#3290488 - 05/09/11 02:53 PM
Can't handle much more than 15 planes offline, worried about campaign.
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Joined: Sep 2005
Posts: 509
Feathered_IV
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Now that the new campaign system is almost upon us, I'm a bit concerned that I won't be able to run it as well as I'd like. Mostly I've used the QMB and online function for play so far, as these don't tax my system as much as multiple AI's do. Currently if I have more than 12-15 AI aircraft in a single player mission at once, the framerate stays good but the overall speed of the game slows right down to a smooth slow motion - around about half speed. If there is a fight, once the numbers thin out through attrition the speed of the game climbs back up to normal and is fine from then on. It tends to kill any immersion you might get from the current campaigns though, as you are swimming through treacle or have to choose wide open spaces with the smallest sprinkle of opponents. The N28 and DVII campaigns are out of my reach for the moment. Has anyone else had a similar problem? The smooth fps makes me thing it is not related to the vid card as such and must be to do with the CPU or RAM instead. My system is near the low end by current standards - A Q6600 quad core, 2gb DDR2 and a GTS260. Currently I'm eating less to squirrel enough away for 8gb of DDR3, but won't be looking at a new graphics card until early next year so it'll have to do for now. I'm wondering if the community geniuses can advise where the biggest botleneck is. I'm sooo hoping it's a lack of ram thats the problem, as it is by far the cheapest to fix. All insights welcome. Please feel free to point and laugh at my current specs and regale me with tales of RoF and your 580x cards if you feel the need.
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#3290583 - 05/09/11 05:11 PM
Re: Can't handle much more than 15 planes offline, worried about campaign.
[Re: Feathered_IV]
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Joined: Sep 2009
Posts: 218
KnowBreaks
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I noticied a few things in your post, maybe it will help:
- You indicate a "GTS260" video adapter. The only GTS 260 I know of is a "mobile" Nvidia GPU - these mobile variants are almost always grossly under-scaled compared to their non-mobile counterparts. For example, the GTX260M has much fewer vertex shaders (112 v 192) when compared to a "real" GTX260. Also, the memory bus width on the GTX260M is only 256 bits, where the GTX260 is 448 bits. These couple of things could make a huge difference in the way that video card performs. (But please do read on...)
- Even in spite of the above, of all the components you named, I would say the RAM is your 'weakest' area. On that point, though, you mentioned going to DDR3 (from DDR2) and from 2G to 8G. I didn't catch if you indicated what OS you're using, but unless you use a '64-bit' version, your machine won't recognize memory beyond 4G (and slightly less than that, in reality). Also, are you sure your current machine - which supports DDR2 - will accept DDR3 memory?
Just some things I thought to comment on.
System Specs: Intel Core i7-930, OC @ 3.36G Scythe Grand Kama Cross HS/F Gigabyte GA-X58-USB3 mainboard 2x Seagate 500G Barracuda (RAID0; C:) 6G OCZ Gold Edition DDR3/10666 Triple Channel eVGA GTX570 1280M GDDR5 PCIe2.0x16 AMCC/3Ware 9650SE SATA 3G/s RAID controller: 4x OCZ 30G SATA 3G/s Vertex SSD (RAID0; D:) Corsair TX-750 PSU, CoolerMaster CM-690 case; 4x 120mm fans TrackIR 5 & TrackClip Pro Windows7 x64 Home Premium
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#3290642 - 05/09/11 06:11 PM
Re: Can't handle much more than 15 planes offline, worried about campaign.
[Re: NattyIced]
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Joined: Feb 2010
Posts: 165
Ogami_musashi
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Throwing more RAM won't help unless you have a lot of system pauses due to storage access. So unless you notice a lot of hard drive access, more RAM won't do anything. RAM is used for much more things than HDD accesses. In the case of multithreaded applications, in order not to have stops in the simulation thread when RAM amount is not enough the Simulation Thread Rate drops giving this slowdown effect. The problem is that if the CPU is itself struggling and need a pause too (thus if it is on the CPU side) it will have the exact same effect so a diagnostic is hard to tell but 2Gb of ram is for sure a limitation since rof uses up to 4Gb...
