How much does resolution impact performance?
By
BlackBullet,
Posted on: 2011-01-22 08:17 in ALL ACCESS Gameplay Technical Issues Bugs
If you're already lagging at 1280x1024, yeah, moving up the resolution will increase graphics lag.
Instead of getting a square screen monitor, however, you could try getting a widescreen monitor. More screen space but with the vertical resolution kept at 1024, the performance lag will be less. I have a 22 inch widescreen monitor, a Samsung Syncmaster P2570HD, that runs City of Heroes at 1920x1080 quite nicely.
You get used to having more screen space very fast. 
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While higher resolution will certainly impact performance you have a more powerful card and CPU than I do and I run at 1920x1080 resolution with most of the UM options active. I do leave Occlusion off and a few things a notch or two down but I maintain 40-60fps almost everywhere. If you're lagging at 1280x1024 with that hardware then something's wrong... you're way overkill on hardware for that resolution.|
Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
Yesterday, I swapped my old 17'' 1280x1024 LCD for a 19'' 1280x1024 LCD, which has produced a curious result - a larger screen with exactly the same matrix means bigger, and thus much more visible pixels. And that's not a good thing.
I may (hopefully) have the chance to swap this one back for something of a similar size but a higher resolution, but here's the thing: How much will a higher resolution affect my game's performance? Ideally, I want to run the game at the screen's native resolution, and the next step up is probably something like 1600x1200, which... Quite a bit more. I run a GeForce GTX 285 card with an I7 processor, which permits me pretty good framerate at 1280x1024 with a few Ultra Mode options turned on, but which nevertheless slows down significantly in places, such as Cap Au Diable, the new Praetorian labs, the new Warehouse instances and so forth. So I'm worried that getting a bigger monitor and boosting the game's resolution might have a detrimental effect on the whole game. |
There are areas where you run into server side lag; the third mission of the ITF is the poster child for that. It really doesn't matter what hardware you have; you're going to lag in those areas. There's a few "black holes" redside where fps tanks; as I recall a couple of them are in Cap. Everyone complains about those areas... I go from vsync cap of 60fps down to 20fps in some of those areas; and I got the same results before I changed from my 8800GTX to my 275GTX vid card. You're going to get a performance hit in those areas and there's not a lot you can do about it.
I do second the suggestion for a widescreen monitor; I'm using a pair of Asus 24" monitors and love them. They're roughly $250 each and they look really nice.
COH has just been murdered by NCSoft. http://www.change.org/petitions/ncso...city-of-heroes
If using the higher resolution because it's the native resolution of your new LCD means turning down other features... do it; for not using the native resolution introduces bad resolution.
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When I upgraded to my current monitor (1680 x 1050) from a much lower resolution I noticed a minor change. Perhaps 5fps and that was with my old video card an 8800gt and all settings maxed pre ultramode.
Minor changes in my um settings affect my performance much more with my current gtx 460.
Don't count your weasels before they pop dink!
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The "black holes" are mostly what I'm worried about, since they tend to be pretty prolific. Everyone knows about Cap Au Diable, and about the Praetorian Labs giant rooms, and about the new Warehouse rooms, and about Grandville and so on and so forth. I'm pretty sure those are the result of shoddy level design, as the Grandville framerate death is only from specific locations in specific directions.|
Originally Posted by Call Me Awesome
There's a few "black holes" redside where fps tanks; as I recall a couple of them are in Cap. Everyone complains about those areas... I go from vsync cap of 60fps down to 20fps in some of those areas; and I got the same results before I changed from my 8800GTX to my 275GTX vid card. You're going to get a performance hit in those areas and there's not a lot you can do about it.
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There's something about the whole engine in City of Heroes that makes it look worse and run worse than a lot of its contemporaries, and I really don't know what that's about.
