ATI graphics optimization

[Joe Hegarty]

I ended up removing the new AMD/ATI 7970 out of my one i7 setup and putting the Nvidia GTX 580 back in along with a fresh Windows install along with the 290.53 drivers to give rFactor2 a second look.

It's like night and day, at 1920x1080 resolution 8x super sampling AA/16xAF with everything at it's highest setting rFactor2 is running completely smooth with great image quality. The frame rate stays consistently above the refresh rate of the monitor (60Hz/60 FPS) so I'm able to run it with v-sync enabled.

I'm more or less in the same situation djt, although the complete opposite! I've had a GTX 570 for the last year or so and was able to run rF2 with all settings maxed out at a reasonable frame rate (30-60fps about). Then my brand spanking new AMD 7970 arrived last Friday . . . what a fracking disaster . . . for rF2 I mean, the card is savage!

Performance in iRacing went up a good 50-100%, which should allow me to go triple monitor soon (the main purpose for getting this joke expensive card). But fracking hell the performance in rF2 fell through the fracking floor . . . FRAAAAAAAACK!!!

I've disabled AA and AF and set everything to Medium / Off and I'm able to get reasonable frame rates but the game looks about on par with Ridge Racer on the PS 1. Even at these insanely low settings the frame rate dropped down to 5 fps going around the final corner at Malaysia on the first lap in the Megane!

This is the BETA phase so it's not a total shock that problems like this exist, I only hope they'll get ironed out over the next couple of weeks so us AMD users (at least those with the new 7970 card) have more to contribute than reporting this single show-stopper bug.

Cheers,
Joe

 

[samuelkorthof]

I'm more or less in the same situation djt, although the complete opposite! I've had a GTX 570 for the last year or so and was able to run rF2 with all settings maxed out at a reasonable frame rate (30-60fps about). Then my brand spanking new AMD 7970 arrived last Friday . . . what a fracking disaster . . . for rF2 I mean, the card is savage!

Performance in iRacing went up a good 50-100%, which should allow me to go triple monitor soon (the main purpose for getting this joke expensive card). But fracking hell the performance in rF2 fell through the fracking floor . . . FRAAAAAAAACK!!!

I've disabled AA and AF and set everything to Medium / Off and I'm able to get reasonable frame rates but the game looks about on par with Ridge Racer on the PS 1. Even at these insanely low settings the frame rate dropped down to 5 fps going around the final corner at Malaysia on the first lap in the Megane!

This is the BETA phase so it's not a total shock that problems like this exist, I only hope they'll get ironed out over the next couple of weeks so us AMD users (at least those with the new 7970 card) have more to contribute than reporting this single show-stopper bug.

Cheers,
Joe

Strange from what I read in the triplescreen topic your system should have been capable of triplescreens with iRacing with the 570GTX. Isn´t there another bottleneck in your system?

 

[SaS]

Thanx. I´am at the office now but tonight I will test this. Doesn´t Flip queu size setting cause inputlag? Nice too hear from somebody with the same setup. I´ve got a major performance boost yesterday BTW by clocking my 955 too 3,7 ghz whole evening at 45c. No stock cooling.

I think default for "Flip queue size" is 4 and yes, it causing input lag if on default value.

 

[Joe Hegarty]

Strange from what I read in the triplescreen topic your system should have been capable of triplescreens with iRacing with the 570GTX. Isn´t there another bottleneck in your system?

Unfortunately the current generation of nVidia cards require SLI to run nVidia Surround. The 590 GTX is a bit of an exception, although really this card is running 2-way SLI between the two onboard chips, so really it still falls into the same category. Galaxy have come out with an overclocked 580 GTX that can output to triple displays, but this is a hack on Galaxy's part and is not true nVidia Surround so often you'll have to hunt around for "render.cfg" style files to get games to work with it, which not all games have.

So currently only the last two or three generations of AMD cards support native triple monitor output from a single chip card. So why didn't I just get a matching 570 GTX and do triple monitor through 2-way SLI? Well I had two reasons: Not all games run that great through SLI, I've read a lot of stories about people getting poor speedup, or worse getting frame stuttering. I'm sure this doesn't happen to everyone but I didn't want to take the risk. Also, I had no more slots left on my motherboard since I also have a PCI-E SSD in there and it's only a mini board so I would have had to upgrade the motherboard too.

