Poor performance after retail patch? Re-installing will solve it!

[Orpheus]

Ho chaps o/

Here's a little story. As most of you know by now, after each patch, it is best to delete the contents of your 1C Softclub folder (found in My Documents) to ensure that the patch overwrites the older files to ensure you don't get any conflicts between the old and the new. I think it was Blackdog that figured this out (thanks mate!), and although from memory we later found out that Steam should do this by itself anyway, it was still a 'good thing to do' to ensure best performance.

After the last retail patch, my game performance went through the floor. I went from High Textures down to Medium, dropped my building level/detail - everything - and still performance wasn't half of what it was. In frustration earlier, I wiped CloD from my hard drive, intending to wait a few months to see how things progressed.

Half an hour later I decided to reinstall the game, figuring 'what the hell'. I put my old controls back in and started the game up for a quick flight, switching off only the Epilepsy Filter in the video settings in what I thought would be a futile attempt to see if anything was different.

I nearly fell off my chair! I'm now running with Original textures (something that has been utterly impossible for me since release), mostly medium everything else. Performance improved massively - there is still a fair bit of stutter when loading new ground areas, but once it's loaded things seem to be ok - definately playable with a stable 25-30 fps, even at heights of about 30 feet! I clipped the treetops in stable, clean flight for the first time since buying the game! Not only that, but the images for both the Adler Angriff and Cliffs of Dover campaigns are different too - so something isn't being changed by the Steam patch alone.

So the lesson here is: delete the entire game, including the 1C softclub folder in My Documents (remember to save your control/ammo configs so you don't have to set them up again). Then reinstall the game from scratch. This should make your game fully compatible with the latest retail patch and noticeably improve performance.

I have no idea why this works, or why just downloading the patch and overwriting the existing files seems to cause conflicts that reduce performance. The only downside I've noticed is that AA no longer works having done the above, to the extent that even the flavour images for each campaign mission are jaggy as hell (no idea why, assumed they were just images, not renders?), and Crossfire, while better still seems to increase the stutter when compared to a single card.

Hope this is a help to those with poor performance after each patch! I know it's a sod downloading the entire game again, but the boost should be well worth it! With any luck this will be a help to Luthier and co as well, as I'm pretty sure they didn't intend for us to have to re-download the whole game every time there's a patch!

Good luck and happy flying! o/

[ATAG_Dutch]

Hi Orph,

Did this happen today?

The only reason I'm asking is that I had a similar thing happen, only I didn't uninstall Cliffs of Dover, I uninstalled Ghost Recon. (!?!)

Seriously, the performance of cliffs was a lot smoother when I started it up today. Like they'd sneaked an update patch in without telling us.

Much, much smoother gameplay, and it can't be connected with Ghost Recon. Can it???

Very strange, but a welcome improvement.

[jimbop]

Orpheus, can you please clarify what you mean by reinstall? I.e. do you have a disc or the steam version? If steam, did you restore a backup made after the last steam patch or the original dl? Thanks.

[Orpheus]

Originally Posted by Dutch_851

Hi Orph,

Did this happen today?

The only reason I'm asking is that I had a similar thing happen, only I didn't uninstall Cliffs of Dover, I uninstalled Ghost Recon. (!?!)

Seriously, the performance of cliffs was a lot smoother when I started it up today. Like they'd sneaked an update patch in without telling us.

Much, much smoother gameplay, and it can't be connected with Ghost Recon. Can it???

Very strange, but a welcome improvement.

Indeed it did Dutch, though I don't have Ghost Recon on my machine, so I'm at a bit of a loss as to how to explain your results! Certainly confusing!

Originally Posted by jimbop

Orpheus, can you please clarify what you mean by reinstall? I.e. do you have a disc or the steam version? If steam, did you restore a backup made after the last steam patch or the original dl? Thanks.

Apologies jimbop, I should have made that clearer. I have the Steam version. From the way I understand it, Steam downloads and installs (what I assume to be) the standard game files, plus the latest patch and any/all modifications made to those standard files by the patch.

