f13.net

So, I noticed that the last few patches my FPS seemed to be going down a bit. Last night I decided to try and figure out what was going on. First I did all the usual things, I updated my sound and video drives. I made sure to go through my startup file and kill all non-essential programs, I ran CCleaner and Ad-Aware, I uninstalled a bunch of stuff to free up space, and I defragged my hard drive. I now have about 60gb free on a 150gb drive.

My system specs:

E6600
2gb RAM
Intel Badaxe2 Mobo
Nvidia 8800gtx (The first edition)
150gb Raptor Drive
XP Pro SP3
Crwative X-Fi Sound Card.
30 Inch Dell Monitor (Native Res 2500x1600)
Logitech Keyboard and Mouse

I installed fraps to get an in game FPS meter.

At boot I am running at about 35% RAM used, when playing the game I am at about 85-90% used, so I am not capping out.

I usually run games in 1900x1200 res, so I used that as my starting point. With "balanced" settings at that res, I was getting between 13 and 22 fps running around the first empire warcamp, and dropping as low as 5 or 6 fps in heavy fighting in the BGs. While not unplayable, I feel with my system I should be getting much better results than this. So, in an attempt to see how good I could get, I put every graphic setting on the lowest it could go. It made maybe a 1 to 2 FPS increase, so next I dropped my resoultion all the down to 1150x750 (something like this) so now I have every setting the possible lowest it could be, and I was getting 18 to 20 FPS. Really no increase.
So, just to see how bad it would get, I put every setting to maximum, and cranked my res up to 2500x1600. Imagine my surprise to see that I was now getting 15 to 30 FPS. While it was spiking a little lower than the low setting, it was holding on average at a higher FPS.

This just seems odd to me. Even playing AoC I could turn down the Pixel Shader to 1.0 and get upwards of 95 FPS.

Does anyone have any ideas as to how I can increae my FPS? Just seems odd that the graphic settings nothing I do can bring my FPS over 30. While my friend who has close to an identical system gets around 35-40 fps in town, and 80 when in first person mode looking at the ground (I get a max of 30 while in fps mode looking at the ground). The only difference is that he has a 8800GT second gen card, which makes a decent difference but it shouldnt account for that much FPS difference.

Please help.

There is something wrong with their engine. In my experience playing, performance hits that were happening, should not have been. Texture loading is worse than AOC's , at least AOC was compiling shaders. I had been collecting screen shots of all the oddity's that i encounted in this game (graphics issues, stalls, texture and LOD issues), but i figured no one would care.(Its so polished!)

I am truly surprised that with the age of the techniques (the ones i could see, i do not know all) that i was not getting upwords of 100+ FPS. Compound that with the incredibly short draw distance, low poly count, reasonable texture resolution....something is wrong.

Just for comparsion

EDIT: I'm not saying it runs badly, i'm saying it should be running flawlessly.

I'd suggest to run some hard benchmarks to check if the system works as it should. If it does the problems are likely in the software.

I've also read other players reporting that FPS go up if you increase the resolution. It doesn't make sense but it's not the first time I hear it.

Remember that Mythic isn't writing the engine, they licensed it. They still use the same stuff behind DAoC and it ALWAYS ran like shit, with plenty of quirks and odd performance problems. They added all the nice effects in games like Oblivion, but the basic render just doesn't perform well and has issues with the memory fragmentation (basically, performance get worse over time).

Try to see if resizing the screen seems to reset or improve the performance. If it's like DAoC, the engine is MUCH more dependent on CPU than it is on the videocard.

I did a bunch of benches. It looked fine. I did find this though.
Link (http://vnboards.ign.com/warhammer_online_tech_support_board/b23276/108545813/p1/?25)
Link (http://www.warhammeralliance.com/forums/showthread.php?t=76218)
Link (http://www.warhammeralliance.com/forums/showthread.php?t=81721)

It seems that for some people the game is only recognizing 256mb of Video RAM, and for every person that has listed as such, they are having the same problems that I am seeing. I wont know for sure if it is the problem until I get home, but I am willing to bet it is, due to the listed symptoms.