This is my first ATI / AMD card ever, and the card itself is very impressive (massive fps improvement in iRacing over the 570 GTX which is good news for when I go triple monitor), but if support for it continues like this I think I'll be moving back to nVidia when Kepler comes out towards the end of the year.

 

[Darren Blythe]

.....Then my brand spanking new AMD 7970 arrived last Friday . . . what a fracking disaster . . . for rF2 I mean, the card is savage!

Performance in iRacing went up a good 50-100%, which should allow me to go triple monitor soon (the main purpose for getting this joke expensive card). But fracking hell the performance in rF2 fell through the fracking floor . . . FRAAAAAAAACK!!!

I've disabled AA and AF and set everything to Medium / Off and I'm able to get reasonable frame rates but the game looks about on par with Ridge Racer on the PS 1. Even at these insanely low settings the frame rate dropped down to 5 fps going around the final corner at Malaysia on the first lap in the Megane!

This is the BETA phase so it's not a total shock that problems like this exist, I only hope they'll get ironed out over the next couple of weeks so us AMD users (at least those with the new 7970 card) have more to contribute than reporting this single show-stopper bug.

Cheers,
Joe

Same situation with me Jo, except i'm running 2 in crossfire. Rips every other game to pieces but i'm lucky to hit 30fps with everything turned down in rF2.

 

[taufikp]

I just found that when the Morphological Filter (MF) check box is ticked, it will always be activated even when you are not using anti aliasing.

This will reduced graphic performance big time.

In the first/home screen, with MF on the average FPS is 140, when MF off, avg FPS jump to 780. In garage screen, with MF on I got avg 22 FPS, with MF off jumps to 46 FPS average.

I think this is a bug of ATI Catalyst (I'm using 12.1 driver). So make sure that Morphological Filter is not used / always unchecked all the time.

 

[aldrew]

I just tried unchecking Morphological Filter and my fps jumped up 30 fps and I am running triple screens with triplehead2go and an ATI HD 5850 video card with the latest official update, not the 12.1a beta update. I was also able to set more of the settings on high.

If only I could get rid of the annoying thumping/drumming sound on the 60's f1 cars, that would be nice. Will be interested to see improvements with the next update. At least now I can drive around without much of a lag or crash in fps. I haven't tried a race yet, that will be next.

 

[Gary Corby]

You probably know all this, ISI, but I'll add my 2 cents after profiling the game while doing a lot of fiddling. I figure the more data you've got the better.

It's not possible to play this game at an acceptable graphics quality at an acceptable FPS. It's a struggle to keep the FPS over 30.

My system:

AMD Phenom II x 2 3.1 GHz
8GB RAM
Win 7 64 bit
ATI Radeon 5860


At no time, no matter how hard I tried, could I get either the CPU or the RAM to max out, even while the graphics sucked. As far as I can tell the bottleneck is the graphics card, or more accurately, how the game uses the card. I suspect the graphics code is using the Radeon card very inefficiently.

With HDR on, at no time does CPU use exceed 55%. RAM use remains remarkably low at all times, even though I'm saving replays to RAM.

I believe you're freeing up track memory when the user leaves the track. You'd be very much better off retaining track memory until either the user selects a new track or the game is closed. That's because the vast majority of the time players leave a track only to return to the same one. You could speed up subsequent track loads a lot by retaining the most recent track in RAM.

The HDR implementation is unbelievably inefficient. If I turn off HDR, it's worth 15 to 20 FPS. At that point CPU use goes up from 50%, to about 70%, but since the system has spare CPU capacity to burn but suffers under HDR that's a no-brainer. The single most important optimisation right now would be to remove HDR. Or fix it.

With HDR on, it's simply a matter of turning on graphics effects one by one until the FPS drops below 30, which it does quite quickly. It doesn't matter which effects you enable to cripple the FPS; it seems to be a general load issue.

I have all optimsations maxed out directly on my graphics card, except for morpgological rendering and vsync which are disabled. Interestingly, if I set the card so that the game determines settings, and then turn on AA in-game, then FPS is measurably worse by 5 to 10 FPS than if I do the same settings direct to the card. I posit that the way the game uses the Radeon is sub-optimal.

Despite all the whining that I've just written about the graphics , this game is light years ahead of some others I could name for lack of bugs. Your early beta release is already several thousand percent more stable than some production games, such as (cough) F1 2010. So thanks for all the effort!

 

[F2kSel]

It's all just guess work, I've read every thread and tried every trick and none of them fix the stutter for me completely.