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| I do second the suggestion for a widescreen monitor; I'm using a pair of Asus 24" monitors and love them. They're roughly $250 each and they look really nice. |
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Originally Posted by Zombie Man
If using the higher resolution because it's the native resolution of your new LCD means turning down other features... do it; for not using the native resolution introduces bad resolution.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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I had a lower end pair of 21" Samsung Syncmaster that were 1600x900; they frankly never really looked that good. I replaced them when one of them died after a year and a half with Asus VE245 24" monitors (1920x1080) and it was a drastic improvement.|
Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
The "black holes" are mostly what I'm worried about, since they tend to be pretty prolific. Everyone knows about Cap Au Diable, and about the Praetorian Labs giant rooms, and about the new Warehouse rooms, and about Grandville and so on and so forth. I'm pretty sure those are the result of shoddy level design, as the Grandville framerate death is only from specific locations in specific directions.
There's something about the whole engine in City of Heroes that makes it look worse and run worse than a lot of its contemporaries, and I really don't know what that's about. Well, I have a Samsung Something monitor at work that's 1440x960, which I think comes out to a net FEWER pixels, but looks a lot better than this one. This one, by the way, has really horrid shadows and blur when I move. I don't know much about LCDs, but I believe it has a very slow dot turn speed, which means that when shapes move across the screen, they blur and leave trails behind. And it's starting to get on my nerves. I'll see about swapping tech. |
If that's more than you want to spend at ~$250 per monitor Asus also has a 21" version of the same monitor (VE215 maybe?) that's exactly the same quality at $150. In my experience a cheap monitor isn't worth having; particularly when there's good ones to be had for only a few dollars more. I can attest that there's very little screen lag and blur on both of these Asus monitors; I have both the 21 & 24 versions in my office. They aren't a top of the line $1,000 panel (I do have 3 of those on my editing machine in the studio) by any means but they're certainly acceptable.
Your monitor is one of the most important pieces of the computer; it's what you're going to be staring at the entire time you're in on your machine so a poor one will make a great box look like garbage. This is one area I never skimp on.
Frankly on the subject of the black holes I don't know of a solution... you're going to encounter them and they're going to choke your fps. At your current resolution your hardware is really loafing; that's something it should handle in it's sleep. Anyway, as I mentioned I'm running an older quad core CPU with one step down in video cards and I get quite acceptable performance on the order of 50-60 (vsync cap) fps in 90% of the game dropping to 25-30fps in the black holes while running 1920x1080. Since you have faster hardware you should get at LEAST that performance unless you're running a lot higher detail and graphics than I am.
COH has just been murdered by NCSoft. http://www.change.org/petitions/ncso...city-of-heroes
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The ITF lag is caused by too many NPCs all spawned at once with many patrols trying to figure out pathing over uneven terrain. The lag is more server side than client side.|
Originally Posted by Call Me Awesome
There are areas where you run into server side lag; the third mission of the ITF is the poster child for that. It really doesn't matter what hardware you have; you're going to lag in those areas. There's a few "black holes" redside where fps tanks; as I recall a couple of them are in Cap. Everyone complains about those areas... I go from vsync cap of 60fps down to 20fps in some of those areas; and I got the same results before I changed from my 8800GTX to my 275GTX vid card. You're going to get a performance hit in those areas and there's not a lot you can do about it.
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The other 'black holes of fps' you mention are caused by improperly manufactured environment. Two main causes are certain animations and 'transparent to draw' objects.
Certain fire animations create a huge fps hit. The same with the giant animated screens of Recluse in Grandville. I bug them when I find them. Most of the fire ones got changed.
Draw transparency happens when a building or wall or floor is 'invisible' to the draw engine. The engine will draw and keep track of everything which is behind that texture, even though you can't see it. In crowded city scenes with lots of shadows... that becomes really graphically intensive. An example of that was when Ultra Mode was introduced. The engine was drawing and shadowing 'rooms' that were under the map (e.g., the interior of city hall is not in the building but floating under the Altas Map). So, when you looked down at the pavement under the statue of Atlas, your fps dropped because the engine was seeing and drawing that room. They've since changed that to make flooring opaque to the draw engine.
