Question Concerning /graphfps

About the time Issue 18 came out I started having difficulty in game with graphical stutters and some weird rubberbanding around areas with groups of players or large amounts of NPC activity. I posted about it and contacted Tech Support but eventually gave up for monetary reasons. Thus followed a three-month hiatus but I missed the game and came back in January. Recently I've started trying to track down the cause of this trouble once again to see if it's something I might be able to fix with my very limited resources.

One of the tools that was suggested to me last year was /graphfps with the flag set to 1. I'll freely admit I'm not the smartest computer user in the world. I am smart enough to know when to ask for help. The first step to that, for me at least, is gaining a better understanding of the diagnostic tools. If I can answer technical questions more clearly, I can get to the root of the issue quicker and easier with whomever is helping me. I grok /netgraph and that's been mostly in the green outside of raids and certain TFs.

According to Paragon Wiki, /graphfps shows four specific things depending upon the value you pass it: swap, CPU, GPU, and SLI. I'm fairly certain I understand CPU and GPU. (The memory activity of your CPU and GPU respectively.) I'm unfamiliar with SLI and swap. What do those two items measure?

For the curious, here's what I'm seeing now. With swap (/graphfps 1) I see red spikes that correspond to the flickers/stutters. For instance, I have a group of Rikti monkeys surrounding my brute. Said brute one-shots a bunch with a PBAoE. My graphics freeze at the instant of impact, a measurable pause, then the graphics resume as the character begins to recover into the neutral combat stance. Swap shows a major red spike or spikes during that. I get similar stutters during travel through zones with corresponding red spikes and occasionally horrible rubberbanding.

ETA: Just did a little testing. I get the same red spikes for CPU and GPU as I do for Swap.

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Author of There's Something in the Water (Arc # 60327)

Not only was that genuine frontier jibberish...

Courtesy: Preventing unnecessary homicides for over 4000 years.

Well, we need more information. Go to this post and start with the part about CoHHelper. The game had a major graphics update with Issue 17 and it's possible your computer simply can't handle it. If the hardware seems capable, then we can continue with other things (like what else is running on your computer that might be causing a problem).

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Paragon City Search And Rescue
The Mentor Project

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Author of There's Something in the Water (Arc # 60327)

Not only was that genuine frontier jibberish...

Courtesy: Preventing unnecessary homicides for over 4000 years.

Actually it's not much of a wall of text at all. If you try to post the dxdiag or official coh dohicky then yeah it's tons of info. Otherwise it's easy to look through for stuff.

However, even though I have no idea what swap is I'm going to make a guess which is probably a good one. You likely have a low amount of ram, or low amount available due to it being taken up by other programs. So the game is forced to swap graphics information to and from your hard drive which acts as virtual ram if you don't have enough actual ram. If your hard drive is very full or badly fragmented then this process is slowed down even more.

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Don't count your weasels before they pop dink!

SLI is Nvidia's term for having multiple graphics cards working together to display graphics. With multiple cards, they share the processing and memory loads, thus leading to better performance. For programs that support SLI, that is.
City of Heroes does not officiallly support SLI, but it can be used in SLI mode. I forget what the command line switch is, though.

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---System information gathered by CoH Helper version 0.2.0.2---

DxDiag gathered at June 7, 2011 20:14 (-05:00)
Operating System: Windows XP Professional (5.1, Build 2600) Service Pack 3 (2600.xpsp_sp3_gdr.100427-1636)
System Manufacturer: MSI
System Model: MS-7194
BIOS: Default System BIOS
Central Processor: AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 4000+, MMX, 3DNow, ~2.4GHz
Memory: 3072MB
.Net Memory Report: 2543MB out of 3071MB available
Page File: 4604MB (354MB currently in use)
C Drive: (ST3160812A) 34805MB out of 152617MB (22%) free
D Drive: (SAMSUNG SP4002H) 317MB out of 38201MB (0%) free
E Drive: (ST3200822A) 5442MB out of 48014MB (11%) free
F Drive: (ST3200822A) 3245MB out of 48218MB (6%) free
G Drive: (ST3200822A) 34315MB out of 46955MB (73%) free
H Drive: (ST3200822A) 8259MB out of 47583MB (17%) free
I Drive: (Optiarc DVD RW AD-7170A) zero-size drive
Windows directory location: C:\WINDOWS
DirectX: DirectX 9.0c (4.09.0000.0904)
DirectX Diag version: 5.03.2600.5512 (32-bit version)

Display Notes: No problems found.
Sound Notes: No problems found.
Input Notes: No problems found.