I've not seen any answer to the question why do frame rates double when I go to desktop and back and the stutter gets worse but only after a one lap.

After that lap in some corners the FPS drop to half that of those before the jump to desktop.

I feel that something is tying up resources and not releasing them.

 

[Sega Mega Dave]

i7 2600k 4.6GHz
16GB RAM 2133MHz
Crossfire AMD 7970's
120GB Vertex 3 SSD
Resolution 2560x1440

First off the game is really enjoyable to play and they have the basis of a great product in their hands, it's major downside though that needs addressing asap is it's performance and optimization as it's worse than any game i've played in a long time, beta or not and thats including Skyrim.

This is a sim so the emphasis is on how the game feels to play/drive so i don't think anyone is or was expecting great eye candy and as of now it's as expected. Because it's an average looking game it shouldn't be very resource hungry at all either on the CPU or GPU and it isn't by the looks of things.

What it is though is so poorly optimized that even the most powerful cards won't be able to run this maxed out at decent res with decent conistant frames. For example running crossfire or single makes little difference, the game maxed out with zero AA at a res of 2560x1440 i get roughly 20fps and below yet the GPU is barely warmed up (38%) and neither is the CPU. Now if i lower the settings down to something that makes the game look so poor then it becomes acceptable performance wise but again GPU usage is non existant.

Another thing i feel is that even if you get a solid 60fps it doesn't ever feel that smooth, nothing flows it's just feels massively rushed.

Beta or not these issues should not be as bad as they are and personally they need a massive push to sort this otherwise there will be a lot of unhappy customers on release, it's not a small job and it may need cooperation with AMD but it needs doing as quickly as possible.

Personally i think this game is a long way off and has come out for beta too soon. I really hope ISI are taking note of these issues as it's too common to be ignored.




Also for the few pages i've read and im sure it's been discussed a few times.

Please drop the myth that the human eye can't see past 60fps, it can and has been proven time and time again. The difference from 60fps to 120fps is very noticable even just moving around windows let along fast paced gaming. Those who say it isn't are usually those who haven't tried it.

Also to those saying it should be running at 300fps blah blah Whats the point running something at 300fps when the max you will see is 60fps if your monitor only supports 60hz? It's not special and neither will you see things better, all you will see is screen tearing which is awful. No matter how many frames you chuck at it your screen will only refresh the amount of times the monitor supports whether it be 60 or 120.

 

[Spyder]

i7 2600k 4.6GHz
16GB RAM 2133MHz
Crossfire AMD 7970's
120GB Vertex 3 SSD
Resolution 2560x1440

First off the game is really enjoyable to play and they have the basis of a great product in their hands, it's major downside though that needs addressing asap is it's performance and optimization as it's worse than any game i've played in a long time, beta or not and thats including Skyrim.

This is a sim so the emphasis is on how the game feels to play/drive so i don't think anyone is or was expecting great eye candy and as of now it's as expected. Because it's an average looking game it shouldn't be very resource hungry at all either on the CPU or GPU and it isn't by the looks of things.

What it is though is so poorly optimized that even the most powerful cards won't be able to run this maxed out at decent res with decent conistant frames. For example running crossfire or single makes little difference, the game maxed out with zero AA at a res of 2560x1440 i get roughly 20fps and below yet the GPU is barely warmed up (38%) and neither is the CPU. Now if i lower the settings down to something that makes the game look so poor then it becomes acceptable performance wise but again GPU usage is non existant.

Another thing i feel is that even if you get a solid 60fps it doesn't ever feel that smooth, nothing flows it's just feels massively rushed.

Beta or not these issues should not be as bad as they are and personally they need a massive push to sort this otherwise there will be a lot of unhappy customers on release, it's not a small job and it may need cooperation with AMD but it needs doing as quickly as possible.

Personally i think this game is a long way off and has come out for beta too soon. I really hope ISI are taking note of these issues as it's too common to be ignored.




Also for the few pages i've read and im sure it's been discussed a few times.

Please drop the myth that the human eye can't see past 60fps, it can and has been proven time and time again. The difference from 60fps to 120fps is very noticable even just moving around windows let along fast paced gaming. Those who say it isn't are usually those who haven't tried it.

Also to those saying it should be running at 300fps blah blah Whats the point running something at 300fps when the max you will see is 60fps if your monitor only supports 60hz? It's not special and neither will you see things better, all you will see is screen tearing which is awful. No matter how many frames you chuck at it your screen will only refresh the amount of times the monitor supports whether it be 60 or 120.