The Grandville statue of Recluse area takes a double hit because not only do the animated screens hit fps, but there are many of them, and the buildings there are transparent to the animations. So, when you look up at the statue of Recluse, the engine is drawing the two screens in view to you, but also the five screens on the other side of the building which you can't see.
When you find a 'black hole of fps', move around and look around to try to triangulate in on what's causing the fps drop. Most places I've /bugged got fixed.
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I'm not really worried about the cost, more about the equipment stats. I have a laptop that has a 1920x1200 monitor on it, and while it's pretty sweet, it really can't run anything at that resolution, nor could it ever, despite having a GeForce 7900 back from when those were top of the line. What this means is I'm forced to run games on that laptop (when I have to run games on it) at below native resolution, and this makes me a very sad panda.|
Originally Posted by Call Me Awesome
Your monitor is one of the most important pieces of the computer; it's what you're going to be staring at the entire time you're in on your machine so a poor one will make a great box look like garbage. This is one area I never skimp on.
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I'll see what can be done about this one, but if you guys think there shouldn't be this much of a performance hit, then I might just go for a higher-res one. I DO NOT want to go for 1920x1200 or anything even remotely as big, but something bigger it probably will be.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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There's one last question I want to ask, and it has to do with pixel response times. I scanned through the entire inventory of the store I can buy from, and all the screens have a listed response time of 5ms. All, including this screen I'm using right now. The problem is that the screen I'm using has a GARBAGE response time, and I'm starting to get really pissed off at the "shadows" I keep seeing bright objects leave as they move or as I look around.
So, my question is the following: Am I just shafted on everything in the store, or do you think their timing stats are bogus? What should I look for? How can I tell what screen has a fast response time before I buy it?
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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And the comedy continues. I swapped the 19'' 1280x1024 for a 19'' 1440x900... Only to find it has no HDMI port. It's just VGA, and my card doesn't have a VGA slot. And no, I am NOT using an adaptor. That's just EH!
So I'm throwing my hands in the air and letting my father pick whatever he feels is decent, as long as it has a fast pixel response time. I just KNOW he'll pick a 1920x1080, and then I'll be chugging my games like I downgraded my video. I just know it.
*edit*
Gotta' say one thing, though - going from 19'' back to my old 17'' makes everything look... Small. Guess all of a day was enough to make me used to seeing everything big
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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1280x1024 ~> 1.3 million pixels
1920x1080 ~> 2 million pixels
Be prepared for about a 35% performance drop*
*It's not necessarily quite that simple. There's a lot of stuff happening in the background and the resolution you're displaying things at probably isn't the bottleneck in your performance. All other things being equal, however, a 35% drop is going to be the worst case scenario.
I will speak from my own experience, though...the hit I took going from a 1440x900 laptop display (just under 1.3 million pixels) to a 1080p TV screen (also 1920x1080) via HDMI cable, displaying, with both screens open but CoH only running on the TV, was rather substantial - I went from about 30FPS to 20, which would be consistent with the 35% estimate.
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Truthfully with your CPU and graphics card I don't think you'll see all that much impact with a 1920x1080 other than you'll have more real estate and the game will look better. Maybe you'll loose 5 fps; but if it bothers you just tweak your game settings a bit. One of the biggest performance hogs is Occlusion (which, IMO, looks like @#!! anyway); I turn it completely off. I like a crisp, sharp image so any option that adds blur (like depth of field for example) also gets canned. Water effects don't start being a big hog until you max them out, I run one notch below max there and on Shadows as well.|
Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
And the comedy continues. I swapped the 19'' 1280x1024 for a 19'' 1440x900... Only to find it has no HDMI port. It's just VGA, and my card doesn't have a VGA slot. And no, I am NOT using an adaptor. That's just EH!