Monitor: SyncMaster 940BW/199BW/941BW, SyncMaster Magic CX915BW(Digital)
Monitor's Max Resolution: 1440,900
Video Device Name: ATI Radeon HD 2400 Series
Manufacturer / Chip: ATI Technologies Inc. / ATI Radeon Graphics Processor (0x94C3)
Video Memory: 512.0 MB
Driver Version: 6.14.0010.6869
Driver Date: 9/23/2008 9:17:07 PM
Driver Language: English

Sound Device Description: Realtek HD Audio output
Driver File: RtkHDAud.sys
Driver Version: 5.10.0000.5172
Driver Date: 9/23/2005 6:56:28 PM


WMI Information
Motherboard Manufacturer: MSI
Motherboard Model: (empty)
Motherboard Product: MS-7194
Motherboard Version: 1A
BIOS Manufacturer: American Megatrends Inc.
BIOS Name: Default System BIOS
BIOS Version: A M I - 2000613
BIOS Release: 20060213000000.000000+000


Registry Information for Current User
Resolution: 1440x853
3D Resolution: 1440x853 (Not using renderscale)
Full Screen: No
Maximized: Yes
Screen Position: -1, 48
Refresh Rate: 60Hz
Vertical Sync Enabled: No


Physics Quality: None
Maximum Particles: 100
Max Particle Fill? 10.000
Physics Card Enabled: No


Anti-aliasing: Off
Anisotropic Filtering: None
Texture LOD Bias: Crisp
Water Effects: None
Bloom: 1.000 (turned off)
Depth of Field Enabled: No
Desaturation Effects (Sepia) Enabled: No
Shader Detail: Unknown (4)


World Texture Level: Unknown (3)
Character Texture Level: High
World Detail Level (Vis_Scale): 0.500
Entity Detail Level: 1.000
Shadows Enabled: No
Shadow Mode: Disabled
Shadow Map Shader: Unknown (0)
Environmental Reflections: Disabled
Advanced Occlusion Settings: No
Ambient Occlusion: Off
Occlusion Strength: Off
Blur: Bilateral
Ambient Resolution: Performance


Gamma Correction: 1.000
Geometry Buffers (VBOs) Enabled: Yes
Suppression of FX When Camera Close Enabled: Yes
Close Suppression Range: 3.000
Show Advertisements: Yes

Audio Mode: Performance
3D Audio: No
FX Sound Volume: 0.198
Music Sound Volume: 0.105

Show Advanced Graphics Options: Yes
Overall Graphics Quality: 0.000
Reverse Mouse Buttons: No
Save Login Username: Yes
Transfer Rate: 131047 bytes/second
Current Game Version: 1950.201102120907.1
Installation Directory: C:\Program Files\City of Heroes

Mod files in the Data directory
.\sound\Ogg\BoomBox has 25 files
.\sound\Ogg\Rave has 7 files
.\texts\English\Menus has 10 files
.\texture_library\MAPS\city has 1 file
.\texture_library\MAPS\Midnight_Squad has 1 file
.\texture_library\MAPS\Safeguard has 9 files
.\texture_library\MAPS\sewers has 44 files
.\texture_library\MAPS\static has 38 files
.\texture_library\V_MAPS\City has 1 file
.\texture_library\V_MAPS\Outdoor_Missions has 9 files
.\texture_library\V_MAPS\Static has 16 files

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Author of There's Something in the Water (Arc # 60327)

Not only was that genuine frontier jibberish...

Courtesy: Preventing unnecessary homicides for over 4000 years.

Logfile of Trend Micro HijackThis v2.0.4
Scan saved at 8:16:01 PM, on 6/7/2011
Platform: Windows XP SP3 (WinNT 5.01.2600)
MSIE: Internet Explorer v8.00 (8.00.6001.18702)
Boot mode: Normal

Running processes:
C:\WINDOWS\System32\smss.exe
C:\WINDOWS\system32\winlogon.exe
C:\WINDOWS\system32\services.exe
C:\WINDOWS\system32\lsass.exe
C:\WINDOWS\system32\svchost.exe
C:\WINDOWS\system32\svchost.exe
C:\WINDOWS\Explorer.EXE
C:\WINDOWS\system32\ZoneLabs\vsmon.exe
C:\Program Files\Alwil Software\Avast5\AvastSvc.exe
C:\WINDOWS\system32\spoolsv.exe
C:\WINDOWS\system32\wscntfy.exe
C:\Program Files\Zone Labs\ZoneAlarm\zlclient.exe
C:\Program Files\Alwil Software\Avast5\avastUI.exe
C:\WINDOWS\System32\svchost.exe
C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe
C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe
C:\WINDOWS\system32\DxDiag.exe
C:\Program Files\Trend Micro\HijackThis\HiJackThis.exe

