Performance and FPS indicator

[gsagostinho]

Hi all, I have a question concerning Oolite's performance on my computer, in particular how reliable is the in-game FPS indicator. Basically I have a near constant FPS of around 60, dropping only as low as 55. I also checked and my GPU and memory while playing and they are not being pushed very hard, and my CPU also seems to be doing quite fine (I have a relatively powerful notebook with an i7, 8 Gb of RAM and a dedicated ATI card). But while playing I often experience quite a lot of stutters (though the performance in between stutters is very fluid). Then I also have terrible lags when witch jumping or when going to red alert. But while all this is happening, my FPS indicator keeps showing a solid 60. I have tested this both on Linux (my main OS) and on Windows, and the performance is pretty much the same on both systems.

On my secondary notebook, I have a FPS indication of around 30, going only as low as 25. This should be very fluid for most games, but Oolite is hardly playable on this notebook as there is a constant stutter and lag. So my questions are: is the FPS indicator reliable? Are these performance problems common? And is there anything I can do to improve the experience?

Many thanks!

[Cody]

The stutter (usually micro) and the lag (<1sec) are normal on my machine (i5/GTX 770/16GB/75FPS), and system usage is low.

[gsagostinho]

@Cody I see. I really wonder why, in this sort of systems Oolite should run as fluid as it gets! Do you also get a very serious lag when witchjumping? That's always the worse one for me.

[Cody]

Currently, the jump lag is lengthened slightly by the Perlin 3D textures in trunk, and I think BGS causes a minor lag too (for me, anyway).

[gsagostinho]

But if P3D is disabled then does it still affect the lag? BGS indeed makes it quite worse. But the jumps is really not the main issue to me, it is really the overall performance. I really wonder how can a strong system which is not being pushed hard and is outputting a solid 60 fps be lagging and stuttering. I do use a ton of OXPs, and I wonder if some of them might be causing this...

[another_commander]

The FPS indicator is reliable. This can be tested by running the game under FRAPS. You will find that the FRAPS indicator agrees with the Oolite indicator.

As for performance, on my low end system (Core 2 Duo at 2GHz, 4GB RAM and GeForce 9600M GT) I get around 50-60 FPS with plenty of eye-candy stuff loaded. I do get occasional stutters because the CPU reaches maximum utilization (runs at around 50% before Oolite is launched anyway though), there is a few seconds pause while witchjump is about to execute but no stutter whatsoever when going to red alert or during any other alert state change for that matter. So, my advice would be to check what is running on the system and try to get rid of what is not needed (mostly services like file indexing etc.). Also note that Oolite may suffer from microstutters, which is a problem hhat is very difficult to resolve. It may be that this is what you are experiencing with your i7 system. Every now and then a frame or two might be skipped. You will feel a mini-stutter but the FPS indicator may or may not catch the skip, depending on whether its update arrives at the right time or not.

I have also tested the game on a variety of higher-tier systems and have found that even when OXP-loaded, it runs really well on them. I had the chance to verify it during my last vacation, where I did test runs on systems with i5 and i7 processors and gfx cards ranging from GTX 640 to GTX 1050 and it was pretty much flawless, solid-60fps performance.

Regaring the situation with your lower-end notebook, I would not consider 25 FPS fluid at all. It's borederline playable and, personally, I consider anything below 55 FPS not acceptable. I can really tell that something is funny if franerate is not very close to 60 per second and many people are like this and can easliy tell a difference between e.g. 60 and 58.. So I would say that what you experience there is normal for the performance being achieved. Apart from getting rid of services that may be putting load on the system, you might want to drop the game detail level a notch or two and see if that helps. Also, make sure that the h, iard disk is up to the task too. CPU and GPU are one thing, but they may not be able to help much if the hard disk can't keep up. This could be an explanation for the lag during witchspace. At that time, the game unloads an entire system's worth of data and loads a new one from scratch, including potential JS garbage collection and shaders (BGS has shaders in the jump animation btw). It is inevitable that a delay will occur there.

[Cody]

Do you have an Oolite profile set-up on the ATI card? If not, do so and tinker with the GPU settings - perhaps disable Catalyst AI.

