A friend told me to wait with purchasing CloD for a year... [Archive]

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Vengeanze

09-07-2011, 08:12 AM

...but did I listen? Noooo. I went ahead and bought me a €2 000 computer and stick and shit.

I wish I had taken his advice. Then the computer would probably have been cheaper, the graphicscard would have been a better one but most of all Cliffs Of Dover would NOT have been a framework filled with good intentions.

I see people rejoycing and prayising the new patch but seriously what did we get? A new great sound that is still porked in many ways (open canopy or bail). A hazy world that takes a good bite out of your frames.
I'm sorry to say this but 1C fix one thing but breaks another.

I'm a fanboy but have lost trust in Luthier and his pack of programmers ability to produce a quality product. It's like being married to a woman with beautiful body but buttugly face - only way to have intercourse is doggy style while looking down.

Last patch robbed me of 5 frames and that pushed me over the edge. Can't overc lock any further so only option is to lower settings and resolution which gives me a sim that looks really good in some parts but butt ugly in others.

Now look away if you don't want to see a grown up cry. ;-)

Blackdog_kt

09-07-2011, 10:54 AM

In all honesty, if you expect to run this sim maxed out on the kind of resolutions iMac monitors boast you're only setting yourself up for frustration :-P

What kind of settings are you running?

I'm running mostly medium settings on a two year old PC (i7 920 @ 2.7Ghz, Ati 4890 1GB and just 3GB of RAM, using win7 x64) and i actually increased my trees amount with this patch, plus it runs like butter with minor stutters (not constant ones, just loading stutters when textures/effects are loaded for the first time, then it's ok). The only case i get real stuttering is if i'm skimming roof tops low over London (less than 500ft) and even then, it mostly hovers around 20 FPS or so (it's the only situation i did use an FPS counter, since i thought it might be useful to know what is my minimum FPS for my settings to make a decision on whether i should adjust them further).

In this patch FPS might be a bit lower (i don't use FPS counters so i can't be sure, plus i don't use the benchmark black death track because it's recorded from an earlier version and this can cause problems too, at least it did in the previous IL2 series), but it seems much more consistent and smooth now.

What i'm trying to say is, i'd rather have a steady 40 FPS than 60 FPS that fluctuates down to the mid 20s at times. It's the same reason many demanding flight sims have been using FPS limiters in the past (FSX is a notable example), if the sim knows it will need to render less frames for a given time it's easier to keep ahead of the curve and render them in time, instead of giving you 50 FPS when looking over sea and then dropping to 20 FPS when you look back towards land.

I can't really know if 5FPS is something that should push you over the edge because i don't know your starting average FPS. If you're getting 40-50 FPS then it's a trivial matter, if you're getting 25-30 FPS then losing 5 FPS can be an issue.

I also don't know what kind of settings you are running but i'll go out on a limb here and suggest the easiest performance fix available.

The best advice i can offer you is to lower your texture size in the graphics options. It's the setting with the highest impact (along with SSAO) in terms of FPS and to be honest with you, dropping it less than two notches results in minimal, almost imperceptible quality loss. Original size textures are just that, the original, unscaled, unoptimized, raw textures, they use up tons of VRAM.

Try this and tell me if it helps, just drop your texture size a notch and you might not have to lower anything else.

ATAG_Septic

09-07-2011, 11:56 AM

...What i'm trying to say is, i'd rather have a steady 40 FPS than 60 FPS that fluctuates down to the mid 20s at times. It's the same reason many demanding flight sims have been using FPS limiters in the past (FSX is a notable example), if the sim knows it will need to render less frames for a given time it's easier to keep ahead of the curve and render them in time, instead of giving you 50 FPS when looking over sea and then dropping to 20 FPS when you look back towards land.

I can't really know if 5FPS is something that should push you over the edge because i don't know your starting average FPS. If you're getting 40-50 FPS then it's a trivial matter, if you're getting 25-30 FPS then losing 5 FPS can be an issue.

I also don't know what kind of settings you are running but i'll go out on a limb here and suggest the easiest performance fix available.

The best advice i can offer you is to lower your texture size in the graphics options. It's the setting with the highest impact (along with SSAO) in terms of FPS and to be honest with you, dropping it less than two notches results in minimal, almost imperceptible quality loss. Original size textures are just that, the original, unscaled, unoptimized, raw textures, they use up tons of VRAM.

Try this and tell me if it helps, just drop your texture size a notch and you might not have to lower anything else.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Great post, thanks. It prompted me to try settings I've so long left switched off and ignored. Taking your advice I have lowered textures to medium and have discovered that I can run the beta patch with everything else at maximum including SSAO at an acceptable frame rate and it looks (and sounds) fantastic. It runs with textures left on original but is choppy.

Sorry there's no proof or scientific information to back this up, I will try and remedy this in case it provides some incentive for people to pick up this beautiful simulation.

Thanks again :)

Vengeanze

09-07-2011, 12:24 PM

Blackdog, thanks for taking the time. You write long posts but they're always substantial.

Like you pinpointed my problem is really the high resolution (2560 x 1440). If I just go down a notch I have very acceptable frames. But the problem is like you already know, if you run at anything else than native then this game looks really...not good.

I don't use black death as the absolute truth but more of one tool amongst many. Pre patch I usually stayed above 30 fps but now I'm mostly under.
I've tweaked the settings and overclocked my card just so I do not have to lower my res and enter the world of fuzzyness and pixelation but no other option with the beta.

