The curse of the trees

[TonyD]

Originally Posted by SiThSpAwN

Kinda defeats the purpose of installing a beta patch in the first place doesnt it?

True, but I sympathise with the sentiment. I’ve had to live with the ‘blue lines’ issue since the official update, which has now thankfully been corrected. To have this replaced with the current tree error has had me considering doing the same, as the blue lines seem to be less of an immersion-killer (although admittedly they had been greatly reduced in the last beta).

I’m also sure that they are well aware of the issue, as there have been just as many posts on sukhoi.ru as here regarding it.

[SiThSpAwN]

I am not downplaying the issue at all, I totally agree, although I have had luck with some of the fixes suggested, well limited luck, but my point is that if you are installing a beta patch you should assume its to find problems and not end up with a perfectly running game... that should be expected from the official patch when its ready, rolling back to an earlier patch doesnt help us move forward, of course if you aren't interested in testing and submitting issues, well then carry on

[pencon]

Originally Posted by SiThSpAwN

Kinda defeats the purpose of installing a beta patch in the first place doesnt it?

Well once they get their pop up trees fixed I'll update again . I just fly offline anyway .I'm not all that tech savy to send in a report .I'm sure there's plenty of Die hards on here that will send in reports .

[Snake9]

Originally Posted by III/JG53_Don

Its just so depressing to turn them off in total. Without them the landscape looks really really empty Anyway since they are bugged since the last beta anyway (sometimes they are there, sometimes they only appear in close distance to your plane, you know what i mean) I can bear this a little more easy at least for the time of this beta.
I just hope that there is a solution for the tree performance (and collision) somewhere/somehow/sometime soon

I mean I wouldnt mind turning some other details down a little bit to get the trees back in the game, but it doesn't really help. They are THE major slowdown in terms of stutters.... as I said in terms of fps I am quite satisfied

If you look at SG1_Luds and my specs it is obvious that this isn't hardware related... i thought at first that this could be related to my GPU (Ati 6870 1Gb)but if you look at Luds beast of a GPU (Ati 7970 3gb VRam) it seems clear that its a problem of optimizing.... or the trees are just sh*t in general

I have the same gx card (bl. ex. 6870) and game is unplayable due to sutters in fullscreen mode. BUT. . . if I run the game in Pseudo mode almost all stutters are gone even with trees on high. Don't know if it's true or not but I thought I read that ATI cards like pseudo mode better. One thing I do know is it works much, much, much better on my card in pseudo mode. Everything maxed out, but no grass puts me between 30 and 50 fps, much the same pc as yours. If you havn't tried it, do so and good luck.

[III/JG53_Don]

Originally Posted by Snake9

I have the same gx card (bl. ex. 6870) and game is unplayable due to sutters in fullscreen mode. BUT. . . if I run the game in Pseudo mode almost all stutters are gone even with trees on high. Don't know if it's true or not but I thought I read that ATI cards like pseudo mode better. One thing I do know is it works much, much, much better on my card in pseudo mode. Everything maxed out, but no grass puts me between 30 and 50 fps, much the same pc as yours. If you havn't tried it, do so and good luck.

You've got to be kidding me... that does it! WOW! Performance tip of the month at least
Thank you very much dude, setting pseudo mode was the only thing I didnt try during these tests!
Right now its kinda hard to tell if this works for me 100% because I cant get the trees working on full level (I mean that they appear in high distance). Right now I only see the trees in direct distance but in fullmode I got stutters before even with this few trees around the plane. At least the BlackDeath track runs with all trees around the landscape and even on this I get only accasional stutters which are totally accepatable for me regarding the state of the game, my relatively poor GPU and that I had graphics on absolute MAX (avg 38fps with Vsynch ON).
Hope I can get the trees working in high distance at least for one or two missions to doublecheck this observation.

Well Snake9 thanks again for your tip! This should be spread around! Huge Improvement!
SG1_Lud you should try this as well... maybe its the problem of all ATI cards... I dunno.

[SG1_Lud]

Thanks for the tips III/JG53_Don and Snake 9, I will try pseudo mode, it is also the only thing I did not try.

But what I tried, and with success was the following:

* Put everything on lowest settings, and made 3 tests in different scenerys. One of them maneouvering just over the rooftops in London, another one in Le Havre and finally a mission with a lot of effects (tracers, smokes, clouds). Of course the FPS were 60 max, 60 avg, and 60 min (with vsync on), as expected.

* Then I started to increase graphical settings, one at a time. Check again, if FPS results were (60max, 60 avg, 60 min), then move on to increase another step the graphical settings, and so on. The test, to be considered succesful, had to yield a constant 60,60,60 with 1-2 FPS variation tolerance, for at least 5 minutes in every scenery.

* Following this schema, I was able to max out everything, until I enabled the shades. Shades caused inmediate stutters over cities, woods etc. Not only by looking at the counters, the naked eye can perceive, looking outside the plane, a continuous microstuttering, very different of the fluid and smooth flight when shades are off.

* Interestingly enough, the trees could be maxed out if the shades were off and keep the 60,60,60. The trees looked ugly, but they all were there and not causing stutters. I always had thought that the trees were the cause of stutters, but maybe it is not the trees the culprit, but the shades of the trees...

* As one cannot (yet) disable selectively cabin shades and the terrain shades, I went to sea with shades on and everything maxed out, and again I got 60,60,60. So I don't think that the cabin shades are causing problems, but the shades of the terrain, buildings, trees etc.


I do not mean that everyone can max out everthing simply by removing the shades, it needs a powerful system like mine; I simply used a method to try to find what was causing that a system like that could still have problems maintaining a fluid framerate. And voila, the tests pointed to the shades. It works online and offline, I miss the beauty of the shades, but I have a great performance in combat.

I will try the pseudo mode and report back.

S!

ASUS p6T deluxe v2
6 Gb DDR3 RAM 6-7-6-18 1600 Mhz
i7 940 @3,80Ghz
SSD for COD and W7 64 bits
ATI 7970 3gb VRAM
Monitor HP ZR24W

[III/JG53_Don]

Interesting observation I try that out... maybe in combination with the pseudo mode its possible to smooth the few remaining stutters out quite perfectly

[SG1_Lud]

Here you are the rest of my settings for your information:

ATi drivers 12.7 beta
CCC:
AA-> use app settings
Morphological filtering-> off
Anisotropic filtering-> use app settings
Tessellation: AMD Optimized
Catalyst AI: Quality and Enable Surface Optimization OFF
Wait for vertical refresh: ON unless app specifies
OpenGL settings: Triple buffering OFF

COD:
Res: 1920x1200
Full Screen: ON
Model detail: High
Building details: Very High
Land Detail: High
Forest: Very High
Visual Effects: High
Texture Quality: Original
Antialiasing: OFF
Anti ep: off
SSAO: 0f
VSYNC : ON
Damage decals: High
Buildings amount: Unlimited
Land Shading: Low
Grass: ON
Shadows: OFF
Roads: ON

And finally, for antialasing and overall color tweaking I use:
FXAA PPI v37 for DX-10

S!

[jamesdietz]

Checked your suggestion with" Fraps" doing same simple mission with one aircraft over & over, with different" tree settings" & I have to say you are absolutely right.High settings kill FPS down low & Very low to None give me about 4-5 extra FPS( about 17-19,) near the ground,still not great but making combat at low altitudes not so frustrating with my rig. Sad in that it takes away a great deal of immersion tho.
Thanks for your post!
( Once they get this patched to the best of their abilities there will be a new graphics card in my future , but until they do I'll have to wait!)