What a Dilemma
 

I am so very desperate to enjoy this sim in the rich way that I did with IL-2 Sturmovik 1946 but it is getting harder by the day.

I have thoroughly enjoyed moments since COD's release & this inspired me to make a vid & I see what this sim can truly offer but to experience it in it's truest form, you need to take away all training aids, & fly properly with full-on CEM, temp effects etc.

Now here's my dilemma. Although the patches have always installed with success, my moderate quad core machine hasn't seen any of these improvements or "massive performance improvements" that so many lucky folk speak of. With days of tinkering & getting to grips with the great CEM system, I am suddenly (since the last beta & tonight's main patch), affected with severe fps drops when my Spit or Hurri climbs to an altitude of 1000 feet or more but only when facing to the front. Looking up, left or right or even behind or to the ground, I'm enjoying fps between 35-60 over land but facing forward; a sudden drop to 7-15 fps. This, I have deduced, is completely down to the exhaust effects. I turn off CEM but keep all graphics settings the same & looking to the front is the same healthy fps rate as when looking in other directions (because the effects are taken away with auto management).
I turned the visual effects from my normal 'medium' to a 'low' setting & this took away the exhaust effect at the expense of explosions, fire, splashes & just about every other combat detail you come to expect in a WWII sim on a quad core machine, 4GB Ram & GTX 580 card.
And so I'm stuck with using CEM & a featureless experience or have the explosions & everything we come to expect & dumb down to an automated pilot experience whereby the automation decides to chop your prop pitch just after take off with no say in the matter or indeed any over ride by the user.

If anyone knows of a workaround that enables you to fly CEM with medium visual effect settings without such an alarming drop then I'd welcome the help. ;-)

My system is: Intel Core(TM)2 Quad CPU Q8400 2.66GHz @ 2.67GHz, 4GB DDR3 RAM, ZOTAC GeForce GTX 580 amp! edition with latest drivers & Vista 64 with SP2

First thing u should do is OC your cpu. Gtx 580 in that rig is frankly, a complete waste, especially at stock cpu speeds.

No offence.

without much else to go on, I'd say the weak point is the CPU/OS - depending on your motherboard/power supply the CPU is ripe for overclocking, which would undoubtedly help - 3-3.2GHz should be doable with stock cooling, 3.6 and up to possibly 4GHz with decent cooling. That might not be your thing though - but I'm surprised you're having problems with graphical effects, considering you're running a GTX 580; I'm deducing that the CPU must be chocking trying to feed the GPU with the information it needs.

Windows 7 would be a viable upgrade too - I'd advise anyone to do that upgrade if they have the cash to spare.

e: hah, nanja'd

My suggestion: try Land Detail on 'Medium', Forest on 'Low', Texture quality on 'High' or 'Medium' (this was one of the big killers - 'Original' is as it was before optimising), and Land Shading on 'Medium'.

I run the settings like this, and it runs well and looks good.

OMG! Only had the sodding thing 18 months ago lol. Thanks for your advice. I would go down that road, it's just the know how that's against me. I wouldn't have a clue how to o/c anything & am not sure even how to find the spec of my motherboard lol. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. ;)

*Edit* M/Board is a P5QC & P/Supply 850W if any help.

http://www.clunk.org.uk/forums/overc...beginners.html

That's a great place to start, imho. Clunk's is a nice noob friendly place with a hell of a lot of info.

Give us the name of the mobo/psu if you can, or a link to where you got the PC/parts from - we can start there :D

Will for sure. Will find out from the guy that made it up for me. Many thanks to you for your help & time thus far. :grin:

I'm simply amazed by how all over the place people's experiences are. You have the same motherboard as me (plus a few bells and whistles) a better proc. (except for mine is OC'd).and a WAY better vid card, yet your having a worse experience. It's really unbelievable, but I guess that's just how computers are.

Assuming that you have the same Bios as I have, your board, while not being an overclocker's dream isn't to difficult to OC. I'll make another post with some basic instructions for you as soon as I stick my head in the bios to make sure I remember everything right.

I'm still confounded though, I can slide the canopy back and stick my head out in front of the exhaust and the frames don't waver with my GTX 470! Maybe it is the OC?

Many thanks to both yourself & squidgyb for helping out. I am a military aviation nut, & sims being a large part of that hobby but the moment a pc lid comes off, I'm afraid my interest leaves the room but always happy & willing to be accept help & advice from decent & accomodating folk as yourselves ;)

If it's graphic effects causing a slowdown, I doubt if it's anything to do with the CPU. I would also be very careful of trying to OC if you don't know what you are doing. That way lies smoking ruin for your PC.

Are you sure it's the exhaust and not the mirror?

With your PC you should definitely get pretty reasonable performance.

Always have mirror turned off. It's most definately the exhaust effect, taking the fps down to low teens. Turning the visual effects to low kills that particular graphic effect & fps climbs again but a very large part of the games graphic effects goes with it. The moment I turn CEM off, the fps counter is back in the 40's.

It's got a very good chance of being the CPU, in all honesty - the CPU "feeds" information to the GPU to display; if the CPU is lagging behind, the GPU has to wait for the CPU to give it what it needs to display the frame.

A quick and easy test would be to run a program(s) that displays a graph of CPU usage and GPU usage. In times of low fps as you describe, I'd expect to see the CPU working at 95-100%, and the GPU load dropping a little - though the GPU load may not drop at all, depending on what's going on and what screen resolution you're running at.

Overclocking is inherently dangerous, but that's why I directed Houndstone to an overclocking beginner's site - I won't be telling him to "press del on bootup and whack CPU voltage to 1.4 and yer done" - like anything fun in life - if approached in the wrong way it can indeed be dangerous/costly. Done in the correct, slow and safe way, there's very little risk involved.

Took another screenshot with the task manager performance tab running.

Hmm, That doesn't prove much, tbh. With a quad core, windows would be sharing some of the work by default anyways, but seeing that one core running >90% tells me that it could well be the issue.

It's up to you really, mate - if you're willing to risk-it-for-a-biscuit, overclocking almost certainly would help - the other options are to buy a faster CPU or upgrade to Win 7.

The rest of the rig is definitely up to the task imo.

If you do decide to OC - read that beginners guide. Then read it again. Probably best to do it a third time before you even get into the BIOS. A friend who knows what he's doing on hand to help would be good - but as long as you take it slowly and try to learn rather than blindly follow instructions, you should be fine :)

Feel free to PM me if you need any help, whichever way you go.

Couldn't help but notice the clouds rendered in your low fps shot. Have you tried disabling them? They seem to be pretty demanding for my rig at least.

Not sure what I can add to help but my CPU is similar to your except I've overclocked my CPU, but you however have a much better graphics card.

Over all I'm getting reasonable results with my PC. The only big difference is that your using Vista. I managed to get a cheep Windows 7 upgrade deal through my work and have never looked back. Windows Vista is an abomination! Irt's slow and horrible.

Hope you get your issues sorted out