Questions on Pushing CoH Performance

Good Morning,

I haven't played in a spell, and have some questions about pushing performance (cause multiple mob situations are killing me). I am putting a new computer together and have some thoughts rattling around.

1) Do you still have to manually specify -renderthread 1, or does the client figure out you have multi-core and adjust?
2) Short of watching the task manager % load, is there an ingame /show command to verify its on, would just /show renderthreads work? Can't try it atm.
3) How many threads does it make? Will it get spread over all 4 logical processors in a quad core?
4) I see on the WWW that NVidia intended to build PhysX rendering into their cards? Did this happen? Does it work for CoX? Does it help or hurt to have the card also thinking of that?
5) Has anyone had experience with a current gen (OCZ/Intel/etc) SSD and loading times?
6) Is there any hardware it favors? My last two cards have been ATI, which is great for 99% of things I do, but is a sort of persona non grata with CoH, so I am going Nvidia this time. How about CPU? Is there a particular cache size, or bus, or etc that it likes?


Thanks for your comments!

1.) No, auto now.
2.) You'd need to look in the task manager... there should be an option to show the number of threads. Also, multi-threading really won't increase the performance that much.
3.) IIRC, it's just one additional thread.
4.) IIRC, all cards since the 9xxx series support it already (via a driver update). CoX's version of PhyX is too old to make use of it. IMO, this isn't a big deal, even a SLOW processor can run with Particle Physica on the max with no real impact on performance.
5.) Can't personally comment on this.
6.) Nvidia. ATI cards are fickle as hell


Honestly, it seems like you're going overboard with this a bit. A desktop with 2 gigs of ram, an older dual core AMD processor, and an 8800 GTS can run CoX with all setting on max and a VERY short load time (as in around 3 seconds... most of the time just waiting for the server to start the instance) and great performance. Hami raids with all settings at max with no human noticable dip in fps

We've been saving Paragon City for eight and a half years. It's time to do it one more time.

Thanks for the response.

I think the problem is I am using a new, wonderful, fast, sleek, ooh-look-at-me notebook (that happens to have a relatively meh graphics card - that's its Achilles heel). Anything non-gpu it feels very fast, but graphics are another story.

I just assumed the card wasm't THAT bad, but its looking like the culprit.

When I build the new machine for W7 timeframe-ish, I am going to be using all new-at-the-time mid to mid-high level components, so it should solve this problem easily from what I am hearing.

[ QUOTE ]
I just assumed the card wasm't THAT bad, but its looking like the culprit.

[/ QUOTE ]You have to actually search a lot when buying a notebook for one with out HORRIBLE graphics capabilities. I was just looking a couple days ago and pretty much all the machines I looked at had graphics that were inferior to a low end nvidia card from 5 years ago... even though every other piece of hardware in all the machines was very good.

[ QUOTE ]
I am going to be using all new-at-the-time mid to mid-high level components

[/ QUOTE ]And CoX will look beautiful, and you'll save a fortune

We've been saving Paragon City for eight and a half years. It's time to do it one more time.