Increasing Game Performance

DarkSkiesx - Dreamweaver · January 2014

WTB more FPS in 80 vs 80 TWs!

Most of us have pretty good computers/laptops, by that I mean they should be good enough to run pretty smooth, calling out names I've seen videos from two people that seem to have flawless FPS in TWs (namely Spell_Caster and Arawin - pls post your specs!) so why do I get 5-7fps qq

Has anyone tried, or does this work;

Changing the PWI Elementclient process to 'priority: High' and also setting the affinity as one CPU.

EDIT: i.e. creating shortcut to elementclient and editing the destination info to;

C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe /C START "../elementclient.exe" /high /affinity 1

As PWI only uses one CPU perhaps modern computers are treating PWI as multi core which then screws over the performance?

EDIT2: More specifically, the elementclient process contains numerous threads these should all be processed on the same CPU which is the way the game engine was designed, and modern computers/windows are instead shuffling these threads to separate cores/CPUs to be processed simultaneously which would work great if PWI was a multi threaded application!

So I can post a speccy later, but just wanted to hear thoughts, experiences, solutions.

Thanks in advance.

FistToDeath - Dreamweaver · January 2014

Last TW I had 3-5 FPS the whole time, so I feel your pain.

An easy solution is for you guys to have less people in TW, npnp.

Wanna know your results too. Having a 600ms ping is bad enough, top that with 5 fps and you have an unplayable situation. Some times I died without even noticing I was under attack.

Desdi - Sanctuary · January 2014

Most of the time I play with 300-500 ping and my FPS drops really low in TWs too...I'm playing on a laptop but it's pretty new, bought it last year, and it's pretty good, works great. I have no FPS issues other than TWs.

Socqar - Lost City · January 2014

I'm using right now a pretty heavy computer, GTX 660, i7 processor... and I usually play at max. graphs... Except in TW, things go crazy there and I have to lower effects or it becomes unplayable...

I'll check next TW/NW what are my FPS and perhaps try that solution... PV on a full pull is a huge lagger as well unless you lower a bit effects...

Playing with 300-600 ping here as well, feel your pain as well U.U

SylenThunder - Twilight Temple · January 2014

DarkSkiesx - Dreamweaver wrote: »

WTB more FPS in 80 vs 80 TWs!

Most of us have pretty good computers/laptops, by that I mean they should be good enough to run pretty smooth, calling out names I've seen videos from two people that seem to have flawless FPS in TWs (namely Spell_Caster and Arawin - pls post your specs!) so why do I get 5-7fps qq

Has anyone tried, or does this work;

Changing the PWI Elementclient process to 'priority: High' and also setting the affinity as one CPU.

EDIT: i.e. creating shortcut to elementclient and editing the destination info to;

As PWI only uses one CPU perhaps modern computers are treating PWI as multi core which then screws over the performance?

EDIT2: More specifically, the elementclient process contains numerous threads these should all be processed on the same CPU which is the way the game engine was designed, and modern computers/windows are instead shuffling these threads to separate cores/CPUs to be processed simultaneously which would work great if PWI was a multi threaded application!

So I can post a speccy later, but just wanted to hear thoughts, experiences, solutions.

Thanks in advance.

I've tried it, and multiple variations on it using systems with anywhere from 2 to 8 cores. Most of the time, it didn't have much impact at all, in some cases, it actually made things worse.

What I've done....

I have PWI on a Raid-Stripe system built for speed. I kill all un-neccesary processes when I play. (or at least, when I TW) I've excluded the client folder from all scans, and given it full access through all of my firewalls.

I run the game on mostly high settings, with the Distance at 4/5 and shadows turned off.

My system specs are as follows....
CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4GHZ I'm pretty sure but I'm not at home to see what it's currently clocked at.
RAM: 6GB Kingston, not certain on the speed, but it matches the CPU and MB specs.
GPU: Nvidia GTX650ti 2GB RAM. It's a bit overkill for the PC, but at this point I can get away with just upgrading the CPU, MB and RAM for a while. I also know the the client barely makes use of it at all.

I usually have a direct server ping of about 78ms, and in-game is usually between 150 and 200 (because the in-game number is round trip.)
I'll have to check my FPS numbers, but last I looked it was around 18-22FPS in Arcosaur, 40-50FPS out in the rest of the works, and I can usually get in the mid-30's during TW's. Most of my TW's are closer to 40 vs 40 though. At 80vs80 you're going to be running into some limitations within the client itself in displaying everything. (I have tested this on personal servers)

The best thing, is to turn the distance down, turn off terrain, and move the effects slider down a bit. That will give you the biggest boost in TW.

Fissile - Archosaur · January 2014

My old system was pretty similar to Sylen's except the Q6600 was over clocked to 3.6Ghz. Had to turn settings down for TW but everything else ran pretty well.

