Huge loss of fps near enemy planes

[leitwolf]

I'm at loss as to what might cause this,
but very often when I go near an enemy plane (it seems to be tied to zooming in) i have a catastrophic drop in frame rate.
It drops from 59/60 (vsync on) to single digits, sound gets choppy and I'm usually in the tower after an undignified farm purchase.

This seems to have appeared after one of the last patches; I am not aware of having changed anything on my end (although I did update sound and gfx driver after the problem reared its ugly head).

When only friendlies are around there is no problem at all, I get full fps regardless of detail settings. The problem appears as soon as i get an enemy in my sights. Has anybody seen this behavior before?

[fuzeman]

Skins maybe? Try checking disable other skins to see if it changes anything.
Also are you using custom sounds?  What level is your sound hardware acceleration set to?

[BigR]

If you have them on, disable all of the shadowing options in the graphics settings for AH.

[Knite]

If you have them on, disable all of the shadowing options in the graphics settings for AH.

I'm with BigR, I had a very similar problem and it was because of enabling "other self shadow" without turning down the "resolution" of my own self shadow. If you run a self shadow of 2048, either turn off "other self shadow" or run your self shadow at 1024.
That should fix it right up.

[leitwolf]

Thanks for the help guys

I tried fiddling with the shadows earlier but didn't try the 1024 setting. It did the trick.. I am puzzled why this would make such a huge difference, my gaming box isn't that old.
Its good not to auger any longer every time I see an enemy

[Knite]

Thanks for the help guys

I tried fiddling with the shadows earlier but didn't try the 1024 setting. It did the trick.. I am puzzled why this would make such a huge difference, my gaming box isn't that old.
Its good not to auger any longer every time I see an enemy

I think I know why...

I'm going to "make up" some numbers here, but it should explain why what's happening is happening.

Basically, let's say you are running self shadows at 2048... and let's say you're running the game at 1080p with everything maxed, running high resolution. The game and all of the details take 300MB video memory, and the shadow map another 200MB of memory. That means on a 512MB video card, you're runnin pretty. However, now we turn on "Other Self Shadow"... well that ALSO is going to run at 2048, requiring ANOTHER 200MB of memory, so instead of the game needing 500 out of 512MB to run, it needs 700MB to run, which of course is more than you have, therefore the game bombs. Reducing the shadows to 1024 reduces the "shadow" memory to 100 MB, so you now have 300 used by the game, 100 used by the self shadow, and another 100 used by the "other shadows" for a grand total of 500MB, which brings you back down under the 512MB max of the video card.

I know the numbers aren't accurate, but the right idea is there. =)
Hope that made sense!

[1701E]

About those numbers:  As you mentioned, they aren't accurate.  To run shadows you need:

4096 = 128MB of video RAM being dedicated to one texture.  Even with 512MB of dedicated video RAM, you could run the video card out of RAM with this setting.

8192 = 512MB of video RAM being dedicated to one texture.  A video card would have to have 1GB of dedicated video RAM to run this setting, and even then it will get close to running out of video RAM.

as quoted from Skuzzy.

So keep those numbers in mind when trying to run Shadows.