Poor Team Fortress 2 Performance (R1)

I haven't played TF2 in ages but have hundreds of hours logged on it. I booted it up on my R1 to try the new Halloween update and was amazed to see my FPS in the 20-30 range.

I've done some basic trouble shooting (Bios OC on, other programs off, gpu on, game booster on, hard drive defrag, and turned off and on multicore rendering) and still have low frames. Anyone able to shed any light on this?

 

Well yeah I get 20~30 during gunfight :x

 

that sounds about right.

if you want more fps, doing the 2.0ghz pin mod gave me about a 20-25% boost in fps. i have a vid in the heatsink mod thread. the link is in my sig if you want to see the actual difference. its at the bottom of the page.

p.s. i should note the blue numbers at the top left is the evga precision overly displaying temps and whatnot. the bottom line of text is the frames per second. as you can see it tends to stay around the V-sync cap when not much is going on but dips to about 45fps during firefights. ive seen it dip into the 30s on 32 man servers at choke points, but before the pinmod that senerio was borderline unplayable for a few classes. now its not an issue.

 

Thanks for responding gents, I guess I was just imagining better frames. Oh well.

This pin mod is definitely something I am going to have to investigate, although I have barely taken a computer apart before.

 

if you need help on the pinmod post over in that thread. more than likely someone will respond shortly after.

reading the first few post is a must.

 

You also may want to try a gpu OC and see if that helps. You may want to try this first as a pinmod voids your warrenty

 

FYI: GPU OC didnt help me much with games built on the Source engine. mileage could vary for others, but Source engine games tend to be more CPU hungry.

never the less, totally worth a try. my GPU OC helped greatly in most other games.

 

GPU overclock? How did I miss this. I only overclocked my Bios. Now I really need to see about doing this. Thanks for the recommendation.

 

I have the r3, I get 50fps-55fps during heavy 24 person defend the point..... try ur drivers..

 

R3 has a significantly faster CPU that the R1 has. so your fps would be higher naturally.

 

My TF2 experience has been awesome on the R1. But that's all I've ever played it on. Maybe I'll run it on my MBP so I have something to compare it too. It's still a C2D but it is faster but still has a 9400 GPU.

 

Not to mention the significantly better GPU.

 

I use msi afterburner because it's simple and easy to understand. To use it google it, download and install it. Open it up and you see 3 bars to adjust to your hearts content to overclock the gpu. I recommend 550/1350/875 for best results but it may or may not work for you, if not bring the bars down slowly 5 to 10 MHz at a time and test it. You can test it with the other program that comes with msi afterburner, it's called kombustor. Use the gpu burn in option to test your overclock. If the numbers on the right clock down to 405/324/810 or something similar, you went to far, reboot your cOmputer and try a lower overclock. Hope this helps goodluck!

 

the GPU really isnt that much better.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/ali...40m-overclocked-benchmarks-6.html#post7460895

 

Thank you for this! Much appreciated.

Any games that you can think of that see the most improvement with an overclocked gpu? I have the usual Blizzard/Source/Steam games.

 

one i have seen the most improvement in is Just Cause 2 about 10 fps difference. also, for source games bring your memory slider (the bottom one) down a bit more otherwise you get artifacts. do maybe 850 or so

 

I had a few artifacts show up in Deux Ex: HR so I went down to 850 and that was the sweet spot. Thanks!

 

Well I tried it on my Mac and it was unplayable. It took over 6 minutes to join the server and the game crashed on 2 out of the 3 servers I tried. So I guess that's one point for the R1!

 

lol yea, I tried playing on my girlfriend MAC and I just confirmed this: MAC computers DO have a graphics card, but... ITS USELESS

 

ahhh mac computers have lower VRAM isn't it?

 

Some do. This one has 256 I think, but it handled every game I threw at it like a stallion. (I dont throw like a stallion. It handles it like it was a stallion bred for handling stuff.) if I could put Boot Camp back on I'm sure it would work great. But I can't do Boot Camp right now.

Edit: it only handled like a stallion under Boot Camp before.

 

There's a simple registry tweak you can do, have a look at How to use the throttling mechanism to control network performance in Windows Vista (of course it works in windows 7 as well)

Basically TF2 and other online games run poorly because the CPU can't handle the large amounts of network traffic (since it's only an ultra low voltage cpu). Windows, by default, throttles network traffic but in exchange keeps the sound/multimedia system running stutter free. The Source engine appears to thread lock and freeze while it waits for Windows to deliver it's data packets, so when Windows throttles the network, your fps gets a kick in the nuts.

By changing NetworkThrottlingIndex to FFFFFFFF, it disables network throttling, and you should get an fps boost. However, you may start to get stuttering sound in game.

EDIT: I should mention that by doing this, I can get tf2 running medium/high settings on my R1 in the low 50s high 40s fps wise, no gpu overclock and only the 1.7ghz cpu overclock.

 

I have never messed with any settings except to remap a key and it runs fine. Is there some setting anyone needs me to check? Like I said, though, maybe I only think it's awesome because I am comparing it to my Mac.

 

WOW! If it frees up CPU then it should help with BC2 correct?

 

in theory yes, if you notice that online games are more laggy than they should be (for similar settings to a single player games), give the tweak a shot. Of course, you may get stuttering audio, so its a tradeoff, and it only makes a difference if your cpu is stuck at 100% in game.

 

Great tip, thanks for this.

 

huh. I tried it with BC2, my audio didnt lag or anything but im not sure it helped with my framerates at all. I wasn't watching fraps the whole time or anything but I didnt exactly go "wow this totally helped"

 

BC2 may be a GPU limited game, it only helps at all when the CPU is the bottleneck. If you drop your graphics quality and get significantly higher FPS, than its not a CPU problem and this won't help :/

I used this for TF2 because I was receiving choppy gameplay and lowish fps no matter how low the graphics quality settings were, and it helped, just depends on the game.