Grimrock

Sorry man but I do not buy your solution Thx for the tips though.

I have a hunch that the game runs primarily in one thread (at the very least, it feels CPU bound in many places on my laptop), so anything you can do to get more power out of your CPU the better. Make sure you have adequate cooling so your CPU can enable Turbo Boost. You might even get more performance if you can set the Thread Affinity of the game to High and/or use Game Booster like software to reduce load from BG tasks?

The game does focus heavily on one core only that is true. Changing other options you mentioned did give a boost of about 5 FPS on average. That is still not enough as the game runs below 30 and still jumps like crazy

More testing! All cheers go to Dr. Disaster who suggested a great Benchmark (Unigine Heavens)



Strangely enough, no green bars appear meaning no power shortages for the GPU to run the scene. Grey ones only when ALT+TAB to check if the GPU-Z is working.

If you have trouble gentlemen:

As some people suggested, and if you have an Nvidia card (Dedicated or Mobile GPU like me. No idea how it works on Radeon cards)

1. In your Nvidia settings, go to Manage 3D settings and check 'Power Management Mode'. You might want to switch it from 'Adaptive' to "Maximum...' or '..driver-controlled'. That gave me a small boost. Maybe you will get lucky too.

Other than that, changing those options did not eliminate green bars in the LoG2 test. This only occurs while playing LoG2. It is non existent in any other game I currently have on my HDD.

Maybe a system like in morrowind(with the mge mod), oblivion, skyrim and fallout would help.
They use a giant static mesh of the whole map and only the near vicinity of the player gets updated. The static mesh may also be in lower quality/lower geometry and only needs to react to the global light.

Right now it seems that the whole area is displayed and calculated in real time with all entities. If you could only update ... say...8 squares around the player the cpu and gpu wont have as much work todo. Of course the downside is, that when you change things/entities on the map they wont get updated in the static mesh. which could look strange. Also with this system you could fog out/not render at all things that ar further away, so that LoG might also run on weaker CPUs.

But with a static mesh the usage of the Editor and everything else is hindered as the static mesh needs to be updated everytime things changed. Right now i can change something and can check it out instantly because everything is beeing done in realtime. It woulkd be still faster though then compiling a complete bsp tree with static shadow maps and light calculations but at least those engine were rendering fast - just not as flexible as the LoG Engine is.

Of course Multithreading/CPU Rendering(like Portal 2 did for example) would help too...but...that's not trivial to implement and it must be a nightmare to synchronise all threads, but the next engine should make usage of multiple cpu cores. Hell...i can run Alien Isolation and stuff like Borderlands 2 on my Netbook(with 2 real cores) but not LoG2 :/
But then again...it runs well on my gaming machine(still only get my capped framerate of 60 fps in dungeons only) so thats ok.

Multi threaded renderin scaled when used 2 or more cores. If Petri the coder wants to use more cores in his code path, i think he will do it. LOG 2 works just fine on dual cores, afterall its the Pete's coding skill that those, in my opinion, fastest volume shadow routine in the scene.

I remember playing the first one, and came to room where monsters, light, and shadows danced...i sat down and watched. Then i said myself "vittu pete" translated "damn pete"
As a ex-amiga demoscene coder, is there any easter eggs like glenz? Maybe a textured donut?

-arc

arcanum wrote:Multi threaded renderin scaled when used 2 or more cores. If Petri the coder wants to use more cores in his code path, i think he will do it. LOG 2 works just fine on dual cores, afterall its the Pete's coding skill that those, in my opinion, fastest volume shadow routine in the scene.

I remember playing the first one, and came to room where monsters, light, and shadows danced...i sat down and watched. Then i said myself "vittu pete" translated "damn pete"
As a ex-amiga demoscene coder, is there any easter eggs like glenz? Maybe a textured donut?

-arc

more analysis about CPU load / multithreading capability by restricting to 1 core (vs 2 core system)
Surprisingly, for low settings my system seems to be CPU/bandwidth bound? Should give Petri a hint where to optimize.

I also noticed that this time GPU-Z gave me the full clock speed for the GPU core, 800MHz instead of 400MHz (this time the GPU reaches also +80°C).

640x400 all low settings, no frame cap, 1 CPU core 2.8GHz, Twigroot forest: not GPU bound, CPU bound

640x400 all low settings, no frame cap, 2 CPU cores 2.8GHz, Twigroot forest: not GPU bound, CPU bound while not utilizing 2 cores fully


1x core (top image) vs 2 core (bottom image) makes an substantial difference in FPS. With 2x cores the GPU is better utilized (driver internal multithreading? LoG2 itself seems not to be very multithreaded). On the other hand the 2x CPU cores are not fully utilized (100%) while still the GPU starves (not 100% load)... bandwidth?

1360x786 all low settings, no frame cap, 1 CPU core 2.8GHz, Twigroot forest: not GPU bound, CPU bound

1360x786 all low settings, no frame cap, 2 CPU cores 2.8GHz, Twigroot forest: not GPU bound, CPU bound while not utilizing 2 cores fully



1360x786 all high settings, no frame cap, 1 CPU core 2.8GHz, Twigroot forest: not GPU bound, CPU bound

1360x786 all high settings, no frame cap, 2 CPU cores 2.8GHz, Twigroot forest: GPU bound, not CPU bound

eispfogel wrote: Of course Multithreading/CPU Rendering (like Portal 2 did for example) would help too...but...that's not trivial to implement and it must be a nightmare to synchronise all threads, but the next engine should make usage of multiple cpu cores. Hell...i can run Alien Isolation and stuff like Borderlands 2 on my Netbook(with 2 real cores) but not LoG2 :/
But then again...it runs well on my gaming machine(still only get my capped framerate of 60 fps in dungeons only) so thats ok.

I got the feeling LoG2 is CPU AND GPU bound (unlike LoG1), not much computational reserves on both resources (at least on my system). So maybe with better CPU code/ multithreaded code / 100% faster CPU I could approx. double (45% GPU load x2) my FPS in the low settings, but not in high settings as there the GPU is already the bottleneck. Maybe is not at all the CPU bound but the bandwidth bound by the memory / cache system... multithreading would work here not at all.

I have poor performance also.... I get about 20-25 fps in the forest. 60 fps anywhere else.

EVGA GTX 560 TI
8 Gigs of Ram
Q8200 2.33 quad core (old cpu I know)

Must be my cpu that is killing my frame rate. Setting everything to low I get some more fps, but the game looks like junk.

Hopefully a patch or some tweaks will help out.

Yeah, most AAA games I can run at highest settings without frame dips and in LoG2 my FPS will randomly cut in half. Most of the time it is a steady 60FPS, but occasionally (especially outside) it will just cut to 30FPS. Normally 30FPS would be annoying but playable but it is really noticeable when your FPS just cuts in half all of a sudden. It may be connected to Vsync, as turning that off seems to fix the issue, but without it I get awful screen tearing.

pongsifu wrote:Yeah, most AAA games I can run at highest settings without frame dips and in LoG2 my FPS will randomly cut in half. Most of the time it is a steady 60FPS, but occasionally (especially outside) it will just cut to 30FPS. Normally 30FPS would be annoying but playable but it is really noticeable when your FPS just cuts in half all of a sudden. It may be connected to Vsync, as turning that off seems to fix the issue, but without it I get awful screen tearing.

I turned off VSync.... and get no tearing. Check the remainder of your settings.