Metro: 2033 Redux and Metro: Last Light Redux - Performance Discussion

LOL you guys are weird. I rarely ever bring up my OSD unless I need to check frame rate or suspect throttling/bottlenecking and things of that nature. It breaks immersion.

 

Yup! Open the game and the vRAM just starts climbing. Fun fact: I never experienced a single stutter issue in ghosts even at max graphics. EVERYBODY I know with a 2GB card or cards did. That game just likes to take and take and take. And it doesn't even actually USE it apparently; just doubles everything up (as approximately every single person tells me when I show the screenshot).

Hehe. I set mine up to toggle the entire display at the touch of a button. Numpad 6 = display off, numpad 6 again = display on. Num 1 = screenshot, num 5 = in-game options (can tune recording options etc without alt-tabbing), num 4 = start/stop record, num 3 = cancel record (doesn't leave a file for you to delete if you don't like what you were recording), num 2 =... I forget what I set that to.

 

GG Infinity Ward...

 

Every game I play is just another way of running a benchmark, LOL. It actually enhances my immersion and not having OSD is a distraction to me... probably because I am OCD and maybe even ADD. Adults with ADD/ADHD often have trouble focusing on tasks that are not interesting to them, but there is a flip side with a tendency to become completely absorbed in tasks that they find exciting or rewarding.

Almost anything that has a deep story-line or requires stopping for dialogue and puzzle solving to gather clues or bits of information (e.g. Skyrim) to make progress in the game and I quickly start zoning out, thinking about other things. The OSD information is a useful distraction that helps me stay in the game. I never grow tired of non-stop run-and-gun games that have no plot whatsoever and the main objective is just shooting and blowing things up. If Metro did not have the skip feature I would never play it. I have never finished either Metro title because after a while I get too agitated by Artyom's story-telling.

Yeah, I love Ghosts single-player campaign. I have never once played the multi-player and I hear it is lousy, but the campaign mode looks amazing and runs as smooth as silk on the 18 and the M18xR2... MUCH SMOOTHER and looks way better than BF4 in my opinion. But, I don't play Battlefield online very often either. Maybe 6 to 10 hours a year... something like that. As you said, it's one of those games that will take and use everything you offer it. Here's an example of it gobbling up 4GB of vRAM at 2560x1440 on my M18xR2. It played fine with 2GB of vRAM at 1080p with 680M SLI as well, but I never ran it at 1440p with 680M SLI... might not have handled that quite as well with half as much frame buffer available.

Spoiler

 

Oh yea I definitely have OCD and ADD. I think this comes part and pair with my extreme level of unwitting devotion to gaming, and also my inability to admit that I am no good at programming, I just keep trying and am determined to make my way in the IT world regardless of my skill level lol

 

I wonder if I have mild ADD then? I have SERIOUS difficulty focusing on any task that does not interest me, but when I do find something that does I can spend days on it. Hell, I don't think any normal person would freely write two as-heavy-detail guides as I have for no other reason than "I can't find this information elsewhere I think it'd be cool if I consolidated it myself to help people!". I don't get as bored as you do with storytelling in games; I really like story, especially if it has interesting bits. But man I hate not having my overlays XD. Even if I turn them off if I feel bored I'll turn em on and see how things run in a lull in the action.

You can imagine how annoying this makes school for me, especially university where "I want to learn programming!" = chemistry, physics, math, english, social skills and maybe 1 programming class... all to learn programming. >_>.

 

Haha Mr. Fox you're the first person I've ever heard say that Ghosts looks and runs better than BF4. Everyone else is the exact opposite.

 

To be honest, Ghosts looks VERY GOOD in the right maps. Example here. I'm fairly certain if I was playing in hardcore mode (no hud) and I told people it was hardcore mode in another game, they would believe me. I actually think it somewhat surpasses Crysis 1 in that particular map (and runs better too).

And Single Player usually looks better, as it's a different engine modification than multiplayer. Few people actually know about that bit, but you can see it best in Black Ops 1 with Zombies using the weapons from MP. There's a lot more shine and detail all around. In BO2 they swapped zombies over to the MP engine as they could put more wacky stuff in, but being rendered in the MP engine it was less graphically-focused. Nobody cared about that on last-gen consoles though, but I found BO2's SP to be beautiful.

