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Performance Tweaks: for low end PC's


nbohr1more

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@Duzenko: I'm pretty sure that FBO wasn't merged into TDM 2.05

 

@Anderson: It looks like tdm_lg_split didn't get enabled by default.

Also, yes "Soft" particles do consume more GPU resources. Particles were used sparingly before 2.03 but since

they were fixed in 2.03 authors have been using them much more. Try these changes:

 

seta r_useSoftParticles "0"
seta r_useIndexBuffers "0
seta tdm_lg_split "1"
seta tdm_lg_interleave "2"
seta tdm_lg_interleave_min "1"

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Duzenko, I'll try your fix next week and let you know how it goes.

The aim isn't to get amazing FPS or anything. Around 30 FPS, in hard, performance intensive situations is just fine! I wonder how much the FPS cap plays into it.

"I really perceive that vanity about which most men merely prate — the vanity of the human or temporal life. I live continually in a reverie of the future. I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active — not more happy — nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago. The result will never vary — and to suppose that it will, is to suppose that the foregone man has lived in vain — that the foregone time is but the rudiment of the future — that the myriads who have perished have not been upon equal footing with ourselves — nor are we with our posterity. I cannot agree to lose sight of man the individual, in man the mass."...

- 2 July 1844 letter to James Russell Lowell from Edgar Allan Poe.

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It should be.

 

If you delete your Darkmod.cfg and run tdm_updater is should have the correct value.

 

Updating the in-situ config is (apparently) not as easy as changing it inside of TDM code.

We'd probably need to make a config parser in tdm_updater that finds specific config changes and updates them without disturbing the overall file.

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

 

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I wonder how much the FPS cap plays into it.

Switching from 60 game ticks per second to 1 tick per frame could bring one or two fps depending on your cpu speed. (On a IGP - contrary, dedicated GPU's may not benefit at all if they're 100% utilized),

The major performance issue of a IGP system, I guess, is struggling between CPU and GPU over memory and CPU L3 cache. And the unfortunate feature of the vanilla D3 engine is it tries to read from system memory all the time. And each time it does, IGP has to stall its background operation.

I suggest to install msi afterburner and monitor your GPU load in real time so that we can confirm it is 100% utilized.

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So, regarding the thread title. Should that read "twek", "twerk" or "tweak"? ;)

Tweak.

"I really perceive that vanity about which most men merely prate — the vanity of the human or temporal life. I live continually in a reverie of the future. I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active — not more happy — nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago. The result will never vary — and to suppose that it will, is to suppose that the foregone man has lived in vain — that the foregone time is but the rudiment of the future — that the myriads who have perished have not been upon equal footing with ourselves — nor are we with our posterity. I cannot agree to lose sight of man the individual, in man the mass."...

- 2 July 1844 letter to James Russell Lowell from Edgar Allan Poe.

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@nbohr1more: I thought tdm_lg_split was enabled by default? Or am I missing some context here?

 

http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=What%27s_new_in_TDM_2.05

 

 

 

Yup, it is enabled by default and will be enabled if you're doing a fresh install. Too bad it can't be forced to overwrite the setting, just in case it's off.

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Did you try the config changes I recommended?

Tried them now.

FPS change isn't too great. Maybe 2-3 points better. But still great stuttering and lags.

The problem needs a much more systematic approach. But thanks for the help.

 

The FBO fix duzenko proposed isn't in Darkmod.cfg. But I think everyone noticed by now its absence in 2.05.

Edited by Anderson

"I really perceive that vanity about which most men merely prate — the vanity of the human or temporal life. I live continually in a reverie of the future. I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active — not more happy — nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago. The result will never vary — and to suppose that it will, is to suppose that the foregone man has lived in vain — that the foregone time is but the rudiment of the future — that the myriads who have perished have not been upon equal footing with ourselves — nor are we with our posterity. I cannot agree to lose sight of man the individual, in man the mass."...

- 2 July 1844 letter to James Russell Lowell from Edgar Allan Poe.

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Thanks. Round Two.

 

Create an autoexec.cfg file and place these into it:

 

seta r_displayRefresh "60"
seta r_skipDepthCapture "1"
seta cm_backFaceCull "1"
seta s_force22kHz "1"

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

 

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

 

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Thanks. Round Two.

 

Create an autoexec.cfg file and place these into it:

 

seta r_displayRefresh "60"

seta r_skipDepthCapture "1"

seta cm_backFaceCull "1"

seta s_force22kHz "1"

Tried right now. Still the same thing. No performance increase, at least not visibly evident.

Edited by Anderson

"I really perceive that vanity about which most men merely prate — the vanity of the human or temporal life. I live continually in a reverie of the future. I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active — not more happy — nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago. The result will never vary — and to suppose that it will, is to suppose that the foregone man has lived in vain — that the foregone time is but the rudiment of the future — that the myriads who have perished have not been upon equal footing with ourselves — nor are we with our posterity. I cannot agree to lose sight of man the individual, in man the mass."...

