Performance Tweaks: for low end PC's

[i30817]

One simple thing you could try is to investigate why the linux version performs worse that the windows version on wine. That ain't right. Maybe it's a misconfiguration? Anyway, count me out of testing, i don't want to be bothered, but if you aren't aware of it, well, try it yourself on a old pc (mobile 2008 core 2 duo here)

[nbohr1more]

I think I know the answer to the Window vs Linux disparity. The SIMD assembly doesn't work in Linux as I recall. Tels was gonna address that but he quit the project. Stgatilov did some SIMD fixes for 2.06 so perhaps things will be better in the next release. Ideally we would want to move anything that requires SIMD to the GPU (eg. Skinning )

[nbohr1more]

For historical purposes, these cvar changes cause problems with 2.06

 

seta cm_backFaceCull "1"
seta image_useNormalCompression "0"
seta s_force22kHz "1"

Please do not use these changes.

[Gadavre]

how to disable soft Shadows?

or how to make  soft shadows poor quality?

I found only one variable. which degrades the quality of these shadows, but does not disable them

seta r_softShadowsQuality = 0

but how do I turn them off? I don't see any beauty. I need my graphics card to work faster with the game

Edited March 30, 2021 by Gadavre

[cabalistic]

If quality is 0, that is literally soft shadows disabled. There's no further step down, you are already on hard shadows. You could only disable shadows entirely, which will make the gameplay rather difficult...

You can experiment between stencil and shadow maps mode and see which one gives you better performance overall. For shadow maps, there's also an experimental mode by setting r_shadowMapSinglePass 1 that potentially improves their performance.

[Zerg Rush]

Apart from low game settings and tweaks, it should be remembered that if it is Windows, that by default it loads a lot of services that are not necessary, such as drivers for peripherals that do not exist and certain services such as the ability to Hibernate and Index files, among others. Disabling these services can drain a lot of RAM and speed up the system considerably.
Especially Hibernate and Indexing are real RAM and speed eaters.

Years ago I have played TDM and DOOM III in a low end PC, without problems of any kind, naturally in a minimal settings.
It is always preferable to optimize the OS, than to have to do DIY in the game itself, this should only be the last option.

Edited March 30, 2021 by Zerg Rush

[Zerg Rush]

I forgot before, in old PCs with few resources, Windows ultimately offers a function called Ready Boost, which allows you to expand the RAM, using a pendrive. It is a feature included since Vista.

https://www.flashbay.com/support/faq/windows-readyboost

This can considerably increase performance on PCs with limited resources, on PCs with more than 4Gb, however the difference is only minimal.

(Disable this function before removing the pendrive, if not, it causes a system crash)

 

[Gadavre]

10 hours ago, Zerg Rush said:

It is always preferable to optimize the OS, than to have to do DIY in the game itself, this should only be the last option.

My system is optimized and clean. I recently installed it. That's not the point. The point is to remove unnecessary load for my graphics card. since the card heats up quickly. it is from the Silent category.

[Gadavre]

12 hours ago, cabalistic said:

If quality is 0, that is literally soft shadows disabled. There's no further step down, you are already on hard shadows. You could only disable shadows entirely, which will make the gameplay rather difficult...

You can experiment between stencil and shadow maps mode and see which one gives you better performance overall. For shadow maps, there's also an experimental mode by setting r_shadowMapSinglePass 1 that potentially improves their performance.

Thank Cabalistic. I'll experiment with shadows...

 I Set the big mission William Steele 4: The Warrens

and began to play. a play in a big city. For half an hour of the game, the temperature of the video card increased to 70 degrees. I stopped playing because I'm afraid the video card will stop working....  Video card for a quiet computer, no fans.... So I want to disable the effects that I don't notice in the game anyway....

Edited March 31, 2021 by Gadavre

[nbohr1more]

r_shadowMapCullFront also improves performance and "sometimes" it even makes things look better because it behaves more like stencil.

Most missions you won't notice the difference except the performance jump.

It has a few quirks with hair-line light leaking from some corner areas but it mostly fine to use.

Just to be clear, both of these suggestions are for the "Maps" mode of shadows ( r_shadows 2 ).

[Gadavre]

5 minutes ago, nbohr1more said:

r_shadowMapCullFront also improves performance and "sometimes" it even makes things look better because it behaves more like stencil.

Most missions you won't notice the difference except the performance jump.

It has a few quirks with hair-line light leaking from some corner areas but it mostly fine to use.

Just to be clear, both of these suggestions are for the "Maps" mode of shadows ( r_shadows 2 ).

Then to optimize the shadows for weak graphics cards, I write in autocommands.cfg:

seta r_softShadowsQuality "0"

seta r_shadows "2"

seta r_shadowMapSinglePass "1"

seta r_shadowMapCullFront  "1"

Is that right?

Edited March 31, 2021 by Gadavre

[nbohr1more]

Just now, Gadavre said:

Then to optimize the shadows for weak graphics cards, I write in autocommands.cfg:

seta r_shadows "2"

seta r_shadowMapSinglePass "1"

seta r_shadowMapCullFront  "1"

Is that right?

Yes

[Zerg Rush]

8 hours ago, Gadavre said:

My system is optimized and clean. I recently installed it. That's not the point. The point is to remove unnecessary load for my graphics card. since the card heats up quickly. it is from the Silent category.

