Drop of the frame rate

[Mr Whippy]

Has anyone else noticed a drop of roughly 50% of the frame rate going from 086 > 087 or 088?

The gauges seem to be intermittent too. There is stuff changing in the shader libraries too that is not being documented, and the racer.ini (ie, new full screen shaders defined but one doesn't even exist)

I wish Ruud would help us out with a better quality changelog, because trying to find why certain things have changed (ie, the alpha func for reflection strength shader stopping working (the one Stereo posted on RSC)), and this recent frame rate drop, is impossible without it.

Dave

 

[Tiberius]

Dave, I've been offline since August so have missed a few versions but haven't noticed any framerate issues. I just imported a WIP track (200k polies onscreen), managing 100fps, wouldn't have expected more in 084 or 085. Lighting has changed though, not sure whether it's just the shaders but looks like there's more calculations going on with the pixel lighting, maybe it's just putting more load on the GPU?

Agreed, things have changed that aren't mentioned in the changelog, that's the first thing I look at and apart from adding the diffuse/ambient script commands nothing's mentioned there.

Cheers, Bruce.

 

[FiftyOrange]

I can confirm this.

Benchmarked Barcelona with Supra, on 086 it served up 200 frames a second. With 088, it's only running at 120. But that's pre INI changes. I need to set up the new INI to my liking for a better comparison.

Edit:
after a bit of setting up the INI to my liking (mostly volume settings) I've managed to get less than 10 FPS, on a non-CG Carlswood.

http://img705.imageshack.us/img705/7978/racersh itfps.jpg
Something must be wrong.

 

[boomer541]

I can confirm this.
http://img705.imageshack.us/img705/7978/racersh itfps.jpg
Something must be wrong.

I also noticed a drop in FPS and I'm running an nVidia GTX285 which I normall use vsync on to limit the frame rate to about 75 FPS so that I don't get taring of the screen image.

Also I have trouble with images on reace department also. needs looking into.

 

[FiftyOrange]

I also noticed a drop in FPS and I'm running an nVidia GTX285 which I normall use vsync on to limit the frame rate to about 75 FPS so that I don't get taring of the screen image.

We've got some pretty serious gaming hardware, and if we're noticing significant drops and actually noticeably slow rates, then for the average or below average gaming gear, it's going to be unplayable. The other point mentioned was intermittent dials. Yes, that's a problem I have too.

 

[Ruud]

Has anyone else noticed a drop of roughly 50% of the frame rate going from 086 > 087 or 088?

The gauges seem to be intermittent too. There is stuff changing in the shader libraries too that is not being documented, and the racer.ini (ie, new full screen shaders defined but one doesn't even exist)

I wish Ruud would help us out with a better quality changelog, because trying to find why certain things have changed (ie, the alpha func for reflection strength shader stopping working (the one Stereo posted on RSC)), and this recent frame rate drop, is impossible without it.

I haven't changed anything regarding alphafunc, but if you have that shader for me I could take a look.
In the main physics loop, I added a glFinish() call (which flushes the entire OpenGL pipeline). This made tearing in non-vsync mode much better, but perhaps it has reduced framerate too much (vsync is really always a lot nicer anyway, but still). I've uploaded a version without glFinish() at http://www.racer.nl/download/racer0881.zip (exe only) so you can try if that gets you your framerate back.

Irritating about the views - any idea if there is a specific car/track combo that exhibits this?

 

[Tiberius]

I'm honestly not seeing a performance hit and I'm still on older hardware (Duo 3.15, 9800GTX+). Just updated one of my own cars (thanks Ian), with that onscreen (50k polies + a few large textures) plus an unoptimized track (200k polies and lots of 1024x1024 tree textures with mipmap turned off - that takes away 25fps easily), I'm still seeing 80-100fps in 1600x1200 with Vsync on and 512x512 env map textures. The newer racer.exe that Ruud posted gives me an extra 10-15fps but nothing really noticeable.

Strange thing is that I have a bug where AF and some other settings keep getting turned of in the nVidia control panel, if I turn it up I actually get better framerates in Racer and Far Cry 2 - is that a bug or what?

Ian, what have you altered in racer.ini? If you turn up the multisampling that will bring your framerate down really quickly on any card - if I run 16x sampling at 1600x1200 I'm down to 30fps, even on Carlswood.

Cheers, Bruce.

 

[FiftyOrange]

I haven't changed anything regarding alphafunc, but if you have that shader for me I could take a look.
In the main physics loop, I added a glFinish() call (which flushes the entire OpenGL pipeline). This made tearing in non-vsync mode much better, but perhaps it has reduced framerate too much (vsync is really always a lot nicer anyway, but still). I've uploaded a version without glFinish() at http://www.racer.nl/download/racer0881.zip (exe only) so you can try if that gets you your framerate back.

Irritating about the views - any idea if there is a specific car/track combo that exhibits this?

This worked.
Exact same car/track with completely the same settings, 088.1 was approximately 50% faster than 088 (82 fps, compared to 120 fps)

 

[FiftyOrange]

Ian, what have you altered in racer.ini? If you turn up the multisampling that will bring your framerate down really quickly on any card - if I run 16x sampling at 1600x1200 I'm down to 30fps, even on Carlswood.

Set to the default, of 4.

Altered things in the INI were just things like turning the volume down, turning off that wrong-way indicator, skipping the lights sequence at the start, that kind of thing.

 

[boomer541]

Thanks Ruud for that 0.8.8.1, I get a 20 to 40 fps increase with vsync off on swiss stroll, carlswood and country tracks with my nVidia GTX 285.

 

[FiftyOrange]

Thanks Ruud for that 0.8.8.1, I get a 20 to 40 fps increase with vsync off on swiss stroll, carlswood and country tracks with my nVidia GTX 285.

I'm getting 3 to 6 times more than that.

Sorry about the weird JPG compression. Something went wrong.

http://img706.imageshack.us/img706/7491/racer55556.jpg

 

[GizmoPower]

Originally Posted by boomer541
Thanks Ruud for that 0.8.8.1, I get a 20 to 40 fps increase with vsync off on swiss stroll, carlswood and country tracks with my nVidia GTX 285.

Think he means 20 to 40 fps more then before. -Increase-

 

[EngineOfDarkness]

This made tearing in non-vsync mode much better, but perhaps it has reduced framerate too much (vsync is really always a lot nicer anyway, but still).

Is that really necessary? There is no real reason to not use vsync (with triple buffering of course) in racer. Older games might be framerate dependent (I think like quake 3 where a higher max fps also makes you able to jump further etc...), but in racer physics shouldn't really be depending on the framerate (that's just my point of view, though).

 

[GizmoPower]

0.8.8.1 with my old 9600gt card

 

[FiftyOrange]

0.8.8.1 with my old 9600gt card View attachment 20801

I squashed my resolution down to a tiny 1600x1200, and frame rates went f**king crazy. Looks a bit rough around the edges though.

More apologies for JPEG compression. It's like it's 8-bit or something. Weird and annoying.

http://img709.imageshack.us/img709/3186/racers14300plus.jpg

 

[Alexander Knoll]

...hmm...i get only ~72fps...but with a 110k poly car

 

[cjjohnsson]

ok, so i just tried how much FPS i would get, since my framerate dropped down to ~1-3 FPS, and testing @a PC with GTX 295, i get now up to 600 FPS with the 0.8.8.1 .exe (when i got 1-3 FPS i was testing with the old 0.8.8 .exe)
what helped me (and might help some others) is, to try the several Graphic-settings in the config window