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#3290643 - 05/09/11 06:12 PM
Re: Can't handle much more than 15 planes offline, worried about campaign.
[Re: NattyIced]
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Joined: Sep 2009
Posts: 218
KnowBreaks
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Throwing more RAM won't help unless you have a lot of system pauses due to storage access. So unless you notice a lot of hard drive access, more RAM won't do anything. You know, just once I'd like to post something on this site without having to be attacked by uninformed drivel... It's OK, though...everyone's entitled to their opinion (even those who have no idea what the hell they're talking about).
System Specs: Intel Core i7-930, OC @ 3.36G Scythe Grand Kama Cross HS/F Gigabyte GA-X58-USB3 mainboard 2x Seagate 500G Barracuda (RAID0; C:) 6G OCZ Gold Edition DDR3/10666 Triple Channel eVGA GTX570 1280M GDDR5 PCIe2.0x16 AMCC/3Ware 9650SE SATA 3G/s RAID controller: 4x OCZ 30G SATA 3G/s Vertex SSD (RAID0; D:) Corsair TX-750 PSU, CoolerMaster CM-690 case; 4x 120mm fans TrackIR 5 & TrackClip Pro Windows7 x64 Home Premium
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#3290739 - 05/09/11 07:48 PM
Re: Can't handle much more than 15 planes offline, worried about campaign.
[Re: NattyIced]
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Joined: Feb 2010
Posts: 165
Ogami_musashi
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Fun question, what is RAM?
When you finally arrive at the conclusion that it's Random Access Memory used for neat things like manipulating those crazy equations, storing textures, or pretty much everything that the CPU NEEDS to access for QUICK changes then you can believe you know what you're talking about. But no, more RAM is only needed unless your system is running out of storage necessary for quick manipulation and drive storage can't cut it. If your computer is not hitting the HDD, the SSD or - for those that think I don't know what I'm talking about - the floppy drive, then you don't need more memory. i'm sorry but that's wrong... RAM is used as a dynamic storage for anything from hdd files to CPU-CG communications to CPU processes variables and processes storage. When the CPU cache memory is full and or some data is used with reccurence this data is stored into the RAM.
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#3290749 - 05/09/11 08:06 PM
Re: Can't handle much more than 15 planes offline, worried about campaign.
[Re: Feathered_IV]
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Joined: Jan 2005
Posts: 1,355
Johan217
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A Q6600 quad core, 2gb DDR2 and a GTS260. Here: Core 2 Duo 2.66GHz, 2GB RAM, ATI HD4870 1024MB, Win7 64bit. My system can handle about the same number of aircraft as yours before the slow motion kicks in, so either I am just lucky or there may be something else that is putting extra load on your cpu?
Undercarriage lever a bit sticky was it, Sir?
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#3290761 - 05/09/11 08:16 PM
Re: Can't handle much more than 15 planes offline, worried about campaign.
[Re: NattyIced]
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Joined: Feb 2010
Posts: 165
Ogami_musashi
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Dude, seriously? That makes as much sense as saying that anytime you need a hammer it should be in your hand, otherwise it belongs locked in your toolbox. ....... http://superuser.com/questions/78362/what-is-the-relationship-between-cpu-usage-and-ram"The speed of this recurrence (the load latency) is crucial to CPU performance, and so most modern level-1 caches are virtually indexed, which at least allows the MMU's TLB lookup to proceed in parallel with fetching the data from the cache RAM" From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPU_cacheAnd.. "RAM is merely a temporary storage area for information that the CPU needs to constantly access. The CPU is the heart of your machine, and everything goes through it. Game data does not travel directly from your drive or RAM to the graphics card; it must first be processed and allocated by the CPU. Your CPU is constantly reading from and writing to RAM, directing information and receiving input from all the devices on your system, all of this occurring through the information pathways on your motherboard." from http://www.tweakguides.com/Graphics_2.htmlhappy? Ram IS used by the CPU and not enough ram available is a possible cause of slowdown in the simulation thread rate.