This beta reminds me of a scene in Saving Private Ryan. On Omaha where a medic struggles to save a guys life and just when he thinks he managed to stop the bleeding a bullet in the head ends the life of his patient. His outcry resembles mine after the patch install: "Give us atleast a friggin change".

Last note: If it hadn't been for my wife I had put my $3500 on a PC and you and I wouldn't be having this conversation. :-D

baronWastelan

09-07-2011, 12:58 PM

;)

LoBiSoMeM

09-07-2011, 02:46 PM

I do a lot of videos. Now I run this sim with textures "Original".

Well. Everybody can judge if the performance is porked. I don't think so...

My rig isn't so expensive: AMD X4, 8GB RAM DDR3 in a cheap ASUS MOBO, GTX 560TI with just 1GB...

If people like to wait one year, ok. I can do this in MP:

47JuCSdFYwU

And I can fly like this over London, low level...

-dnobzWFmb8

Good enough for me... Amazing sim, great sim engine and a lot of room for further evolution.

I saw people with a lot of "frustrations" that can't even taxiing in strong wind. People blame CloD for some not so big bugs and don't explore the sim properly.

Ali Fish

09-07-2011, 02:58 PM

nice vids Lob !

posted them at ED for there entertainment !

Vengeanze

09-07-2011, 03:09 PM

I do a lot of videos. Now I run this sim with textures "Original".

Well. Everybody can judge if the performance is porked. I don't think so...

Well, you got the pre beta patch from Steam that fixed your game. ;-)

Seriously, I'm glad for you but the tip to wait a year from launch is generally a good one for any game or OS for that matter.

I'm having a great time in CloD and the last patch raised the immersion quit a bit.
I gonna do some screenshots so you can see for yourselfs where I was quality wise pre patch and where I'm at now having to lower the res. It's ugly, I tell ya.

Blackdog_kt

09-08-2011, 12:27 AM

Just a bit of clarification. I wasn't refering to lowering your monitor resolution, that will indeed result in a fuzzy picture.

What i was meaning to say is to launch the sim, go to options->video and click on the little button that displays the expanded options. Then, find the one that is labeled texture resolution (or size) and drop it a notch.

I'm not sure if this requires a restart of the sim but just to be on the safe side, once you lower your texture size

a) exit the sim and clear you cache in documents\1c softclub\il-2 sturmovik cliffs of dover\cache

b) run it again to rebuild your cache, this will take a bit of time

c) exit again

d) run it once again, it should now take a lot less time and you can go flying/testing

The original textures are pretty huge, as an example pilots are probably a few MB each and the Buckingham palace is 20MB or so, these are raw, uncompressed textures. Now take into account all the different field variations, the building textures and so on, it adds up to quite a lot and can easily swamp a GPU with less than 2GB of VRAM.

Hope it helps in any case ;-)

Vengeanze

09-08-2011, 04:56 AM

Blackdog_kt

09-09-2011, 02:49 AM

Hehe. You've been hanging with numbnuts too long Blackdog. :-P
I'm talking about in game res of course.
But thanks for the tip to clear cache even after res change. Don't have high hopes but gonna try it asap.

It seems you're talking about in-game screen resolution. I'm talking about in-game texture resolution, which has a direct effect on their size and how much VRAM in your GPU is chewed up while playing and is also a different setting :-P

Just go to your video options, make sure you click on the checbox to show the advanced options and mouse over to the one named "texture size", that's the one you want. If i misunderstood and you already know/tried this then excuse me, hanging around here either makes people impatient or gives onr the habit of explaining the obvious, but after all the answers i've given to often repeated questions i don't risk it anymore, i give step by step descriptions ;)

Vengeanze

09-09-2011, 07:03 PM

Thanks Blackdog.

Like you I test and tweak alot and run benchmarks.
The settings I've got is the absolute minimum. If I lower even more then I loose too much feeling. Got the "Texture quality" at High and won't go lower as the terrain texture looks hideous then.
I've even tried the ramdrive without any perfomance improvement.
Hopefully the official patch will give me my 10% back plus a couple of more frames on top of that. That'll keep me on the right side of 30. :-D

Btw, I tried that FXAA and it works great. No performance hit and not that dramatic smear effect that I get with that new AMD AA (can't remember the name).

Pudfark

09-09-2011, 09:26 PM

@Vengeanze

It seems to me...
The folks that have the most success with this sim are using:
Fast, overclockable Intel processors...which you seem to have.
Win 7 64 bit OS
A quality MB with 8gig or more of RAM.
NVIDIA 580 GTX w/ 3gig of Vram...no sli

In my mind/experience...this sim is about to turn the corner, in the
direction of success...the patch after this one will determine it.

I am not advising you to spend $600 on the NVIDIA card at the moment.
However, when things are sorted? It might be a consideration...It will be that for me...along with the equipment listed above.

Many folks here are smarter than myself, to include you...
Frustration often leads to good folks overlooking simple things...
When trouble shooting problems?
The best advice, I have ever received, is to work from the wall plug towards the problem...

Good Luck and a cold beer go a long ways towards problem solving...;)

katdogfizzow

09-09-2011, 10:02 PM

Op should start a whinery

Vengeanze

09-10-2011, 05:21 AM

Op should start a whinery

Hey, do I whine so much? :(
Didn't mean to but was expecting so much from this beta. But the official patch will be better.
Still enjoy this sim enormously and the new sound has raisen the immersion level alot.

Vengeanze

09-10-2011, 05:23 AM