Can I make TDM perform better?

[Skaruts]

I was looking at darkmod.cfg, and wondering if there's anything there I could change that would give me performance at the expense of graphical quality. In the game's settings menu I already have everything set to minimum, except AA x4, which doesn't seem to make much difference but removes visually annoying aliasing. I don't mind lowering quality if that means I have better performance.

 

I realize not all options are available in the game's settings menu, and that's why I'm asking.

 

 

 

 

For perspective, I have an old PC, a Pentium 1 OC'd to 3600Hz with a 4800 HD series ATI card and 2GB RAM (man, that once was a ferrari ), so TDM easily runs a little badly. For example it runs at ~30 fps in the Bakery Job or in Business As Usual's city streets (though mostly over 60 fps inside its buildings), and below 10 fps in Briairwood Manor's frontyard.

 

It runs Skyrim mostly fine with minimal settings pushed a little bit up.

[peter_spy]

Don't use in-game AA, it's super expensive. Force FXAA in your drivers if you can.

[HMart]

Alongside disabling AA go to the advanced tab and mess with the options there, those are the ones that influence performance the most.

 

Also http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/18670-performance-tweaks-for-low-end-pcs/

[duzenko]

 

a Pentium 1 OC'd to 3600Hz

A what?

Does it support SMP?

If not, you're out of luck. You're CPU limited. Get 2.07 alpha from @nbohr1more and try r_shadows 2

[Skaruts]

Also http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/18670-performance-tweaks-for-low-end-pcs/

Well that gave me some interesting results. I'm at 60 fps outside the bakery and 35-40 inside. Doing better.

Also set r_shadows to 0 but not sure if I gained performance.

 

Don't use in-game AA, it's super expensive. Force FXAA in your drivers if you can.

Not sure if the AA I can force is FXAA, but I'll give it a try.

 

A what?

Does it support SMP?

If not, you're out of luck. You're CPU limited. Get 2.07 alpha from @nbohr1more and try r_shadows 2

I have no clue what my CPU supports.

 

r_shadows 2 makes everything really dark and lights less noticeable. No gain in performance though. r_shadows 0 does. I lose all the shadows, but it's worth keeping in mind. Actually I'm not sure I gained any performance from that.

Edited October 13, 2018 by Skaruts

[kano]

Don't use r_shadows 0. It will break the game. Not as in cause crashing, but it will cause AI's to see you when they shouldn't, since no shadows are calculated.

 

EDIT: setting tdm_lg_interleave to 3 will help you some. It will minimally impact gameplay, really not noticeable at all. This causes the player visibility to be calculated every third rendered frame, not every single frame.

Edited October 13, 2018 by kano

[HMart]

Tell us what CPU do you really have and also what GPU do you have a 4800 HD is really generic because there's many under that family, instal CPUZ or CPUID. Also you can't enable FXAA on AMD GPUs on the drivers, only MLAA, is the same thing tho, FXAA is competing similar tech from Nvidia, it does work on AMD GPUs but for that you need to use a third party tool like the old RadeonPro free software to force it on games that don't have the option.

r_shadows 2 on the 2.07 Beta enables the new shadow map shadows, they are still being worked on by duzenko and others and bugs can happen, but your AMD 4800 HD should support them just fine has is a GPU with support for shader model 3.3, unless like duzenko said your CPU is to old and limiting you. What GPU drivers are you using? Catalyst 13.9?

 

For duzenko if he really has a pentium 1 CPU then i don't think it supports SMP is not that for multicore processors only?

Edited October 13, 2018 by HMart

[Skaruts]

Tell us what CPU do you really have and also what GPU do you have a 4800 HD is really generic because there's many under that family, instal CPUZ or CPUID. Also you can't enable FXAA on AMD GPUs on the drivers, only MLAA, is the same thing tho, FXAA is competing similar tech from Nvidia, it does work on AMD GPUs but for that you need to use a third party tool like the old RadeonPro free software to force it on games that don't have the option.

 

r_shadows 2 on the 2.07 Beta enables the new shadow map shadows, they are still being worked on by duzenko and others and bugs can happen, but your AMD 4800 HD should support them just fine has is a GPU with support for shader model 3.3, unless like duzenko said your CPU is to old and limiting you. What GPU drivers are you using? Catalyst 13.9?

 

For duzenko if he really has a pentium 1 CPU then i don't think it supports SMP is not that for multicore processors only?

Actually it's maybe not pentium 1. I'm probably just talking out of my ass, as I tend to care so little about hardware that I forget even the basics.

it's an Intel dual core cpu with 2.13Ghz, with OC at 3.6GHz. It's an "Intel Core 2 Duo E6400", iirc.

 

As for GPU drivers, yea it's catalyst 13.9. They haven't updated it since ~2013 (last I checked a month or two ago).

As for the gfx card, the best I can tell you is it's "Radeon HD 4800 Series". I can't find anything more specific.

 

I'm not sure what you mean by shader model 3.3, but that reminds me that my gpu doesn't seem to support GLES3. I suppose there's a relation between the two. I know this from having had trouble running Godot engine 3 because of GLES3. I can run Godot 3.1 nightly builds on GLES2 mode. It runs in GLES3 mode but badly, so I'm not sure whether that means my GPU supports it badly or not at all.

Edited October 14, 2018 by Skaruts

[nbohr1more]

Start here:

 

http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Performance_Tweaks

[peter_spy]

You can try these values with r_shadows 2:

 

r_softShadowsQuality 14

r_softShadowsRadius 6

r_shadowMapSize 512

[HMart]

Actually it's maybe not pentium 1. I'm probably just talking out of my ass, as I tend to care so little about hardware that I forget even the basics.

it's an Intel dual core cpu with 2.13Ghz, with OC at 3.6GHz. It's an "Intel Core 2 Duo E6400", iirc.

