The cause of FPS drops

[Dmitriy]

So right now I was checking why does my FPS drops so dramatically down to 25fps in big battles in Nuclear Dawn. I have found out that disabling HUD using
cl_drawhud 0
gives almost twice more FPS then I had with HUD enabled.
Also particles make some noticable FPS drop. Disable particles with
r_drawparticles 0

I hope some optimization can be made here, because it's really hard to play at 25 FPS on lowest settings on my gtx560 card.

[Dmitriy]

This reproduces when a lot of structures are present on the map. I think that the icons over structures and structres' health bars may be the issue. Because on empty map disabling HUD doesn't give so big increase of FPS like on a map with lots of players and structures

[Spazzo]

Particles could very well be problematic - I'd like an option to disable all the particles that go flying about when buildings are unpacked, and also to disable the bits of ash around the map. Couldn't hurt, as they are purely aesthetic.

[Dmitriy]

AFAIK those particles are all func_precipitation brush entities. In Alien Swarm for example they are not being drawn on Low video settings. So I was suprised when I saw them in Nuclear Dawn on lowest settings.

[Vertex]

50% of the fps drops were coming from the server to cilent and cilent to server rates not being high enough by default, i fixed that on redstone you should be stable no lower than 35-40fps with that graphics card.

[Dmitriy]

I highly doubt that network rate have something to do with the rendering system, but will check it later.

Right now I've found out that reconnecting to the server increases FPS count from 30 to 80. This means that over time some overhead is created in the client what causes framerate to drop down. Probably some resources are not being freed.

Also there is some bug when you get a very low framerate, 10-15 FPS, to fix this you need to type in console snd_restart. This restarts all client sounds and framerate goes to normal. Thanks to Spazzo for this tip

[noob]

Is there any completed High FPS configs for ND?

[Dmitriy]

I don't think so. I used only one optimization command afaik:
cl_radgollimit 0

In the upcoming version there will be an r_decals variable to control the number of dynamic decals. It is possible to ask developers to unlock more variables for increasing framerate, such as forcing cheap water, turning off some particles

[noob]

It would be awesome, cause i need to configure all that *insert_bad_word_here* to play with 30-60 FPS on my PC.

[X]

ive never had this problem