So I'm throwing my hands in the air and letting my father pick whatever he feels is decent, as long as it has a fast pixel response time. I just KNOW he'll pick a 1920x1080, and then I'll be chugging my games like I downgraded my video. I just know it. *edit* Gotta' say one thing, though - going from 19'' back to my old 17'' makes everything look... Small. Guess all of a day was enough to make me used to seeing everything big |
There's little chance that your CPU and graphics were running full bore on your old monitor so you should see little change in performance. I get nearly the exact same fps hit in the black holes on multiple machines; it doesn't seem to matter much what resolution I'm using.
COH has just been murdered by NCSoft. http://www.change.org/petitions/ncso...city-of-heroes
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I hope this is the case. I actually have a feeling that the real dead zones are the result of... Something else. Bad environment design, as Zombie Man puts it, most probably. The reason I say this is I've noticed there's almost no performance change when going from x4 FSAA to x0 most of the time.|
Originally Posted by Korith
*It's not necessarily quite that simple. There's a lot of stuff happening in the background and the resolution you're displaying things at probably isn't the bottleneck in your performance. All other things being equal, however, a 35% drop is going to be the worst case scenario.
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As it stands right now, it doesn't look like I'll have a choice in what monitor to grab, and I'll probably end up with a 1920x1080, and I sure as hell hope the game won't start lagging drastically more than it does today. I'd hate to have to turn anything off, which will probably be shadows, which I have at probably the lowest setting available.
I don't run Ambient Occlusion at all, for one because it's a SERIOUS performance detriment, and for another because it actually overrides FSAA and gives me nasty jaggies. That, and it plays havoc on ambient lighting, turning some instances a deep orange, for example.
Fingers crossed, I guess.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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As far as I know, areas where performance tanks like the mess in Cap au Diable aren't improved by a reduction in resolution. Instead, it seems to tank because of all the objects that are on-screen. It must be a function of how the game handles object culling.
I'm running 1680x1050, and changing my 3D resolution setting doesn't really help THAT much at CaD.
Advice to gain better performance? Keep your World Detail in check, make sure you don't have any Flash pages open in the background (YouTube included), and... try to avoid looking at south CaD, I guess.
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I'm mostly worried of seeing performance drops in areas where there were none before, like that transformer area with the many shadows in St. Martial. I'm also worried about other games. I can run almost any Unreal Engine game at full details with no slowdown at all (always amazing how that engine can look better and run faster...), but that's at 1280x1024. I'm not sure that will hold at 1920x1080
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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Hi, Samuel_Tow,
I run CoX on a rig comprised of hardware which is about two years old (Core i7 quad-core w/HT @ 2.93 GHz), 6.00 GB RAM, GeForce GTX 280 1.0 GB graphics card, Razer Barracuda sound card (in 5.1 mode), using Windows 7 x64 (upgraded from Vista, which is what I ran when it was first built).
I have twin Hanns-G 22" LCD monitors, each with a native resolution of 1680×1050. They're not the same exact model, but they both have a pixel response time of 5 ms (grey-to-grey). I don't notice any full-motion ghosting on either of them, and I have played the game on each of them at its native resolution.
I run CoX at my monitor's native resolution, with most UM settings enabled (I don't play with everything maxed out, but I have tested visual impact of pumping up all the settings, and there isn't a terribly noticeable difference. According to FRAPS, my video framerate while in-game hovers between 40 and 60 fps, although truthfully, most humans cannot distinguish between anything above 30 fps or so. I do experience the video black-holes mentioned above, in those areas, but as has been said, there isn't much anyone can do about those.
I believe I turned down the 3D modelling resolution, but I don't remember how far down below the monitor's native resolution I set it.
Hope this helps.
~ corva ~
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Well before I upgrade my GFX card i had a GTS250... running dual screen (1x 1920x1080, the other 1280x1024). CoX is on the HD monitor.|
Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
I hope this is the case. I actually have a feeling that the real dead zones are the result of... Something else. Bad environment design, as Zombie Man puts it, most probably. The reason I say this is I've noticed there's almost no performance change when going from x4 FSAA to x0 most of the time.
