Topic: SFC OP Laggy frame rates in Single Player and Multi...?

[benbean]

Dizzy,

Do you have vscync turned on?

[Strat]

Also,

Does this happen with stock 2552?

When did this start?

If your in the mood to keep experimenting:
It could be a Video Setting(Like benbean was saying).  If your not keen on all that stuff, then try the following to reset it all.

0) Download Latest Drivers for your Vidcard
1) Uninstall all nVidia Software(Add/Remove Programs)
2) Remove the Display Card from the Device Manageer (If not done by the unstalling of the software in step 2)
3) Restart
4) Follow instructions to install new drivers.

If that doesn't work, or you've already done it, we can look at the Display settings more specifically.

Let me know whats up.

Oh and I would suggest puttin the CPU back to its correct setting. 1.667GHz

While in BIOS, try the following if you can, unless you have specifcally something the way you want in there.

Select "Set BIOS to Fail-Safe Defaults"
Restart
Select "Set BIOS to Optimized Defaults"
Restart

There may be a problem in there too.  That sorta clears out funky settings.  If you have stuff the way you like it, take that into consideration before you do that, or simply set thngis back after you do the above.

[Strat]

Thats great Cleaven. I was hoping someone had a similar situation.

Ummm, my windows firewall is off. I cant seem to find any other one thats running... How do I know where to look?

Oh, and Pesty, I ran that SFC /SCANNOW and a dos window opened and closed b4 I could even read anything in it. Was that supposed to happen?

Still cking the drives, but a while back in between GW2 and 3 I eliminated all registry/virus/pop-ups and trojans. My system is pretty clean.

For that sfc/scannow
Goto Run and Type 'CMD' Press enter
Then do what pesty said about SFC /SNANNOW

The Window will Stay open and you can see the results. (Probably an error message)

What it SHOULD be doing though is opening another window were you see it scanning all files.  Something is now rowking right if it just disappears and nothing happens.

[Dizzy]

Dizzy,

Do you have vscync turned on?

What is Vsync?

[Dizzy]

Decided to defragment my hard drive last night anyway.  I'll see if that helps out the Virtual Memory errors...  I keep debating on whether or not I should set aside a gig or so of my HD as a permanent swap file...

One other thing that concerns me.  I've always used the "skip movie" executable. 

I defragged 2 mo. ago and it looks good. Even said I dont need to defrag again yet. I use the 'skip movie' exe as well.

[Dizzy]

Can you get it to behave differently if you change your desktop resolution, or change the game resolution in SFC.ini?

Hehe, I have tried these resolutions in windows: 800x600 16 and 32 bit using Refresh rates 60, 70, 72 and 75. On 1024x768 I ran 16 and 32 bit using all 4 refresh as well. I also tried changing the .ini file's game resolution from 800x600 (what i usually use) to 1024x768 to no avail. It still chokes when the action starts...

[Dizzy]

In the Windows Task Manager click the box "Show processes from all users" and lets see what that shows.  I'm looking for any sepcific programs what may be troublesome.

I did that. Dont have any. No other users.

[Dizzy]

Guys, I want to thank you all for the excellent help you all give every member of this community. You all are great.

This sh*t sucks. I was SO looking forward to this server. I finally have all my models done (None of them are super poly. Chokes when even low poly models are used). It is wholly frustrating...

There are a few great other ideas above I will try shortly... Let you know.

[Julin Eurthyr]

Decided to defragment my hard drive last night anyway.  I'll see if that helps out the Virtual Memory errors...  I keep debating on whether or not I should set aside a gig or so of my HD as a permanent swap file...

One other thing that concerns me.  I've always used the "skip movie" executable. 

I defragged 2 mo. ago and it looks good. Even said I dont need to defrag again yet. I use the 'skip movie' exe as well.

Mine said the same thing.  Files 6% fragmented, drive itself supposedly "9%" fragmented.  But when I looked at the analysis bar, there was no big chunk of white that could readily be used for much of anything...

Defragging anyway, "against window's better judgement", moved all my files except for a couple to the front of the bar, and I now have 2 nearly-equal sized free space chunks where before I had about 20...

Windows always hated non-contiguous swap files, I'm not sure if that prohibition still exists in XP, or if the technology is highly optimized to use fragmented swap files.  Either way, making sure your swap file is on contiguous HD space never hurt anything...  (who knows, your system could be nice and preety and I'm just blathering on here... )

[Dizzy]

Ok Julin, interestingly enough, I thought it quite surprising when I saw there were 3x SFC entries after I defragged.

Before I did it, it was 9% freagmented. Thats when I installed SFC.

