Springsettings optimization thread - Share and Compare

[Forboding Angel]

What smoth posted is essentially what automatically generates that wiki page.

Which, btw, you're welcome for that, klap.

[Beherith]

but there are no magic config tags to increase FPS in a 16v16 on speedmetal!

I highly disagree. This is a direct comparison of thisBA 8v8 speed ball 10 replay
Settings for shadows:

Code: Select all

Fullscreen = 0
GroundDetail = 102
LastSelectedMap = DeltaSiegeDry
LastSelectedMod = Balanced Annihilation V7.91
LastSelectedSetting = AllowDeferredMapRendering
NormalMapping = 0
ScreenshotCounter = 7
WindowPosX = 368
WindowPosY = 169
WindowState = 1
WorkerThreadCount = 4
snd_volmusic = 1.0099999904633

Settings for no shadows:

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Fullscreen = 0
GroundDetail = 102
LastSelectedMap = DeltaSiegeDry
LastSelectedMod = Balanced Annihilation V7.91
LastSelectedSetting = AllowDeferredMapRendering
NormalMapping = 0
ScreenshotCounter = 7
WindowPosX = 368
WindowPosY = 169
WindowState = 1
WorkerThreadCount = 4
snd_volmusic = 1.0099999904633
Shadows = 0

The camera was locked to the same player whole game (aleksey_high) with the lockcamera widget. I left the computer untouched while running. /debuginfo was logged every 0.5 seconds.

Results:


This seems to be very distant from what you are saying, jK. What am I doing wrong? Want me to plot gamespeed as well?

Edit: system settings: i5-750 @3.6ghz, win7 x64, GTX560TI

[very_bad_soldier]

First you need to say _what_ you want to optimize (startgame, midgame, endgame, ...) and then you need to identify what limits it (startgame is pure GPU & Lua, midgame is a mix of all, endgame is pure CPU & Lua).

Sound like overcomplicating things to me. I never heard of anyone claiming that he has perfect fluent endgame but his start is too slow so he wants to specifically tweak startgame.
The game is just getting slower and slower from the start to the end. Quite sure people want to have it faster at the end.
Telling people that tweaking their GPU wont help them much is a good hint though.

but there are no magic config tags to increase FPS in a 16v16 on speedmetal!

No one asked for a magical tag but when I understand you correctly the problem is the simulation part that runs on the CPU and we are not able to tweak the simulation in any way since it is synced, yes?

[malric]

No one asked for a magical tag but when I understand you correctly the problem is the simulation part that runs on the CPU and we are not able to tweak the simulation in any way since it is synced, yes?

From what I have seen on my systems and understand from the forums, there might be more than one problem (for low end system it might be the GPU, for high end system might be CPU, for some games it might be LUA, and so on). So, if you want some result, you should be as specific as possible in describing the problem.

This seems to be very distant from what you are saying, jK. What am I doing wrong? Want me to plot gamespeed as well?

If I read the whole post of JK, your result seem inline with what he says. He mentions "important config parameters" (shadows is one), and "disable this to get twice FPS" (you do not get twice FPS at start by disabling shadows anyway).

I would also appreciate an automatic way of the flags being set depending on game/system etc., but tbh, for me it would be more interesting first to understand the player base. It is obvious that the people that have problems will be the most vocal. What percentage of the players have performance problems is a different question though...

[klapmongool]

I don´t want a turn key experience. Would I make a thread about sharing obscure Spring settings with other players otherwise? I am looking to manually change Springsettings.cfg in order to have better performance. Not very 'consoly', now is it?

Having part of the information available through commands in the engine doesn't solve any problem here since many of the descriptions are lacking.

We can discuss the most important config parameters.
But sentences as "disable this to get twice FPS" are just bullshit. RTS aren't Shooters, there is a fundamental divergence between CPU & GPU & RAM/Bandwidth limitation, disabling GPU stuff when you are CPU limited doesn't help you at all.
First you need to say _what_ you want to optimize (startgame, midgame, endgame, ...) and then you need to identify what limits it (startgame is pure GPU & Lua, midgame is a mix of all, endgame is pure CPU & Lua). So we can discuss optimization possiblities for low-end systems (intel gpu, <120$ gpus, ram restricted systems, ...) and AMD driver workarounds, but there are no magic config tags to increase FPS in a 16v16 on speedmetal!

I never said or implied anything like this though. Others posted adequate responses in reply to this. Thx vbs/Behe.


@silentwings: Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that the people who put those descriptions in did a bad job. Not at all! It must be great stuff for (game) devs!

[klapmongool]

What smoth posted is essentially what automatically generates that wiki page.

Which, btw, you're welcome for that, klap.

haha :D

[smoth]

klap get over it or buy a console.

[dansan]

IMO lots of ppl here forget who is who's user. As I understand it, the spring engines users from the engine devs point of view are the game devs - not the players! That engine devs do actual support work for players here in the forums is just being nice, but not really part of their job - it's the respective moddevs job.

