Mulitiple Performance tests across 3 pc setups

[matsher]

Mulitiple Performance tests across 3 pc setups -
A Min spec set up, a med spec set up & a upper medium spec set up

Hi all,

Okay I am just posting my finding after a whole weekend of testing COD.
So this will be quite a long post - I tried to be a thorough as possible.

Before the testing started I and my IT Bof friend cleaned out all the useless crap from my
pc and got my system to only draw +/- 375mb of memory to run my PC (XP SP3).
So it was as clean as we could make it.

Please note: We were still using the stock config.ini for all the tests.

First PC set up - Min Specs as per COD DVD Box

Mobo : Asus M2N-SLI Deluxe
CPU: AMD Athlon x 64 3800+
Ram: 3gb DDR 2 667
GPU: Nvid 9800 GT 512mb
OS : XP sp3
HD : Samsung HD200HJ 7200rpm (200gb)
Display: Samsung 22inch (max res 1680x1050)

This is my machine I have had for years, it plays most things very well on high specs
Most recently - Battlefield Bad Co 2 - Deadspace 2 - Fallout Vegas etc.- All good.
It didn't love Call of.Duty Black Ops - It slowed down at times. - possible driver issues.

Second PC set up - MED Spec PC

Mobo : Asus M2N-SLI Deluxe
CPU: AMD Phenom II x4 955 (3.2mhz) Black Edition
Ram: 3gb DDR 2 667
GPU: Nvid 9800 GT 512mb
OS : XP sp3
HD : Samsung HD200HJ 7200rpm (200gb)
Display: Samsung 22inch (max res 1680x1050)

Third PC set up - UPPER MED Spec PC

Mobo : Asus M2N-SLI Deluxe
CPU: AMD Phenom II x4 955 (3.2mhz) Black Edition
Ram: 3gb DDR 2 667
GPU: Nvid GTX260 867mb
OS : XP sp3
HD : Samsung HD200HJ 7200rpm (200gb)
Display: Samsung 22inch (max res 1680x1050)


I'll try and keep it short.
The game installed fine, loaded 500mb patch - Epi filter off.

First tests on MIN SPEC PC SETUP

First I tried Med settings to see whats what.
Initially it wouldn't load missions at all, I kept restarting and fiddling with specs till I could finally load a Free Flight over water. (Hurricane)
Graphic corruptions made the sea look like a small pond surrounded by green patterned textures - horrible to look at.
I read somewhere that it was an XP issue.
FPS were terrible complete slideshow the very best I could get was about 8-9fps - avge 4-5 fps. MAX 11-13FPS

Over land flight training mission was predictably even worse.

NOTE: Interestingly it didn't make much difference if the settings were high or low.

The Sim wouldn't let me use AA and the only res I could use with full screen was 1680x1050.
I set it to Windowed mode and it let me choose a lower res 1024x768... I managed to up the frames a bit to (+/-10-13 FPS)
although every few seconds it would drop to 1-3fps (I think thats the Stutters - everyone was talking about)

I discovered that the Effects settings smash your fps, even on low... If you fire into water and it causes splashes fps
would go to 0-1 and then recover a bit when the splashes died down.

Conclusion: the min spec layed out on the DVD box simply cannot feasibly run the game in it's current state.
I noticed that both cores were maxing (but RAM memory was stable). I have read many guys reporting that
only one core was working hard and the others were almost idle. I never saw that, maybe the new patch accesses
both cores well - although not to much effect it seems.


Tests on MED SPEC PC SETUP

Okay so we hauled the Athlon 3800+ CPU out and put in the brand new Phenom II x4 955 BE.
Loaded the new bios etc etc and finally got everything working well...

First impressions were dismal, couldn't see any clear difference at all .. Although there might have been 1-3 fps increase avge.
But I think I am being kind... Overall the performance did not increase to a playable speed anywhere. tried to do a few tests
but quickly saw no notable changes to MIN SPEC SETUP... I was really disappointed cause the Phenom II has proper Horsepower.

I did notice however that the CPUs were being used extensively. All 4 cores were using about 60-65% CPU power.
Interesting, however there was no real performance change. We noticed that music in the menus were erratic, not sure if this is meaningful or not
to performance. Also there was very little fps change when playing around with the graphic settings...
Still had the Green patterned sea corruption... Which seems to be related to the cores being choked, the memory usage seems to
be stable well under 2gb out of a max of 3.5gb. (3gb on CPU and 512mb on GPU)

Tests on MED UPPER SPEC PC SETUP

Mkay, so we hauled out the Nvid 9800GT 512mb and put in the GTX260 867mb. Installed the latest Nvid drivers (266) and tried our luck again.
Finally there were some results. Sadly, not enough to make it playable but results nonetheless.
Free flight over water no other planes - I could get +/- 20-28 fps with occasional stutters that dropped it back down to 1-3fps avge 16 or so FPS.
However, with a 2v1 dogfight the FPS went back down to 10-13 fps . and if you shoot the water or get close to an enemy plane. it grinds to a halt.
So still unplayable.
Same results over land, although slightly better than the previous set ups we were still getting sub 10 fps and frequent slow downs to 1-3 fps.
Very little change noticed from low to high settings... With all 4 cores working evenly. So a terrible result... I would even say that the LOWER SPEC
SET UPS performed a bit better than the MED UPPER SET UP.


Okay so there is very little difference between al the set ups. That makes me hopeful that the problems are not
PC power related but strictly coding related. Thats good in a way cause it means even a lower spec'ed machine
can run it once it is better optimized. Well I bloody well hope so anyways.


This morning I got around to changing the line in thee config.ini - affinitymask 63. And I got interesting results.

1. The Sea became the sea - no weird green textures - so thats good.

2. I was testing different missions and after 5 or 6 restarts the graphic textures totally corrupted (could see plane but everything else
was ugly repeating patterns (Got a screenshot) - All 4 cores were maxed (90-95%) and the RAM was 3.8gb (All of it - 3gb DDR2 + 867mb GPU RAM)
Restarting the PC fixed it.

3. When I loaded up a mission over water the MAX frame rate figure rocketed to about 114 FPS - Whooa.
but in a second or two it throttled back to low FPS (13-16 avge). No matter if I was alone or flying with enemies in the sky.
Over land it was still terrible but on avge a bit better than before.
The PC was using all CPUs evenly at 30-35% - stable
Ram usage: 1.60 - 1.80gb - stable

4. STEAM - MyPC is lying flat on my desk after all the poking around it yesterday so I could see the back of it while I was testing the sim.
We noticed that the network light was flashing consistantly - Even if STEAM was in OFFLINE mode. So the Pc is transferring data - not
sure to where - but my IT Bof friend reckons that this may be a large unseen drain on the PC resources. So STEAM might be a factor in
the current bad performance.

LAST WORD:
i am no Pc Boffin, all the observations here are just that, observations. I took the time to try and observe and note the differences
between the 3 set ups in the hopes of helping others who know more than me figure out how to better this brilliant SIM so we can
be happily playing it smoothly soon.

If you have any questions, just ask... There are lots of little things I left out for the sake of time and space,
but I think I have covered all the important points.