Performance Question: What FPS Should I be Seeing?

#21 Ok... so these are the things to test if your performance is bad. Test them in this order... and test them in the Warrior Camp level.

1. First thing to test is disabling SSAO... then try DoF or EdgeAA (but those are much cheaper). If any of these improve your framerate significantly your fillrate bound.

2. Disable reflections on WaterBlocks or Rivers. These cause a nearly 2X hit on draw calls each when they are visible. If this significantly improves your framerate then your CPU bound.

3. Select the Sun and disable shadows. If this gives you a huge performance improvement then again your probably CPU bound. The Sun currently takes a 4x hit on draw calls because nothing in that scene has LOD on it.

4. If nothing else fixes it... switch to Basic Lighting. If you got this far then your card has extremely really low fillrate.

I suspect 1 and 3 will solve most people's issues with framerate.

While i expect to make significant improvements to Advanced Lighting, you should not compare it to TGEA lighting performance. AL is a completely different beast... its an advanced technique that is used in games like GTA4, Crysis, and Killzone2.

#22 @Bloodknight - Your fullscreen resolution is an unrealistic expectation for Beta 1. By the benchmarks your card can barely run Crysis at 30fps at 1920x1200. I expect improvements here, but don't expect 100fps at that resolution with AL.

@JC - If you can send me a before and after prefs.cs i can tell you what is going wrong. I suspect the SSAO is getting forced on.

@deepscratch - Sounds like your fillrate bound. An 8800GT is a good card... but what resolution are you trying to run?

#23 My dev machine system specs:
Vista 64 (just did a fresh install about a month ago)
Intel i7 920 quadcore (4x 2.66ghz)
6GB tri-channel DDR3 (3x 2GB)
GTX 295 video card (latest drivers)
March 2009 DX SDK / runtime

At 1280x1024 resolution on warrior camp with SSAO and edgeAA enabled I get between 30-40 fps. Disabling the SSAO/EdgeAA/DoF had a negligible impact on performance. Disabling full reflect gave a little extra boost (5 fps or so). Deleting the water plane completely is about the same.

At full screen 1920x1200 resolution, even with all the post FX turned and water reflection turned off, I get 1 fps.

Interestingly it doesn't seem to matter where the camera is facing in the scene. It can be facing straight down at the terrain or looking out across the open valley and my FPS remains constant.

Is T3D utilizing vsync by default by any chance?

In any case, great work so far guys. Looking forward to continuing with the beta and the final release.

#24 50-55 FPS on a Vista 64 quadro dual Core i7, 9800 GTX+ at 1440 x 900 (28")
10-15 FPS on a Vista 64 quadro dual Core i7, 9800 GTX+ at 1920 x 1200 (28")

550-600 FPS with TGEA 1.7
150-200 FPS with TGEA 1.8

In the world, much of players (future customers) n' do not have powerful PC.
Steam Hardware Survey: April 2009: http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/

#25 @Ademys - People that have lower end GPUs... they can use Basic Lighting... thats whats its there for.

#26 @Matt - Try disabling the shadows on the Sun. What results do you get?

#27 Alright, I did a diff of the two preferences just now. In the first test I used stock settings, 1024x768x32 windowed. This test was in a custom map, and received ~115fps. I then set the resolution to 800x600x32 windowed through the options window, and saw a drop to ~11fps, despite being in a lower resolution. The setting was the resolution.

Before:

$pref::Video::mode = "1024 768 false 32 60 0";

After:

$pref::Video::mode = "800 600 false 32 60 60";

Changing the ending 60 to a 0 fixes the problem, getting me back up to 135 fps.

#28 @JC - Ah... you beat me to my post in another thread.

Yes... a bad script has it setting the antialias level to 60... which screws things up bad.

#29 Lol

question related to the graphics options / behavior

I've seen that the "driver selection bug" from TGEA is still present. I guess it might be somewhere by intend but to me its really annoying if I set it to D3D8 for rendering and it just switches back to D3D9 on restart, ignoring my request.

#30 @Marc - We've discussed it some and the D3D8 GFX layer may get dropped from Torque 3D all together. Its more to maintain for a tiny slice of the PC market.

#31 ok

#32 Go into

/Torque 3D 2009 Beta 1/Genre Kits/FPS Genre Kit/game/core/scripts/gui/

Open optionsDlg.cs

Change the line :

%newMode = %newRes SPC %newFullScreen SPC %newBpp SPC %newRefresh SPC %newFSAA;

to

%newMode = %newRes SPC %newFullScreen SPC %newBpp SPC %newRefresh SPC "0";

Disables the saving of the 60x FSAA thing, so when you change resolution again it wont add the 60..

And 60xAA bug gone, there is no option called OptFSAASelectMenu in the dialog anyways.

Its the same for the PhysX demo at
/Torque 3D 2009 Beta 1/Demos/PhysX/game/core/scripts/gui/

PS: Remember to change resolution atleast once for the change to update your config file.

#33 Great catch.. Bo!

#34 Ok Thanks BO!

70-90 FPS on a Vista 64 quadro dual Core i7, 9800 GTX+ at 1920 x 1200 (28")

#35 Well if it wasnt for J.C we would still be pulling our hair out :P

Credit where credit is duo :) finding out how to fix it was the easy part :P

#36 I positioned the camera to face what appears to be a destroyed church (the largest building in the level aside from the tower) and did a few tests. The results actually don't seem that unreasonable, at least at this resolution in Windowed mode (of course keeping in mind there is still optimization work underway as well):

1280x1024, windowed, All post fx OFF, sun shadows off - 93fps
1280x1024, windowed, All post fx OFF, sun shadows ON - 53fps
1280x1024, windowed, All post fx OFF, sun shadows ON, waterplane deleted - 57fps
1280x1024, windowed, All post fx ON, sun shadows ON, waterplane deleted - 37fps
1280x1024, windowed, SSAO off, edgeAA and DoF ON, sun shadows ON, waterplane deleted - 48fps

#37 Nice catch on the FSAA value being set to 60x. Using the fix above I was able to use full screen, 1920x1200, everything on (except SSAO but including full reflect water) and getting up to 100fps in some areas.

Unfortunately Flickr didn't keep the largest size screenshots (1920x1200) but you get the idea [fps is in yellow in top right]:

#38 Thanks Bo. Your fix took my fps from This to 5-10 fps. (depending on where I'm looking)

#39 @Mike.

from 1 to 5-10 fps ?

What are you playing on, your cell phone ? :P (sry coudnt resist) hehe

#40 @Mike - What are you system specs?