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#3290764 - 05/09/11 08:21 PM
Re: Can't handle much more than 15 planes offline, worried about campaign.
[Re: NattyIced]
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Joined: Feb 2010
Posts: 165
Ogami_musashi
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This is silly, you are reiterating every point I originally made. Lol...Well enough.
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#3290772 - 05/09/11 08:33 PM
Re: Can't handle much more than 15 planes offline, worried about campaign.
[Re: Feathered_IV]
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Joined: Apr 2008
Posts: 788
NattyIced
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Throwing more RAM won't help unless you have a lot of system pauses due to storage access. So unless you notice a lot of hard drive access, more RAM won't do anything. RAM is merely a temporary storage area for information that the CPU needs to constantly access ...used for neat things like manipulating those crazy equations, storing textures, or pretty much everything that the CPU NEEDS to access for QUICK changes then you can believe you know what you're talking about. But no, more RAM is only needed unless your system is running out of storage necessary for quick manipulation and drive storage can't cut it. If your computer is not hitting the HDD, the SSD or - for those that think I don't know what I'm talking about - the floppy drive, then you don't need more memory. Lol indeed.
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#3290960 - 05/10/11 02:03 AM
Re: Can't handle much more than 15 planes offline, worried about campaign.
[Re: Feathered_IV]
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Joined: Sep 2009
Posts: 218
KnowBreaks
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NattyIced, I have no idea what you've learned (or from where), or what you think you know...but you're talkin' out your a$$ here pal.
The Q6600's, along with many of that same line of Intel CPUs, are renowed for out-performing their cost; indeed, these things are still considered plenty capable as CPUs go. Admittedly not top of the line by today's standards, but still well within the range of what RoF is known to perform well on. The Q6600, especially with moderate overclocking, can hold it's own against most any dual core; even against some of the best quad-cores around. Does about as well as an AMD Phenom X4 9950 Black, almost as well as the Core 2 Extreme QX6800...even the mighty QX9650s are only about 14% better than the Q6600 in 'across-the-board' performance.
And there are quite a few people here who report running RoF fairly well with only dual-core CPUs. Mine did, when I still had an E8400. Actually never saw any "slow-downs"...then again, I had 4G RAM.
By comparison, you're considering a Windows-based PC with half the memory it can support as not being a potential bottleneck (and that's only if we assume the OP is NOT running a 64-bit OS).
Now let me ask you: Dude...seriously?
So, although yes, the Q6600 might be a bit 'long in the tooth' by today's standards, there's still whole lotta whip-ass left in that quad core, be assured. At least as far as RoF is concerned.
Anyone who actually knows what the hell they're talking about wouldn't look at the OP's arrangement and say the CPU in this case is the biggest likely bottleneck, if you're allowed to pick only one.
And, for the record, yes, *NOT* having enough memory actually forces constant drive access - like you said. But that's not - by far - the only thing RAM does in a computer. Among other things, consider the amount of crap the average WIndows PC loads these days; even a 'clean' one can have several tens of processes running while at idle.
It's long since impossible to run a PC where only one app (RoF) is actually loaded into memory. In fact, that hasn't been the case since well back into the DOS days - hell, even then command.com was always loaded into memory no matter what else was running (let's discuss "internal" and "external" DOS commands some time, shall we? Or did you even know what those are???)
I feel almost certain you'll continue to argue the point; that's too bad, because while being ignorant isn't wrong, staying that way is.
Best of luck.
System Specs: Intel Core i7-930, OC @ 3.36G Scythe Grand Kama Cross HS/F Gigabyte GA-X58-USB3 mainboard 2x Seagate 500G Barracuda (RAID0; C:) 6G OCZ Gold Edition DDR3/10666 Triple Channel eVGA GTX570 1280M GDDR5 PCIe2.0x16 AMCC/3Ware 9650SE SATA 3G/s RAID controller: 4x OCZ 30G SATA 3G/s Vertex SSD (RAID0; D:) Corsair TX-750 PSU, CoolerMaster CM-690 case; 4x 120mm fans TrackIR 5 & TrackClip Pro Windows7 x64 Home Premium
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