As it stands right now, it doesn't look like I'll have a choice in what monitor to grab, and I'll probably end up with a 1920x1080, and I sure as hell hope the game won't start lagging drastically more than it does today. I'd hate to have to turn anything off, which will probably be shadows, which I have at probably the lowest setting available. I don't run Ambient Occlusion at all, for one because it's a SERIOUS performance detriment, and for another because it actually overrides FSAA and gives me nasty jaggies. That, and it plays havoc on ambient lighting, turning some instances a deep orange, for example. Fingers crossed, I guess. |
I am pretty much able to max out most of the settings. There is a lot that you can do to help tweak whilst still maintaining almost all the quality of what you had previously).
Oh, and I can run shadows at the middle setting with few issues.
The area's that people have picked up on, will cause issues no matter the resolution/pc set up that you have (well, not unless you are running triple SLI GT580's or something like that... and even then its still dubious).
Oh and i lag at big mothership raids... but that is due to how much is kicking off and not due to lack of grunt on the gfx card.
I *did* have sudden FPS drops at one point even when playing solo at one point, but that was resolved by excluding CoX from Microsoft Security Essentials.
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So people tell me, but I can, speaking specifically for myself. I can't give you an exact framerate, but I like to keep mine stuck at 60FPS at all times. As soon as that drops by even 10FPS, I can see it. The motions don't look as smooth.|
Originally Posted by Corva_NA
truthfully, most humans cannot distinguish between anything above 30 fps or so.
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I've actually confirmed this many times. I have +showfps bound to my plus/equals key, so for a while I'd hit that every time I suspected my framerate was slowing down, and sure enough it was down to about 45, and already that bothered me intensely. I really, really want to keep as high a framerate as possible (up to 60FPS, anyway) at as much of the time as I can manage. Unfortunately, with how slap-dash so many of the game's locations are, perfect framerate is impossible, but the few the locations this happens, the better.
To specify, the quality I really want includes:
*Native resolution
*Vertical Sync
*Anisotropic filter of at least x4
*High model quality (I keep that at 200%)
*Normal world detail (100%)
*Very High textures for both world and players
*Particle count where it is (50 000, I think)
*Environment and Water reflections to a notch below maximum
*SOME level of dynamic shadows, irrespective of quality.
*Physics Quality at ultra high (not recommended with Agia PhysX, which no longer exists)
FSAA I can take or leave at such high resolution, I don't want or need Bloom, Depth of Field or Ambient Occlusion. The rest of the settings aren't important.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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Vsync is one that by default i keep turned off... Because unless You can guarentee that your system will pull 60fps no matter the problem, keep it turned off; otherwise you will find that the game will pull it down to 30fps/20fps as soon as it can, whereas you might get 55/45 fps otherwise.
Take the physics Quality down so it doesnt list the Aegia card. Although it no longer exists, it would still assume *some* level of a dedicated card for it (ie 2nd gfx card). And to be honest, how much more difference is there (never having turned it on, i would assume that it would be the number of knockables after something has been destroyed...
The rest i can understand, and a GTS 250 manages to pull it all off pretty well...
And remember, if you cant run it "full screened" try resizing in windowed mode to shrink it all down a bit.
*edit* Unless you are hitting in excess of 60fps consistently (with Vsync turned OFF) I will always expect some FPS drop when it gets busy.
Vsynch will be the important one here i would say... Windowed mode will "cap" at 60fps (or refresh rate of monitor) but with Vsynch turned off, windowed or full screen, you will be able to hit those inbetween FPS that will smooth out your experiance.
*2nd edit*
Here is a link about Vsynch, and when it should and shouldnt be enabled... Linkage
in short... if you want stable and around 60fps, disable vsynch, otherwise you will pull down 60/30fps with Vsynch enabled... there is NO inbetween with Vsynch enabled.