 

As for GPU drivers, yea it's catalyst 13.9. They haven't updated it since ~2013 (last I checked a month or two ago).

As for the gfx card, the best I can tell you is it's "Radeon HD 4800 Series". I can't find anything more specific.

 

I'm not sure what you mean by shader model 3.3, but that reminds me that my gpu doesn't seem to support GLES3. I suppose there's a relation between the two. I know this from having had trouble running Godot engine 3 because of GLES3. I can run Godot 3.1 nightly builds on GLES2 mode. It runs in GLES3 mode but badly, so I'm not sure whether that means my GPU supports it badly or not at all.

 

That CPU should support SMP is a dual core cpu but i'm not sure as is a old CPU.

 

Yes the 4800 is now a legacy GPU and the last driver for it is 13.9. To know exactly what gpu do you have instal GPUZ is free and tells everything about the GPU in your computer.

 

shader model 3.3 is the shader language (GLSL) version of OpenGL 3.3, it has nothing to do with OpenGL ES 3.x they are two different APIs, but from wikipedia your GPU should support GLES 3.0 and 3.1, maybe Godot implemented GLES 3.2 and that is only supported by GCN GPU's from AMD, HD 7000 and above.

[chakkman]

Actually it's maybe not pentium 1.

 

Most probably not. Pentium 1 was single core, and up to 300 MHz, max. Very ancient CPU.

 

Yours is probably a Intel Core 2 Duo.

Edited October 14, 2018 by chakkman

[Anderson]

Absolutely!

 

nbohr1more came up with this, for which many thanks to him! http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/19498-image-downsize-in-206/?do=findComment&comment=423359 In fact I'd sticky this. It needs to be in the wiki. But need time to arrange the text properly.

 

Definitely go through all that. You can also make TDM in 8 or 16 bit. All of that helped me quite a bit. Try my settings because I'm running a weak laptop too.

Edited October 14, 2018 by Anderson

[Skaruts]

I'm not sure image_filters and that stuff aid performance, as I played around with that but wasn't quite paying attention to performance (but it was what made me think of making this thread).

 

However, it's worth a try as well. I'm also interested in image_filters, is there a place where I can see which are the options I can use there? So far I only know about GL_NEAREST, besides the default one.

[Skaruts]

Most probably not. Pentium 1 was single core, and up to 300 MHz, max. Very ancient CPU.

 

Yours is probably a Intel Core 2 Duo.

I still have a pentium 200 MMX lying around (with a Voodoo2), but sadly it's dead... I used to use it to play old games.

[peter_spy]

Btw. on my old laptop I used lower aniso filtering (8 or 4 instead of 16), and it also helped with performance.

[chakkman]

TDM is a strange one, when it comes to performance. I have stuttering and lagging in the training mission, in the jump and climb area, when you enter the first courtyard through the crawlspace. It shows a stable 60 fps though. I also could swear (an absolute assumption) that i have more frames now that i upgraded my Ram, and graphics card, even though it has always been said that TDM especially benefits from the CPU performance (which i didn't change).

Edited October 15, 2018 by chakkman

[Skaruts]

Well I've ran through the options suggested here and it seems the only thing that significantly raised performance for me was those suggested by nbohr1more in the thread HMart linked to. Specifically tdm_lg_interleave 3 and tdm_lg_interleave_min 1, it seemed. This is apart from what I had already done before, like lowering everything in the video settings menus.

r_useMapBufferRange 1 actually made it significantly worse (with or without tdm_lg_split -- lost about 10 fps iirc) so I dumped it.

 

I notice no difference in frame rates on the lowest resolutions, fullscreen or not, or with lower image_downSizeLimit (and lower image_downSizeBumpLimit/SpecularLimit), or with everything else I tried. Turning off anisotropic filtering seems to make no difference at all (I still have it off). I disregarded certain settings like turning off fog and lip-sync for now, as those are situational and not really relevant for the overall performance.

 

The sense I got is that if I use all those settings -- considering that everything has its cost, which means I have to gain something by turning them off -- I'd gain like 1 fps...

 

Well, g_fov does make some difference, but there's no way I'll ever go under 90.

 

I still have a thing or two to try, like the ATI tray tools (I've used those once, I can't remember why I stopped using them).

 

To test it I essentially sat in a corner of The Bakery Job looking at the oven thingy (hearth?), where I'm currently at a fluctuating 34-37 fps. Seems like that's as far as it can go.

 

 

 

 

[Skaruts]

You can try these values with r_shadows 2:

 

r_softShadowsQuality 14

r_softShadowsRadius 6

r_shadowMapSize 512

I had forgotten about this.

 

r_shadowMapSize seems to be an unknown command. As for the others, don't they depend on soft shadows being turned on? I have them off. I seemed to get no lighting at all with them on when I tried.

 

Or is r_shadows 2 soft shadows? It makes the lighting very dim for me. And I actually seem to lose about 2-3 fps with that and those other two commands.

Edited October 15, 2018 by Skaruts

[nbohr1more]

I had forgotten about this.

 

r_shadowMapSize seems to be an unknown command. As for the others, don't they depend on soft shadows being turned on? I have them off. I get no lighting at all with them on.

 

Or is r_shadows 2 soft shadows?

 

Requires the VBO Beta:

 

https://www.moddb.com/mods/the-dark-mod/downloads/tdm-206-vertex-buffer-beta