 

I have not experienced the random pauses in Ghosts that BF4 is famous for. BF4 is sometimes smooth, sometimes not. It depends on what kind of mood it is in.

I think sometimes CoD haters can sometimes be like Alienware haters... once they decide they don't like something, having a valid reason is no longer necessary and they post all kinds of negative stuff in forums and develop a following of other haters. It will be a fail no matter what just because of what it is.

 

Hive mentality

 

Yes, it can be a hive mentality. If Ghosts online is (or was in the beginning) a really bad experience I can certainly see being unhappy about that, but I have actually seen a number of posts by haters that refuse to buy it based on what others have said. They fume and fuss about how terrible it is even though they don't own it, LOL. In addition to that, my experience may be different because I buy games most of the time when they are a year old, sometimes older, because I am a cheapskate and don't like paying a lot of money for games. By then it is probably safe to say that often many of the bugs are fixed.

 

I can safely say that ghosts is a disgusting excuse of a PC game. It's beyond awful, and HERE is a bit of text I even wrote 1 week into its launch when I started noticing a RIDICULOUS number of issues with the game, most of which took months to be addressed (and most were not)... and all the bugs I listed were ONLY PC-related bugs or disappointments. I did not list core-game issues, like the entire lack by design of any way to tell your in-game ping at all.

That being said, anybody who hates on something without at LEAST doing a lot of research on it is just a moron. As much as I wish to smack every single IW employee who so much as breathed on the PC version of any of their CoD games MW2 and beyond, I will never say how the game does not improve or change with each iteration. Each of them are quite clearly distinct from the last, and I remind people as such when they say there's never any improvement. And I swear they'll just get labeled as hypocrites for the rest of their life if they so much as THINK about liking CS:GO when making those statements about CoD, as CS:GO is a game that literally has had nothing but a molotov cocktail, few rebalance tweaks and two licks of paint added for approximately 15 years.

I actually find the CoD community to be the best of the popular FPS games... because as bad as they are, they do not spend half their lives bashing BF4/CS:GO while saying their game is the best while their own game is buggy or broken. That's what BF and CS players do XD

 

I can honestly say Ghosts wasn't even that bad of a port considering it looked so much better than anything console could offer, but it did freeze to a crawl about once every 1 to 2 minutes.The thing that really bothered me about the game was that it did not differentiate itself from any of the other games in the series at all and it felt like a rehash of the last 4 games I have played.

 

Really? I think even Killzone Shadowfall and Infamous Second Son on PS4 look much better than Ghosts on PC. Ghosts is last-gen tech with poor optimization to boot. It looks worse than BF3 and runs worse than BF4.

@D2 Ultima I think it's a bit disingenuous to say that all CS:GO is is a graphical update of CS 1.6 with Molotovs and a balanced de_dust. What about the biggest change of all, the addition of the ranked matchmaking system?

 

In some maps Ghosts looks like amazement. This has happened in... 1 map. 2, tops. In other words, it had potential. The rest look worse than MW2 half the time.

As for the matchmaking thing... I guess that is a pretty big implementation. But it's broken as hell, and lots of fundamental things about CS:GO are broken, and have been for years. And I can't forgive that. I was more referring to the gameplay mechanics though. Nobody really attacks the menus or equipment system of CoD/Battlefield, so I left CS:GO's out of it. Was purely speaking from a gameplay standpoint.

 

And that exactly is the problem with Ghosts and I'd say every CoD after MW1. You simply can't make a bleeding edge game if your engine tech is so outdated that you can't fundamentally improve the graphics. Adding some gimmicky dog fur and smoke or blurring everything to hell with TXAA won't cover up the crappy pre-baked static lighting or horrendous texture quality or lack of destructibility and dynamism.

Hmmm I'd say the rank system in GO has a large affect on how you approach and play the game if you're matchmaking competitively.

 

Speaking of CoD....