Current computer has an Intel Core i7-4770k clocked at 4Ghz with "turbo boost" increased to 4.8Ghz. I play TW at max settings with everything enabled except "soften" at 1920x1080. That's enough to keep frame rates playable even in high attendance TW in one team's base (with 100 or so players on screen channeling skills simultaneously drops the frame rate to around 10-15fps).

GPU is pretty much irrelevant for PWI because nearly all of the effects processing is done on the CPU due to PWI's dated game engine. If you want to get pwi running as smoothly as possible the things to focus on would be single-thread performance, network performance (QOS / packet scheduler for your PC or "gaming" network adapters that prioritize packets using hardware rather than software), ensuring you have at least 2GB of free physical memory, and to a lesser extent faster hard drive access (I don't know it for a fact but it appears some things are loaded dynamically during game play).

Honestly, due to the way the game is programmed even the top end of modern gaming systems are going to choke on it in situations like 80v80 TWs.

Socqar - Lost City · January 2014

Fissile - Archosaur wrote: »

My old system was pretty similar to Sylen's except the Q6600 was over clocked to 3.6Ghz. Had to turn settings down for TW but everything else ran pretty well.

Current computer has an Intel Core i7-4770k clocked at 4Ghz with "turbo boost" increased to 4.8Ghz. I play TW at max settings with everything enabled except "soften" at 1920x1080. That's enough to keep frame rates playable even in high attendance TW in one team's base (with 100 or so players on screen channeling skills simultaneously drops the frame rate to around 10-15fps).

GPU is pretty much irrelevant for PWI because nearly all of the effects processing is done on the CPU due to PWI's dated game engine. If you want to get pwi running as smoothly as possible the things to focus on would be single-thread performance, network performance (QOS / packet scheduler for your PC or "gaming" network adapters that prioritize packets using hardware rather than software), ensuring you have at least 2GB of free physical memory, and to a lesser extent faster hard drive access (I don't know it for a fact but it appears some things are loaded dynamically during game play).

Honestly, due to the way the game is programmed even the top end of modern gaming systems are going to choke on it in situations like 80v80 TWs.

I'll check that "Soften" thingy myself and see if it helps... MOreover, will have to give it a read on those improves you mention before...

DarkSkiesx - Dreamweaver · February 2014

Thanks all for the responses some very good info there!

I should probably add that I record my gameplay for TW/NW videos and such so this may be having an impact indirectly.

I have recently found out that my laptop has a USB 3.0 port so will be switching from USB 2.0 external HDD to a 3.0 version which allows for faster transfer rates. I believe there was a formula along the lines of 1920 x 1080 x 3 x 30fps = 186MB/s which was probably causing a bottleneck at USB 2.0 (which explains the lag/stutter in my videos) will be testing this out shortly.

In terms of the TW, having Optimization/naked mode/simple models on helps quite a bit, I usually prefer to keep the effects slider on full as even if you drop it a notch enemy skills are unrecognisable which is bad! Distances can be turned down a lot though unless you're scouting.

As Sylen pointed out the CPU affinity/priority thing is a bit temperamental, I've seen good and very bad from trialling it so probably won't be using that!

I have installed a SSD in my machine, and migrated the PWI folder there, which gives pretty good improvements, massively better in normal world daily stuff and pretty good in NW, but TW it's marginal but an improvement from before.

I've always shrugged off the 'exclude from anti virus and firewalls' so I will try that and see if that improves things. This slows down the data read rates?

I play mostly on my laptop except for TWs which I play on my computer, TWs on the laptop is pretty bad, even though its an i5!

Will update soon when I have more improvements!

SylenThunder - Twilight Temple · February 2014

DarkSkiesx - Dreamweaver wrote: »

...
I have recently found out that my laptop has a USB 3.0 port so will be switching from USB 2.0 external HDD to a 3.0 version which allows for faster transfer rates. I believe there was a formula along the lines of 1920 x 1080 x 3 x 30fps = 186MB/s which was probably causing a bottleneck at USB 2.0 (which explains the lag/stutter in my videos) will be testing this out shortly.
...

Yeah, for that I wouldn't go above something like 1680x1050.

DarkSkiesx - Dreamweaver wrote: »

...
I've always shrugged off the 'exclude from anti virus and firewalls' so I will try that and see if that improves things. This slows down the data read rates?
...

Mileage will vary by your AV/Firewall software, but here the skinny on it...

With the AV software, the worst part is that it will scan your client folder, find a false positive, and "clean" or quarantine the files. This causes client instability of course.
It will also actively scan the running processes, which will slow down the CPU time for the client and cause delays in processing data. (And remember, the CPU is where the client does the majority of the rendering.)
For the first reason, you absolutely need to exclude the client from all scans. It's something that is pretty common with some games on older engines because of the way they call for data from the server.

For the firewall, it's basically doing the same thing with all the packets going through your network adapter. If you exclude the .exe files for the client, then it will just ignore the data stream for those and won't run scans on them. Delay can be as extreme as 24k/ms with software like Norton360.

Increasing Game Performance

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