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That hasn't been my experience, at least not according to the City of Heroes in-game FPS counter. Only very, VERY rare occasions seem to drop me down to 30 FPS, and those are the aforementioned FPS holes. Most of the time when I slow down, my card slows down to between 40 and 45 FPS, and that's with V-Sync turned on.|
Originally Posted by Gangrel_EU
if you want stable and around 60fps, disable vsynch, otherwise you will pull down 60/30fps with Vsynch enabled... there is NO inbetween with Vsynch enabled.
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That's not to say I won't disable it to see if I can't get better framerates, but I will do so reluctantly. Few things bother me as much as vertical tearing (motion shadows being one of these), so if I see a lot of that... I don't know. It's always the little things that ruin the experience.
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Oh, about PhysX settings - the setting determines the number of simultaneous physics objects that can exist before older ones start disappearing. It might seem like I wouldn't need to see that many trash cans, but the one thing I need to see a lot of is shell casings, especially when playing a Mercs Mastermind. These are one of the coolest parts of any conventional weapon powerset, and conventional weapons tend to spit A LOT of shell casings.
As I understand it, nVidia cards past the 8000 generation all come with either a PhysX chip already in the card, or with chip emulation in their software drivers, and more than enough capacity to handle this, hence why I've been advised that this won't make a difference in the past. It will probably slow down my machine some, granted, but this is one place where I don't want to skimp out.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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nVidia bought Ageia after seeing their fancy PhysX software, then re-wrote it to run on GeForces. I wouldn't call it emulation, as this implies trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. Modern graphics cards are extremely general-purpose, and lots of neat physics effects are well suited to them.|
Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
As I understand it, nVidia cards past the 8000 generation all come with either a PhysX chip already in the card, or with chip emulation in their software drivers, and more than enough capacity to handle this, hence why I've been advised that this won't make a difference in the past. It will probably slow down my machine some, granted, but this is one place where I don't want to skimp out.
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Unfortunately, City of Heroes won't use GeForce cards. The version of the PhysX software that CoH comes loaded with either runs on the CPU or a dedicated old-timey PhysX card (which have been discontinued). It's also impossible to patch it up to a more modern flavor. Unless Paragon Studios goes in and changes whatever needs to be changed on PhysX to work on GeForces, you shan't be seeing any acceleration.
Oh and while they're at it, they should port the sound system over to OpenAL so that they regain EAX effects. (Or they could work on more Ultra Mode stuff and/or more content. Priorities and all.)
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Just for comparison I'm running the current settings:|
Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
So people tell me, but I can, speaking specifically for myself. I can't give you an exact framerate, but I like to keep mine stuck at 60FPS at all times. As soon as that drops by even 10FPS, I can see it. The motions don't look as smooth.
I've actually confirmed this many times. I have +showfps bound to my plus/equals key, so for a while I'd hit that every time I suspected my framerate was slowing down, and sure enough it was down to about 45, and already that bothered me intensely. I really, really want to keep as high a framerate as possible (up to 60FPS, anyway) at as much of the time as I can manage. Unfortunately, with how slap-dash so many of the game's locations are, perfect framerate is impossible, but the few the locations this happens, the better. To specify, the quality I really want includes: *Native resolution *Vertical Sync *Anisotropic filter of at least x4 *High model quality (I keep that at 200%) *Normal world detail (100%) *Very High textures for both world and players *Particle count where it is (50 000, I think) *Environment and Water reflections to a notch below maximum *SOME level of dynamic shadows, irrespective of quality. *Physics Quality at ultra high (not recommended with Agia PhysX, which no longer exists) FSAA I can take or leave at such high resolution, I don't want or need Bloom, Depth of Field or Ambient Occlusion. The rest of the settings aren't important. |
1920x1080 resolution
FSAA - 2x
Environmental Reflections - 1 down from max
Water Reflections - 1 down
Adv. Shadows - disabled
Shadow Quality - 1 down
Occlusion - off
Particle Quality - High
World/Character detail - Very High (maxed)
Detail 100%
Particle amount - maxed
Ansitropic - 4x
Bloom - Off
With those settings I typically stay between 50-60 (vsync cap) fps most areas, in really busy battles with lots of effects popping off I drop to 35-40 fps. I find it quite playable except for the areas where server lag becomes a problem... the ITF for example. With those same settings you should see a little better result due to your faster CPU and graphics.