METRO REDUX BENCHMARK RESULTS
8/31/2014 9:18:25 PM

Options: Resolution: 1920 x 1080; Quality: Very High; SSAA: Off; Texture filtering: AF 16X; Motion Blur: Normal; Tesselation: Very High; VSync: Off; Advanced PhysX: On;

Run 0 (Scene 1)

• Total Frames: 15223, Total Time: 171.2764 sec
• Average Framerate: 88.91
• Max. Framerate: 258.06 (Frame: 12451)
• Min. Framerate: 22.63 (Frame: 3116)

METRO REDUX BENCHMARK RESULTS
9/1/2014 12:21:21 AM

Options: Resolution: 1920 x 1080; Quality: Very High; SSAA: Off; Texture filtering: AF 16X; Motion Blur: Off; Tesselation: Very High; VSync: Off; Advanced PhysX: On;

Run 0 (Scene 1)

• Total Frames: 15156, Total Time: 171.2754 sec
• Average Framerate: 88.52
• Max. Framerate: 309.79 (Frame: 12382)
• Min. Framerate: 27.95 (Frame: 2665)

 

TXAA is the most disgusting anti aliasing method I have ever had the displeasure of turning on in black ops 2. Stand still? Looks like 4x MSAA or so. Move? My cowsauce, what are textures even in the game for? The whole game becomes one blur with players moving about. I just put the game at 16x CSAA and leave it at that XD. In fact, one of these days I'll try forcing 32xQ CSAA on in nVidia control panel. That + FXAA should make a pretty game indeed.

As far as baked lighting and stuff goes, a ridiculous number of games rely on this for graphical improvements. As much as I hate both the frostbyte and cryengines for their unoptimizations, they are essentially the best thing you can get in terms of visual advancements these days. Unless you hire the people from prototype 2. It *STILL* battles me how their textures looked so good. I usually walk around "super good" games until I find an awful texture or something. I found them all the time in Crysis 2 in places you had no business going to, but I never found them in 1 or Warhead. Prototype 2 was basically the same. The worst examples I saw were strewn newspapers drawn into the floor in rare places.

Anyway, I think we need new ENGINES is what we need. Cryengine 3 looks great but runs badly in just about any game that actually utilizes it even halfway. Frostbyte 2 and 3? I don't even think DICE know what the hell makes their engine tick anymore. BF4 came out... windows 8.1 improved FPS. Then it didn't anymore. Then 6-core CPUs improved framerates a bunch!... then they didn't anymore. And now the Pentium G3258 dual core, no hyperthreading chip intel is making based off of <S>Blast Furnace</S> Haswell apparently runs BF4 EXACTLY the same at stock as it does at 4.5GHz, exactly the same as an A10 APU, exactly the same as an i3, exactly the same as an i5-4690K, exactly the same as an Athlon X4 chip, using the same video card. And then there was the whole faster RAM fiasco, where I remember seeing comments on questions asking the validity of the tests Corsair ran with 1600MHz vs 2133MHz RAM for BF4, stating how they went from 1600MHz to 1866MHz and saw 5-10fps boosts in the game, give or take. And now apparently that's a joke and has no real proof.

And then we have Unreal Engine 4, which has had a lot of features removed due to "if the engine released with these only the bleeding edge tech users could play any games made on this engine" effect. So visuals took a nice leap backwards that day.

I think the best thing we've got is the Fox Engine (I bet Brother Fox loves that name) from hideo kojima's team, which apparently manages to make the visuals of MGS 5 at 1080p 60fps on PS4 with almost no fps drops. Imagine that thing let loose on a PC. Yummy. I would also like to see a nice re-write of the Source Engine and more games use a possibly updated Avalanche 2.0 Engine (Just Cause 2, The Hunter, Renegade Ops) which can make better use of large GPU memory buffers like we have access to now for its procedural generation and streaming functions. THESE are some solid optimized engines that have some real potential.

Optimization is key, and the same reason why I spent a lot of time bashing watch dogs. It looks, on average, as good as sleeping dogs and GTA 4, but runs worse than both while using far far more GPU memory. It's unoptimization at its finest. If you optimize a game properly, you'll be able to cross the barrier into legendary visuals without destroying someone's system in the process. If one game on low runs like someone else's similar game on ultra, and the game on ultra looks better, that other guy's game on low just needs work.

 

True what you say there, but for me all those numbers on the screen would break the immersion in the game a bit I think - I can cope with one number up there though, often have FRAPS running.

 

This is kind of interesting to look at...

Spoiler

Versus these results from... Steam Community | Post your Last Light benchmark HERE!

