well over 40 in all on-screen
situations. (Many mobs, moving, complicated architecture. And in normal gameplay my
fps in those games with high settings is 60's to capped.) It seems that there is something
eating, bogging, or throttling the engine somehow. It's quite odd.
Uh No its not an over heating issue I play more graphically intense games then this on my machine without a problem. This is the only game that causes me to lose 20 frames after 30 mins of play time. Not to mention after logging out for a few hours ad coming back it remains borked.
Basically I log on and after 30 mins or so when it hits top prime time hours is when I get hit.
My Stuff-
BFG Nvidia Geforce GTX285 1GB - Driver version: 8.15.11.9038
Intel Core 2 DUO 6420 - OC 3.2/ 4 GB
Windows Vista 64 SP 1
Recommended settings except for (no comic oulining, no cinematic field, low shadows, No bloom, 4x AA, 1600x900, max char detail)
I would like to start off by saying that todays patch does seem to have helped out for me. I seem to be averaging a stable 25-35 FPS at present. Yesterday I was getting about 15-25 FPS with it dropping as low as 5FPS sometimes in town. However, I am not sure which of these above categories I fall into as with the first option, lowering resolutions or reducing AA to none seems to give only very small increases in FR or no noticable FR difference at all. I read that someone had increased performance by turning off the GUI. I laughed when I read that, but I tried it in game and sure enough I was getting no less then 10 FPS and as high as 30 FPS faster.
These were taken today after the patch. FrameRate is in the upper right corner (Game FPS counter and FRAPS in Yellow) The boost in FPS with the GUI off is stable and constant. The GUI is bottlenecking and sucking up FR for me. While on an indoor mission today I was averaging 38 FPS with the GUI on, which was great but I turned it off and it shot up to 70 FPS and remained stable between 70-74 FPS. Which is what I should be getting.
Standing Still with Gui ON
http://i650.photobucket.com/albums/uu227/Valeran113/GameClient2009-08-2116-41-47-91.jpg
Standing Still With Gui OFF
http://i650.photobucket.com/albums/uu227/Valeran113/GameClient2009-08-2116-41-59-19.jpg
Flying with GUI ON
http://i650.photobucket.com/albums/uu227/Valeran113/GameClient2009-08-2116-45-46-38.jpg
Flying with GUI OFF
http://i650.photobucket.com/albums/uu227/Valeran113/GameClient2009-08-2116-45-53-14.jpg
WIndows XP service pack 3, 32 bit. 1gb ddr5 ram, 1000mhz clock speed RADEON (NOT NVIDIA!) 4800 HD video card. 2gb DDR2 memory. 3.0ghz dual core processor, intel e8400. Sata 1 hard drive. No background programs, drivers up to date. Champions uses up to 400mb of my ram, and up to 70% of my processor. It averages 150mb and 30%. I run on minimum settings with auto FPS smoother options off and GPU processing on, 1680/1050 fullscreen. It runs at 30 FPS when i first log in, but that quickly degrades after some combat.
The new patch did make my initial FPS smoothness last longer, but still runs out. It gets smoother if I restart the game. DEFINATELY some sort of memory leak.
I was having the same issue everyone is having I have:
C2D E6600
4GB of RAM
Geforce 9800 GTX
Windows Vista Ultimate
I play at 1920 X 1080
I was getting between 7-20 FPS which was killing me. My computer isnt the fastest but I was hoping to at least get 20-30 fps. I started fudging around and have now gotten it to 20-40 frames with some dipping into the teens when there are 10 people or more around, much better than when I started this.
1. Go to your NVIDIA control Panel and Disable PhysX
2. When you run the game check to see if you have a wmnetwk.exe (I found this using up 30% of my CPU)
If you see this, then go to services.msc on your run bar and stop the Windows media Player Network Sharing service.
In Game I turned off Anti-Aliasing, set my shadows to low, bloom to low and max physics debris objects to the lowest setting.
I hope this helps you guys out! Feel free to PM me if you have questions.
In the Champions launcher/patcher, click Options, and under "Advanced Command Line", enter the following:
-SetTestingMode -threadPerf -showfps
Then start the game normally (you should see a bunch of debugging information in the lower left part of the screen), enter a zone where the performance is bad, and run this command to generate a screenshot:
/screenshot_ui_jpg
And email the screenshot (saved to Champions installation folder\Champions Online\Live\screenshots) to profiler@crypticstudios.com
Then exit, go back to the Options in the launcher, and remove these options from the "advanced command line".
If you have not already done so, please also follow the instructions here to send us a timerRecord profile at the same time.
I like the game a lot, ohhh i cant wait till I'm playing this the way it was suppose to be played!
Just submitted my profiler file and the ticket!
Hope it helps out!!
You should already have my previous profiler log, but I included another that goes along with the screenshot. The system information hasn't changed from my last ticket submission.
