Aces High Bulletin Board

General Forums => Hardware and Software => Topic started by: major347 on April 29, 2013, 09:10:23 AM

Title: Drastic drop in Frame Rate when entering a populated area.
Post by: major347 on April 29, 2013, 09:10:23 AM
Ok, where do I begin? I guess I'll off with a little info on my system.  I have a AMD Phenom II 955 (oc 3.6) on an Asus MB with 8gb of Gskill 1600mhz RAM (cl 9). The OS and Aces high are on a Adata Sp900 (sata 3gb/s) ssd everything else is on WD 750gb hdd. A Seasonic 750watt PS. My GPU is a HIS Radeon HD 7950 3gb witch is the most power component, I know I know... i bought that planning on a future computer. Windows 7 is running on minimal programs and services in the background with no conflicts. When I play AH I shut down any program that use internet. I am pretty knowledgeable on computers

I game a lot on my computer with many different games. all of them run really really well except AH. Every other game I can run maxed out or almost maxed out and get FPS rock steady >60FPS. With AH I float around 55 until I get to a populated area where WHOA 20-40FPS. ANNOYING!!! I have tested this by turning off most, all of the advanced graphics, AA and no real change.

It seems like when there is a lot data traffic for AH my FPS drops. My connection is a 15mb/s Mediacom Cable through a Linksys G wireless router (hardwired 100mb/s). Just thought of testing directly to modem, I'll do that tonight maybe.

Anyone else have this kind of problem? How did you fix it?
Title: Re: Drastic drop in Frame Rate when entering a populated area.
Post by: Bizman on April 29, 2013, 09:23:39 AM
Do you play AH on wireless? If so, try with a wire and see if that helps.
Title: Re: Drastic drop in Frame Rate when entering a populated area.
Post by: major347 on April 29, 2013, 09:27:38 AM
through a Linksys G wireless
router (hardwired 100mb/s)

Wired to the router, not wireless
Title: Re: Drastic drop in Frame Rate when entering a populated area.
Post by: gyrene81 on April 29, 2013, 09:37:47 AM
through a Linksys G wireless
router (hardwired 100mb/s)

Wired to the router, not wireless
gaming on wireless g is going to be troublesome...wireless n isn't much better although I have tried on a 450mbps adaptor at 5ghz and it seemed to be fast and stable. you would do better wired to the router.
Title: Re: Drastic drop in Frame Rate when entering a populated area.
Post by: major347 on April 29, 2013, 09:41:58 AM
gaming on wireless g is going to be troublesome...wireless n isn't much better although I have tried on a 450mbps adaptor at 5ghz and it seemed to be fast and stable. you would do better wired to the router.

i am on a wired connection. my computer has never been on a wireless connection. it doesn't even have a wireless card.
Title: Re: Drastic drop in Frame Rate when entering a populated area.
Post by: Skuzzy on April 29, 2013, 09:46:54 AM
What you are describing sounds like the CPU is not able to provide the video card with the data fast enough to keep it busy.  If you turn down game graphics and the results are the same, then it points to the CPU being the bottleneck.

Check your CPU usage, when nothing is running on the computer.  It should be at 0, virtually all the time.  Any deviation from that is a sign you have other active processes taking time away from the game.
Title: Re: Drastic drop in Frame Rate when entering a populated area.
Post by: Bizman on April 29, 2013, 12:56:05 PM
CPU vs GPU imbalance would have been my next guess after learning wireless wasn't the issue, but I had to go to watch my younger daughter in a school concert. Skuzzy's advice for checking that are way better than mine would ever have been, though.  :salute
Title: Re: Drastic drop in Frame Rate when entering a populated area.
Post by: major347 on April 29, 2013, 02:24:02 PM
ok I guess I will be my services again.

what about Microsoft Security Essentials?
Would it cause that much of a slow down? that is really the only major background program running.

whatever I install I make sure it doesn't load when the computer boots. I usually reboot before an evening of AH.
Title: Re: Drastic drop in Frame Rate when entering a populated area.
Post by: gyrene81 on April 29, 2013, 02:42:28 PM
do a full system power down, then turn it back on...once windows is up and running, before you start any programs, open task manager and look at the performance tab. let it sit for 5 minutes without touching the mouse or keyboard...any processor activity means you have a process running that probably shouldn't be while the system is idle.
Title: Re: Drastic drop in Frame Rate when entering a populated area.
Post by: major347 on April 29, 2013, 07:33:00 PM
do a full system power down, then turn it back on...once windows is up and running, before you start any programs, open task manager and look at the performance tab. let it sit for 5 minutes without touching the mouse or keyboard...any processor activity means you have a process running that probably shouldn't be while the system is idle.