Spoiler

...wonder if any of them are numbered among the self-proclaimed experts that are so adamant that laptops just can't keep up with their desktops.

 

^That guy with the 290X is getting his frame rate butchered due to having Advanced PhyX on which is running on the CPU. That's why even the 7950 result is better.

 

Yeah, your system is comparing very well against those desktops. One thing I've noticed is that Metro 2033 Redux really hits the CPU hard: all 8 threads being used equally and 80-90% load during the benchmark on my i7 mobile CPU - the most of any game I've ever played. PhysX ON also increases CPU usage. I think you have a very strong CPU, so that really helps with your framerates in this title. Also, from what I've read sli is broken unless you do some manual tweaks, so that might explain the 'low' framerates of some of the 780ti sli results up there - maybe you've done the manual tweaks to get sli working? Plus, 780M sli is as good as a single 780ti anyway I think, especially when overclocked. 780M sli is definitely a good desktop replacement!

 

Yup... but he is probably an expert gamer, so who are we to question it.

 

I like how the 2 x 780Ti result was worse than you XD.

I also like how the single 780 card user was APPARENTLY getting 81fps. I call shenanigans and horse faeces.

 

Actually stock 780M SLI with 90% scaling or so should surpass a 780Ti at stock (reference speeds). 950/6000 SLI 780M requires a decently overclocked 780Ti to match it, and it can only match the core speed; memory bandwidth of 6000MHz mem clock 780M SLI is 384GB/s

 

Apparently the PhysX libraries in the game are broken ATM so it runs on the CPU no matter what. That's why having PhysX on increases CPU (not GPU/dedicated PhyX card) usage and can decrease FPS considerably. I heard that copying the latest PhysX DLL's from the game Daylight to the Metro directory fixes it.

 

Gotta love that PC optimization.

 

Yeah, that's a good point, I've read stuff along those lines, and also noticed the NVidia PhysX on-screen widget stating PhysX running off CPU. For me I don't get a big performance hit running Advanced PhysX On (less so than other titles) - I guess the CPU can cope, and I'm a bit loathe for them to transfer that load to the GPU if they 'fix' it! Having said that, I've also read that Redux titles are using a new version of PhysX that the on-screen PhysX indicator is not compatible with & therefore incorrectly showing that it is running on the CPU. My personal intuition on this topic though, is that PhysX is functioning as they intended & the new version 'spreads' the load of the PhysX between CPU & GPU (did see GPU usage increase slightly in some areas of the benchmark with PhysX enabled).

 

Thanks... it does a nice job of holding its own in a tank with bigger fish.

Yes, setting a manual profile by browsing to the EXE and selecting AFR2 was actually good enough. Another dude shared his tweaked profile with me and I used the Geforce 3D Profile Manager to add it to my profile. That added just a few extra FPS, so it did help a tad. It's basically the same simple tweak that MaLDo recommended for the SLI bit, but there is was no profile in the driver for Redux at all until it was added.

Code:

Profile "Metro Redux" UserSpecified=true
    ShowOn All
    ProfileType Application
    Executable "metro.exe" UserSpecified=true
    Setting ID_0x00a06946 = 0x080410f6 UserSpecified=true
    Setting ID_0x106d5cff = 0x00000000 UserSpecified=true
    Setting ID_0x10f9dc81 = 0x00000011 UserSpecified=true
EndProfile

Even with SLI running around 95% utilization on both GPUs the average FPS improvement wasn't huge after the tweak. I'm guessing we might see a bigger improvement after NVIDIA actually releases a driver better suited for it.

I should do that and see what happens just for kicks. Let me see if I can find them easily enough in my Daylight game directory. My CPU is running 4.3GHz and doesn't seem to be under much load at all. I think the max temp I have seen has been around 76°C running the benchmark with the R2 sitting on my lapdesk.

 

Yeah, probably a clueless gamer who confused PhysX for physics. :laugh:

 

Nope, that actually lowered the performance just a bit... Tested on two runs and it was better without the Daylight PhysX files. I'll put it back the way it was until the next NVIDIA driver is available for testing. Max CPU core temp was 74°C @ 43x4 and GPU max was 71°C @ 1006/1500/1.037V, which is more or less what it was before that tweak. This is very similar to what it was without any kind of SLI tweaking.