[another_commander]

Oh yes, thanks for reminding me Cody. Check also if there is anything in the Catalyst settings about threads optimization (not sure what is called for ATI/AMD). If such thing is enabled, disable it immediately.

[Cody]

I think the Catalyst AI is the nearest equivalent to threaded optimisation - I always disabled it when I had an ATI card.
That was back when ATI had poor support for OpenGL - then AMD came along and their new drivers were even worse.

[gsagostinho]

Thanks for all the replies, guys.

I do get occasional stutters because the CPU reaches maximum utilization (runs at around 50% before Oolite is launched anyway though), there is a few seconds pause while witchjump is about to execute but no stutter whatsoever when going to red alert or during any other alert state change for that matter.

This stutter when going to red alert, and sometimes when entering/leaving mass lock is quite present when I am using my Dangerous HUD (I suspect it's perhaps related to the image cacheing). @another_commander I've seen that you have used (or at least tested) my HUD, did you experience something like this at all? It doesn't happen at every red alert nor at every mass lock event, but I do experience it every one in a while during a session. As for the stutters, micro stutters would be fine but I do get some longer freezes that I feel shouldn't be happening on this system (my guesstimate is something around 100 ms as it's quite noticeable). But I am really starting to think there is some problem on my side, in particular after your replies.

I have also tested the game on a variety of higher-tier systems and have found that even when OXP-loaded, it runs really well on them.

I will check if I have some particular OXP which is causing these issues to happen, I will load them by small batches and test for some minutes until I see if I can trace it back to a single specific one.

Regaring the situation with your lower-end notebook, I would not consider 25 FPS fluid at all. It's borederline playable and, personally, I consider anything below 55 FPS not acceptable.

Well, I agree with you that 25-30 fps is not optimal for gaming by any means, but the game runs almost like a slideshow. It really feels like 10 fps with the constant stutters. I have experienced other games running at this rate of around 30 fps and, while not ideal, they are completely playable.


Also, thanks to you both for the setup advices, I will take a look at those ATI settings as well as hard drive reading/writing speeds (I believe my both HDs are quite slow, 5400 rpm). Unfortunately this ATI card is a nightmare to setup on both Linux and Windows, so perhaps there is something being caused by it as well.

[Cody]

I have also tested the game on a variety of higher-tier systems and have found that even when OXP-loaded, it runs really well on them. I had the chance to verify it during my last vacation, where I did test runs on systems with i5 and i7 processors and gfx cards ranging from GTX 640 to GTX 1050 and it was pretty much flawless, solid-60fps performance.

Are we talking SSD rather than spinning rust?

[another_commander]

@another_commander I've seen that you have used (or at least tested) my HUD, did you experience something like this at all?

No, never experienced it and I did try to trigger it multiple times when you first mentioned it, without success.

Well, I agree with you that 25-30 fps is not optimal for gaming by any means, but the game runs almost like a slideshow. It really feels like 10 fps with the constant stutters.

Something seems wrong here. Not sure what, but it shouldn't be like a slideshow at 25-30 fps.

@Cody: Not sure what HDs thay were loaded with, but I would guess SSD because all of them were gaming machines.

[gsagostinho]

Great, thanks really a lot for the feedback! I will take a good look at it and if I find out what's causing this I will report here.

[Cody]

I would guess SSD because all of them were gaming machines.

This is a trifle irksome, Admiral - I'm supposed to be buying an exercise bike, not an SSD.

[Astrobe]

I switched from an AMD/ATI card to a twice-as-big nVidia recently and it seems to me that Oolite is performing worse with it, while all of my graphic-heavy AAA games benefited from it. While looking for clues on how to improve things I stumbled upon this thread. I might be interpreting it incorrectly, but it seems that buying a bigger graphics card doesn't help much, and having more CPU cores doesn't help either.

Some stutters may directly be attributed to disk I/O lags. I've observed it in front of station ads or YAH; every time the panel switches to another ad, I get a stutter (the fact that fake ads in the game become as annoying as IRL ads is pretty ironic...).

But there might be other sources of stutter like shader compilation.

The fact that the FPS are ok but the experience is not fluid is fishy. Oolite displays and manages almost nothing compared to most other games I run, and is fine even with the sub-optimal Javascript I make it run every frame. There must be a grain of sand somewhere.