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SuperHero
Joined: 10 Dec 2003
Location: Superhero Hideout
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 Posted: Mon Dec 24, 2007 2:56 am Post subject: gamers - question for you |
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so I got my new system last Tuesday and Demophobe insisted on installing COD4 despite my not being interested in gaming. Anyhow I've tried it out and impress despite my lack of skill. Basically I want to know how to find out all the important things about running the game smoothly etcetera that I've seen bandied about on this forum - resolution fps etc...
I've got it running at 1680x1050 and it looks smooth to me, but where do I find out the fps?
Also, I'm not big on first person shooters - anything similar to Age of Empires or Civilization of modern computers that you would recommend? |
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eamo
Joined: 08 Mar 2003
Location: Shepherd's Bush, 1964.
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| Posted: Mon Dec 24, 2007 5:13 am Post subject: |
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The most commonly used utility to see your FPS is FRAPS.....
http://www.fraps.com/download.php
Just open it before you start up a game. The FPS should show in the top-left corner during gameplay.
I've found with the most recent games (COD4, Crysis, UT3) that the automatic detect function has been pretty accurate in setting the game to the optimal setting for your comp. In those three games I've mentioned, anytime I tried to go higher than auto-detect settings, the game would run less smoothly.
Resolution is probably the biggest factor. You have the HD3850. Right? So, 1680X1050 might be straining that card a bit. It only has 256mb memory. Try lowering the resolution to 1280X 1024 to see better FPS.
Of course, there's always overclocking............  ........come on.....we know you want to! |
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Demophobe
Joined: 17 May 2004
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| Posted: Mon Dec 24, 2007 5:16 am Post subject: |
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FRAPS is a good utility to see your frames.
Edit: Beat me 2 it eamo!
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SuperHero
Joined: 10 Dec 2003
Location: Superhero Hideout
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| Posted: Mon Dec 24, 2007 5:27 am Post subject: |
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Before I do that. What is the benefit of having more than 30 fps in any case since that is all you get in film...
just played one minute at 1680x1050 while rendering video and got 40fps |
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eamo
Joined: 08 Mar 2003
Location: Shepherd's Bush, 1964.
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| Posted: Mon Dec 24, 2007 5:38 am Post subject: |
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| SuperHero wrote: |
| Before I do that. What is the benefit of having more than 30 fps in any case since that is all you get in film... |
In film, 25fps is a constant. It doesn't matter what's happening in the movie. 25fps will always look fluid.
But, in computer games, when you set the game settings to high, at high-resolution, some parts of the game will have a lot more action/smoke effects/characters/shadows/foliage etc........when all these graphic-hungry effects happen in a game then your frame-rate will drop dramatically. Even if it's for half-a-second, you'll get an annoying stutter in your game. Known as lag.
Gamers don't want those stutters at all. Therefore 300+ dollar graphics cards and the insane quest for high framerates. |
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eamo
Joined: 08 Mar 2003
Location: Shepherd's Bush, 1964.
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| Posted: Mon Dec 24, 2007 5:39 am Post subject: |
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| just played one minute at 1680x1050 while rendering video and got 40fps |
That's the quad-core for you! You made a good buy there. |
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Thunndarr
Joined: 30 Sep 2003
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| Posted: Mon Dec 24, 2007 6:04 pm Post subject: |
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frame_rate
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[edit] Frame rates in video games
Frame rates are considered important in video games. The frame rate can make the difference between a game that is playable and one that is not. The first 3D first-person adventure game for a personal computer, 3D Monster Maze, had a frame rate of approximately 6 fps, and was still a success, being playable and addictive. In modern action-oriented games where players must visually track animated objects and react quickly, frame rates of between 30 to 60 fps are considered minimally acceptable by some, though this can vary significantly from game to game. Most modern action games, including popular first person shooters such as Halo 3, run around 30 frames a second, while others, such as Call of Duty 4, run at 60 frames a second. The framerate within most games, particularly PC games, will depend upon what is currently happening in the game in the way of CPU occupying.
A culture of competition has arisen among game enthusiasts with regards to frame rates, with players striving to obtain the highest fps count possible. Indeed, many benchmarks released by the marketing departments of hardware manufacturers and published in hardware reviews focus on the fps measurement. Modern video cards, often featuring NVIDIA or ATI chipsets, can perform at over 160 fps on graphics intensive games such as F.E.A.R. One single GeForce 8800 GTX has been reported to play F.E.A.R. at up to 386 fps (at a low resolution).[citation needed] This does not apply to all games: some games apply a limit on the frame rate. For example, in the Grand Theft Auto series, Grand Theft Auto III and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City have a standard 30 fps (Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas runs at 25 fps) and this limit can only be removed at the cost of graphical and gameplay stability. It is also doubtful whether striving for such high frame rates is worthwhile. An average 17" monitor can reach 85 Hz, meaning that any performance reached by the game over 85 fps is discarded. For that reason it is not uncommon to limit the frame rate to the refresh rate of the monitor in a process called vertical synchronization. However, many players feel that not synchronizing every frame produces sufficiently better game execution to justify some "tearing" of the images.