And you only had to go to 4 places to find it!

Could some of you link some benchmarks and advice you can recommend on tuning up older (<1.5yrs, one with AGP) PC's?  My wife and i are keen to play WAR, but are put off by the probable lack of performance.  Could use some realistic facts before dropping >$100 on an experiment.  Thanks!

Post your specs.

thanks for posting that,  yeah it is only recognizing 256 of my v-card   :tantrum:

Bartender i will take a double shot of Meh on the rocks please.

Folks,

   Unfortunately we discovered this error late in the process.  We were hoping to get it totally squashed by launch but who knows.  One of the programmers said "Now that we found the problem I can finally rewrite the texture system we are using!"  After the daggers grew from our eyes like in a cartoon, the guy realized that 3 days before Head Start is not a good time to rewrite an entire graphical sub-system.   In the meantime, the draw distance increase helps some people a lot and we'll get the fix in after launch.  Fortunately, it doesn't affect stability in any way or I'd probably have to go through another case of Excedrin Migraine Strength pills like Dr. House goes through Vicodin.

Mark

I'm having this issue as well, but while trying to find the root of the problem last night it finally made me sit down and configure WAR using my Nvidia Control Panel... holy cow now that I've got the game setup decently it runs smooooth on my 8800gtx.  It was fun and passable before, but now 8x AA and 4x aniso, with Vsync and triple buffer on it looks amazing. 

Good to hear.

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE tell me what you did. I have a 8800gtx, and I am pretty much unable to get more than 15 FPS, no matter what settings I put my system at. My friend who has pretty much an identical system (He used my wishlist on newegg to build his comp) is getting constantly 40 on higher settings than me.

mind posting the exact settings you tweeked?  or is it just the 4 you listed?

I'm no super computer whiz.  I don't do this for a living and may be doing it wrong.  When the game first loads each time, I need to swivel my toon around and let all the immediate textures load properly, after which I get pretty minimal graphic issues.  Here goes:

I keep a clean PC.  Only a few games at a time, no real hardcore apps.  I've got 50 gigs used on a 250 gig drive.  I defrag all the time and keep up on registry cleaners and av/spam.  I don't have 103 things running in the background on my system. 

175.19 drivers for the 8800gtx, using XPPro. 

Ingame settings are set to max on everything which is how the game loaded default.  The only change I made was in 'custom' the GPU texture memory cache I set to "largest".  I'm playing full screen 1680x1050. Everything is else set to high quality and all the lighting/water/shadows boxes are checked.

In Nvidia Control panel I made a game profile for war.exe and set it to this:

(http://i34.tinypic.com/2h37ak6.jpg)

(http://i34.tinypic.com/2py6i3l.jpg)

EDIT:  I was getting some hitching at 8x AA, so I backed it off to 2x for the time being.  Post-launch a month or two Mythic will tweak things on their side and I will push it back up then, maybe.  Depends on how the system does in rvr.

thanks for the response, appreciate it.

Good luck!  Also, I did a quick edit at the bottom of my post about AA.  Hope it helps.

Do you know if your 8800gtx is the newer chipset or the older one?

Mine is the first generation of 8800gtx. And the game still runs like ass. At the same resolution as you, with basically the same in game settings, I get about 12 fps running around in the wilderness and between 6 to 8 in PVP. It is very annoying.

I have the first generation 8800gtx, and it runs fine.  Wonderfully, even.  Odd.

I honestly have no idea what gen it is.  It's about a year old, I think I built this system in late September of last year.  Bought parts off Newegg. 

So, I tried messing with my nvidia settings like you said, and it didnt help. Still getting horrible FPS.

Hardware wise, I'm running 4gig (3.25 recognized by XP) memory and a 21" monitor that could be helping my situation in comparison to yours.  Otherwise we've got identical systems. 

Wish I could be more help, but I really don't know where to go from here. 

A few other things I did, was add 4gb more of ram for 6gb total, but like you XP is onyl seeing 3.3. I will be moving to Vista in the next week. I also disabled custom skins, as some people said that might work.

