Clouds and stutters
 

Flew a few single player missions yesterday and noticed severe fps hits when in the clouds. I'm using a GTX 480 card so is that the problem or are the people with much better cards seeing the same thing? Not complaining… Just wondering.

It's the particle system, it requires massive amounts of processing power for some reason.

The problem is that clouds are rendered with several layers, so, if the cloud fills all the screen, the engine have to render every pixel in the screen as many times as layers. That is a extremely lot of pixels. 480 is a bit obsolete for this if you play with high resolution. You can low the resolution, buy a more powerful card or avoid clouds filling all the screen.

So to be clear, folks with a GTX 670 are getting goor fps flying thru the clouds? I was asking to see if I needed to upgrade my card or just wait until BOM comes out which might have better coding. All my the games like FSX, COD and ROF run great.

switch your effects to medium... You will barely see any difference (smoke and cloud look a teeny bit sharper at high), but you will see massive fps increase.

I have a 670gtx, running at 2560x1440, everything high except effects (no ssao of course), game is pretty smooth (50-60fps?) to me at ATAG with clouds on.

Why no SSAO? SSAO is used to create illusion of 3d depth on all objects.

Also you dont need to guess your FPS, press shift+tab and type " fps SHOW START " and you'll get ingame fps counter.

I tried it but I'm still getting water flickers..

SSAO only adds a bit of shadow based on already rendered depth position of pixels. It´s a post-process aplied over the already rendered image. Nothing releated with the clouds or that can be used to render clouds.

You will see a massive difference when firing tracers and lighting effects.