| starking018 | Date: Tuesday, 2017-02-21, 1:58 PM | Message # 1 |
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Colonel
Group: Friends
Messages: 395
Status: Offline
| I'm sharing my experience, which can hopefully help some people who have unexpectedly low framerates in FHSW fix that. This issue concerns mainly people with a desktop PC and a discrete graphics card (i.e. not an integrated GPU).
A few months ago I bought an ATI Radeon HD5870 graphics card, which I expected would be able to run FHSW very well at all times. For some convenience reasons I decided to initially install it not in my first PCI-e v2.0 x16 slot, but in my second one, which I knew runs at only x4 mode (later I found that it also ran at v1.1 speeds, so together this means 8 times less bandwidth than on the main slot). I had previously seen test results on newer games showing that such a reduction in bandwidth did not lead to a dramatic reduction in overall performance. Framerate wouldn't go 8 times lower, or even 2 times lower, but just several percent lower. The card has plenty of speed for FHSW, so I thought I could live with that and afford to lose a few frames per second. Moreover, I thought older games would be less affected than newer games. Indeed my framerates were very good in most cases. But I was somewhat surprised to find out that I had framerates which were not very good (going as low as 25 fps) accompanied by noticeable and very unpleasant changes in latency (lag) in certain places with many objects, such as some main bases (e.g. allied main on Iron Monster, Gazaps) and most places on certain maps (such as Operation Varsity, Operation Dracula).
It turns out that by moving the card to the full bandwidth PCI-e slot the framerates in the problematic places went multiples higher, and the game looked very smooth and responsive again. So FHSW must be unusually sensitive to low bandwidth to the GPU, compared to other games.
I remember someone complaining about low framerates in FHSW on a multi-GPU machine, which ran BF1 well. Now this makes sense to me, because multi-GPU set-ups usually run some or all PCI-e slots at limited modes. This old game does not support running on multiple GPUs, so if the one GPU it runs on (typically, the one to which your monitor(s) is connected) happens to be connected to a low mode slot, you'll get this issue of unexpectedly low performance. Some motherboards allow PCI-e slots to run at different modes, depending on the multi-GPU set-up, but there is usually a way to get one card to run at the maximum PCI-e x16 mode (see your motherboard manual), and this is what you should try to do if you are in this situation. For people with a single graphics card, just make sure that it is placed in the first PCI-e x16 slot (the one closest to the CPU).
Air Troll a.k.a. starking018
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