R1 - HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main,Default_Page_URL = http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=69157
R1 - HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main,Default_Search_URL = http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=54896
R1 - HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main,Search Page = http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=54896
O4 - HKLM\..\Run: [ZoneAlarm Client] "C:\Program Files\Zone Labs\ZoneAlarm\zlclient.exe"
O4 - HKLM\..\Run: [avast5] "C:\Program Files\Alwil Software\Avast5\avastUI.exe" /nogui
O22 - SharedTaskScheduler: Browseui preloader - {438755C2-A8BA-11D1-B96B-00A0C90312E1} - C:\WINDOWS\system32\browseui.dll
O22 - SharedTaskScheduler: Component Categories cache daemon - {8C7461EF-2B13-11d2-BE35-3078302C2030} - C:\WINDOWS\system32\browseui.dll
O23 - Service: avast! Antivirus - AVAST Software - C:\Program Files\Alwil Software\Avast5\AvastSvc.exe
O23 - Service: TrueVector Internet Monitor (vsmon) - Check Point Software Technologies LTD - C:\WINDOWS\system32\ZoneLabs\vsmon.exe

--
End of file - 2095 bytes

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Author of There's Something in the Water (Arc # 60327)

Not only was that genuine frontier jibberish...

Courtesy: Preventing unnecessary homicides for over 4000 years.

First off, update your graphics drivers. Those drivers were written before the graphics update that came in Issue 17 and doesn't support many of the graphics calls currently in use.

You may not want to get the most recent drivers as there have been reports from some that are having problems with the 11.5 drivers, so I'm linking the Archived drivers page for your video card and OS. After downloading the drivers, follow the steps below.

Install Driver Sweeper but don't run it yet, uninstall your current video drivers and software, reboot into Safe Mode and cancel any hardware wizards, run Driver Sweeper and let it remove the remnants of the old drivers, reboot into normal Windows, cancel any new hardware wizards, install updated drivers.

Then, start working on freeing up some space on your drives. Many of the routines Windows uses were written in the old DOS days and only look at the percentage of free space and not the actual amount of free space on a drive. Once a drive starts getting around 20% - 25% of Free Space left, those old routines start having problems and some won't run at all. Even though the routines have been recoded, they weren't totally re-written and instead were based on the old code that looked at percentages. Right now, only one drive has any real free space to speak of as far as percentages go.

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If the game spit out 20 dollar bills people would complain that they weren't sequentially numbered. If they were sequentially numbered people would complain that they weren't random enough.

Black Pebble is my new hero.

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Author of There's Something in the Water (Arc # 60327)

Not only was that genuine frontier jibberish...

Courtesy: Preventing unnecessary homicides for over 4000 years.

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Steps taken today to move toward better performance:

1. Caught up on Windows updates. (I was a couple weeks behind.)
2. Removed old video drivers.
3. Ran Driver Sweeper in Safe Mode.
4. Moved files off my primary drive to open it to 51% free space.
5. Set Paging File to 0, ran a defrag on the drive, reset Paging File to 2048/4096. (This was a general performance enhancement suggestion posted on the boards years ago and I try to do it often.)

I've not had much time to actually play to check performance. I logged on for five minutes and ran /graphfps 1 while bouncing around a mostly deserted Atlas Park and a moderately busy RWZ Vanguard Base. I can't see any improvement so far but I'll need to spend some more time with it to get a solid impression.

I'm too broke to afford much in the way of system upgrades. My hope is still that I can keep the game playable for little or no cost. Thanks for the help so far. If anyone has any further suggestions, I'm willing to listen.

Edited to add
Played for an hour or so running missions and have not seen an improvement from the way the game ran yesterday.

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Author of There's Something in the Water (Arc # 60327)

Not only was that genuine frontier jibberish...

Courtesy: Preventing unnecessary homicides for over 4000 years.

Have you got chat logging enabled by any chance? If you do then turn it off.

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Don't count your weasels before they pop dink!

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Author of There's Something in the Water (Arc # 60327)

Not only was that genuine frontier jibberish...

Courtesy: Preventing unnecessary homicides for over 4000 years.

Some people have reported that deleting the combat tab from the chat window has helped them. And if the processor is not busy processing combat messages to the chat tab, that's a little more processing time that can be put towards graphics processing.

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Author of There's Something in the Water (Arc # 60327)

Not only was that genuine frontier jibberish...

Courtesy: Preventing unnecessary homicides for over 4000 years.