METRO REDUX BENCHMARK RESULTS
9/1/2014 1:41:18 AM

Options: Resolution: 1920 x 1080; Quality: Very High; SSAA: Off; Texture filtering: AF 16X; Motion Blur: Normal; Tesselation: Very High; VSync: Off; Advanced PhysX: On;

Run 0 (Scene 1)
Total Frames: 13931, Total Time: 171.1724 sec
Average Framerate: 81.42
Max. Framerate: 282.81 (Frame: 11653)
Min. Framerate: 4.58 (Frame: 9350)

Run 1 (Scene 1)
Total Frames: 13975, Total Time: 171.2206 sec
Average Framerate: 81.65
Max. Framerate: 285.39 (Frame: 11688)
Min. Framerate: 16.84 (Frame: 12457)

Average Results
Average Framerate: 81.50
Max. Framerate: 285.39
Min. Framerate: 4.58

 

Yeah, I guess baked lights are fine for CoD. Given its severely limited destruction, environmental interaction, and dynamism (no day-night cycle, weather, etc.) who needs dynamic lighting anyway?

Although I do wonder why you always say that BF3 and BF4 are unoptimized. I personally think BF3 is great. Performance and visuals scale incredibly well on a vast range of hardware. At the low end, it can run with respectable FPS on minspec machines while still looking good. At the high end, it can look absolutely phenomenal while running much faster. And it has great multi-core CPU support. Contrast that with, for instance, Crysis or Warhead, which look like donkey on lower settings and only utilize two cores, meaning they frequently get CPU bottlenecked by the object count at higher settings and draw distances.

If you're referring to not being able to maintain a high min frame rate and drops in GPU usage, that's due to CPU bottlenecking. 64-player Battlefield can benefit quite a bit from CPU overclocking given a sufficiently powerful GPU setup. Microstuttering due to frame time variation caused by CPU spikes can also be an issue. I would pin these problems more on M$ and its failing with DirectX, and to a lesser extent on AMD/Nvidia drivers, than I would on DICE not being able to optimize its game or engine. BF4 under the Mantle path is excellent. Not only is the CPU bottleneck completely removed resulting in fewer dips, but the game perceptibly runs much smoother due to the much tighter/consistent frame times compared to DX11.

 

Deleted all of the Daylight files and unzipped the original PhysX files and it jumped right back up to 88+ FPS again. Temps peaked a little bit higher at one point, but nothing major. Probably a sign it was working better.

METRO REDUX BENCHMARK RESULTS
9/1/2014 2:06:32 AM

Options: Resolution: 1920 x 1080; Quality: Very High; SSAA: Off; Texture filtering: AF 16X; Motion Blur: Normal; Tesselation: Very High; VSync: Off; Advanced PhysX: On;

Run 0 (Scene 1 )
Total Frames: 15091, Total Time: 171.203 sec
Average Framerate: 88.18
Max. Framerate: 290.44 (Frame: 12363)
Min. Framerate: 8.59 (Frame: 21)

Run 1 (Scene 1 )
Total Frames: 15161, Total Time: 171.2777 sec
Average Framerate: 88.55
Max. Framerate: 277.62 (Frame: 12433)
Min. Framerate: 30.55 (Frame: 11378)

Average Results
Average Framerate: 88.00
Max. Framerate: 290.44
Min. Framerate: 8.59

Metro Last Light Redux using Daylight PhysX files	Metro Last Light Redux using stock PhysX files
Metro Last Light Redux using Daylight PhysX files	Metro Last Light Redux using stock PhysX files

 

Mr Fox, Does Aida64 not have an OSD? I know we have the sensor panel but seems odd it doesn't have an OSD.

I have even run 2 screens before so I can see my Game and Aida64 Sensor Panel. I did think about that Little TFT display from eBay as well. looks kinda nifty plus you don't have to have the details on screen.

