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TDM 2.03 low FPS issue


Arcatera

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Hello there,

I did a clean install of TDM 2.03 via TDM Updater, and when I change my resolution to 1366x768, the game becomes slower, especially when I go outdoors (between 10-15 FPS). But the most interesting thing about this issue is this happens when I use my Nvidia graphics card. Onboard Intel HD Graphics perfoms better but not that much. I mean, still not smooth enough. Also tried changing some stuff in Darkmod.cfg but to no avail. I was able to play Doom 3: BFG Edition smoothly but I haven't tried the vanilla Doom 3. I don't understand why this happens.

My specs:

Intel Core i5 4210U 1.7 Ghz (2.7 Ghz with Turbo technology) and Intel HD Graphics 4400 integrated graphics
Nvidia GeForce GT840M (latest driver is installed, and I could play some recent AAA games without lowering the graphics settings)
8 GB of DDR3 RAM

I also use Windows 10 but I don't think that is the issue. The problem was existent on Windows 8.1 too.

Thanks in advance.

Edit: See the entry #386991 for a possible solution!

Edited by Arcatera
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The 840M only has a 64-bit memory interface so it gets beat-up pretty badly with The Dark Mod's fillrate requirements.

It may be that your Intel HD graphics is faring a little better with fillrate or z-cull.

 

That said, my Geforce GT 730 only has 64-bit and it does alright for most missions at 1366x768 as I recall.

 

What mission is having this problem?

 

Please post your Darkmod.cfg.

 

Please also post your Nvidia control panel options.

Please visit TDM's IndieDB site and help promote the mod:

 

http://www.indiedb.com/mods/the-dark-mod

 

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The 840M only has a 64-bit memory interface so it gets beat-up pretty badly with The Dark Mod's fillrate requirements.

It may be that your Intel HD graphics is faring a little better with fillrate or z-cull.

 

That said, my Geforce GT 730 only has 64-bit and it does alright for most missions at 1366x768 as I recall.

 

What mission is having this problem?

 

Please post your Darkmod.cfg.

 

Please also post your Nvidia control panel options.

 

Darkmod.cfg is not a big deal, because I reverted it back to the original state (except some changes made in-game, such as resolution, V-Sync). Still, here it is:

 

http://pastebin.com/csNuqXpp

 

Edit: I tried Training Mission only. But as far as I remember the problem was persistent in other missions as well.

 

How do I export Nvidia settings to a text file? I couldn't find it.

Edited by Arcatera
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Have you got vsync on..? and also check that power management mode is set to max in the nvidia CP.

 

Yes, V-Sync is on. Tried that, but didn't help a lot for Training Mission. Tears of St. Lucia performs better though (with and without power management mode setting, around 30 FPS). Guess the problem is related to Training Mission?

Edited by Arcatera
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Try deleting and re-downloading the Training mission, I believe there was an outdated version on one of the mirrors at one time.

 

Good idea, I'll try when I get back home. Thank you!

 

Turn it off, also make sure ambient rendering and interaction shader are set to lowest.

 

Hmm, turning V-Sync off definitely breaks immersion, because tearings occur a lot. V-Sync didn't cause any problems in Tears of St. Lucia. Got ~30 FPS with the current settings that I posted above. I will try the other options though. Thank you!

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Hmm, turning V-Sync off definitely breaks immersion, because tearings occur a lot. V-Sync didn't cause any problems in Tears of St. Lucia. Got ~30 FPS with the current settings that I posted above. I will try the other options though. Thank you!

The latest drivers have an option called 'adaptive Vsync', this should give you better frame rate and less tearing.

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Try deleting and re-downloading the Training mission, I believe there was an outdated version on one of the mirrors at one time.

 

Okay, I did a cleanup of Training Mission and it didn't help. Removed the file from fms folder just to install its newest version, and guess what? You can't download it in-game. :D I don't know where to find the latest version either. Guess I'll skip Training Mission. Not that I'm not familiar with Thief series, but I just liked that map. Anyway, I hope the low FPS issue is not existent in other maps too. Tears of St. Lucia is fine in terms of FPS.

 

The latest drivers have an option called 'adaptive Vsync', this should give you better frame rate and less tearing.

 

Ambient rendering and interaction shader are now set to lowest. Turned V-Sync off in-game and forced V-Sync via Nvidia control panel. No difference. :(

 

The only thing that bothers me is that with this computer I could play lots of new titles with no problems at all, but I experience framerate issues with TDM. I suppose id Tech 4 is not well optimised?

Edited by Arcatera
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Yeah, Id Tech 4 is very fillrate heavy because it's:

 

1) A forward renderer (it doesn't wait till the whole scene is evaluated for visibility before rendering)

2) It uses Stencil Shadows

3) It relies on detailed Normal Mapping for geometric appearance throughout the whole scene

4) We don't compress Normal Maps for most textures because RXGB doesn't look so good when compressed.

