Hi,

I'm experiencing low framerates and I'm not sure why. I'm really hoping to get some advice from you guys.
In short - here's my specs:
AMD Athlon 2800+ (2.08GHz), 512 meg RAM (2x 256; I'm not sure what kind of RAM that is - will check if needed), gf 6800gs (bought today to replace my old radeon 9500).

I saw a few times on the forums, that people with comparable cpu's (sometimes worse than mine) and a better gpu than my radeon9500 reported better performance. My guess was that the radeon was too old and needed replacement. Unfortunately, the gf6800 made a difference in every other game, but not LFS.

So basically my question is - what's wrong? I'd like to underline that the fps for me are really bad (like around 20 with full grid on FE Black) with lots of graphics options set to low (I even have the cars turn into cuboids to improve performance :/ ).

Two more things to note: I'm using patch U28 and I have a sound card integrated with the motherboard - could the bad performance be a sound issue? What should I set in dx-settings in audio acceleration? If I'm missing some vital info, please tell me what to check and I'll be happy to report back, because I'm really desperate to get any improvement.

Thanks in advance,
maczo

Like i always say, get Driver Cleaner, remove all traces of the ATi drivers, it could be an underlying problem with the old ATi stuff

Couple of things to check - latest drivers from Nvidia.com, and removed the old ATI drivers cleanly?

Is the CPU set to the correct FSB? The amount of Athlon XP machines I've worked on in the past that were set to 100mhz when it should have been 133 or 166mhz..

Do you have Hardware Vertex Shading enabled in LFS? Without that enabled you'll get a performance hit. And do you have any anti aliasing or antisoptic filtering enabled in the video card drivers? They effect the framerate quite a bit.

Another thing to check is for any background processes that might be keeping the CPU busy - ran a spyware & A/V scan recently?

Onboard sound is a nonissue these days, I've not used a dedicated sound card in years and haven't noticably suffered because of it.

TBH you should be getting very good performance, my old system was an Athlon 3000, 1GB Ram & 6600GT AGP card, and that rarely dropped below 40fps on a full grid, and averaged 70-80fps while racing.

Quote from Jakg :

Like i always say, get Driver Cleaner, remove all traces of the ATi drivers, it could be an underlying problem with the old ATi stuff

Thanks for the hint, I'll try that tomorrow morning.

Quote from Rtsbasic :

Couple of things to check - latest drivers from Nvidia.com, and removed the old ATI drivers cleanly?

Drivers from CD - is that bad? Will check website tomorrow. As for removal of old drivers - I'll make sure with the driver cleaner.

Quote :

Is the CPU set to the correct FSB? The amount of Athlon XP machines I've worked on in the past that were set to 100mhz when it should have been 133 or 166mhz..

Do you have Hardware Vertex Shading enabled in LFS? Without that enabled you'll get a performance hit. And do you have any anti aliasing or antisoptic filtering enabled in the video card drivers? They effect the framerate quite a bit.

I'm quite sure all the CPU speeds are ok, as both the startup screen (before Windows load) and the hardware manager (or whatever that's called) in Windows show the correct speed (2.08GHz).

Quote :

Another thing to check is for any background processes that might be keeping the CPU busy - ran a spyware & A/V scan recently?

I can't see any suspicious processes, although I'm not really an expert on that.

Quote :

Onboard sound is a nonissue these days, I've not used a dedicated sound card in years and haven't noticably suffered because of it.

TBH you should be getting very good performance, my old system was an Athlon 3000, 1GB Ram & 6600GT AGP card, and that rarely dropped below 40fps on a full grid, and averaged 70-80fps while racing.

I'll be more than happy to get 75% of that...

Thanks for the hints, tomorrow morning first thing I'll do is check the things I read here.

One more thing - both 3dmark and my brother's games show big improvement over the old card - it's only LFS that seems to see no difference.

Using the drivers on the CD will work fine but will be at least a couple of months out of date, definately best to fetch the latest ones from nvidia.com that might help performance a bit.

If the Windows device manager is reporting the correct speed (not just the 2800 ID tag, but the actual 2.08Ghz) then that rules that one out.

If its just LFS and no other game that hasn't shown a marked improvement, perhaps it'd be worth trying a fresh new install of LFS. Would rule out any LFS-specific settings at least.

In response to the above post, download and install LFS into a seperate folder, apply the same settings, and test that. After cleaning the drivers, and applying the new ones, and that still shows no improvement download HijackThis, run a scan and log, and upload the log here. I will review it and see if anything unneeded is running in the background.

I don't think there's many extra frames to be found, but please do post if you find some.

