[2.2] Massive FPS loss with Buildings

Whenever a building, turret, or any other building is destroyed (or when a building is unbuilt) I get a massive FPS loss (20-30 per building). Like, when a building is destroyed it "explodes". All of those particles seem to kill my FPS for some reason.. is anybody else experiencing this, or is it just me?

Here's some screens..
Buildings are unbuilt (around 29 FPS) - link
Buildings are built (around 70 FPS) - link

Just wondering it it's me or something.. although that would be kind of odd

 

I get that with the current public version, but then again my computer ain't that great. :p

I guess if they use those Ep2 particle effects it might ease up on the frame rate.

 

I get that too. Also, since revision 400 with the debug stuff and such, I only get 26 fps at most.
It seems to have something to do with the smoke that comes out of unbuild/damaged buildings. I had one issue where it would drop the fps when I just looked at a certain spot of the BE-ref though.

 

Low FPS with Debug build is normal.

 

Even without debugging (a few days ago) one newly placed ref reduced my fps from 120 to 90-100.

If i remember i shall test it again when there's a normal version.

And yes debugging cuts my fps in half. I had compiled my map yesterday to test it and i saw the insanely low fps. I was shocked. Luckily after a few minutes i came to the conclusion that it hopefully was caused by the debugging. I'm glad to see that confirmed.

 

The game slows to a crawl whenever a building blows up, even engineer placed objects.

 

Ye noticed it today, an unbuilt vf gave me 26 fps when I looked at it and when I looked away I had 32. 40 when zoomed out.

 

I dont have any FPS issues with buildings, there are a couple of client commands to control the smoke and tone it down, I guess these commands were copied when i copied my Empires config over.

 

Seems to be the smoke.

 

I'm running game with mat_bumpmap 0 and mat_specular 0 most of the time.

 

I get this too but you can minimize the amount of lag you experience by using the "emp_cl_buildingsmoke_interval" command (not sure if thats exactly it but if you type in "emp_cl" in the console it should be the first one to show up).
Set it to a larger number to decrease the amount of smoke and a smaller number to increase it. not exactly a fix but it will alleviate some of the lag while the devs figure out a more permanent solution.

 

You should expect people to play a game with default settings. As testers we should be playing with default settings as well, or we won't be doing a good job.

This seems pretty serious. It reduces fps a lot more than it should be. I'm surprised a little smoke can cause this.

 

its probably an ancient particle system or has something incompatible with OB to function 'correctly' (read: no lag drop)

 

All the effects will be moved to the OB perticle system.

 

only one i found close was vehiclesmoke_interval....did anyone have any luck with this solution?

currently my showbudget is showing that 'swap buffers' is overloaded when i sit my view inside a particle system (dead burning wreck) or a tree (not all trees).

i'm going to try lowering my dxlevel to 81 but if anyone has any more knowledge about fixing this (even if its temporarily needed) please share.

 

Swap buffer could mean textures to bitchslap, try at a lower res

 

i'm going to wait for ALL the particles to be swapped. in the meantime the only thing out of like 60 solutions that made any significant difference is to set the dxlevel lower.

mat_dxlevel 80 (options are odd numbers and 70 is too low for new fire effects)

any of you with OLDER pcs should definitely set this.

 

I worked out how to get bare minimum settings for best FPS on older computers, unfortunately it makes Empires look like this:

 

Wow, awesome.

 

ooo ooo shaer yer secrets, i want mario_empires too!