5) It's fully dynamic lighting (which is also why normal map usage is much greater than most engines)

 

and then add to that the fact that shadow silhouettes are determined on the CPU and all animation skinning

is done on the CPU and you've got a recipe for performance issues.

 

Please keep in mind that most engines out there still are mostly rendering static lights with tricks like scene probes

to make things a little more dynamic.

 

Id Tech 4 has strange trade-offs that mostly sacrifice static lighting appearance in favor of better looking lighting "in-motion".

 

Melan has really mastered painting light on city streets in a more or less

static manner akin to a traditional light mapped scene, but if you want to see what the tech is optimized to do... play

a mission like Sotha's "The Transaction" or Springheel's "A Score to Settle" where guards are running around with torches

and see how all the moving light interacts with the scene.

 

As long as the radius is small enough, Id Tech 4 is still capable of rendering more unique shadow casting lights per scene than most engines out there.

The other engines tend to have smaller numbers of unique light sources but many more unique shadow casting objects.

The latter tends to have more use cases for natural lighting scenarios but Id Tech 4 does work well for sci-fi environments with lots of little lights or (in our case)

for scenes with lots of little candles (etc).

 

Still, there is ongoing work to optimize further.

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Well, as a sanity check I just tried the Training Mission and at 1440x900 with all effects enabled, I never go below 30FPS outdoors.

 

Hard to say how my desktop GPU with 384 cores and a 64-bit memory interface compares to your mobile GPU with the same configuration.

I can only conjecture that you might have lower GDDR speed?

 

Since the Training Mission isn't in the downloader, try running tdm_update again and I believe it'll download the mission for you.

  • Like 1

Please visit TDM's IndieDB site and help promote the mod:

 

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(Yeah, shameless promotion... but traffic is traffic folks...)

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Well, as a sanity check I just tried the Training Mission and at 1440x900 with all effects enabled, I never go below 30FPS outdoors.

 

Hard to say how my desktop GPU with 384 cores and a 64-bit memory interface compares to your mobile GPU with the same configuration.

I can only conjecture that you might have lower GDDR speed?

 

Since the Training Mission isn't in the downloader, try running tdm_update again and I believe it'll download the mission for you.

 

Done, but didn't help a lot. :( Still between 15-22 FPS.

 

Here is the Nvidia report of my graphics card:

 

http://pastebin.com/YwUtG2da

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The only thing that bothers me is that with this computer I could play lots of new titles with no problems at all, but I experience framerate issues with TDM. I suppose id Tech 4 is not well optimised?

 

Arcatera idtech 4 (even tho using old paradigmas) is very well optimized for what it does, was made in 2001 by one of the best engine coders of the world, John Carmack, at a time where Unreal Engine was still totally light mapping based (and still is today to some extent).

 

Just to add to what Melan said, a forward renderer contrary to new deferred rendering doesn't decouples lights from the geometry, so for any light you put in the scene it needs to be redrawn, this was how ALL games did rendering when idtech 4/ Doom 3 was made, including HL 2 Source engine, Unreal 2.5, etc. But deferred rendering has problems of its own, it has serious problems with MSAA antialiasing (that is why they invented post process antialiasing like FXAA , MLAA or SMAA (that look worse imo) ), it has problems with transparency sorting, it lacks the same material flexibility nor the same lighting flexibility that a forward renderer has and lastly it only becomes faster than a better implemented forward render at large scenes with many small lights and large amounts of geometry (exemple stalker, crysis, etc) but for Doom 3 or i bet TDM it would not be that faster.

 

Melan i take that you know stencil shadows are very cheap when done on the GPU? IMO Doom 3 stencil shadows are still faster than modern Shadow mapping, even being CPU based, if you play RBDoom 3 BFG you will see that.

 

All games now use Normal mapping and it is very cheap so TDM is not losing performance by using it.

 

Not compressing normal maps is indeed a performance problem, for low end GPU's, that's his case.

 

Being fully dynamic lighting is also another performance killer, again for low end GPU's, but TDM is not more heavy as say Stalker or Metro, Crysis or any other modern full dynamic light game that exist now.

 

TDM by design has also a much more demanding AI system so don't compare this game lightly to others.

 

And lastly idtech 4 has used on TDM is still a single core engine and many of its technologies are run on the CPU so if your individual CPU cores are relatively slow ( the case with laptops) TDM will be slower than modern Multithreaded games.

Edited by HMart
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Done, but didn't help a lot. :( Still between 15-22 FPS.

 

Here is the Nvidia report of my graphics card:

 

http://pastebin.com/YwUtG2da

 

OK, after a deep dive your GPU should be a bit faster than mine but there is one deficit and it might be important,

my GPU has a texture fillrate of 28.9GT whilst yours has 18GT. And this appears to be because you have 24TMU's while

I have 32.

 

Still, that's quite a performance disparity.

 

One thing I would check is whether there are any new motherboard chipset drivers. It could be that you are bogged-down at the system level.

I will mention that I got a huge performance boost from upgrading my motherboard BIOS but I don't recommend trying this unless you

don't mind risking a bricked system (typically this is designed to be a safe operation but it's so low-level that there's always an inherent risk).