Since my day job is in video production believe me I can see framerate issues... I can easily tell the difference between 60fps and 45fps and anything with lots of movement really bothers me if it drops to 30fps. While video is generally listed as "30 frames per second" each frame is actually composed of 2 fields so allowing for that and the fact that video isn't QUITE an even 30 (29.97 fps actually) what you're used to seeing on TV is 59.94 fps.
I've played with vsync on and with it off... yes I get higher framerates with it off but I also get occasional tearing of the image which bothers me FAR more than a lower framerate.
COH has just been murdered by NCSoft. http://www.change.org/petitions/ncso...city-of-heroes
Well, I got the new screen after many problems, and it's a LG Flatron W2363D, or so it says on the side. It's HUGE!
I did nothing to City of Heroes but change resolution (and move windows around), but the game ran perfect for what I tried it with. I haven't yet hit any of the sink holes, but I didn't find any of the problems I was worried about, and baseline non-sink-hole performance seems good. I didn't mess with FSAA (I left it at x4) because even at 1920x1080 I still see the jaggies, and it doesn't seem to show me a performance drop, so I left it on.
An unexpected problem was my mouse slowing down SIGNIFICANTLY, I expect because of the larger surface are, but that's easily fixable. Just have to find a new balance point. I'm also having to pull my camera a lot farther back because widescreen chops off the vertical, rather than expanding the horizontal, but that's also fixable.
Finally, one last question: Is it a bad idea to have a large picture as my background? I remember being told as much years ago, and I'm not sure how much I believed it, but I did snag a large Darksiders wallpaper which I'm using right now.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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Like a lot of things in terms of performance, it depends. In this case it depends how much RAM you have.|
Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
Well, I got the new screen after many problems, and it's a LG Flatron W2363D, or so it says on the side. It's HUGE!
I did nothing to City of Heroes but change resolution (and move windows around), but the game ran perfect for what I tried it with. I haven't yet hit any of the sink holes, but I didn't find any of the problems I was worried about, and baseline non-sink-hole performance seems good. I didn't mess with FSAA (I left it at x4) because even at 1920x1080 I still see the jaggies, and it doesn't seem to show me a performance drop, so I left it on. An unexpected problem was my mouse slowing down SIGNIFICANTLY, I expect because of the larger surface are, but that's easily fixable. Just have to find a new balance point. I'm also having to pull my camera a lot farther back because widescreen chops off the vertical, rather than expanding the horizontal, but that's also fixable. Finally, one last question: Is it a bad idea to have a large picture as my background? I remember being told as much years ago, and I'm not sure how much I believed it, but I did snag a large Darksiders wallpaper which I'm using right now. |
If you've loads and CoH and any other games you are running seem nice and fast it's fine. I suspect it would be written into scratch-space (basically HD space reserved as a dump for memory) if a game needed memory and the desktop isn't being displayed anyway (but I've no actual basis for saying this, it just seems likely)
Yesterday, I swapped my old 17'' 1280x1024 LCD for a 19'' 1280x1024 LCD, which has produced a curious result - a larger screen with exactly the same matrix means bigger, and thus much more visible pixels. And that's not a good thing.
I may (hopefully) have the chance to swap this one back for something of a similar size but a higher resolution, but here's the thing: How much will a higher resolution affect my game's performance? Ideally, I want to run the game at the screen's native resolution, and the next step up is probably something like 1600x1200, which... Quite a bit more.
I run a GeForce GTX 285 card with an I7 processor, which permits me pretty good framerate at 1280x1024 with a few Ultra Mode options turned on, but which nevertheless slows down significantly in places, such as Cap Au Diable, the new Praetorian labs, the new Warehouse instances and so forth. So I'm worried that getting a bigger monitor and boosting the game's resolution might have a detrimental effect on the whole game.