Maybe a "translation chain" like this would be better:

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player <--> game dev <--> engine dev

That would automatically make this topic gear into a different direction, along what malric wrote: making "tables" of "for game X with Y players setting Z is helpful". So the OPs question would end up in a game subforum, and the game devs would consult the engine devs about good settings for their game - passing that to the players.

PS: Idea: Ideally the games would use such a table to instruct the engine, during launch, to optimize some settings for the scenario that it is being started for.

[smoth]

I'd be fine with that but alas these people go straight to the devs.

[Silentwings]

It is possible for games to overwrite/override the users settings (in many cases, without even telling the user it's happening).

BA does none of this - because it's not a one dimensional optimization problem with a unique solution. Different people want different balances between performance and speed, some people love/hate particular gfx options. There is no 'one size fits all' - I'm somewhat painfully aware of this since requests for "help, I broke my spring" often filter towards me.

Afaik there is perfectly good information on http://springrts.com/wiki/Springsettings.cfg for ~all settings a player could ever want to change. Also:

the only cases in which doing anything beyond the blindingly obvious to springsettings (i.e. turn graphical stuff off) will help/speed up spring is (1) ATI-fail or other driver/os/hw fail and (2) when some user already fiddled with their settings ... and accidentally did smth dumb.

[Beherith]

Just as a side note, I recall BrainDamage made an fps manager widget, which turned off gfx settings as your fps got lower towards the end of the game. Very smart bit of code, but I lost it somewhere. Anyone have a link to the most up-to-date version?

[klapmongool]

Dansan, that would be the ideal situation. In this case I am aiming for highest FPS, besides some personal preferences, in multiple games. I haven't encountered a Spring game that ran with higher FPS with higher settings yet. Therefore it seemed appropriate to make this a engine-wide thread instead of a game specific one. This thread was not meant for either engine devs or game devs, it was meant to be for players. Which I also implied in the opening post by saying ´users´.

So, even though (most) information is available somewhere, sharing players' springsettings is still my goal here.

[dansan]

Just as a side note, I recall BrainDamage made an fps manager widget, which turned off gfx settings as your fps got lower towards the end of the game. Very smart bit of code, but I lost it somewhere. Anyone have a link to the most up-to-date version?

I tried it once and found it to be very annoying. It was to aggressive: Ground texture quality changed to often and to radical. Steep cliffs would suddenly disappear and reappear, it'd look like a clipping error, but I think it was just a quality setting jumping or being to low. If it were tweaked to use thresholds that make changes slow / seldom (and optionally not below a configurable minimum) that would be very cool. I think it's "FPS Manager": http://widgets.springrts.de/index.php#13

[BrainDamage]

that's not my widget, just check th author next time (i'd have to dig around if i still have it somewhere)

[smoth]

Klap again, no.

The game devs should be developing:
A) a proper settings dialogue
B) simplified user settings for people like yourself who are false members of the glorious pc master race.


highest FPS, LOL there has to be a balance, you could drop all settings to next to non-existent disable lua ui etc. OH wait some projects might need lua ui.. oh I guess it is project specific! I mean you can drop the unit distance to 0 and watch icon wars(not radar icons, if the lod distance is zero the units will become sprites) on glitched as hell terrain, man I hope the maps have pre-rendered shadows... oh wait most don't

[very_bad_soldier]

I dont think klap can be hold responsible for every deliberate or non-deliberate misinterpretation, derailing or trolling of this thread.
Thread was a nice idea though...

[Jools]

Klap again, no.
The game devs should be developing:
A) a proper settings dialogue

Already exists:


Also, I think Chili and IceUI have similar dialogues

[smoth]

Klap again, no.
The game devs should be developing:
A) a proper settings dialogue

Also, I think Chili and IceUI have similar dialogues

That is a fairly minimal one but yeah that is what I mean. Look at what is being done in BAR that is more exhaustive in it's options. I don't much care for the zk one(chili is a framework not a ui) but again yeah.

Klap isn't playing those projects apparently or is blithely unaware of the options at his feet. Again, which makes it a per project(In the case of them not having full options coverage) issue and not an engine usability issue.

[klapmongool]

Klap again, no.
The game devs should be developing:
A) a proper settings dialogue

Also, I think Chili and IceUI have similar dialogues

That is a fairly minimal one but yeah that is what I mean. Look at what is being done in BAR that is more exhaustive in it's options. I don't much care for the zk one(chili is a framework not a ui) but again yeah.

Klap isn't playing those projects apparently or is blithely unaware of the options at his feet. Again, which makes it a per project(In the case of them not having full options coverage) issue and not an engine usability issue.

You know so very little about me Smoth, I propose you stop making assumptions and go troll some other dude. I was kinda hoping some admin would have made your presence in this thread minimal by now.

[Jools]

Klap again, no.
The game devs should be developing:
A) a proper settings dialogue

Also, I think Chili and IceUI have similar dialogues

That is a fairly minimal one but yeah that is what I mean. Look at what is being done in BAR that is more exhaustive in it's options.

Where can you find BAR?

Also, it would be nice to discuss which of these settings can be adjusted from the game, and which not. I think, in general that settings from springsettings.cfg are to be set before the game, and in that case it's not up to gamedevs, they are then engine settings.