Turning off the UI gives an immediate 20 FPS increase. I remember City of Heroes had this issue as well, so you might want to have people go back and look at what the solution for that was.
Second observation... the game client seems to only use around 500 MB of memory on average, this seems exceedingly low. I mean, I might be missing something here, but web browsers use that much memory.
My Gaming machine:
Athlon 64 X2 5000+
2 gigs DDR2 800 RAM
Geforce GTS 250
Recommended settings - 10-20 FPS
My friend's gaming rig:
Intel E8500
4 gigs DDR2 800 RAM
Geforce 8800GTS
Recommended settings - 25-40 FPS
My Laptop
Intel T2250
2 gigs RAM
Geforce Go7600
Recommended settings - 5 -12 FPS
My Home Theater PC:
Athlon 64 X2 7850
4 gigs DDR2 800 RAM
Geforce 9500GT
Recommended settings: 25 -40 FPS
The trend I saw in all of this is that the computers with the faster processors perform much better than the ones with slower CPUs even when the machine with the slower CPU has a much better video card installed.
I then started running the Nvidea System Monitor while playing and my suspicions were confirmed. In all cases, on all machines the CPU was being pushed to 90-100% while the temps on the GPU barely changed at all during gameplay.
This means that the game currently is not utilizing the graphics card to any real degree and is instead putting most of the graphics load onto the CPU, meaning that even if you had a Geforce GTS285, if you have a lower end CPU you will see poor graphics performance in Champions Online.
The only point in playing where I saw any serious workload being pushed to the graphics card is in the Character Creator menu. In that part of the game, the GPU temps spike up 15-25 degrees indicating that the code in that subprogram does put the majority of the workload onto the graphics card there, but in the rest of the game the code hasn't been optimized yet to take advantage of the higher end video cards.
The programmers probably didn't have enough time to optimize the graphics code for the entire game before launch and instead left the bulk of the performance issues running through the CPU in order to have the game quickly ready for launch. However, since the Character Creator is basically a seperate program (and one that they probably worked on first) the code for that program did get tweaked to use the graphics cards.
Swapping the CPUs in the Gaming and HTPC rigs essentially swapped the FPS in each machine.
Gaming machine with Athlon 64 X2 5000 - 10-20 FPS
Gaming machine with Athlon 64 X2 7850 - 25-40 FPS
HTPC machine with Athlon 64 X2 5000 - 10-20 FPS
HTPC machine with Athlon 64 X2 7850 - 25-40 FPS
This basically confirms that with an Nvidea baced system, the graphics processing load is being placed on the CPU and NOT the video card.
The part that baffles me in my case is that with post-processing off neither my CPU or GPU is maxing out, yet I still only get about 40 FPS. Where the heck is the bottleneck??
Core2Duo @ 3.6 GHz + Radeon HD4770
http://forums.champions-online.com/showthread.php?p=770119#post770119
This fix only worked for the OP, don't bother.
This is an example. It actually happens on all the maps, anytime a "new" environment is loaded.
I know the xbox and other consoles have some challenges with that mechanism. Could it be linked to an xbox / console code optimization?
Is it linked to the GPU memory? or GPU speed? or GPU memory speed? Something else?
ATI 4890HD 1GB
Q8200 Quad Core
4GB Ram
[EDIT]
Never mind.. fixed mine.. un-installed the first client and re-downloaded the updated one from fileplanet (the one where you don't have to move any files and only downloads a 168mb patch), now I get 50+fps both still or moving
Yeah, i've heard this as well. What I don't get is, how could they let this happen? Tons of people have 2 cores now etc, I'd understand is having dual cores was a rarity..but it's not.
I mean my specs are :
Intel Core 2 Duo E8400
Radeon 4870 x2
3 gigs of ram
XP
And I gotta put most stuff too before even the half way point, and a few of the other options off...and even then I only get 30s-40s.
Running on:
AMD Phenom 9600 quad-core 2.3 GHz
512mb Ati Radeon HD 4670
4 GB ram
Vista home premium 64-bit
AMD fusion for gaming utility can be found here:
http://game.amd.com/us-en/drivers_fusion.aspx?p=1
I'l have to try this and see if it helps.
While I thank the DEV's for this thread...has there been any progress on this? We are getting close to a week of these problems and its really becoming annoying to play this @ 5-30 FPS ..my god its just a MMO..they are typically less taxing on systems then say FPS (first person shooters). OK now stop reading this and get back to work optimizing ...I'm done with my mini rant:D
That worked for me I now have 30 fps on low setting instead of 20 with 8800GTXOC
core 2 quad @ 2,3 gh, 4 gb ddr 2 ram, geforce 9600 gt, win 7 in win xp mode, game settings at zero performance, max speed, and i think too, the game is running on one processor...