Performance issues? Read more here

[Brian Clancy]

Okay, its pretty general knowledge that rF2 is heavy on resources, with even killer PC's having some pretty low FPS. I wanted to add a few details and put together a little info on the whys and what if's

Firstly, rF2 does NOT need or use the +Fullproc command anymore as rF1 did, it currently makes use of 2 cores. However, this is an issue for many people who run multicore (3-4-6 or more cores). Many people think that really good frame rates are almost totally down to the GPU (gfx card) but in reality, the CPU does handle a massive amount of the data/work for the GPU so the current limitation of 2 cores will and does effect some PC's performance The good news is that ISI may well increase this number later

Next up is GPU Drivers, this is something else that can have a dramatic impact on the performance of your PC. ATI/Radeon cards have proven to show big increases in FPS in rF2 by using the newest Preview Drivers (you can find the article Here http://www.racedepartment.com/forum/threads/rf2-fixes-and-adjustments-list.45695/) and you can be sure that newer drivers later will further improve performance on most cards.

The next thing to consider is that this is very much a BETA, the code has yet to be optimised for performance and little tweeks that can add to FPS rates have not been made yet. I did some testing today on my rig:

Intel Q8200 quad core 2.33Mhz O/Clocked to 3.5+ Mhz
Asus P5QB Deluxe MoBo
XFX HD6970 (Overclocked) running 3 screens in Eyefinity ( 3840 x 1024)
8Gig Corsair Dominator Ram

Now, this rig, running rF2 with all setting at Max/Full with 16xAA (No HDR) at Mills with the Megane averaged around 120 FPS. Very playable and really quite nice looking, but well below par compared to other games. Once I had finished my tests, it was apparent the GPU peaked at a VERY LOW 62% occupancy, leaving almost 40% of the cards capability unused. This will improve as the software is improved, but added to the 50% of cores unused, its not too hard to see that we can expect some very good increases in performance in the future before the gold edition.

I hope this helps to make users a bit more aware of the reasons for the current FPS issues..... At the end of the day, this is a BETA test and its really too easy to forget that with all the excitement

We will continue to add new fixes/updates and improved settings etc as we get them in the 'Fixes and adjustments list' sticky thread here: http://www.racedepartment.com/forum/threads/rf2-fixes-and-adjustments-list.45695/

 

[Quo-Fan]

Someone wrote here what he did to solve the problem: http://cmsracing.com/champion/forum...sible-solution-frame-rate-problems-rf2-18411/
I am not shure if this is worth the work and i don´t know, if that is a solution that helps everyone.

 

[Eric. K]

Performance gain from parallel CPUs is always constrained by whatever amount of the code must be run in sequence, which varies per program. Typically you see a linear improvement curve with small numbers of CPUs, which slowly flattens out to no improvement at all at some point which has to be found by experiment (communication overhead between the threads is also a factor). Since driving a car down the road is very linear (by definition!), I'd be surprised if 32 cores showed any significant improvement over, maybe, 8. That's just a guess, of course.

Your response is the perfect illustration why software is so poorly written these days. There are a lot of software engineers that do not know much about the underlying hardware nor parallel computing. People think that in order to use all the cores they have to create worker threads and have complicated synchronization mechanism. Which couldnt be further from the truth!! You can write a single loop which will use all the cores on your PC without EVER having to create a new thread. Please do some serious reading on parallel computing before making such a comments. There is a very basic start -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCL

 

[Neil Bateman]

It depresses me that some people on older machines get such high frame rates and it makes me think i have some serious problems with my PC which i thought would cope with most things, i had a race at sepang with 20 megans, 1680x1050 with everything turned up to maximum and at one point it went down to 10fps on the straight, maxed out at 30fps.
My specs are below and i can run rF1 on the same settings using a default car and track at around 120fps minimum and 250fps maximum, is it my system or is rF2 such a huge resource hogger at the moment.

Windows 7 Home Premium
Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-2500K 3.30GHz (3.60GHz)
Gigabyte PH67A-UD3-B3 Mainboard
8GB OCZ3G1600LV2G DDR3 533 MHz (DDR3 1066)
AMD Radeon HD 6950 2GB Graphics
1TB Hitachi HDS721010CLA332 ATA Disk
1TB WD Ext HDD 1021 USB Disk
HannsG HG216 22" Widescreen Monitor

 

[Brian Clancy]

It depresses me that some people on older machines get such high frame rates and it makes me think i have some serious problems with my PC which i thought would cope with most things, i had a race at sepang with 20 megans, 1680x1050 with everything turned up to maximum and at one point it went down to 10fps on the straight, maxed out at 30fps.
My specs are below and i can run rF1 on the same settings using a default car and track at around 120fps minimum and 250fps maximum, is it my system or is rF2 such a huge resource hogger at the moment.