Right now there seems to be 2 possible solutions. Its a bug to do with some sort of obscure software thing, or my card is dying. From the amount of people reporting the same problem, I am leaning towards the first.

Here is hoping Mark can get it worked out, as its very frustrating.

Just as an FYI your going to only see 3.5ish GB in Vista also running a 32bit version, make sure you run 64bit version to allocate all of your RAM.

Yeah, I know. Any one have any opinion on if I should get Vista Business or Home Premium?

This explains a lot for me.  I went back and checked my log and sure enough I have the same thing, only 256 megs of video ram detected (8800 gt).  I was wondering why I could get 60 fps in AoC with all settings on high and it seemed crappy in WAR (but I had no way to judge as I couldn't find a way to monitor FPS).

From doing research around a lot of forums, it seems the majority of people this happens to are 8800 owners.

Ditto. 512MB 8800GT showing the same thing.

I adjusted the GPU slider under performance to not quite max and had a noticable different with the game. YMMV of course.

I can pretty much put my settings at anything and the FPS difference is a max about 3. I can go from 1080 res to 2500 res, and only have about 2 fps difference. Same with the performance settings.

Its very frustrating.

So far the worse area for me is on top of the "troll pacifier" tower, when we are fighting for it. I get like mini performance hits constantly, like every 2 seconds it freezes for about .5 of a second.

Here's my performance issue:

The game is totally unplayable for me.

Clunky, laggy, slow, disjointed. I don't know if it's my computer or what - but they had better hope that my experience is limited to, well, me.

I wrote a post on my blog (http://www.cesspit.net/drupal/node/1778) about performance issues, since I saw a pattern.

I think it's useful to make a distinction. There a fps problem and a hard disk trashing problem. Imho the latter is more severe.

Basically if I stand still I have smooth fps, as soon I move in a direction the hard disk starts trashing and the client stutters heavily. On the blog more details about this.

CTDs have come back for me with a vengeance.  This is strange, considering it never happened once in Head Start. 

All I can say is that if you're experiencing anywhere near what I am when I attempt to play this game, and if it's anything NEAR a commonplace problem, this game is in serious, serious trouble.

I run WoW on the higher options for video. I run 25 man raids and pvp. I run WAR on the absolutely fucking minimum best framerate adjustments, and it still clunks when I walk 15 feet in a minor quest point.

WTF? I went into a major city and I had to take 3 minutes to get to a mailbox.

Try turning UP your settings and see if it gets much worse or if it doesnt change. If you cant make it reallt better or worse, you probably have the same bug I do.

If any of you guys are rocking multiple monitors, be sure that in the nvidia control panel, under 3d settings / manage 3d settings / global settings that you set "Multi-display/mixed-GPU acceleration" to "single display performance mode".

This is not the default setting. This might be changed if you have a new fancy monitor (maybe even that first gen 8800 GTX) that does some video output so it 'detects' a multiple monitor, even if you don't have more than one hooked up.

Did Mythic end up using PhysX in the game engine, or did that get scrapped?  I can't find anything online about it being mentioned recently. 

Ah good tip. I'm playing on my laptop tonite as the PC is being used by family, but I will try that as I run both my 56" TV and my 19" monitor of the PC.

Another performance note, if you were running off the beta client you might see some imporvment if you uninstall it and install the game from the DVDs

is that a WAG? or something *lots* of people have experienced??

WAG? Just something I read in a thread on WHA, It has something to do with a cache folder in your beta directory slowing things up.

Then delete the cache.

Retail also looks better to me, and the folder is 1.5gb bigger. I suspect better textures, my Helf clothing doesn't seem to clip as badly on the retail client as the beta too.

Yeah, the cinematic.

There should be absolutely no difference between retail and beta. After both pass through the patcher they are the same.

I've heard both - but I assume the two installs are identical save for the cinematic. I'm reinstalling anyway on the faint hope it helps.

Today I reinstalled today from the pre- order beta weekend client(updated to retail) to the retail box version, mostly because I wanted the cinematic.  Maybe I'm crazy, but the the textures do seem sharper and the crowded areas a lot smoother.  So it probably has a lot to do with the texture cache, which is obviously deleted when reinstalled.  I upgraded to a 9800 GTX+ yesterday and was a little puzzled why all my other PC games ran like butter and this WO chugged a lot a certain points. 