It should also be noted that there is a rather large controversy over what is known as the "feel" of the game frame rate. It is argued that games with extremely high frame rates "feel" better and smoother than those that are just getting by. This is especially true in games such as a first-person shooter. There is often a noticeable choppiness perceived in most computer rendered video, despite it being above the flicker fusion frequency (as, after all, one's eyes are not synchronized to the monitor).
This choppiness is not a perceived flicker, but a perceived gap between the object in motion and its afterimage left in the eye from the last frame. A computer samples one point in time, then nothing is sampled until the next frame is rendered, so a visible gap can be seen between the moving object and its afterimage in the eye. Many driving games have this problem, like NASCAR 2005: Chase for the Cup for Xbox, and Gran Turismo 4. The polygon count in a frame may be too much to keep the game running smoothly for a second. The processing power needs to go to the polygon count and usually takes away the power from the framerate.
The reason computer rendered video has a noticeable afterimage separation problem and camera captured video does not is that a camera shutter interrupts the light two or three times for every film frame, thus exposing the film to 2 or 3 samples at different points in time. The light can also enter for the entire time the shutter is open, thus exposing the film to a continuous sample over this time. These multiple samples are naturally interpolated together on the same frame. This leads to a small amount of motion blur between one frame and the next which allows them to smoothly transition.
An example of afterimage separation can be seen when taking a quick 180 degree turn in a game in only 1 second. A still object in the game would render 60 times evenly on that 180 degree arc (at 60 Hz frame rate), and visibly this would separate the object and its afterimage by 3 degrees. A small object and its afterimage 3 degrees apart are quite noticeably separated on screen.
The solution to this problem would be to interpolate the extra frames together in the back-buffer (field multisampling), or simulate the motion blur seen by the human eye in the rendering engine. When vertical sync is enabled, video cards only output a maximum frame rate equal to the refresh rate of the monitor. All extra frames are dropped. When vertical sync is disabled, the video card is free to render frames as fast as it can, but the display of those rendered frames is still limited to the refresh rate of the monitor. For example, a card may render a game at 100 FPS on a monitor running 75 Hz refresh, but no more than 75 FPS can actually be displayed on screen.
Certain elements of a game may be more GPU-intensive than others. While a game may achieve a fairly consistent 60 fps, the frame rate may drop below that during intensive scenes. By achieving frame rates in excess of what is displayable, it makes it less likely that frame rates will drop below what is displayable during stressful scenes. |
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cubanlord
Joined: 08 Jul 2005
Location: In Japan!
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| Posted: Tue Dec 25, 2007 6:08 pm Post subject: |
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| SuperHero wrote: |
Before I do that. What is the benefit of having more than 30 fps in any case since that is all you get in film...
just played one minute at 1680x1050 while rendering video and got 40fps |
For a smooth flowing game, you do not want to drop below 45 fps, ever. You video card REALLY comes into play with this. You seem to have a good card.
I am wondering, you said you were rendering video and playing at 30fps. You must have been in a point during the game that didn't require a lot of juice to be extracted from the card. I bet you weren't in the middle of a fire-fight with bombs going off and bullets flying and the background completely surreal.
Thundarr and Eamo sum it up nicely. |
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Demophobe
Joined: 17 May 2004
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| Posted: Tue Dec 25, 2007 11:49 pm Post subject: |
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| cubanlord wrote: |
| SuperHero wrote: |
Before I do that. What is the benefit of having more than 30 fps in any case since that is all you get in film...
just played one minute at 1680x1050 while rendering video and got 40fps |
For a smooth flowing game, you do not want to drop below 45 fps, ever. You video card REALLY comes into play with this. You seem to have a good card.
I am wondering, you said you were rendering video and playing at 30fps. You must have been in a point during the game that didn't require a lot of juice to be extracted from the card. I bet you weren't in the middle of a fire-fight with bombs going off and bullets flying and the background completely surreal.
Thundarr and Eamo sum it up nicely. |
Rendering video wouldn't tax the GPU at all, especially if he turned the preview off. I'm not even sure if CoD4 takes advantage of multi-cores. |
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cubanlord
Joined: 08 Jul 2005
Location: In Japan!