Ok I did that. and a steady 0% for several minutes.
Title: Re: Drastic drop in Frame Rate when entering a populated area.
Post by: Bizman on April 30, 2013, 07:20:00 AM
If you suspect MSE could be the culprit, just uninstall it, reboot and try AH without it. You should be safe enough during playing AH behind the Windows firewall, maybe your modem/router has one too. If it helps, it'll be time to change the antivirus. If not, the reinstall of MSE is no big deal.

Another thing that came into my mind is that AH is the only game on the SSD. There's been quite a lot of talk about SSD's losing their speed due to AH writing on the disk all the time. Doing a benchmark test wouldn't hurt. You can even try to uninstall AH and reinstall it on the regular disk where your other games are.
Title: Re: Drastic drop in Frame Rate when entering a populated area.
Post by: ImADot on April 30, 2013, 08:16:06 AM
You can even try to uninstall AH and reinstall it on the regular disk where your other games are.

I don't think you need to uninstall the current game to install it somewhere else. I think you might even be able to simply copy the game folder to another location and run it from there. It's been a while (and a few versions/patches) since I tried, so maybe it isn't just a simple folder copy anymore.
Title: Re: Drastic drop in Frame Rate when entering a populated area.
Post by: major347 on April 30, 2013, 09:07:24 AM
something i forgot to mention. i just bought the SSD about two months ago and did a fresh install of everything. i did see a general performance increase in AH with the SSD (removed a shutter and load times are a lot faster, so i am keeping aces high on the SSD.

last night I bypassed the router and just went straight to the modem. i saw a little better performance increase ( populated areas 45-55 fps with spikes to 35 )

i then moved MS Security Essentials to lowest priority through task manager and moved AH to High. no change.

but with 45-55 fps in a big dogfight i can live with. as long as can bypass the router. hard to do when my wife or kids wants to watch netflix too.

my router is not a gigabit router. If I get a new router with a gigabit connection, do you think i would the same outcome? ( lets just assume nobody else was using the internet to. )
Title: Re: Drastic drop in Frame Rate when entering a populated area.
Post by: Skuzzy on April 30, 2013, 09:12:02 AM
I do not recommend running Aces High on an SSD.  While it may seem to get you better performance in the short term, long term it will degrade the performance over time due to the number of small writes the game constantly does.

If your system is performing correctly, here should be no stutters when loading textures are done as the game anticipates those loads and does it before they are actually needing to be rendered.
Title: Re: Drastic drop in Frame Rate when entering a populated area.
Post by: gyrene81 on April 30, 2013, 09:43:13 AM
i'm starting to get a bigger picture of all the contributing factors here...what graphics settings are you using major347?
Title: Re: Drastic drop in Frame Rate when entering a populated area.
Post by: major347 on April 30, 2013, 02:30:15 PM
graphic options
slides are max

advanced graphics
are all on except for environment slider and bump map other vehicles
shadows are at 1024

main video settings
1024 with one notch of AA
Title: Re: Drastic drop in Frame Rate when entering a populated area.
Post by: zack1234 on April 30, 2013, 02:48:10 PM
The "Update" slider is only set to 55% any more it impacts on FSP.

Title: Re: Drastic drop in Frame Rate when entering a populated area.
Post by: major347 on April 30, 2013, 03:58:23 PM
The "Update" slider is only set to 55% any more it impacts on FSP.


"Environmental Map" updates is set to "NONE"
Title: Re: Drastic drop in Frame Rate when entering a populated area.
Post by: zack1234 on May 01, 2013, 12:41:00 AM
Do you have enough cooling? :old:
Title: Re: Drastic drop in Frame Rate when entering a populated area.
Post by: major347 on May 01, 2013, 07:07:52 AM
Do you have enough cooling? :old:

yes, Antec 300 case with 6 120mm fans (including CPU which has 20) and a 140mm fan

Cpu stays at about 56C during Prime95