Windows 7 Home Premium
Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-2500K 3.30GHz (3.60GHz)
Gigabyte PH67A-UD3-B3 Mainboard
8GB OCZ3G1600LV2G DDR3 533 MHz (DDR3 1066)
AMD Radeon HD 6950 2GB Graphics
1TB Hitachi HDS721010CLA332 ATA Disk
1TB WD Ext HDD 1021 USB Disk
HannsG HG216 22" Widescreen Monitor

I really dont get it? A system like that should perform AT LEAST as well as mine, considering its not running eyefinity, better :O

Have you updated to the optimized 12.1 Preview Drivers for the 5xxx / 6xxx series cards? Have you updated you win7 (some people have found big gains with both) Are you running HDR? (this can cause a big FPS hit for some)

rF2 is a resource hog atm although that will improve as the code is optimized and we hope it will later run on more than 2 cores

 

[Philip Antonia]

The preview AMD drivers made a difference for me even with my ageing 4870 512mb GFX Card. Gained about 20-30 FPS at Monaco with most settings on high/max, shadows on medium & 1680x1050.

I have a i5 2500k running at 4.3GHZ and 8gig Corais Vengance Ram.

Fairly happy so far.

 

[Ivo Simons]

Hmm didnt help me with my 4850. Shame..

 

[Brian Clancy]

Hmm didnt help me with my 4850. Shame..

Again its all a bit 'Hit n Miss' it does seem to depend on 'other' system specs too, but a lot of people have found good gains with the 'Preview' driver, sorry Ivo

 

[UMC 22]

It depresses me that some people on older machines get such high frame rates and it makes me think i have some serious problems with my PC which i thought would cope with most things,

Perhaps people are again forgetting that rF2 is a beta. While better system specs usually mean better performance, this particular game is in raw form and is not optimised to use the latest technology. By the time of the final release it will surely take advantage of all the nifty kit people have and those of us on older hardware will be blown away by the performance they get.

At the end of the day, if all other games work fine then there it is clearly rF2 that is the problem, not your system.

 

[Rob Every]

I have little or no idea about framerates, so decided to have a look today.

Took me an hour or so to find out which key it was!!!

I was running the FR at Malayisa with most things medium apart from my car. Only practice, but was getting no worse than 100 most of the time!

What is better, lower or higher!! I have no idea!!

 

[Brian Clancy]

I have little or no idea about framerates, so decided to have a look today.

Took me an hour or so to find out which key it was!!!

I was running the FR at Malayisa with most things medium apart from my car. Only practice, but was getting no worse than 100 most of the time!

What is better, lower or higher!! I have no idea!!

Higher is better! and 100+ is very good at the moment

 

[Mark Burlinson]

Hi All
I have a Core i5 2500K @ 4500 / 8Ghz DDR3 Ram and 2x GTX 460 1GB (in SLI) and I was getting 10-20 fps with all settings on max / full! :eek: I disabled SLI in the Nvidia Control Panel (not in the game profiles menus, but actually turned it off using the radio button) and I am now getting 90 to 100 FPS with all settings on max and 16x AA / 16x AF

This might have been mentioned before, but it is worth a go for users who have FPS issues, remember you have to disable SLI not just select 'use single GPU' as just selecting 'use single GPU' does not have any effect

 

[Ramon van Rijn]

Me have this:

Intel Core i7 920 (the first i7 series), 12 Gb memory 1600mhz (low latency's, the good old
AMD 6970 2Gb in Crossfire. Anti-alias off, HDR off, Anisotrophic 2x, rest Max.
Then I get around 30-40fps on 1920x1200.

With 1680x1200 it will be around 40-50. When switch down to high settings it is around 60-70. On spa even 75 on some parts of the track.

Note: I already did a windows update to be up to date with Win7, and installed the 12.1 preview drivers.

Very strange and low fps here!

 

[Paul Thomas]

It was probably gleaned from the internet, the same place many people have 'heard' things that simply aren't true. This discussion is one that comes up frequently on gaming forums. Unfortunately, there are never any optical scientists involved to point out how wrong people are. No-one has proved one way or another just how much information we can process through our eyes in terms of 'FPS'.

One thing worth pointing out is that our eyes are not video cameras. They process a constant stream of information, and do not capture individual 'frames' at a specific rate. This information is then processed by our brain, which is capable of applying some interesting affects of it's own to make the final image that we 'see' look better. Those affects are why TVs, monitors and cinema screens work at all for displaying motion, rather than looking like a set rapidly flashing still images.

