How I got the most speed out of spring-How I tripled my FPS

[Beherith]

I used to be content with some decent fps, 45 at start, down to <10 on long games.
My system is a winxp 32bit, core 2 duo cpu, 2gigs of ram, 8800GT gpu.

If you have a multi core CPU, you can gain a lot from this. If you dont, then unfortunately guide cant help you.

First I got the multi threaded build from the downloads page. Direct link to latest at time of posting: http://planetspring.free.fr/spring/exec ... b45722.zip

Now before you install this, launch your favorite mod, and disable FPSManager and LUPSManager widgets.

Then back up your old spring.exe, and replace it with multi threaded version.

Next, you must turn off threaded optimization. If you use Nvidia, you can do this like so:


If you cant select the spring executable in the drop down box of step 1, then press add and browse to spring.exe.

All thats left is to play spring and enjoy the huge performance boost.
I can now patrol 3000 core vamp fighters before my cpu starts to slow down, and even so I get 20 fps when all the fighters are visible, and 80 fps when they are not on screen at 1920*1200 resolution, 4096 shadows, and almost everything else turned to max.

Oddly enough, the healthbars widget, with so many units on screen, eats almost 30% of my fps.

Your results may vary, for some people the MT build doesnt work, but its sure as hell worth a shot!

[Master-Athmos]

Yeah - multiple threads are really going to help the CPU-whore which Spring is (although I'm not up to date what actually did get an own thread). You should mention though that it might not run stable (even with LUPS & stuff deactivated)...

For everyone else I can recommend turning off things like LolUI or those advanced selection highlight widgets which really can cost you 50+% of your fps...

[DavetheBrave]

this is awesome ^_^

[TheMightyOne]

cant find anything remotely similar in my catalyst, help?

[Beherith]

If im not mistaken, non sim code got a thread, so thats mostly rendering stuff.

If you dont want it to run on two cores, because your cpu gets too hot (laptops) you can still turn off threaded opt. since it helps loads.

Sorry, I dont know anything about ATI drivers, if someone does, please chime in. The MT build alone without the threaded opt turned off helps too.

[very_bad_soldier]

Now before you install this, launch your favorite mod, and disable FPSManager and LUPSManager widgets.

Sounds nice but this feels like a major drawback. Whats the reason, are they crashing Multithreaded-spring.exe?
I like FPSManager for having at least at the start of the game all gfx-features enabled and having them disabled later ingame automatically. Not being able to use it would mean I would have to disable gfx-features in the first place.
Still keen on trying it out...

[Master-Athmos]

cant find anything remotely similar in my catalyst, help?

There doesn't exist anything similar for ATI. In the end I never understood why NVIDIA would put something about multithreaded code in their driver's options...

Sounds nice but this feels like a major drawback. Whats the reason, are they crashing Multithreaded-spring.exe?

Yeah that's pretty much it. You might find the reason for this in zerver's topic about his changes on Spring - it should have been discussed there for a couple of times and in general LUA seems to have some problems with the MT version...
http://springrts.com/phpbb/viewtopic.ph ... 57&start=0

[BrainDamage]

the fps manager works fine with gml, but since it auto adjusts the details to keep fps around 30, you'll never notice any improvement by the fps digit when following his tutorial, you will instead get it indirectly by achieving an higher detail, which is a worse way to check performance than comparing a digit

for normal play the fps manager will do fine

[aegis]

hmm... but my fps never drops below 60, windowed with compositing (aero) enabled

[Jazcash]

Ok, I'm getting spammed with stuff about GML every time someone issues a message ingame. Bill Adama thinks it's the Player Info from Ice UI causing this, yet if I disable it, it still continues. However, if I disable Ice UI completely, it stops.

This might be a case for Meltrax to update Ice UI to work with Multithreaded Spring but I want to know if there's anyway I could fix this myself?

[Apollo]

ally rescource bars

[Jazcash]

ally rescource bars

That's what Bill told me, I've always had them disabled and always will have. Ice UI's resource bars are what I use.

[Forboding Angel]

Then perhaps you should disable ICEui's ally resource bars.

[Jazcash]

yet if I disable it, it still continues.

Then perhaps you should disable ICEui's ally resource bars.

[Google_Frog]

Thanks this works really well. I had about 60 fps at the start before and now it's over 300. I haven't tried turning my settings up though. There's a little visual mis-match such as unit models overshooting their location when they stop but this only happens when there are a lot of units. Also this causes GML error spam for the Arm Nano Tower effect in CA but the effect is unchanged visually.

[Apollo]

i had same GML error when i tryed ca

[Auswaschbar]

Like BrainDamage already stated:
your performance comparison is borked
You need to compare both builds with FPSManager disabled, as it will set your settings higher if you have much FPS.
With GML, I get about the same FPS, but a 20% higher CPU usage with my core2 duo.

[Beherith]

I never used fpsmanager previously, and theres nothing it can add, since i run settings maxed out in both tests. The only difference is the lack of lups aircraft trails.
Want a screenshot of the settings I ran it at? I highly doubt fpsmanager would increase them any more.

The only reason im telling ppl to disable it, is that I got the info that it doesnt work with GML, so im going the safe route.

[Master-Athmos]

Well it's sort of true that the comparison between standard Spring + LUPS against MT Spring + no LUPS isn't that fair. Those aircraft trails eat up your performance like mad - especially when doing tests with like on thousand aircrafts...

With that said the biggest part of your perfomance gain simply comes from disabling the LUPS-effects still the MT version delivers a nice boost...

[Beherith]

Enabling lups after the fighters are already spawned is possible, and it doesnt spam error messages.
Tested it with 3k core vamps patrolling over whole dsd, same gfx settings.
When all fighters are in view and fully rendered with trails: 13 fps
When no fighters are on screen: 55 fps