My previous version was an install from.. probably around the time of the second retail patch, if memory serves. That install then had the latest patch (third retail patch) applied over the top when it was released, with the contents of the 1C Softclub folder deleted to ensure no conflicts (just deleted after patch, then 'validate files' or whatever it is in Steam to get the latest versions). That was when my performance went downhill.

This time I deleted the entire game ('Delete Local Content' I think, in Steam/Properties) and the whole 1C folder from My Docs. I then redownloaded the entire thing from Steam again - and that fixed nearly everything. The only files I retained from the previous install were my personal control config (mycontrols.ini) and my weapon loadout config (user.ini). How it would work from a disc install I'm honestly not sure.

Hope that helps!

[jimbop]

Thanks Orpheus. I'll give this a go tomorrow and report back.

[Zaltor]

A reinstal didn't help me, but i'm using crossfire, the game runs better without crossfire, and I found the game ran better for me 2 patches ago i was getting 45+fps plus in london now im getting 15-20

[Bryan21cag]

Originally Posted by Zaltor

A reinstal didn't help me, but i'm using crossfire, the game runs better without crossfire, and I found the game ran better for me 2 patches ago i was getting 45+fps plus in london now im getting 15-20

same here tried to deleting everything with clean install and i get the same as Zaltor with lots of shudders no matter where i am and no matter what settings. I even turned everything down to low and cant even get it to run perfectly smooth really at that point lol just everything looks awful and i get better fps with the same stutters

Worth a try though thanks anyway

I would try turning off my crossfire again but it seems to do more harm then good for me. The game doesn't really run that much better on the single 1G and it sends my desktop colors all out of whack for some reason and takes a restore to get them back after.

[David198502]

orpheus, could you please post a screenshot of the new images of the campaign?i would be interested if i have the same, cause i did a new install one week ago, but didnt notice any performance improvement.

do you have steam cloud enabled or disabled?
cause i did several new installations til now, and recognized a difference in the menu section whether you do a clean install with steam cloud enabled or disabled.

[Orpheus]

Dave - screens from the campaign starts here:


http://img40.imageshack.us/img40/214...7031326389.jpg
http://img6.imageshack.us/img6/5548/...7031326100.jpg

The text for 'Cliffs of Dover' is different to the way I remember - initially I just thought 'oh, new pics, nice..' before it started to dawn on me. I first noticed the difference in the 'Cliffs of Dover' text. I'm 99% certain the images were different, though of course it's impossible to check as I don't have screens from the old install. I'll be very interested to hear if you have the same ones! My Steam Cloud is disabled, though I do have CloD still set to auto-update.



@ Bryan & Zaltor - Sorry to hear it didn't do any good. I would consider deactivating crossfire if at all possible, my experiments with single & double gpu's have always shown markedly increased stutter with two cards. Why this happens I don't know, but a single gpu has always performed better. Have you done your reinstalls recently (i.e. as a result of this post), or was it a while ago? Only reason I ask is that I've reinstalled before and seen little improvement, but my reinstall post-latest retail patch has given me the improvements in the OP.

Edit: included mission flavour image with no AA:
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images...031339050.jpg/
Little hard to see as it's not full screen size in the browser but if downloaded should show the lack of AA. Not all mission flavour images seem to show this, which is even more confusing.

[flyingblind]

I also did a complete reinstall with much the same results as you. After the last retail patch my fps probably halved, the first time I had got a backwards step from an update. They are now back to the old levels if not a bit more. I tend to use the 'Bomber intercept over London' mission as a benchmark. I load the mission and hit autopilot and watch the fps counter especially in the first attack on the bombers. When I first bought and installed the game I got a freeze of several seconds at that point. Now it drops to around 24fps from just over 30.
Funnily enough running it over a few days I also had that feeling the developers had sneaked in another update. This was mainly due to a marked improvement in ground object texture, particularly trees. Before there was a circle around my plane where the LOD of trees suddenly changed from good to poor. This was also where any fickering of tree and cloud shadow would occur. Suddenly, a few days after reinstalling, the LOD transition had smoothed right out and any flickering shadows were almost completely gone. The trees in general looked much better, sharper and better defined. Even the green seems to have improved.
Incidently, after reinstalling all my controls settings had changed. Needless to say I hadn't saved. And aircraft had aquired icons.