City of Heroes: Live Forum Archive

How much does resolution impact performance?

BlackBullet

By BlackBullet,
Posted on: 2011-01-22 08:17 in ALL ACCESS Gameplay Technical Issues Bugs

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Carnifax_NA View Post
Like a lot of things in terms of performance, it depends. In this case it depends how much RAM you have.
Well, I have 8 GB of RAM, that's why I decided to go with Windwos 7 x64. I think that should be plenty, so that means I can keep my wallpaper, right?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Arcanaville View Post
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.

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow View Post
Well, I have 8 GB of RAM, that's why I decided to go with Windwos 7 x64. I think that should be plenty, so that means I can keep my wallpaper, right?
It won't have an appreciable effect on performance; and when you have something up full screen it won't matter anyway. I've used photos that were 8MB+ in size and never noticed any problems.

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Posted

Thank you. That settles the last of my concerns, then.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Arcanaville View Post
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.

 

Posted

We haven't been RAM-bound so much to warrant disabling your background for a really long time. Not since we started getting 2GB and 4GB in PCs, anyway. People's needs and wants have changed; now we demand not just peak performance, but enough extra headroom to multitask effectively.

If I can have Photoshop open and manipulating large images while City of Heroes is running on 4GB of RAM, you can definitely keep your wallpaper on 8GB of it.

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Posted

I find this thread to be very interesting. I’ve played CoX for over six years and I always had the same complaint. Basically, sporadic/sucky frame rates no matter what card you have. I’ve learned a few things from this thread, however.

Question: I assumed that particle count is the density with the power animations? Correct? I always had that down to 50% ~ 25k and I never noticed any visual difference.

I have ultra mode maxed with exception of occlusion, which is off. I am running a Radeon 5830 with a six core Phenom with 8GB RAM on a 24inch 1920 x1200. 50% of the time I am pinned at 60. However, in Talos or running around I usually however around 35ish FPS. With flash in the background I drop to 15ish. That annoys the heck out of me. I have often wondered why I can play Crysis at much higher settings than CoX.

I plan on upgrading my card for some upcoming games, i.e, Crysis 2, Deux Ex, Witcher 2, but I know I won’t notice much difference with CoX. Which is the game I play the most. Blah !

I would also agree that 60fps is a lot smoother than 30fps. Although, 30fps is playable, IMO.

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Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Korith View Post
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.
One thing that can be done to offset the higher loads imposed by higher resolutions is to back down on FSAA and AF levels a bit. With higher resolutions, very high levels of FSAA/AF are less important (at least in CoH).

Don't turn them OFF of course, but if you're running 8x FSAA ad 8x AF right now, back down to 4 and 4. I'd be very surprised if you noticed a difference.


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Posted

The only time I noticed particle count making a difference was on Striga. If you look toward the volcano when you first enter the zone, you can see it smoking if your particle count is up. Crank the count down and the smoke disappears.

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Posted

Particle count only really comes into play on large teams where many players and critters are activating many emitters simultaneously, and that's when you usually see the effect of lowering it. Under normal circumstances, it shouldn't come into play.

As far as AA and AF go, I have mine at x4 by x4. I tried turning AA off entirely, assuming that my resolution was so high I wouldn't see the jaggies, but I was wrong. Very wrong. x2 is doable, but I can still see the interpolation. At x4, my eyes cannot notice any hard line jaggies unless I rub my nose on the screen and put on my glasses, which is good enough in my book.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Arcanaville View Post
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.

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow View Post
Particle count only really comes into play on large teams where many players and critters are activating many emitters simultaneously, and that's when you usually see the effect of lowering it. Under normal circumstances, it shouldn't come into play.

As far as AA and AF go, I have mine at x4 by x4. I tried turning AA off entirely, assuming that my resolution was so high I wouldn't see the jaggies, but I was wrong. Very wrong. x2 is doable, but I can still see the interpolation. At x4, my eyes cannot notice any hard line jaggies unless I rub my nose on the screen and put on my glasses, which is good enough in my book.
Going up to 8x FSAA at 2560x1600 drops my frame rate to 5-6ish. Obviously need more VRAM since it hovers around 30fps at 4x FSAA. 5970 2GB (1GB addressable per GPU).

4x is mostly good enough for me, I can see jaggies easily when it's off. 2x never worked right for me.