Things have really smoothed out, but I think they do have some optimization to do.  At 1680x1050, maxed out, the game looks good but far from state of the art;  it should run with a more consistent frame rate.  Compared to Lotro and Conan, the view distance is a joke at maximum settings; there is no reason why it should stutter like it does at times.

Regardless, enjoying the hell out of the RvR and PQ.  Looks like I'll be playing this one for a while.

One thing they did right is having Custom1 and Custom2 settings for video. 

PvE - Custom1 with max settings

RvR - Custom2 with everything set to low except draw. 

Makes a huge difference when:

(http://i37.tinypic.com/2qdc4nr.jpg)

Dual Core 6750, 4gig (3.2 used?), 8800gts 320. 1650x1050 and the stuttering is horrible. I've reinstalled from the DVD and I like many others think it looks better, but no change in performance. I've tweaked stuff in the nvidia control panel. It's texture load stuttering.

The better graphic is a myth.

I have two directories now, one retail, one beta client. In game they are exactly the same (at least if you compare them both post-patch) and the directory is 1.5Gb bigger because 1.5Gb is the video file.

The other files are actually a couple of megabytes smaller in the retail client than they are in the beta one, probably because of some leftovers from beta.

So it's really the same stuff, and performance and quality wise they are identical to me.

If there are differences it's because they are local, like if you kept the beta client for a long time and have the files gone fragmented. Or some cache leftovers.

I'm getting this same problem. The hitchiness.

This is another reason to have official forums. Or at least something like that.

There's absolutely NO feedback about the game. Thankfully Mark Jacobs when he decides he has some free time to post on the forums, outside of that it's complete silence. Now I know that asking the dialogue with the devs is an utopia, but at least tech support.

There is no way to know if a problem is acknowledged and investigated. You have no idea if they are working on a fix or even aware of certain things. It's DAoC all over again, if you had a problem you had to live with it because technically it looked like they bought the engine and had no clue where to put their hands to fix things.

On Warhammer Alliance there are many, many posts about this stuttering, and no reply from Mythic.

It's really a matter of communication. Not pretending to have problems fixed ASAP, but at least know they are being looked at, some news on the progress.

I remember that at least WoW support forums worked well. Often there weren't just CM helping there, but also the engineers themselves, asking for details, providing informations and so on. I remember I helped solving a video memory fragmentation that made performance worse over time. That required some back and forth but worked in the end. They were really responsive acknowledging technical problems and solving them quickly.

If you have a problem there's not much you can do in Warhammer. Posting on a unofficial forum is like talking to a wall and casual players probably don't even know where to look for infos.

http://help.warhammeronline.com/cgi-bin/eawarhammer.cfg/php/enduser/home.php?p_sid=-vGBEFdj

http://www.warhammeralliance.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=129


And specific to your Hitching problem:

http://www.warhammeralliance.com/forums/showthread.php?t=99123

Yes, I'm saying that Mythic lacks communication on these issues, not that the players aren't trying what they can to be heard.

  Took you long enough, was wondering when youd show up.

Well, it's a start:
http://www.warhammeralliance.com/forums/showthread.php?p=1660202#post1660202

On the other side:
http://www.warhammeralliance.com/forums/showthread.php?p=1663078#post1663078


Which kinda mean they still don't know what it is about.

How the fuck they know it's "few people" when:
1- They don't have official forums and the unofficial ones have plenty of threads and posts about this
2- They have no way to report these kind of problems

Or should I start petitioning or spam support so that they get a clue there's a problem and more players they expect are experiencing it?

I agree perfectly with the poster he replied to. I now have tested on four different PCs with completely different configurations and the issues is there in all of them. With the difference that it isn't prominent if the hardware is fast (lots of memory, fast bandwidth).

"We've had very few reports". I wonder where the fuck they get these reports as the boards, no matter where you go, are filled with these. It's just that for some players it's not too dramatic to disrupt the gameplay, while for others it's abysmal.

