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Issues, Workarounds & Localization

 
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[Rubicon] Low Frame Rate and Low GPU usage during large fleet battles

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The Mynx
Ebolaids Anonymous
#1 - 2013-12-03 07:11:42 UTC  |  Edited by: The Mynx
I'm experiencing very low framerate during fleet battles, but also low overall GPU/CPU load at the same time.

During normal roaming/PVE/empire activities I am able to maintain a steady 144 fps (limited via MSI Afterburner) and anywhere from 30% to 99% GPU usage. As soon as a large battle cranks up my framerate goes out the window.

For example, a large battle over the weekend saw upwards of 1000 ships on grid, and my frame rate dropped from 144 to the low teens. The strange part is my GPU usage drops to the low teens as well. CPU usage is rarely if ever over 60-65% so that doesn't seem to be the bottleneck either. Zooming way out helps a bit, bringing both GPU % and FPS to the high 20s but that still doesn't make sense.

The issue persists both in DX11 and in DX9 rendering modes, in windowed or fullscreen with Vsync both on and off. I have also tried turning off MSI Afterburner, with no effect.

Is this a known issue or is there a setting I can toggle to make my PC actually work to render fleet battles?

System Specs:
Intel Core i5 @ 4.5 GHz
NVIDIA GTX 780
16GB RAM
Windows 7 x64
CCP Maxwell
C C P
C C P Alliance
#2 - 2013-12-03 12:55:24 UTC
The Mynx wrote:
I'm experiencing very low framerate during fleet battles, but also low overall GPU/CPU load at the same time.

During normal roaming/PVE/empire activities I am able to maintain a steady 144 fps (limited via 3rd party software) and anywhere from 30% to 99% GPU usage. As soon as a large battle cranks up my framerate goes out the window.

For example, a large battle over the weekend saw upwards of 1000 ships on grid, and my frame rate dropped from 144 to the low teens. The strange part is my GPU usage drops to the low teens as well. CPU usage is rarely if ever over 60-65% so that doesn't seem to be the bottleneck either. Zooming way out helps a bit, bringing both GPU % and FPS to the high 20s but that still doesn't make sense.

The issue persists both in DX11 and in DX9 rendering modes, in windowed or fullscreen with Vsync both on and off.

Is this a known issue or is there a setting I can toggle to make my PC actually work to render fleet battles?

System Specs:
Intel Core i5 @ 4.5 GHz
2x Nvidia GTX 660 Ti SLI
16GB RAM
Windows 7 x64



Hi.
We have noticed that the SLI does not seem to run with DX11 unless you go to the Nvidia Control panel and under the program settings tab find "SLI Rendering Mode" and change the setting to either "Force alternate frame rendering 1" or "Force alternate frame rendering 2". It might be worth trying to see if this helps.

CCP Maxwell - QA Engineer - Team RnB
The Mynx
Ebolaids Anonymous
#3 - 2013-12-03 13:41:25 UTC
CCP Maxwell wrote:

Hi.
We have noticed that the SLI does not seem to run with DX11 unless you go to the Nvidia Control panel and under the program settings tab find "SLI Rendering Mode" and change the setting to either "Force alternate frame rendering 1" or "Force alternate frame rendering 2". It might be worth trying to see if this helps.


I've done this as well and noticed an overall decrease in performance. While both cards will show usage in DX11 my framerate becomes choppy and stutters when alternate frame rendering is forced. For this and other reasons I've been using DX9 pretty much exclusively, where SLI works as expected.


In any event, this is not a SLI issue - what I'm noticing, whether using one card or two, is low system resource usage during fleet battles.

What I would expect to see during an intense fleet fight is high GPU and CPU usage, with a corresponding drop in frame rate as the machine works to process all of the data on my screen.

What I'm seeing is a massive drop in frame rate AND resource usage. Again, during the last TiDi battle even zoomed out I was running 15-20 FPS, 20% GPU usage and 50% CPU usage. My machine actually runs cooler during these battles because the usage is so low. This is the issue I'm hoping to resolve - I have a reasonably powerful PC but it is not being put to work when it should!
The Mynx
Ebolaids Anonymous
#4 - 2013-12-05 22:26:46 UTC  |  Edited by: The Mynx
Anything?

I will be upgrading to a single GTX 780 this weekend so depending on current war action will update as necessary.

Edit: Here are some screenshots from a fleet tonight, using a single GTX 660 in borderless window mode, DX9, interval immediate

http://imgur.com/a/v0OwO#0
The Mynx
Ebolaids Anonymous
#5 - 2013-12-24 22:01:27 UTC
I tried disabling drone models and reducing textures in case it was an issue of running out of vram, but these didn't help either. Any suggestions?
Romeo Deluxe
School of Applied Knowledge
Caldari State
#6 - 2013-12-26 10:41:49 UTC
I remember a game from a few years ago that had similar sounding problems. It was a making a lot of read/writes to the hard drive. This was when SSD's were still very expensive. I recall people getting some relief by using thumb drives for some files. OMG
The Mynx
Ebolaids Anonymous
#7 - 2013-12-26 16:24:07 UTC
Haha wow that would be a pain.... I plan on getting a decent SSD soon so maybe that will have an effect. It's pretty strange behavior.
The Mynx
Ebolaids Anonymous
#8 - 2013-12-28 07:10:16 UTC
The underwhelming response to this issue is a little disappointing. I'll try submitting a tech support ticket and go through all the dxdiag stuff. Thanks guys.
lacal
Meltdown Technologies
#9 - 2013-12-31 13:27:47 UTC
did you try uninstalling the third party software that limits your frame rate, in case the software is having an unexpected side effect?