I just upgraded from a Radeon 9550SE to a 6800GS, the rest of my (core) system consists of a Celeron D 2.4 GHz clocked at 3 GHz and 1 GB 400MHz dual channel DDR. The performance change in <insert not-LFS here> could be measured in hundreds of percent, in LFS, none. I basically have the exact same frame rates as before (~20-30 in full grid, maximum about 70 while racing), but i went from 720x576 4xAA/AF to 1600x1200 8xAA 16xAF, there's no difference in minimum FPS between 640x480 0xAA/AF to the resolution/filtering i run now, minimum FPS stays the same all the way up to 2048x15-something with all card/driver settings on max.

I guess i'm more limited by the CPU then i thought before buying the new card, my theory before upgrading was that i could perhaps bump my minimum FPS up to about the FPS i could pull in a full grid with simulation paused. It's a bit strange that lowering the various LODs make such a big difference in LFS, mirrors also steal about 10 fps, seems like the simulation cycles aren't the only ones heavy on CPU. I use about 0.4 user LOD and 0.3 dynamic LOD reduction, it's also weird how there's no difference in performance between the minimum and maximum car draw distance. This thread is also interesting.

That would be why I recommended running HijackThis as we could shut down any unneeded processes to use his processor more efficiently, as the card seems more than able to handle anything thrown at it.

Quote from Rtsbasic :

Using the drivers on the CD will work fine but will be at least a couple of months out of date, definately best to fetch the latest ones from nvidia.com that might help performance a bit.

OK, I'm stuck with this one. Which drivers should I download? I have the following to choose from:
GeFroce and TNT2
GeForce 8800 Series
GeForce Go 7 Series
Quadro
RIVA 128 / 128ZX

I assume the last 2 are not the ones I'm looking for, but how do I know which of the first 3 I should choose?
Anyway I'll go for the 8800 Series but if theyr'e not what I should get please do let me know. Thanks


Edit:
Will adding more RAM help? I mean it should help, but will it be noticeable? If so, what amount should I be aiming at (in terms of cost-effectiveness).

Quote from maczo :

OK, I'm stuck with this one. Which drivers should I download?

GeForce and TNT2

Quote from maczo :

Will adding more RAM help? I mean it should help, but will it be noticeable?

You won't notice any performance gain in LFS, except from load/reload times perhaps.

OK, seems I've made a major breakthrough... In-game settings :doh:
I've set "Limit framerate" to "yes/on". I have no idea why I should limit something that is already lacking, but the improvement is HUGE.
For comparison: start of a full-grid race at fern bay (red lights, focus on one car): 28fps -> 44fps. A look down the start straight right after race start: 13fps -> 22fps illepall

Edit: Better than that! I must've changed two settings at a time. It's not the limit framerate setting that's made the difference. It's "minimum sleep" (had it at 20, changed to 10 [some units; ms?]). What's that about?

Try the lowest possible minimun sleep value...

Quote from spankmeyer :

Try the lowest possible minimun sleep value...

Yea, now I know, duh. Set it to 1ms and it got me a few more fps without any side-effects that I could notice...
So what's the setting for anyway?

Quote :

Minimum sleep: You select time value. This setting forces LFS to sleep/wait the set amount of time between each frame, to allow Windows to update controller inputs, etc. Increase this value if you're having problems with controller stuttering/lag or similar. Don't put it too high, though, as it will limit your maximum framerate.

from http://en.lfsmanual.net/

Oookey... I'm back guys
I now have LFS configured correctly, but would like to ask a general hardware question - hope it's OK that it's not directly related to LFS.

I changed my CPU - the old Athlon XP 2800+ got replaced by a AMD64 x2 4200+. I have some concerns.
Do I need to reinstall Windows (XP) ? Should I install a 64-bit version of Windows? If I stick to XP, do I need to install AMD drivers?
I'm asking all of this, because some programs started to act funny (well, terminating with error messages isn't exactly funny...) and I asked a friend who was running Windows x64 whether it would get better if I installed it too. He told me that he also has problems with some apps crashing [more or less] randomly.
If there are good readings on the subject, I'd love to know what to search for. Thanks in advance, guys.

You dont need to reinstall Windows on a CPU change, you more than likely would if you changed the motherboard aswell though. You dont need 64bit Windows. You might see an improvement by installing the AMD Dual Core patch... just google for it, you'll find it. Should help with any crashing you get or applications acting weird.

The motherboard is new too, but Windows run. It's just that things started to be less stable. Will a fresh install help that?

Yes... sometimes you can get away without a Windows reinstall if you're replacing your motherboard with one thats the same brand/model/chipset. I'd say alot of your problems are caused by drivers from your old board conflicting with the new ones. Im actually surprised it booted into Windows.

Reformatting is your friend.

Oh and dont forget to install the Dual Core patch after you're done.