About that WCUSA bug

I did little testing in WCUSA, got some information that might help some people to learn why their computers are not running WCUSA quite way they think they should.

In short reason is CPU power limitations. It does not really explain of why some persons experience 5-10fps instead of normal 40-60fps, but it explains why some CPU's are not enough fast to run WCUSA and why some even fast GPU's run that map very poorly.

Also it explains why lowering graphics details is not having much difference for some people.

In video I show high details, then I lower details to lowest details (around 2 minutes mark) and you can see how GPU usage at lowest detail is not 100%, that is because my CPU is not enough fast to keep up with GPU on lowest details.
Also you can see how #7 thread is around 80% in task manager, but with much faster CPU monitor (CPU speed #8) you can see how that CPU thread goes to 100% meaning GPU is not reaching maximum usage.


So if you have slower single core performance you might not get quite as much benefit from faster GPU.

Also if you have less cores, computing will cramped to more CPU cores meaning CPU is being overwhelmed (reaching 100% in single thread) which gives less GPU.

Having around 20% slower single performance than i7-6700 might not be enough to reach over 60fps even with 1080, especially if number of cores is less.

With Coffee lake WCUSA should run quite bit better and faster GPU would give more benefit. So while WCUSA uses lot of GPU, there is this CPU limit on background.

Hwinfo64 helps to really see what is happening so one don't need to guess, but when it comes to spiky fast changing CPU load, I haven't found better tool than my own made CPU monitor as everything else is too slow to catch those spikes.

So there you have it, reason why your computer runs WCUSA poorly.

 

Nice vid you got there.
The thing i cant wrap my head around is that my fsp drop happens out of nowhere but its probably a CPU limit. I can start in WCUSA and say for example have turned shadows off to be sure it starts flawless. Then when im ingame i turn the shadows on and BOM!, fps drops big time. The one thing i cant grip is why it wont raise again when i turn the shadows off ingame. I need to reload the map in order for it to do so. If i start a game with shadows on and it runs smooth as butter, it can still get the huge fps drop if i just change a part on the car. Kind of like its slowing down when loading stuff and when its done loading the CPU or cache or whatever dont get back up to speed again.

 

That would probably require bit more investigation, but I would like to go easy route and blame bugs in graphic settings changing part of Beam, I get often crashes when changing graphics settings if there is lot of vehicles, it is not the most stable part of the game, I guess.

I did test that and for me there is no such low fps state after enabling shadows and disabling.

One thing that is rather interesting is that I get 4-5fps less with vsync on, that is with high details and shadows on, which means fluctuating fps rarely reaches 60fps or more.

Reason for that is such that if vsync is on and fps is less than 60 with 60Hz monitor, it locks to 30fps, so I imagine some frames are 30fps and some are 60fps, which averages out to bit less than without vsync on which gives whatever fps system is capable of doing.

Generally if you can't keep up FPS of monitor refresh rate, then vsync should be off, I guess that smart vsync option would disable vsync if dropping below monitor fps rate, but I'm just guessing.

Without shadows 95 fps max and without them max 62fps without vsync, but it is 51.5-62 fluctuating even stationary. So there is huge impact by shadows, however changing settings changes fps accordingly and no such odd slowdowns for my system.

Jungle rock island runs 111fps at max with shadows on at high (hangar spawn) and with much lower CPU load than WCUSA, so faster GPU would make JRI run even a lot faster as there CPU is not causing limits so easily.

There is some odd cpu load pikes over several cores which I have not observed until this 11.x version of the game, almost all cores have that load spike at regular intervals, 20-30% spike on each core is not good, but would need to examine more if something else is causing that, haven't really paid attention to that earlier.

Oh and OBS recorder is taking 2-3fps and few more when recording I guess.

Now with lower FPS and perhaps higher CPU loading there can be delays and sometimes it takes too long to finish task which can cause all kind of weird bugs and events, so for example it could be that enabling shadows and then disabling causes something to time out which could cause what you are experiencing, but there really is not knowing.

Next big update probably will swap bugs and issues to new ones, that is idea of development, keeps things fresh

 

Quick answer from my part. Ran a AMD card before my current GF1050. The AMD card (or if it was a Win10 setting..) had an annoying timeout issue where it would cut power to it when doing something that effected graphics in BNG. I think i disabled the timout and that fixed that single issue. Didnt help the bigger issue that caused the computer to shut off and needed power removed for it to find the hard drive again.

 

Let's gather the data, it happens more often when..

• It's an AMD card
• ReShade is enabled
• Any window interruption is experienced during/after loading
• Shader or lighting settings are changed
• Resolution is changed
• V-Sync options are changed

Personally, it runs fine when ReShade is off, but as soon as it's on I can't load WCA without the spike. This tells me there's a problem with shader generation, along with the above data.

 

I wonder if the game doesnt shut off shadows/deactivate draw fo shadows for the rest of the city at a certain distance, only the cars. Say all buildings, trees and so on still produce a shadow that eats CPU/RAM. The shadows for cars shut off at a distance, as can be seen on the cinematic camera.

 

I notice something on WCUSA. I usually driving only on race track in freeroam.

Everything working fine (I mean, no bugs, framedrops etc.) and I managed to ran out of fuel without issue. However things start happening when I keep restarting car (R key) or changing cars. I notice that if you make a lot of changes (like switch to different car or change anything in parts and tuning) it can drop framerate in random places. For example sometimes game slowdown on S-es before first long straight and on finish line. I don't know if that sound bug appear while I'm driving or only when I make car to reload.

Maybe there is memory issue?

 

Well it usually happens when i do something like change a car. Also if i start without shadows it works fine, then activate shadows while ingame, it drops. If i then deactivate shadows the FPS stays low. This makes me think it does have something to do with memory, cache filling up or whatever.

 

While I don't have unplayable FPS on WCUSA, it definitely runs at a lower FPS than the other stock maps. I can imagine the devs are either working on a hotfix for it, or it'll be fixed in 0.12

 

I have like 10 FPS, i think there us something wrong. Its nit normal because i can run like Utah & ECA at like 40-50 fps. I think another FPS hotfix will be my life saver.

 

Sooo i tried one thing, about the shadows.

I parked in chinatown and zoomed out. The cars shadow disappear first, it takes a fair bit more zooming out before the buildings shadows disappear so that could be one thing.
Also, if i was zoomed in just enough to see the shadows from the building (this is still really high up) and looked around, when i wasnt looking in the direction of the car (it was behind a building though) i had far better fps than if i looked in the direction of the car. Also, shutting off dynamic reflections had quite a difference still at that height, the fps didnt drop anymore when i looked towards the position of the car.

 

Still here trying to reach better FPS.

Found this old (2010) thread on the subject, using Torque3D:

http://www.garagegames.com/community/forums/viewthread/112477

Long story short, when you have a model on a map that uses more than one texture file then it will generate drawcalls for that model as many times as the texture amount it got.

Another good tip, if not outdated:
"Quote:
You could assign a different material to your non-shadow LODs and uncheck the "cast shadows" box in the material editor."

In that thread though was a comment that it was going to start using instances which would reduce the drawcalls if multiple matreials, by 50-75 percent.

Heres another optimazation thread for those who are intrested for example when making their own maps.

 

Hi, its me again.. starting to feel abit lonely in here.. Welp..

Anywho, i opened WCUSA in World Editor and cut the shadow distande and bitsize by half, way less prone to fps drop now so could be a quick fix for some