Fully agree with everything you say but the ISI fan club are gonna kick your butt over this post! There really is no excuse for releasing a public beta in this sorry state, my pc plays all my racing games on high/ultra settings with triple screens and there's no reason why I shouldn't be able to do the same with RF2.

PCars may have less than desirable handling at the moment but even in pre-alpha and unoptimized I can hit 60fps plus on triples with high settings and that games graphics are years ahead of RF2!!

Just hoping the optimisations from ISI come thick and fast, until then I'm sticking full time with iRacing.

 

[SLuisHamilton]

I wonder when specialized sites will start to calling RF2 of the great disappointment of the simulators in last years.

 

[[NAR]Steve]

I would say if it still performs the same when it is a full release, THEN people can start bashing it, but it IS still the FIRST beta, people need to calm down, I am fully confident they will fix the graphics problems.

 

[jubuttib]

I wonder when specialized sites will start to calling RF2 of the great disappointment of the simulators in last years.

I'd say never, since it isn't a disappointment yet. It can be a disappointment after it releases, but that's something we'll see when it comes around. Wouldn't hurt to have a bit of trust for the guys. =)

EDIT: If anything I'd say the great disappointment in the sim world in recent years was Shift 2, which was touted as a full on simulator, but fell drastically short of that. Compared to that rF2 would have to get worse than it is now to actually be a bigger disappointment.

 

[Gary Corby]

I've been puzzling over how the FPS can be so poor when none of the hardware ever seems to get stressed.

All I can suggest is either there are an astounding number of critical sections in the code, or else the game spends a lot of time in wait states. It seems extraordinary that anything should wait on a graphics card, but that's sort of the implication from the difference when HDR is enabled. Like a few others I've observed the big drop in FPS on second and subsequent laps, and that's mildly consistent with a lot of events getting queued up, unable to be processed in time. I wonder too if the code handling the vaunted FFB (which personally I dislike), might be blocking on a wait state on the FFB device?

 

[TonyRickard]

Interesting thoughts, Gary. It does seem baffling quite where the system is choking given the posted CPU & GPU charts? It kind of feels there is a bunch of performance that could be unlocked if found and modified.

 

[Nuno Lourenço]

Rfactor 2 ins't a disappointmen to me, it have everything what i've been waiting for...

Rain
Wind
Great graphics when everytinh is maxed out
Amazing FFB and physics (when have at least 60 fps)
Dinamic track
etc...

The only disappointment to me is almost one month after releasing beta, we don´t have any feedback from ISI. That is a shame... The only thing we had was a post from Tim offering our money back...

Understood, just be sure to know you can get a refund via the purchase tab if you feel you are in this too early.

Yes, if you cannot run it as you don't meet requirements, please put in a refund request via the launcher's purchase tab.

What the hell is this man? We play rfactor 1 for years, we love it, we don't want a refund... I don´t understand how could you say this instead of giving us some feedback from your ISI partners... Unbelievable man......

We NEED to know if ISI already know what is causing this poor performance. We need to know if you are doing something about that our if you are just giving the final touch in the other material to lanch all after 6 months but with all this bugs....

In my case for example with everything maxed out my CPU is used less than 50% and GPU is used 50% +/- with 20/30fps... It's clearly poor optimization in game or a conflit with something....

Please Stop telling us about refund, talk with your team, and give us some real answers...

 

[GauchoRS]

rfactor 2 ins't a disappointmen to me, it have everything what i've been waiting for...

....

Please stop telling us about refund, talk with your team, and give us some real answers...

+1 - well spoken !!!

 

[TonyRickard]

Staff have stated "Graphics aren't finished".

Now we can be patient, have a refund or say "are we there yet?" in the back seat every 20 minutes.

We don't NEED to know everything ISI are doing. It would be nice but then we know that if they say something should be done by the end of the month then at 00:01 on the 1st there will be a bunch crying that ISI broke their promise.

 

[Nuno Lourenço]

Staff have stated "Graphics aren't finished".

Now we can be patient, have a refund or say "are we there yet?" in the back seat every 20 minutes.

We don't NEED to know everything ISI are doing. It would be nice but then we know that if they say something should be done by the end of the month then at 00:01 on the 1st there will be a bunch crying that ISI broke their promise.

We don't need days, weeks or even months. We just need from ISI "We know or don't know what is causing that. We are workin on it or not."

If we are helping to test something "not for free" we need feedback too. So simple like that...