 

I actually am referring to how much power it demands from a system to perform at X framerate. I mean, throw it on min spec it'll run just fine; I played BF3 on my 280M for a good while (though it ran MUCH better in beta than final release). I did not expect that card to run the game properly. But BF3 and BF4 essentially demand a crapton of resources for not enough returns. See, DICE had (I say had because it apparently no longer is so) made the engine so CPU-bound it was a joke. 4 cores was nice, 6 cores was better, overclocking helped it a ton... but the amount of CPU power it needed to drive its visuals was far far more than other games with a fairly comparable visual set. Like Crysis 2/3. In this respect I think DICE could have done better. BF3 is also still fairly demanding on a system (I *CANNOT* get 120fps on that game on anything above low to save my life... that's silly) but it does not hold up visually. On max graphics it looks about as good as a mix of med-high BF4. So that's where I say that game's unoptimization comes from.

And now apparently dual core non-hyperthreading CPUs work as well as quad cores as far as BF4 is concerned, and APPARENTLY hexacores do not provide any great FPS improvements anymore; barely 10fps over the quads, and Results: Battlefield 4 - Intel Pentium G3258 CPU Review: Haswell, Unlocked, For $75 this article apparently says that all that's necessary is a dual core for that game. So I don't even know WHAT to think anymore. Some kind of madness is what it is though.

Anyway, I just dislike the frostbite and cryengines as a whole for their average system drain vs visual candy in games. I WILL admit that frostbite is getting better, but it isn't anywhere near there yet and EA was basically forcing all their studios to make as many games as they could in frostbite 3. It's why the need for speed games are now in frostbite and Dragon Age Inquisition is in Frostbite and stuff.

Also I love how you snipped my long night-time text and said book <3

 

I have not checked because I have never needed to wonder. It is Rivatuner Statistic Server (RTSS) that is doing all of the work for OSD. I just use HWiNFO64 to pump all the data through it to my screen. I don't know if AIDA64 works with RTSS. To me it would be far less distracting to have it on my screen when gaming than turning my head/eyes in a different direction to look at something else. But, I know some people do not like having in on the same screen as their game. Plus, having it on my screen shots (and videos) eliminates the need for people to ask questions about what my clock speeds, power settings and temps were.

 

You do realize that large-scale online multiplayer shooters are, by their very nature and design, going to be more CPU-bound than linear singleplayer titles? BF4 was a good pilot for Mantle for this very reason as it's the type of game that can benefit from reduced CPU overhead. It's the same whether you're talking Red Orchestra 2/Rising Storm or ARMA III or BF4. That's why you can't compare Crysis with Battlefield, although it should be noted that Crysis 3 isn't exactly light on CPU resources either as it scales up to 8 threads just like BF4 (BF3 scales up to 6).

It's like wondering why RTS and MMO games are so CPU-intensive. And if you think BF4 is bad, you ain't see nothing yet until you've tried PlanetSide 2, which is an MMOFPS that can have hundreds of players in a single skirmish and thousands on a server. It's ridiculously CPU-bound, compounded by the fact that it's primarily a single-threaded game. I'd much rather have a game such as BF4 that utilizes a lot more of my CPU overall in exchange for better performance and less bottlenecking than I would have PlanetSide 2 which runs like crap and bottlenecks on the CPU for just about everybody.

 

AIDA64 does have an OSD. It's effectively useless though as soon as you run a game on full screen its not on top. Even if you set it to always on top, still useless.

I'll use RTSS and Hwinfo64.

Thanks Mr Fox

 

It has an OSD other than the Sensor Panel? Hmm... will have to look and see what you mean. Now I am curious. Darn it! See what you did now?

 

Curious fox LOL.

BTW is your avatar based on the Witcher medallion?

 

Yeah in preferences you can enable the OSD. As well as sensor panel I will let you play. I tried to get it to work on top of my games and failed


LOL curiosity its a bit*h

 

No, but it certainly looks like it could be. I just Googled for the coolest looking fox avatar that I could find and what you see is the best I could come up with. I never would have guessed how difficult it could be to find something that wasn't all cute and fluffy looking, or not some goofy cartoon fox, LOL. I modded what I found a little bit with Photoshop to make it more unique. Would make for a cool little tattoo, and so would the Witcher medallion.

It really is... sometimes I feel more like a cat than a fox. Hopefully, if I am sly enough, it won't lead to an untimely demise like it did for the cat.

