Game Unplayable

[janpitor]

Tou can also try lower textures setting...for this resolution maybe low...and turn SSAO off every case

[335th_GRAthos]

Originally Posted by Spinnetti

I'm on Win7 Ultimate/64 bit. - Max spec.

I've got a i7 2.8 - Above their recommendation

I've got 4GB DDR3 - their recommendation at least

I've got a ATI4850

My screens native resolution is 2560x1440, and even cutting that in half and putting the graphics on "medium" with no other changes is unplayable.

Hallo Spinnetti,

Nice machine, nice setup (Win6 64), you have a Ferarri, unvortunately on a set of "wooden" tyres. As other mentioned already, your GPU is the main and probably only problem, mainly due to the 512Mb VRAM which are exhausted all too easily in this game.

By the way, no offence but minimum configuration used to be 640x480 (since you know the IL2 times, I dare to remind you). Everything higher than this, you are taking your chances.

The rest I have posted already in this thread if you go through them you can find most necessary optimisations and use GPU-Z to see how fast zou VRAM reached its limit.

You should be able to fly great with your machine although not at resolution you expect...

Happy flying!

[Aty2]

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[RE77ACTION]

Hi, my first post...

I think the game is really good playable (offline) with a combination of settings and hardware below. I get frame rates between 30 and 90 with an average of about 50 in most missions. And I think the game still looks good. Only big cities at low altitude are really unplayable (FPS well below 20). I did came to these settings with many runnings of the Black Death track.

The strange thing is that nor my CPU nor my GPU run ever at full utilization. And no, I have luckily no problems with 'underclocking' of the GPU because it scales up nicely when I start the game. In Black Death my GPU runs between 37% and 71%. In the same track my CPU core 1 runs at about 80% on average (never 100% for a moment) while core 2,3 and 4 do respectively 45%,35% and 35% on average.

Two more examples of not using up all my hardware is given in the following.
1) I can put on SSAO (100% GPU powered) and it totally doesn't matter for the frame rate although my GPU gets 5% or 10% more utilization. I leave it off by choice because I don't see any visual improvement.
2) Overclocking my GPU and GDDR5 memory gives totally no difference in frame rate in this game.

I've upped my PCIE bus speed to 110 and it gave me a little improvement in frame rate. I also tried 120 but higher than 110 didn't give better results. I've eventually settled for 114 because my FSB is also 14% OCed and this would possibly prevent any synchronization issues (although not noticeable, so it's only between my ears). WARNING, I don't want to encourage anybody to OC his/her PCIE bus because it brings serious risks, for example data corruption on your storage devices (especially in RAID (as I have)). Do so on your own risk!

At first I installed the game on my HDD. But after some messages of this forum that installing it on your SSD could improve issues with stuttering I tried running it from my SSD. In my opinion it really doesn't matter at all. I see totally no difference. The stuttering looks just the same and keeps being mild in my case.

My biggest question is where the real bottleneck lies for my system and thus for others. I'm thinking of replacing my CPU for a 1090T or maybe 1100T (both 6 cores, more speed per core and better to OC) in the hope my GPU gets a better data delivery. But still have my doubts because (as I said) I'm not utilizing my current CPU for the full. Maybe it's just the (currently unoptimized) code of this game that's keeping the utilization down. I will wait for reports of other users who've upgraded their CPU's for the cause

Settings are as follows:

version: 1.00.14101
resolution: 1920x1200
full screen: on
model detail: medium
buildings detail: high
land detail: medium
forest: medium
visual effects: high
texture quality: original
anti-aliasing: off
anti-epilepsy filter: off
SSAO: off
damage decals: high
building amount: low
land shading: medium
grass: on
shadows: on
roads: on

Hardware is as follows (also in signature, but that's probably dynamic and will change in every post when updated):

cpu: Atlon II X4 640 @ 3.42
memory: 8 GB DDR3 1600 @ 1824
gpu: 6970 2GB @ 910 / 1425
storage: SSD 180 (3 in raid 0) + HDD 500 (7200)
mb: ASUS M4A79XTD EVO @ FSB 228 / PCIE 114

[KG26_Alpha]

Nice first post.
Welcome to the forums.

[Rattlehead]

RE77Action - why are you running model detail on only medium? You should be able to put it on high with little to no ill effect.

[TonyD]

Originally Posted by RE77ACTION

... I'm thinking of replacing my CPU for a 1090T or maybe 1100T ...

Hi, nice lucid post. For what it's worth, I don't think you'll see any improvement in CoD with with one of those cpu's, since it isn't using your current one fully (the extra L3 cache may have some effect, but I doubt it will be much). Out of interest, I clocked my cpu to 4Ghz to see if it would improve anything, but it made no noticeable difference.

[Edit: just ran Black Death with both cpu settings, just to check again:
3.4Ghz: avg.41, max.93, min.10
4.0Ghz: avg.44, max.102, min10
All other settings the same, adjusted cpu speed with the multiplier, re-start between tests, one run only.

Ps: I think your bottleneck, as with others, is the current state of the software, and throwing expensive harware at it will yeild minimal results]

[RE77ACTION]

I've model detail on medium because it gives me one FPS extra in Black Death (average 32 vs 30/31). When testing the FPS in black death I use every time the following consistent procedure. Every test I start the game clean from Windows, load and start the track for 5 seconds and then exit the track. Then load it again, wait 5 seconds and start the track for the second time. From this run I take the average from the absolute beginning (includes building the screen and loading all textures) to the absolute end. The reason for this is because I've learned that the game is not always consistent in its FPS returns when running each benchmark right after the other. Another reason is that I like to restart the game when changing settings, even when the game itself doesn't ask for it. This is just to be sure.

The biggest performance hit I get from shadows. Shadows cost me easily 30-40% in frame rate. However, I think it's worth it because it adds enormous to the overall experience.

I've played extensively with all the settings and I have to get my FPS from somewhere. It's a tradeoff that I'm willing to make because the loss in quality between medium and high is in my opinion minor. But I clearly understand that others would make other choices on personal preference and hardware.

[RE77ACTION]

@TonyD:

Thanks for your experience with upping your CPU performance! My CPU isn't the strongest one when it comes to OC. With 3,42 Ghz @ 1,525V (stable) I'm at my absolute max unfortunately. I which I could go higher to test the difference. Typing this gives me new inspiration, because I could of course go lower to test the difference. I'll be back later today to give my results.

[RE77ACTION]

As promised I've tested the Black Death track several times with scaled down CPU performance. For this test I've lowered the multiplier of my CPU from 15 to 13 and kept everything else the same (FSB still 227+1 (because of smiley error when I type eight in numbers). This way we know we are only testing the CPU and not things like memory, NB, SB, etc. The CPU runs now with 4 cores on 2,96 GHz instead my originally overclocked 3,42 GHz.

The results are pretty staggering if you ask me. The average frame rate dropped from 32 to 29 which is a decrease of about 9.5% while I decreased the CPU speed with about 13,5%. The strange thing here is that the CPU utilization is about the same as it was with higher CPU speeds. And still none of the cores reached ever 100% for a moment.

Maybe I and many others get never 100% utilization shown because the game uses functions which saturates only a part of the processor. And saturating only that part never translates to full utilization in a graph. I'm no expert on this, but I vaguely remind that I once read something like this.

It looks to me that my processor is a bottleneck even when it never shows a full 100% utilization in any one of its cores. In these tests I've grown stronger towards a better CPU. However more CPU power will give diminishing returns as this little test already showed.

I hope someone else will find these results useful.