Issue 17 lagfest

Originally Posted by Smurch

CoX is an old game, but Ultra-Mode itself is brand spanking new. If you want to play it as an "old game" your video card can smack around, then turn UM off. Ultra Mode, however, was designed to push the boundaries on video cards. Sure, it's got some optomization issues, but they told us months ago that if you wanted everything turned up you'd need an NVIDIA 485. The 470, they said, would run UM at the middle of the range. That seems likely: my old 8800GT runs UM at the high-middle of the range.

Originally Posted by Zombie Man

Even before I17, there were lag spots. The problem with the infamous statue of Recluse is not the statue, but the animated screens all around the area. There are drawn and animated even when behind other geometry.

And that's one of the biggest problems for fps hits in the game, and was made even more problematic with dynamic shadows. If the computer is still drawing complex polygons that are out of sight and hidden by some other geometry, then it gets worse if it's drawing dynamic shadows that are out of sight.

All during Closed and Open Beta, we've been reporting those fps black holes, and many of them got fixed. E.g., the torches in the entrance-cave of Cimerora was a huge fps black hole -- there was something about those animations which killed fps. The odd thing was that you could go to the edge of the map, turn around and face where the cave is, and even though it was hidden by the geometry of the hills, you still took the huge fps hit. The game was drawing and animating that cave and its contents far away and out of sight.

That's been fixed.

Another big fps hit is looking down towards one of the under-zone rooms, such as the hospital or the inside of Paragon Town Hall. It seems the ground wasn't opaque enough, and was still tracking what was happening hundreds of yards under the zone.

There are other hot spots like that, especially looking into the heart of a city zone... all the buildings supposedly obscured are being rendered, and we know that CoV was built with very 'transparent' buildings. Dynamic shadows makes that more complicated.

The Devs are working on making that geometry more opaque, but it will take time.

The best way to keep dynamic shadow but avoid those fps hot spots is to make sure your world detail doesn't go about 100%. Only top end GPUs can handle 200% with dynamic shadows and keep fps over 40. I have a 5870, the top end for ATI, and when I put world detail up to 400% (/visscale 4.0), my fps goes down to 20 fps.

Which brings me to another point that bears repeating: There is no GPU out on the market right now that will allow anyone to turn everything up to max (including 400% world scale) and be at 60 fps. Just ain't happening.

Ultra Mode is enabled for the *next* generation of GPUs to max out. This current batch can't handle it (until SLI or Crossfire is fully enabled). Everyone has to chose which features to dial back for acceptable fps.