 

After the original performance enhancements for Planetside 2 (I believe I tried it sometime around january or february of this year? I think you were the one who told me it since got worse) and my minimum FPS with the game maxed out as high as the settings would go was about 115? at 1080p. That being said it never went above about 160, and usually hovered around 155; and I had TONS of spare GPU power. You are definitely right about larger open FPS titles needing more on the CPU than single player titles though, but it should have to do with what the GPU has to render. BF3 though seems to cut the performance. It makes zero sense that BF4 runs better than 3 at the same settings with equal system drain, except that BF3 needed work.

But it is true, it's getting better. And if it gets really good, then that's awesome. But I still think DICE is relying a bit too much on the CPU. Cryengine 3 can rip up a CPU, I know that; but it's not so limited. It's more like a "want" than a "need" in that case.

 

I've been around the game a while and I've heard you make those claims before. I'm gonna call BS on it once again considering that vulcan with his 4930K @ 4.5 GHz and 780 Ti SLI doesn't get anywhere near the same performance you do. Unless, of course, you were referring to frame rates outside of battle with nothing going on and no other players on-screen and not on Hossin.

These types of games are more CPU-bound than GPU-bound because of their massive scale. The GPU might have no problem rendering all these detailed scenes and objects, but if the CPU chokes on the amount of draw calls when it's telling the GPU what to to, it can become the bottleneck. It's exacerbated in PS2 due to the DX9 renderer since draw calls can only be done on one CPU core. Also, the sheer number of players and various entities to simulate and keep track of physically is a big burden on the CPU in any MMO, but since PS2 is an MMO FPS, it's even worse.

BF4 performs better than BF3 for you probably because of the improved CPU utilization. If you were more CPU-bound in BF3, BF4 runs better for you. Likewise, if you're like me and you were already mostly GPU-bound in BF3, BF4 runs worse.

 

SWEET!!! Hey, look what I found...

http://forum.notebookreview.com/ali...tlefield-4-performance-alienware-18-m18x.html

http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware-18-m18x/619966-battlefield-3-m18x-discussion-thread.html

My favorite level in BF4 is when Artyom snarfles the garthok.

 

Well here's what, when I get a chance I'll reinstall PS2 and try it out again XD.

I cannot say I saw 100-man odd battles. I CAN say I saw ~30-man odd battles in one area, where we were coming down from a cliffside. I never saw over 40 players at one time in that game because I did not play it all that often. I never could find friends to play with so I just kind of... ran it to see if I liked playing it Solo. Which I really didn't because I had zero idea where anyone was.

Curious: What kind of framerates does vulcan get? Does he top out at 55fps for some reason?

 

PlanetSide isn't Battlefield. It's an MMO and definitely not a game for lone wolves. You haven't really experienced PlanetSide until you've participated in a massive Zerg smash with hundreds of people and dozens of vehicles within a single 100 meter firefight. Of course, it helps that vulcan and I both play on Connery, the second most populated server, so we see these all the time.

30-something players is but a drop in the water. Performance goes down exponentially once you start adding more and more into the fight. Another thing is that a whole new continent, Hossin, was released since you last played, and it looks astounding but runs really, really poorly.

Last I talked to vulcan in-game, he told me he almost never drops below 60 FPS. There's definitely an upper limit to what your min frame rate can be in this game, regardless of hardware, given its insane CPU bottleneck and lack of optimization. Unless, of course, you just happen to have a 5-6 GHz i7 or something.

 

I never wanted to be a lone wolf; just all the friends who told me to come play it got engrossed in other games. I actually LIKE lone-wolf games because I can almost never find someone who wants to sit and game with me now and then, so a deathmatch/ffa type of game OR a game where me doing sufficiently well = team winning is good for me. If I had friends who would actually play things like I did a couple years ago, I would probably be more invested in such team games.

 

Well that's why you should play with a squad/platoon or join an outfit (guild).

If you play on Connery VS, vulcan and I are on a lot. Emerald is probably the closest server to you geographically and ping-wise though. But make a Connery alt and roll with us some time. :thumbsup:

 

Haha once I install it again I'll send you all a PM and try it. I hope you two are ready to explain about 500% of the game in teamspeak to a guy with a heavy accent XD.

Also, as for closest to me, Miami Florida servers is best. Atlanta is second best, and Texas isn't bad either. Anything anywhere else in the US and it's 150+ ping in regular games, far less a MMO.

As for guilds, I've had way too many bad experiences with guilds and clans, so I usually stay away from them. But I don't mind giving things a try now and then XD.