Precisely when it is newly installed, the first task is always to throw out a lot of garbage and unnecessary things 'to improve the user experience' that always come by default with Windows. Freshly installed Windows is never 'clean'.  Really clean up Windows can increment the performance up to 20-30%, trust me.

A recomended tool (by MS itself) https://wpd.app (free, portable)

Edited March 31, 2021 by Zerg Rush

[Gadavre]

I turned off the soft shadows

r_softShadowsQuality 0

maybe it makes sense to also disable these variables?  After all, they are only needed if soft shadows are enabled

r_nvidiaOverride 1

Note: forces r_useFBO if you have nvidia hardware and soft shadows enabled

 

r_useGLSL 1

note: Default on. Enables the GLSL backend. If off, it is automatically enabled when enabling Soft Shadows.

 

I hope there will be no problems with the game after disabling?

Edited March 31, 2021 by Gadavre

[cabalistic]

These CVARs do not exist in recent releases anymore. FBO and GLSL are always active as the old fallbacks have been deprecated.

[Gadavre]

Just now, cabalistic said:

FBO and GLSL are always active as the old fallbacks have been deprecated.

That is, in version 2.09, they can not be disabled?

How do they affect the performance of the game?

[nbohr1more]

As of 2.07 and newer, FBO and GLSL perform as well or better than ARB and direct render did.

Here is performance comparison for one of the heaviest missions that runs on both old and new TDM versions ( the original un-optimized Return to the City ).

In 2.06 GLSL was slower. In 2.07 GLSL is faster. In 2.08 ARB is gone but GLSL is faster than 2.07 GLSL ...

 

[jaxa]

In the "Max FPS" selection in Settings/Video/Advanced, can we have caps lower than 60 FPS? For example, 30 FPS? This would probably allow for smoother gameplay at the low-end. Other possibilities: 40/48 (factors of 120/144).

I'm guessing this can be done in the config file, but it could be nice to have in the menu.

Edited April 7, 2023 by jaxa

[nbohr1more]

Yes, should be easy enough to modify the GUI. There is no hard-coded limit on the com_maxFPS cvar.

BTW: You don't need to edit the config file, you can just open the console and invoke com_maxFPS 30.

Rev 16795

[Bikerdude]

Just did some testing of my WIP (BHM) and at the one of the worst spots for perf,  @1080p with all settings set to normal and colour bit depth set to 32, I am getting nearly 100fps. other bas spots the FPS is over 144 and inside Im seeing 200+ So this bodes well for low end users I would think.

Test system:

CPU - core i5 4430@3.2ghz
GPU - 2080ti limited to 80% power (only loosing 5-10% fps but saving 70W)
Mem - 16GB DDR3-1333
OS - Win11 24h2

If I had some spare SSD's I would install CatchyOS or Bazzite and see if the perf was any better.
 

[datiswous]

3 hours ago, Bikerdude said:

If I had some spare SSD's I would install CatchyOS or Bazzite and see if the perf was any better.

Well I think you don't have to install Linux to run TDM. You can just boot (with Linux Live usb) into a Windows pc and run tdm from that Windows ntfs disk. The Windows version of tdm includes the Linux executable I think. At least that's the way on the Linux version, but I thought I tested this method on a Windows pc in the past. Otherwise you could use the standalone version, which is for both systems.

It runs it of the disk (not usb) so should be fast.

Edited January 7 by datiswous

[Bikerdude]

38 minutes ago, datiswous said:

Well I think you don't have to install Linux to run TDM. You can just boot (with Linux Live usb) into a Windows pc and run tdm from that Windows ntfs disk.

Ah yes, I forgot about this!

[Bikerdude]

So tested 3 distro via ventoy - 

- Bazzite, same fps as windows (100)
- Nobara, same fps as windows (100)
- CatchyOS, more fps then windows (115)

The little i5 4430 is preventing the 2080ti from stretching its legs, but its a reasonable low end perf base to aim for (100fps @ 1080p. The 2080Ti is about the same as a 3070 or a 6800 XT, but the i5 4430 is holding back the 2080ti, so its more like a 3060 12gb etc.

Edited January 7 by Bikerdude

[Arden]

Replacing MSAA with SMAA can improve performance, and it looks good with Contrast Adaptive Sharpening.

 

[Kaaiman]

The best performance tweak so far for me has been upgrading to Linux 7.0!

My main computer setup is about 13 years old, with an AMD Phenom II X6 1090T CPU and an ATI Radeon R9 270X GPU. Starting from Linux kernel 6.19 the legacy 'radeon' drivers for the AMD GCN 1.0 "Southern Islands" or GCN 1.1 "Sea Islands" graphics cards (like the R9) have been replaced by modern 'amdgpu' drivers, with lots of optimizations.

Resource-heavy missions like The Painter's Wife and The Year of the Rat were barely, if at all, playable to me. After I did the OS upgrade today (Ubuntu 25.10 to 26.04), The Painter's Wife seems to run smoothly now. The Year of the Rat still has some lagging but overall the performance has certainly improved.

Heck, I can now even watch TDM playthroughs on YouTube on 4K without stuttering!  Before only a miserable 720p was about the limit...

Thus, if you happen to have a legacy Linux pc with an old Radeon GPU: upgrading to Linux 7.0 is strongly recommended!

Edited May 7 by Kaaiman