Graphics card utilization?

[Cataphract]

Dark Mod generally runs well for me, at least with stencil shadows off. But on a few maps certain areas will consistently drop below 60 fps. I'm thinking my system should be able to handle things, but it seems from the charts on my task manager that my gpu and vram are not being fully utilized. Especially the vram, I've got 8 and it's using like... 1...

I tried mucking with the vram settings in an autoexec file to no avail. Is there anything I can do about this with Dark Mod, or is it something I need change involing my drivers?

[Zerg Rush]

In Windows the CPU/GPU configuration isn't good optimized when you use several cores (one work at 100% while the other do nothing). Time ago I found for my old Laptop with a similar problem you describe, this app, which solve the problem, ajusting the settings in a better way.

https://bitsum.com/process-lasso/

 (The free version has some limitations, but is enough for normal use)

Edited May 20, 2022 by Zerg Rush

[Xolvix]

If you've got a card with 8 GB of VRAM then it must be suitably modern enough to run The Dark Mod pretty damn well. Stencil shadows are basically Doom 3 shadows and that's technology from 2004, so you shouldn't be hitting any hurdles. Unless it's perhaps an integrated GPU and sharing the VRAM with the system memory. What are your specs?

[Shadow]

You hadn't said what your video card brand is, but I would try some optimization features in the video card software, and do be sure you've got the correct card selected there and the hardware looks proper. I've even seen it where someone had a powerful NVidia 1060 installed but the HDMI cable was still plugged into the onboard video. In that case it was pretty obvious when a 3D accelerated game was really choking.

[Cataphract]

Okay, I've got a Radeon RX 580 with 8 GB vram, 16 GB ram proper, a Ryzen 5 2600 six core at 3.6 GHz.

[Cataphract]

I'm running The Painter's Wife right now, which I think is a good benchmark for hard to run Dark Mod missions. When looking at the center of the map from the start point my FPS drops from a consistent 60+ to a consistent 30-40. My GPU is only being used at about 40% capacity, and my CPU only at about 20%. So I don't think it's my hardware that's the problem here. What can I do to make the game make better use of stuff? I'm pretty sure I already set my CPU cores to 6 in the config.

[cabalistic]

There isn't necessarily much you can do. TDM is based on an old rendering engine that is not optimized for modern hardware. It only has limited multi-core support and doesn't always make the best use of modern GPUs. As such, your results will vary from mission to mission - some missions are better optimized than others.

[Cataphract]

I'm also messing around in the tutorial mission, and for some reason the objects room takes huge amount of work out of my GPU to render. In this case it actually IS being almost fully utilized though, and at most it only drops to 45 fps.

[Cataphract]

1 minute ago, cabalistic said:

There isn't necessarily much you can do. TDM is based on an old rendering engine that is not optimized for modern hardware. It only has limited multi-core support and doesn't always make the best use of modern GPUs. As such, your results will vary from mission to mission - some missions are better optimized than others.

That's what I suspected...

Given my main issue seems to be with shadows, is there anything I can do in that respect?

[stgatilov]

Yes, the engine uses limited number of threads, so most of the CPU cores cannot be utilized.

Also, don't look at memory utilization.
TDM loads the whole level into RAM & VRAM, so unless you have too little memory, its size does not matter.

6 hours ago, Cataphract said:

Given my main issue seems to be with shadows, is there anything I can do in that respect?

1. Enable frontend acceleration (helps if limited by CPU).
2. Reduce antialiasing and soft shadows quality (helps if limited by GPU).
3. Prefer stencil shadows if limited by GPU, and shadow maps if limited by CPU.
4. Just accept that FPS will drop at some places. Mappers cannot make it 100% sure any system will handle map perfectly in every corner.

[freyk]

And take at look at our old wiki article for some other pointers:

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