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| Posted: Wed Dec 26, 2007 3:02 am Post subject: |
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| Demophobe wrote: |
| cubanlord wrote: |
| SuperHero wrote: |
Before I do that. What is the benefit of having more than 30 fps in any case since that is all you get in film...
just played one minute at 1680x1050 while rendering video and got 40fps |
For a smooth flowing game, you do not want to drop below 45 fps, ever. You video card REALLY comes into play with this. You seem to have a good card.
I am wondering, you said you were rendering video and playing at 30fps. You must have been in a point during the game that didn't require a lot of juice to be extracted from the card. I bet you weren't in the middle of a fire-fight with bombs going off and bullets flying and the background completely surreal.
Thundarr and Eamo sum it up nicely. |
Rendering video wouldn't tax the GPU at all, especially if he turned the preview off. I'm not even sure if CoD4 takes advantage of multi-cores. |
Demo,
Of course it would. If the cores are busy rendering video, then obviously there is less power to distribute. |
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Demophobe
Joined: 17 May 2004
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| Posted: Wed Dec 26, 2007 2:20 pm Post subject: |
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| cubanlord wrote: |
| Demophobe wrote: |
| cubanlord wrote: |
| SuperHero wrote: |
Before I do that. What is the benefit of having more than 30 fps in any case since that is all you get in film...
just played one minute at 1680x1050 while rendering video and got 40fps |
For a smooth flowing game, you do not want to drop below 45 fps, ever. You video card REALLY comes into play with this. You seem to have a good card.
I am wondering, you said you were rendering video and playing at 30fps. You must have been in a point during the game that didn't require a lot of juice to be extracted from the card. I bet you weren't in the middle of a fire-fight with bombs going off and bullets flying and the background completely surreal.
Thundarr and Eamo sum it up nicely. |
Rendering video wouldn't tax the GPU at all, especially if he turned the preview off. I'm not even sure if CoD4 takes advantage of multi-cores. |
Demo,
Of course it would. If the cores are busy rendering video, then obviously there is less power to distribute. |
GPU. Rendering video wouldn't tax the GPU at all and 4 cores is more than enough for those two tasks.
I found CoD4 to be a very scalable and forgiving engine. We don't even know what settings Superhero is using. Something tells me that most of his settings are on "medium", because at that resolution, his card would be struggling with all on 'high'. And he certainly has no AA or AF. |
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cubanlord
Joined: 08 Jul 2005
Location: In Japan!
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| Posted: Wed Dec 26, 2007 2:49 pm Post subject: |
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Damn...my eyes were reading CPU. lol. |
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eamo
Joined: 08 Mar 2003
Location: Shepherd's Bush, 1964.
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| Posted: Wed Dec 26, 2007 4:28 pm Post subject: |
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| Quote: |
| I found CoD4 to be a very scalable and forgiving engine. We don't even know what settings Superhero is using. Something tells me that most of his settings are on "medium", because at that resolution, his card would be struggling with all on 'high'. And he certainly has no AA or AF. |
CoD4 does seem like a well coded game. I got pretty much the same framerates in all areas of the game. Average of around 55. plus or minus no more than about 10. Settings on high.
Crysis, however, can jump around from 85fps to 15fps on my comp. Settings on medium. The first half of the game was pretty smooth. Now that I'm in the last quarter of the game there's a lot of lag. I would expect gamewriters to try and make the fps more consistant than that. You don't want to go into settings to turn things up or down during games. |
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IncognitoHFX
Joined: 06 May 2007
Location: Yeongtong, Suwon
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| Posted: Wed Dec 26, 2007 8:09 pm Post subject: |
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CoD4 runs very well on very little. At home I'm running at 2GHZ AMD (non-dual core) with 1GB of RAM and a GeForce8600GT video card.
Some older games really struggle on my system, but CoD4 runs beautifully no matter how intense the firefight--and this is with all of the settings maxed out (except you can only have the real high def textures with Vista + DirectX 10 which I don't have).
Strange thing is, I'm having a lot of trouble running Battlefeild 2142 on my system. The game is over a year old and not that graphically intense, but to have a decent playing experience I have to turn the resolution down to 800x600 and the textures down to medium. |
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chevro1et
Joined: 01 Feb 2007
Location: Busan, ROK
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| Posted: Thu Dec 27, 2007 5:30 am Post subject: |
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| IncognitoHFX wrote: |
| Strange thing is, I'm having a lot of trouble running Battlefeild 2142 on my system. The game is over a year old and not that graphically intense, but to have a decent playing experience I have to turn the resolution down to 800x600 and the textures down to medium. |
Get another gig of ram. BF2/ BF2142 are terrible resource hogs. Make sure youre running the newest patch as well. |
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