Here are the files:


As I said originally, I noticed that the hiccups happen especially when there are explosions, weapons like photons and plasma torps being launched, etc... strangely enough all textures... Hrmmm...

I wonder what the "Above8bitTextures.txt and aafonts do?

Anyway, looks like that is something quite suspicious, eh? Could this be the problem? What happens when you have a fragmented file that windows cannot defrag? Would it create the lag/choking effect on the game's frame rate I am experiencing?

If so, then what should I do now? Should I delete the entire SFC install and start anew now that I am newly defragged?

[Dizzy]

I reinstalled EAW and loaded up some high poly ships. No problems. Didnt choke lag or anything like OP does.

So Im gonna delete EAW and OP, defrag and then reinstal (sigh) OP and see if that fixes the problem...

Any further ideas I should try?

Oh and get this... It is interesting to know that my other older/slower comp runs OP w/o a glitch... But here is something funny about that...

The OLD comp has a 1.7GHz processor and a 64MB MX440 GeForce card with 512MB ram.

The NEW comp has a 2.0GHz processor and a 64MB GeForce Ti 4200 (a decidely more powerful and expensive than the MX440) with 1GB of ram.

But at the desktop, running the model viewer using the same high poly model, with low processes on both comps, the OLD comp has a higher FPS at 169 vs 142.

Wonder why that is? The Old comp is loaded with XP home, the new is XP Pro. Old comp is using 129MB as shown on DXDiag, the New shows 127... ??? Why would the old comp run slightly faster?

Does anyone know where to get a system benchmark program, something simple that will test the various hardware speeds so I can compare these two computers?

[Cleaven]

What happens if you open up display properties, settings, advanced, troubleshoot, and turn down the hardware acceleration?

[Dizzy]

U know, I never tried that, Cleaven. I looked over that in the middle of trying to fix this issue, I didnt understand how that would help given the descriptions of the  changes made for each level drop. But I suspect the problem was in the fragmented SFC textures folder I mentioned a few posts ago. Hope it is....

I'm about to completely reload the whole package anew after several defrags. If it doesnt work then, then it's likely a hardware isue and I'll tinker with the troubleshooting hardware acceleration part and look elsewhere as well. Good idea.

[IAF Lyrkiller]

Dizzy, i had the same problem. everything would slow down to a crawl, and my two fans in the back would kick in. (laptop). i tried to figure out

WTF was going on. so what i did was restart the syst and do last known good configuration, and then ran a repair of windows. so far everything is

back to normal so it seems, since that time i have been playing Fallout:Tactics and Mechcommander2 w/ no iss. Now i know that some people

would go against a repair. it is your choice. i am just throwing it out there for you...

[Dizzy]

Reload Windows? 'Why fix it if it ain't broke?' (just to be safe will prolly reload some win files anyway...)

WOOHOO!

It was that textures fragmented file.

Here's how it happened. Somewhere during the last cpl days of GW2, this file: C:\Program Files\Taldren Software Inc\Starfleet Command Orion Pirates\Assets\Textures was fragmented somehow. It caused a game where I was in a PvP 2v2 and it lagged all to hell (or so I thought). But what happened was my frame rate crashed everytime SFC tried to load the textures: weapons, explosions, damage, etc... all that stuff. Something about it being fragmented caused SFC's game engine to screech almost to a stop while trying to access each time a weapon was fired or an explosion. Even AMD on a drone causes explosions and it killed the frame rate.

Using advice from this thread, I defragged and found that this file was fragmented:

I  loaded up EAW to see if the problem persisted there. It didnt! So that pretty much concerned my suspicions about it being that fragmented textures file.

So I uninstalled OP and EAW and defragged once more.

I then reloaded OP using Pesty's OP Enhancement Pack v2.0 yet again, (AWESONE installer. Easy one stop shop for no hassle SFC  everything). I loaded up with a 16 ship furball using all high poly models and my frame rate averaged 40fps! I fixed it. What a freaking needle in a haystack!!! Damn, took me 2 days and a half to find the *$#&%.

Thanks guys for all your help. This community kicks ass when it comes to getting tech support. Now if I can just get Crim to stop locking my trash talk threads...

Checks in the mail all!

[Dizzy]

On a side note guys, with an LCD monitor, what refresh rate is the best to use for SFC and web browsing. (Less flicker and eyestrain...) 50, 60, 70, 72 or 75 Hz?

Also in the sfc.ini file, what do these settings do when you change the numbers around? I figured out that 0 is off and 1 is on, but I have seen lowres=3 before... And didnt know some values can be higher than 1.