And it's also kind of obvious *where* the problem is. Differently from other games Warhammer streams the textures continuously and instead of using up all the video memory before flushing it, it continuously loads and unloads things. This stresses the hardware on certain configurations, while in other cases the constant load/unloading doesn't seem to affect the frame rate.

For a fix, either they find a loading memory that is better "threaded" and doesn't stress the videocard and cause heavy stutters, or they simply use up all the video memory so that, once loaded, the textures stay there and don't get in/out every time you turn in a direction.

I spent my employers time looking through tech posts while the little microsoft bar moved towards the next time I had to press "next" and I found my solution. Turn off specular lighting and lightmaps. You can only do that by turning it to the low quality defaults and then turning everything else up. I don't notice much of a difference in visuals at all, but the hitching is gone completely--even in a good old solid 50+ person keep siege.

Yes, turning off lightmaps and speculars reduces the stuttering considerably. But it's kind of obvious since this is a loading/streaming issue. So if you reduce the "stuff" that is being moved on and off, the stuttering is reduced as well.

It's not a fix. It doesn't fixes anything, it just reduces the problem because it reduces the stress on the hardware. It's like saying to reduce the resolution to increase the framerate.

And by the way. Their official feedback form IS BROKEN: http://herald.warhammeronline.com/feedback/index.php

I keep trying to send feeback about this and it tells me the security code is wrong (when it is not).

Maybe that's why they receive "few" reports.

I recently took the plunge and installed Vista. After doing that, the game has run much much better. Now I don't know if it was because that cleaned my system, forced me to reinstall the game, or I had some kind of driver bug or what. But now I have completely playable FPS. The game still seems to have a major memory leak, especially noticeable if you tab out a lot. After tabbing out a few times I am forced to restart the game as my FPS start dropping lower, and the game gets choppy.

But overall it seems to have fixed my problem.

Once again, playing in Windowed mode fixed a lot of my problems. I did go from 60 to 45 or so FPS but it's a STABLE 45 outside of HUGE CLUSTERFUCK battles - but then getting a great framerate in those is simply asking too much. And tabbing out is a non-issue in windowed mode and I seem to crash much much less than I used to.

Totally agreed on windowed mode.  The game is running with less FPS, but it's smooth.  Makes alt-tab possible too. 

So after having problems even after upgrading my PC. I tried something a little different than has been mentioned on here. I reloaded WAR from the game disc's, replacing the beta files and also a friend suggested turning off the "Indexing" feature in XP. This has worked perfectly. I have zero video hitches. I havent touched the video settings since reloading the game. So they are at the default settings.

I'm thinking just clearing this cache might help with the few issues I get.

How would one go about this?

Turning off the lighting effects has produced a huge bump up in my FPS. That was key, so thanks for that tip.

Personally, I don't give a shit about OMGWOW graphics. I never have. A simply 3d rendered game is fine without all the crazy shadows and textures, and whatever the hell other bells and whistles some ooo and ahh over. After about 10 minutes, nobody notices them anymore and they start grinding their asses off again. Just give me solid gameplay that doesn't suck and I can run on my computer, and I'm generally happy.

For whatever reasons, it won't let me turn off the lighting effects.  I'm sure I'm missing something completely obvious and already stated in this thread.

Same issue with the lighting stuff. Can't uncheck one of the boxes.

Turn the global settings thing down to the minimum or whatever, then go in and custom turn everything but lighting back on? I think that's how you have to do it (haven't tried myself.)

Before you log into the game, and your character is sitting there, there is a settings button. Click and set it to fastest framerate. This will turn your lighting and speculars off. Set the rest of the setting to your custom 1. Done.

New official Nvidia video drivers released yesterday... nothing specific to WAR listed, but someone might play with it and see if there's any diff.

178.13

Quote from Warhammeralliance:

Works like a charm for me, especially in larger groups.

I installed this on my work computer (Vista) and got much better performance today. Playing it yesterday, I had bad performance and for a little while my video card just shit itself, throwing textures and the whole screen out of whack.

I finally remembered to try this last night and it made a big difference for me. Eliminated a lot of the stuttering.