- 2 July 1844 letter to James Russell Lowell from Edgar Allan Poe.

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Last resort options in Darkmod.cfg:

 

seta image_downSizeBump "1"
seta image_downSizeBumpLimit "256"
seta image_downSizeSpecularLimit "128"
seta image_downSizeSpecular "1"

 

Try updating your chipset drivers:

 

https://downloadcenter.intel.com/download/22586

 

https://communities.intel.com/thread/32601

 

 

Very, very, last resort, try updating your BIOS to 213

 

https://www.asus.com/Notebooks/X301A/HelpDesk_Download/

 

A 1.8ghz (low power) mobile Celeron with integrated graphics is going to struggle here, certainly.

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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Last resort options in Darkmod.cfg:

 

seta image_downSizeBump "1"

seta image_downSizeBumpLimit "256"

seta image_downSizeSpecularLimit "128"

seta image_downSizeSpecular "1"

Then there is

seta image_downSize "1"seta image_downSizeLimit "256"and evenseta r_skipBump "1"
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Yes. You can go that far. Most folks wouldn't wanna lose bump map altogether but it's an option. If you use regular image_downsize make sure Postprocess is off or the screen will be black.

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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What I've noticed when playing 'A new Job' was that if I set ambient rendering to simple, I got a performance boost of up to 20%, but couldn't see any difference optical (but that may only be me). I guess especially people with old graphic cards may benefit from that, as the simple ambient method isn't occupying the shader units.

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What I've noticed when playing 'A new Job' was that if I set ambient rendering to simple, I got a performance boost of up to 20%, but couldn't see any difference optical (but that may only be me). I guess especially people with old graphic cards may benefit from that, as the simple ambient method isn't occupying the shader units.

 

Yeah, you shouldn't see much of a difference visually. The bump maps may appear slightly more flat, but other than that it should be pretty consistent. We should be making sure people are trying the the non-enhanced settings before suggesting the deeper settings since I noticed the game ships with the Enhanced Ambient by default.

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Just a curiosity, whats the limit here, where are you guys willing to go to make TDM run on low PC's? Does a computer that even struggles to run Doom 3 should be considered as a minimum target for this game? Specially for missions?

 

Just asking because this IMO has serious implications on the size, graphical complexity of the missions and on the probable future evolution of the engine.

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Just a curiosity, whats the limit here, where are you guys willing to go to make TDM run on low PC's? Does a computer that even struggles to run Doom 3 should be considered as a minimum target for this game? Specially for missions?

 

Just asking because this IMO has serious implications on the size, graphical complexity of the missions and on the probable future evolution of the engine.

 

If a PC struggles to run Doom 3 then it's never going to run TDM due to the additional load AI, sound pathing and lightgem computation put on the system. I would say that if someone has an 'older' system that runs Doom 3 with all the bells and whistles, then they should be able to run TDM half decently. They're going to take a hit though, no doubt.

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This is a newer mobile Celeron. It's IPC and GPU performance are not known to me but I suspect that it's "not good".

That said, we do try to accommodate pretty lowend hardware because the Thief community balks at upgrades.

Ideally, I would say that nobody with less GPU power than a Geforce GT 6600 or less CPU power than an AMD Athlon 3200+

should be trying to run the game but I don't think anyone has set a minimum requirements limit other than "must support ARB Assembly shaders".

Edited by nbohr1more
removed typo

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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Thanks for the replies, nbohr1more , personally and now that you guys are about to enter steam, and perhaps upgrade the engine to use glsl shaders and shadow maps, i just think you shouldn't limit your self to much to ancient hardware, not even to those in the thief community that don't upgrade, one because the engines demands are totally different, two because that puts a artificial limit on what you can and can't do with TDM engine, the steam hardware statistics could be a good source of info for a minimum goal as also a pool in the forum to see how old most of the PC's here are.

 

Like New Horizon i would say the recommended minimum should be hardware capable to run vanilla Doom 3 at ultra at 1080p 30fps or more.

Edited by HMart
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Atm it shouldn't be too complicated to use the info provided here and some tweaks I found on the wiki regarding performance.

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

I'll apply them these days hopefully to test.

It's not a life or death situation either. I have a desktop PC, but it's not always available, and why not eventually have it run on a laptop? It's playable, yet not perfect as weak PC's often whine.

Edited by Anderson

"I really perceive that vanity about which most men merely prate — the vanity of the human or temporal life. I live continually in a reverie of the future. I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active — not more happy — nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago. The result will never vary — and to suppose that it will, is to suppose that the foregone man has lived in vain — that the foregone time is but the rudiment of the future — that the myriads who have perished have not been upon equal footing with ourselves — nor are we with our posterity. I cannot agree to lose sight of man the individual, in man the mass."...

- 2 July 1844 letter to James Russell Lowell from Edgar Allan Poe.

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