Dual core vs. Single core CPU

[MH]

On a Mobility Radeon 4250, ramping everything up to that extent will cause you performance problems.

When an explosion goes off in your face a number of things happen.

You'll get the explosion sprite (or shell effect, in DP). This is drawn up close, occupies a reasonably high fraction of the screen size, and as it's another alpha-blended layer over what has already been drawn fillrate is it's major bottleneck.

As I mentioned in your other thread, Mobility Radeons seem particularly sensitive to fillrate as a bottleneck. Switching off the explosion shell may help; the sprite will still bottleneck you on fillrate, just not so much.

You get particles. Particles are another thing that mostly bottleneck on fillrate.

You get lots of dynamic light updates affecting all around you. I'm not sure how DP handles dynamic lights with your settings, but setting r_dynamic 0 will prevent these from slowing you down.

You get shadows thrown about. These will bottleneck you on almost everything.

You get a red screen tint signifying that you've taken damage. More fillrate.

Bottom line is that with hardware like that you simply cannot dial DP up to almost the max, add in a load of high-def custom content, and still expect it to perform well in all circumstances. Something has to give way. You can't put 10 pounds of shit in a 9 pound bad, and there is no magic setting that will let you.

[yuggsoth]

are you using a dual/tri/quad core cpu? is anyone else in quakeland utilizing two gpus besides me?

I'm using a dual core CPU. Anything I can do to optimize DP's performance with a dual core processor?

[yuggsoth]

On a Mobility Radeon 4250, ramping everything up to that extent will cause you performance problems.

When an explosion goes off in your face a number of things happen.

You'll get the explosion sprite (or shell effect, in DP). This is drawn up close, occupies a reasonably high fraction of the screen size, and as it's another alpha-blended layer over what has already been drawn fillrate is it's major bottleneck.

As I mentioned in your other thread, Mobility Radeons seem particularly sensitive to fillrate as a bottleneck. Switching off the explosion shell may help; the sprite will still bottleneck you on fillrate, just not so much.

You get particles. Particles are another thing that mostly bottleneck on fillrate.

You get lots of dynamic light updates affecting all around you. I'm not sure how DP handles dynamic lights with your settings, but setting r_dynamic 0 will prevent these from slowing you down.

You get shadows thrown about. These will bottleneck you on almost everything.

You get a red screen tint signifying that you've taken damage. More fillrate.

Bottom line is that with hardware like that you simply cannot dial DP up to almost the max, add in a load of high-def custom content, and still expect it to perform well in all circumstances. Something has to give way. You can't put 10 pounds of shit in a 9 pound bad, and there is no magic setting that will let you.

I'll try turning explosion shells off and r_dynamic 0. Is there a way to disable the red screen effect when taking damage?

[MH]

If DP supports gl_polyblend try setting that to 0.

[Mindf!3ldzX]

I'm using a dual core CPU. Anything I can do to optimize DP's performance with a dual core processor?

Awhile back I found on my quad core that limiting qrack to a single core of four made my quake experience,atleast under MY circumstances, much smoother.You could try changing the affinity setting of Darkplaces.exe by using the task manager, right click on darkplaces.exe , and set your affinity.


I just did some non in-depth testing , and measured idle fps on dm4, with unknown settings in graphics options but settings remained unchanged/consistant....here are some results


all four cores darkplaces.exe = 200ish FPS,never above 210,always fluctuating.
single core (core0) darkplaces.exe = 230 FPS , SOLID , non fluctuating.

I read into the whole affinity / multi-threading , and it makes sense. Unless an application or program is coded to make use of multithreading (I dont code) , there IS a performance leap by disabling all but one core.



The exception being DirectQ,it likes multicore

Yuggsoth, could you please let us know if you see a increase or decrease in performance by disabling one of your cores?

[yuggsoth]

Awhile back I found on my quad core that limiting qrack to a single core of four made my quake experience,atleast under MY circumstances, much smoother.You could try changing the affinity setting of Darkplaces.exe by using the task manager, right click on darkplaces.exe , and set your affinity.


I just did some non in-depth testing , and measured idle fps on dm4, with unknown settings in graphics options but settings remained unchanged/consistant....here are some results


all four cores darkplaces.exe = 200ish FPS,never above 210,always fluctuating.
single core (core0) darkplaces.exe = 230 FPS , SOLID , non fluctuating.

I read into the whole affinity / multi-threading , and it makes sense. Unless an application or program is coded to make use of multithreading (I dont code) , there IS a performance leap by disabling all but one core.



The exception being DirectQ,it likes multicore

Yuggsoth, could you please let us know if you see a increase or decrease in performance by disabling one of your cores?

I'll let ya know later tonight!

[Spike]

if nvidia, open up your driver settings and disable 'threaded optimisation'. quake engines tend to prefer it off.

also, an intel cpu will overclock one core if it can underclock all of the others, which can mean you can loose performance merely by stuff running on other cores (other than by just memory bottlenecks).

[yuggsoth]

My card is an ATI and my CPU is AMD...

[yuggsoth]

Well, r_dynamic 0 seems to have given me a few frames, but turning explosion shells and shell clip off had no effect on the massive framerate drop following a direct hit with a grenade.

Also, setting it to high priority and using only 1 core gave me like 10 frames. It's the irregularity of my framerate that bothers me most though. Sometimes 75+ sometimes 25... If I could just get it to stay at 60 FPS i'd be happy.

[Mindf!3ldzX]

It sounds more and more like as MH said , 10lb's of shit in a 9lb sack.

[yuggsoth]

Is there a way to get Windows to "remember" to run DP on High Priority and 1 core? It is highly impractical to start DP, then go to windows, then select affinity settings, then go back to the game, every time I launch DP.

[grave_digga]

Is there a way to get Windows to "remember" to run DP on High Priority and 1 core? It is highly impractical to start DP, then go to windows, then select affinity settings, then go back to the game, every time I launch DP.

RunFirst could do that.

[yuggsoth]

runfirst could do that.

ty.

[MH]

Try turning off everything. All settings down at their lowest, no shadows, no extra lighting, so replacement models, no replacement textures.

See does the framerate drop happen then.

demo1 (the first Necropolis demo) is a great test here because it has a grenade go off in your face early on, so just launch DP and let the demo run until that point.

If it drops then you're basically screwed. Not much you can do at all.

If it doesn't drop then you've got a hope; something you're using is causing it. So bring them all back on, one at a time, testing with demo1 after each one, until you identify the setting that's causing it.

Then don't use that setting.

It may be more than one thing causing it, so bring the rest back up, also one at a time, and also testing after each one, and make sure that other stuff doesn't also cause it.

[yuggsoth]

RunFirst could do that.

Ok, I downloadedand extracted RunFirst, but I have no idea how to use it. The website says to insert the runfirst command into (my DP) shortcut. How do I do that? I'm using Windows 7 64 bit.