[3D]
wireframe=0
windowed=0
zbuffer=1
lowres=0
driver=0
backdrop=1
shipstacking=1
ambientlighting=0.33
luminancetextures=1
luminancedamagetextures=1
spacedust=0

In addition, I see that this:

[UI]
UIType=2
QuickTip=1
Grid=0
OrderDelay=30
HeadingDisplay=0
AutoFilm=1
SkipUpsell=1
ASCIICharacterSet=0

What happens when you mess with the UIType= ?
What is OrderDelay= ?
HeadingDisplay= ?

[Julin Eurthyr]

Glad to see you found your main problem...

Little explanation as to why it was giving you all that grief:  Fragmented files are scattered all over the hard drive.  The drive heads may have to move a lot in order to read the fragmented file.  Since the textures were fragmented, any time SFC needed a texture loaded into memory on the fly, it has to read it off the drive, and the drive was scampering all over the place trying to read the various file parts, and SFC practically froze while it waited for your hard drive to cough up all the information.

The Above8bit.txt files aren't much of anything, they're generated by the model viewer / game to list which texture maps are "above 8 bit" graphics quality.

aafonts I'm not too sure of, but I think it's used for most of the text in the UI...

Now, onto the most recent batch:

Refresh rate should be the highest you can get while still getting the framerate and resolution you want.

Now, on the .ini entries, most from memory:

Wireframe, I believe, forces the game to render the ships as wireframes (no textures)
windowed is the entry to allow SFC to run in a standard window, this feature is broken in OP.  Leave it at 0
zbuffer says to use the video system's z-buffer.
lowres is the indication of what resolution you want.  All I know is that 3=1024x768 resolution.
backdrop turns on and off the backdrop (space backgrounds?)
shipstacking - no clue.
ambientlighting is how bright things look in SFC.
The 2 luminance entries turn on the glowies
spacedust turns on and off spacedust.  Drawing dust in space (along with stars etc.) causes a significant framerate drop...

The UI stuff, I've never played with...

[Dizzy]

Yup, when I saw that fragmented file, and it contained the very things that happened right when the system choked, figured that was it. Good explanation. Was still a damned needle in a haystack. But this is good for peeps who 'think' they are having lag in Multi... may just be a fragmented file and they simply need to defrag to fix it. I'll bet there are a few 56k'ers out there who may attribute lag to their slow connect when in fact they just need to do a defrag... But what are the freaking odds I'd get just the perfect file to f*ck up my whole game? Heh. I'm going out to buy a lottery ticket.

Ship stacking I think is what causes the ships to float above and below one another when they occupy same space.

Thx for the info on that refresh. I notice that CRT's poison your eyes with the lingering effects of horizontal lines after spending a lot of time on them, but LCD's dont seem to. So why would a faster refresh on an LCD make any difference? I can see why frame rates would drop using higher Hz, but what is the lowest you can go and not have any discomfort, any noticable flicker or whatever on an LCD? I have 60, 70, 72 and 75 as choices.

[KBF-Dogmatix_XC]

On a side note guys, with an LCD monitor, what refresh rate is the best to use for SFC and web browsing. (Less flicker and eyestrain...) 50, 60, 70, 72 or 75 Hz?


<snip>

On an LCD, the "refresh rate" you're talking about is fairly meaningless.  By all means, set your monitor to as high as it will go, but my guess is that you will see no change in "flicker" on your monitor.  LCDs doesn't have the same flicker that CRTs have.

They have a pixel refresh rate that, if it's too high, you'll see ghosting in fast moving images, but it's not anything you can change, anyway.  Your monitor's refresh rate is set according to it's own specs by the factory.  Low 20's ms is perfectly find for all gaming...high teens is even better.  Mid to high 20's in milliseconds onthe pixel refresh rate and you'll start seeing lots of ghosting in fast moving images..especially in FPS games.


When I had a CRT, I always had to have a refresh rate of 85-100 hz because my eyes were very sensitive to the flicker.  My LCD defaults to 60 hz and can be set to 70 hz (no visual difference) and I'm not bothered at all.



I hope this helps or wasn't altogether repetitive... 

[Dizzy]

I didnt think LCD flickered... They never do when I hold the video cameras up to them compared to CRT's. Great selling tool.

But if refresh doesnt affect flicker on an lcd, then why set it at 75 or even 60? What is the benefit? Also, doesnt it take more processing power to operate at higher refresh? That'd cut down on FPS, wouldnt it?

My ms response time is 25. Very average, but SFC looks great. Better than it ever did on my CRT... For the first time I saw how beautiful the colors and light were as they played across the planets surface after I towed Mavericks G-BCHF into that planet... hehe. Impressive lighting display. Looks 10x better on an LCD.