Put very simply, the closer something on a monitor is to the real world, the better it will appear to our eyes because less of those affects need to be applied by our brains. In other words, the higher the FPS (and therefore closer to a constant 'stream' it is), the better it will look.

Another thing people dont realise about human vision is what you see of the real world is heavily processed by the brain.
For starters the eye see every thing upside down which the brain flips. If you wear glasses that flip every thing upside down and wear them all the time soon, the brain will flip the image the right way up again. So if you then take your glasses off you will see everything upside down again until the brain adapts and flip it back again.

The high resolution vision of the eye is about the size of the your of your thumb held at arms length. every thing beyond is of low resolution which the brain processes to appear high. Its actually worse than that because we have two blind spot where the optic nerve is attached to the retina. Its interesting to note that the part of the brain that does thins processing is the same area of the brain evolved in imagination. Don't believe me about the blind spot you can see for yourself at http://www.doobybrain.com/2008/02/25/the-human-eye-has-a-blind-spot/.
(While your there check this out.
http://www.doobybrain.com/2012/01/14/samsung-transparent-smart-window/)

What you thing you see of the real world is not the real world but of a brain generated version (model ) of it. Not totally sure of the figures but human vision is 20% eye and 80% imagination. This is why magic works.

I could go on but rfactor is calling.

 

[Christopher Aponte]

Right now I have the following issue with my Laptop before testing on my game pc (...yeah...just making a test just in case if in the future my game pc says bye bye )

current specs:
Asus K53SV-B1 (Windows 7 HP 64bit)
CPU: Intel Core i7 2630QM @ 2.00GHz
RAM: 6GB DDR3
GPU: Intel HD Graphics 3000 (igp) (64mb) & Nvidia Geforce GT540M (1GB)

Now this is my issue with the laptop. While I have made changes in the sim configuration setup and in the nividia control panel to run with the nvidia graphics, the game still picks the Intel graphics as the main graphics driver. This creates the issue that i get really low fps (4fps minimum on Portugal) on track. I am pretty sure running it with the nvidia graphics card instead of the Intel's igp, I will get at least 10 to 20 fps extra.
The question is, how do I get rfactor 2 to see and use gt540m.

 

[Eric. K]

Right now I have the following issue with my Laptop before testing on my game pc (...yeah...just making a test just in case if in the future my game pc says bye bye )

current specs:
Asus K53SV-B1 (Windows 7 HP 64bit)
CPU: Intel Core i7 2630QM @ 2.00GHz
RAM: 6GB DDR3
GPU: Intel HD Graphics 3000 (igp) (64mb) & Nvidia Geforce GT540M (1GB)

Now this is my issue with the laptop. While I have made changes in the sim configuration setup and in the nividia control panel to run with the nvidia graphics, the game still picks the Intel graphics as the main graphics driver. This creates the issue that i get really low fps (4fps minimum on Portugal) on track. I am pretty sure running it with the nvidia graphics card instead of the Intel's igp, I will get at least 10 to 20 fps extra.
The question is, how do I get rfactor 2 to see and use gt540m.

I hate to say it Chris... but how to be mild about it... Intel graphics are nowhere near Nvidia and ATI discrete GPUs.

 

[UMC 22]

You can usually disable onboard graphics cards via the BIOS. Doing that should prevent anything detecting it, making your nVidia card the primary instead of the secondary.

 

[Brian Clancy]

Me have this:

Intel Core i7 920 (the first i7 series), 12 Gb memory 1600mhz (low latency's, the good old
AMD 6970 2Gb in Crossfire. Anti-alias off, HDR off, Anisotrophic 2x, rest Max.
Then I get around 30-40fps on 1920x1200.

With 1680x1200 it will be around 40-50. When switch down to high settings it is around 60-70. On spa even 75 on some parts of the track.

Note: I already did a windows update to be up to date with Win7, and installed the 12.1 preview drivers.

Very strange and low fps here!

WHAT! OMG! thats mad Ramon, I see 120FPS on a single 6970, in eyefinity (3840x1024) with 8Gig Dominator ram, Old Q8200 2.33Ghz O/C to 3.5Ghz....... Crazy, Im starting to think that the older hardware runs better :O

Try Disabling crossfire, some people have seen massive improvements

 

[Eric. K]

Ramon problem will be fixed soon Also, I wonder if anyone even tried to run it on Win8? It is a nice OS.

 

[Mark Birney]

Windows 8? Next week, Eric will be playing rFactor 3!

 

[Eric. K]

Windows 8? Next week, Eric will be playing rFactor 3!

lol... Yes, Windows 8 is in it ALPHA stage