[RESOLVED] Framerate Issue

[Bluddy]

I wouldn't be surprised if it's an ATI driver issue. They probably built power saving into their driver and didn't give proper access to it. As Castruccio and I know from Din's Curse, ATI's recent drivers have been horrible, and are tweaked only for the latest games, screwing over every other game in the process.

[keith.lamothe]

The lowest res my set up offers is 1024x600, where I get about 17.5 fps on the world map.

Oh, sorry, I meant to change the resolution of the window, on the Settings menu; are you in fullscreen?

[keith.lamothe]

They managed to mess up their drivers enough to cause Din's Curse to go slowly?  Not knocking that game's graphics, but it's 3D (which cards are way more optimized for than the stuff we do) and has relatively undemanding textures, iirc.

Anyway, yea, that makes it sound more likely that it's a driver thing.

[Castruccio]

The lowest res my set up offers is 1024x600, where I get about 17.5 fps on the world map.

Oh, sorry, I meant to change the resolution of the window, on the Settings menu; are you in fullscreen?

Changing the window size to 800x600 results in identical performance. 

The Din's mess up was mostly with AA, which I guess isn't a factor in AVWW. 

[Castruccio]

I've been playing around with all kinds of power controls and application settings in the Catalyst software, and nothing has resulted in an improvement thus far.  I guess I can try rolling back to the drivers my card shipped with  and see if that helps.

[Castruccio]

Looks like rolling back to an earlier driver version doesn't fix the problem

[keith.lamothe]

Changing the window size to 800x600 results in identical performance.

... that's just bizarre.  Frankly, I'm running a craptop here.  I think it's demonstrably, substantially inferior to your machine in almost every relevant aspect.  And it's using ATI, same as yours.  But i get 27 fps on the world map and you get 18?  There's got to be something weirder than the program going on here.  But it seems like all the ideas we've tried (and thanks for trying so many) just don't yield an explanation.

[Castruccio]

Yeah, thanks for all your help.  I think that, for some reason, the GPU just isn't kicking in on AVWW.   On other games (both indie and AAA) that are 3d based, everything spins up the minute I launch the game.  For AVWW, for some reason, everything stays quiet.    I know Terraria worked fine, but I guess AVWW is a little more demanding than that.  I also have the Diablo 3 beta, which works fine on medium settings.  AVWW just hits some sort of sweet spot that messes things up.

[Bluddy]

As a weird test, maybe you guys could make a build that has too much GPU work? I know it's extreme, but maybe it'll work? Or perhaps there's some kind of tweak that can be made to spawn a gazillion entities on screen?

[eRe4s3r]

That would be weird, AVWW is a Direct3D application so if you start it 3d-mode should trigger for any and all cards in existence even if there is 0 load on the card. As long as any 3D-App is open and does not request actually have a "no motion, no rendering of the frame" function cards are actually required to run in 3D mode

That said, It is possible that if the driver is VERY badly coded it uses GPU load as definition whether to "ramp up" or not. In which case... that could be a problem.

See attached file, GPU load even with many enemies, never goes beyond 20% and as you can see, the GPU never even breaks out a sweat when playing AVWW... in fact, i was doing soemthing in the background (firefox..youtube, 9 tabs) so yeah ,p

Could you get GPU-Z 0.60 and look in the Sensors tab while playing AVWW ? Does it look like this attachement, or does the 3d-mode not trigger?

[Bluddy]

Castruccio, you might want to run a light 3d game like Din's Curse in a window, and then run AVWW in another window. That might be an easier test.

[Castruccio]

Castruccio, you might want to run a light 3d game like Din's Curse in a window, and then run AVWW in another window. That might be an easier test.

This is interesting.  I have not tried eraser's test yet, but when I try Bluddy's test of running Din's Curse in a window while AVWW is also on in a window I do get between 15-25 more fps on the world map.  It goes from about 17 to about 30 when  Din's Curse is on and the fan spins up, and then when I turn Din's Curse off it drops back down to 17 fps on AVWW.  It looks like AVWW is definitely not causing the GPU to kick in for whatever reason. 

[keith.lamothe]

It goes from about 17 to about 30 when  Din's Curse is on

That is so, so wrong

[Castruccio]

It's pretty infuriating.  It means that I have the hardware to run AVWW well, but I just can't unlock it to make it do so.  I guess I can just run another game in the background when I am playing AVWW and maybe that will boost my framerate by 10-25 frames.   

[eRe4s3r]

you could try starting up a youtube video that's looping and mute it

like this http://www.infinitelooper.com/?v=Twp4Fjjo8J0&p=n#/0;29

Does this do the same thing when you play AVWW than Dins curse? Youtube has hardware playback so that SHOULD trigger the 3d mode as well....