Frame Rate!

Well, just to cut straight to the point, here is my problem

My FPS ranges from a peak of 17fps sitting around not doing much, and to a low of around 3-4 FPS when flying somewhat fast.

As far as my system specs go...I have a 1ghz AMD Athlon (thunderbird), 896MB of ram, a Geforce 4 Ti 4600, and a SB Live X-Gamer 5.1 soundcard.

( for a very specific description of my pc: http://www.sparklyfresh.com/sys.php )

And yes, I do have the latest Detonator drivers (42.01)
I also have the latest 4in1 (hyperion, v4.45) driver installed..

Agp 4x is enabled, and I have tweaked As many settings I can find to tweak to make games run better--and they have worked in every game but this, unfortunetly.

Any help is greatly appreciated.
Thanks!

Same problem here! Only my frame rate rnages from 3 to 7 fps.
I got 2ghz, 512 rambus ram, GF3 Ti200 (128mb). I run UT2k3 at 80fps. I don't see why it laggs so bad here!
Any suggetsions or tweaks you can suggest? Id be happy to ahve it over 20 fps!

i have noticed when i alt+tab out of the game for things, then come back, the frame rates plummet. things, such as the inside of my house, that would pull a minimum of 15fps drop to 2-5fps. I try not to, but sometimes i just need to read a bit about scripting or what have you, and coming back to low frame rates is a tad bothersome. At least it still runs with no major artifacting.

I run it in window mode. DO you think that affects the framerate?

first, you can't really compare framerates between UT and this. In unreal tournament, you have the entire map downloaded before you even start to paly - textures and all. even the lighting is mostly set in stone. so all the framerate depends on is how fast your computer can cruch those #'s and render the pic. Even if you are on the laggiest server ever, your framerate won't drop.

Here, everything is streamed to your computer. The map is completely dynamic, you are contantly encountering new textures and structures. suddnly your FPS depends on how fast you can download the scene, then render the scene. Not to mention tha single sim is at least 4 times the size of a unreal map, and capable of supporting (so they tell me) 3 times as many players and everything can change at any time, including lighting. you have a LOT to get downloaded and processed in a very short time. SO what happens is that while the rendering your system does is fast, we don't have the information on what to render as quickly. If you didn't have to download everything and the map was static, I imagine you would get framerates compareable to current 3d games (probably faster). Thats why your FPS drops so bad when you are flying, suddlnly you have to render 256meters in front of you while traveling at 20m/s. Thats about 5800 sq meters of map your rendering every second - about a football feild's worth of land you are downloading and rendering in 3d on your computer.

Then you also have to consider the serverload. EVERYTHING is being calculated by the server, for up to 100 players per server. it has its own FPS, which you can see by hitting alt-1. It has to figure these things out faster than your home computer can render them so you don't get phasing.


right now, 10 fps is considered the low end of acceptable framerates - if you get less than that, you have cause to worrie. as the beta progresses, and the software gets better, so will the FPS. As our internet connections get faster, so will the FPS.

Some things you can do to improve your frame rate is lessen your draw distance. Tell the program you have less bandwidth, or just hang out facing the ocean all day - nothing to render, your frames jump up. That and have faith that it will get better - and remember, you can't see faster than 24fps anyway.

BBC

Perhaps when you logon, you can be given the option to download the current sim you are in, and along with it a type of checksum. This way, all the stuff is already downloaded, rendering faster.....And the checksum would be used to determine if anything at all has changed...And if it has...it would only download that single item. This would probably require a long time to download the state, and since I dont know how large (in mb) exactly an area can get, I dont know if this is feesable or not...

I would think that as little or less then 5 mins after login a full sim download would be pointless. As so much can change so quickly. Not to mention traveling across to different sims. I am no programmer or net wiz but that seems to sound like more processes that both the server and client would have to go through even during play. Considering that not only would you be rendering what is there but in the backround youd be running a check to see if there is an update to what is in your system.

Maybe some sort of read ahead type thing could work?

But i can see the same issues for that too.

Hang in there!

We will continue to work VERY aggressively to get the frame rates up. We are monitoring rates very closely and have a bunch of good metrics to track it - average frame rate for all users right now is around 13fps, but as you guys describe, it's the bad cases (flying toward new sims), etc, that are really tough.

The technology to get even to these frame rates is quite sophisticated, given that everything (objects, lights, movement) is completely dynamic. But we have lots of ideas yet to play with to go faster. Part of what we are doing is waiting and watching what kind of content is created, so that we can optimize for that.

What you are seeing mostly slowing you is that when you are rapidly moving, there are lots of objects streaming into scene. As those objects are decompressed from the network, turned into geometry and lit, there is considerable load. This is where the biggest bottleneck is - our 'static' triangle rate (when no object are coming in) is quite high - typically >1M tris/sec, and can get as high as 3-4.

Hang in there!

We will continue to work VERY aggressively to get the frame rates up. We are monitoring rates very closely and have a bunch of good metrics to track it - average frame rate for all users right now is around 13fps, but as you guys describe, it's the bad cases (flying toward new sims), etc, that are really tough.

The technology to get even to these frame rates is quite sophisticated, given that everything (objects, lights, movement) is completely dynamic. But we have lots of ideas yet to play with to go faster. Part of what we are doing is waiting and watching what kind of content is created, so that we can optimize for that.

What you are seeing mostly slowing you is that when you are rapidly moving, there are lots of objects streaming into scene. As those objects are decompressed from the network, turned into geometry and lit, there is considerable load. This is where the biggest bottleneck is - our 'static' triangle rate (when no object are coming in) is quite high - typically >1M tris/sec, and can get as high as 3-4.