 

And I guess I can't ignore that your max CPU speed is 2.7ghz verses my CPU being 3.4 Ghz, though that still shouldn't be as much of an issue in

your testing AFAIK. One thing you could try to eliminate some of the CPU factor is opening the console and invoking killmonsters. If the FPS jumps to around 30

or higher then the CPU is your biggest problem.

  • Like 1

Please visit TDM's IndieDB site and help promote the mod:

 

http://www.indiedb.com/mods/the-dark-mod

 

(Yeah, shameless promotion... but traffic is traffic folks...)

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Arcatera idtech 4 (even tho using old paradigmas) is very well optimized for what it does, was made in 2001 by one of the best engine coders of the world, John Carmack, at a time where Unreal Engine was still totally light mapping based (and still is today to some extent).

 

Just to add to what Melan said, a forward renderer contrary to new deferred rendering doesn't decouples lights from the geometry, so for any light you put in the scene it needs to be redrawn, this was how ALL games did rendering when idtech 4/ Doom 3 was made, including HL 2 Source engine, Unreal 2.5, etc. But deferred rendering has problems of its own, it has serious problems with MSAA antialiasing (that is why they invented post process antialiasing like FXAA , MLAA or SMAA (that look worse imo) ), it has problems with transparency sorting, it lacks the same material flexibility nor the same lighting flexibility that a forward renderer has and lastly it only becomes faster than a better implemented forward render at large scenes with many small lights and large amounts of geometry (exemple stalker, crysis, etc) but for Doom 3 or i bet TDM it would not be that faster.

 

Melan i take that you know stencil shadows are very cheap when done on the GPU? IMO Doom 3 stencil shadows are still faster than modern Shadow mapping, even being CPU based, if you play RBDoom 3 BFG you will see that.

 

All games now use Normal mapping and it is very cheap so TDM is not losing performance by using it.

 

Not compressing normal maps is indeed a performance problem, for low end GPU's, that's his case.

 

Being fully dynamic lighting is also another performance killer, again for low end GPU's, but TDM is not more heavy as say Stalker or Metro, Crysis or any other modern full dynamic light game that exist now.

 

TDM by design has also a much more demanding AI system so don't compare this game lightly to others.

 

And lastly idtech 4 has used on TDM is still a single core engine and many of its technologies are run on the CPU so if your individual CPU cores are relatively slow ( the case with laptops) TDM will be slower than modern Multithreaded games.

 

 

Yeah, I know about John Carmack but I'm not really into technical details. Your post and nbohr1more's post above are too technical for me, well, at least, to some extent. :P But thanks for clarifying. Guess my problem is related to single core stuff. Wish the engine supported multithreading. Is it possible for the developers to add this feature to TDM's custom id Tech 4 engine?

 

 

OK, after a deep dive your GPU should be a bit faster than mine but there is one deficit and it might be important,

my GPU has a texture fillrate of 28.9GT whilst yours has 18GT. And this appears to be because you have 24TMU's while

I have 32.

 

Still, that's quite a performance disparity.

 

One thing I would check is whether there are any new motherboard chipset drivers. It could be that you are bogged-down at the system level.

I will mention that I got a huge performance boost from upgrading my motherboard BIOS but I don't recommend trying this unless you

don't mind risking a bricked system (typically this is designed to be a safe operation but it's so low-level that there's always an inherent risk).

 

And I guess I can't ignore that your max CPU speed is 2.7ghz verses my CPU being 3.4 Ghz, though that still shouldn't be as much of an issue in

your testing AFAIK. One thing you could try to eliminate some of the CPU factor is opening the console and invoking killmonsters. If the FPS jumps to around 30

or higher then the CPU is your biggest problem.

 

Well, there is a new update for BIOS but I cannot risk it, because this laptop is not mine, it belongs to my sister. If anything happens she'll simply kill me. :D

 

I will try the killmonster command as soon as possible.

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Oh, make sure you disable the Nvidia Streamer Service in services.msc. That services is meant to allow you to stream from your PC

to an Nvidia shield device. It has been known to eat up to 30% of your performance.

  • Like 1

Please visit TDM's IndieDB site and help promote the mod:

 

http://www.indiedb.com/mods/the-dark-mod

 

(Yeah, shameless promotion... but traffic is traffic folks...)

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Oh, make sure you disable the Nvidia Streamer Service in services.msc. That services is meant to allow you to stream from your PC

to an Nvidia shield device. It has been known to eat up to 30% of your performance.

 

Done, but no difference. :(

 

I think I'll stick with Intel HD Graphics for now. It performs better than Nvidia (which is strange) and its performance is better than I remembered (maybe because of the updated drivers). Anyway, thanks for all your efforts. :)

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  • 5 months later...

Hello, didn't want to bump an old thread, but I solved the problem by increasing almost all Nvidia Control Panel settings to highest and it is silky-smooth now. Anyone who experiences this problem on an Nvidia card could try this.

Edited by Arcatera
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