System Specs

[Boizaum]

I know that amd gear is usually less then efficacious, but it is budget friendly and i do try to keep to the games that do run best on my pc. I kinda like this game, was looking forward to it but have had it run sort of choppy, someone suggested I bring a new thread about this, seeing as there is an influx of players it might be all around usefull.

Overall I experience fps dips ( we all know what that is) and choppyness (laggy feeling, even though i'm on single player). This happens all the time, on medium, high and ultra settings, there really are quite a few tweaks in the menu, and restarting the game all the time makes troubleshooting quite time consuming, so if anyone has a recommended, optimal setting, i'd appreciate it.

My system is FX 8350,16g ram at 1333 9-9-9-30 (i think) and r9 280 x vga. Upgrading for just a handfull of games isn't really an option when there is so much that I can enjoy right now and for the next few years, thanks.

[AceMaster]

Well

- Check your mobo supplier for BIOS update
- Check to make sure you are running latest AMD GPU drivers
- Check to see if they don't have any fixes for amd cpu ( I haven't had AMD in a long time but I remember a time I had to download this fix from Intel for AMD CPU clocks or something of the sort)
- Turn off windows page file as it's old tech and any system over 8GB unless your a developer on a small budget doesn't require this on anymore. (Though old games might require it IE: Dawn of War 2)
- Now I noticed you didn't' mention what type of drive you had if it was SSD or just a regular HD (IF SSD never defrag as this will cause huge performance lose)
- one thing that can cause performance problems is windows system file corruption which a lot of people don't think about you can run this by running CMD from the run line if required go to C:\windows\system32\ find cmd.exe right click run as admin and type sfc /scannow this will verify your windows system integrity and fix anything that might be wrong.
- last but not least validate the game to ensure no files got corrupted (I've had it where the game runs or crashes due to a file being messed up)

[Boizaum]

-well.. I do have my mobo updated to the latest bios
-using latest non-beta drivers for gpu
-there aren't any fixes available for windows 8
-i would really rather not turn off the page file, it helps my ssd run crisp and fast.
- the game is actually on my hdd, my ssd is actually small and is quite full right now.
- yeah.. i don't think i have corrupt files.. might run a scan if something else is wrong, i can just skip on a game or two that aren't that special.
-i'll validate it... see if anything is corrupt, i guess.
thanks though..

[yeeyoh]

You should have no problem running this on very high settings. Up until a few months back (Christmas) I was running this on a Phenom 955, 16Gb (1600) and HD4890 2Gb. I was playing with most of the settings on High, some on Ultra, and a couple (shadows, maybe something else) on medium and it was super smooth. That systems lower than yours so something is up. Oh and I use an SSD and the game was on a seperate HDD.

[Boizaum]

Funny thing, i just finished downloading the multiplayer, and that runs pretty good, very very smooth. It must be the some sort of issue with the single player.. maybe tha ram, i don't know..
I really like the graphics on this game, could be potentially one of my favorites from now on. Thanks guys, i guess i'll stick to the MP, just finish the campaign for completion sake and get rid of it i suppose.

[AceMaster]

Oprindeligt skrevet af Boizaum:

Funny thing, i just finished downloading the multiplayer, and that runs pretty good, very very smooth. It must be the some sort of issue with the single player.. maybe tha ram, i don't know..
I really like the graphics on this game, could be potentially one of my favorites from now on. Thanks guys, i guess i'll stick to the MP, just finish the campaign for completion sake and get rid of it i suppose.

Actually I noticed a post earlier from a developer saying it's CPU intensive due to the AI in the single player portion.

Also page file uses your SSD to virtualize ram which is 1000 times slower than the speed of Physical RAM. By eliminating Virtual RAM you are eliminating communication lag between your components by maximizing your RAM performance. One thing with SSD's they are bad for backup devices compared to traditional HD at least the tech isn't reliable enough. But for loading games and running your OS SSD is the place to go. If you find things are slow to load that is due to it running on your HD and not the SSD. I've done the tests myself with online games like Planetside 2 were I saved probably upwards to 30 sec in loading times.

[Boizaum]

huh.. i guess there is no harm in experimenting with that. Maybe I'll give it a try down the road. Thanks for that. You know, it does make sense, the AI is alltogether another load on the CPU after all. Thanks guys.

[HerZie]

Your PC is pretty powerful actually. This game came out almost 3 years ago and it's using the UE3 engine. You should be able to max this game and them some with 100fps. I play this at mostly at 60fps (drops to 45 does happen in hectic fights) @ 1920x1080 with a combination of ultra, high and medium settings. This is in multilayer though. i3 2120 with a GTX550ti. A snail compared to your rig.

[yeeyoh]

Just to mention it. I'm not even sure if they update or patch the single player. It's a very multi-player oriented game. When I first got the game the A.I. on single player was so bad I quit trying it after about 20 minutes.
(As far as switching off page filing, most windows tweak guides do not recommend it. Windows does more with the page file than just use it to swap ram. With 16Gb it would probably never use it for that.. It's used to speed up boot times and other tasks... Here's an excellent guide to setting up an SSD if you ever feel like getting into it. http://www.overclock.net/t/1156654/seans-windows-7-install-optimization-guide-for-ssds-hdds The site is not just for 'over clockers' as they offer a lot of great advice for anybody.)

[AceMaster]

Well here is the thing. You can have all the cores in the world but if the game is not designed to make full use of the additional cores in the end it doesn't mean ♥♥♥♥. I would have to say the Unreal engine while it has been updated it is an old engine and I suspect it's not optimize for multi core usage and that's why it might not perform as well as you would expect. So it's nice that you have 8 cores but in real world that will only help you if your a multitasker who works with multiple spreadsheets or design work production etc... More games today take advantage of multi threading but it's mostly to offload certain features so sound on one core, AI using another core etc... but the new and next gen engines I suspect will take way more advantage of multi threading and 64bit which will give a big boost due to limitation of 32 bit instructions.

[HerZie]

His CPU is future proof for gaming though, even if it means a very old game will run just as good or better on a fast dual core. It's worth having that 8 cores for stuff coming out now and tomorrow. Battlefield 4 is a great example of a multithreaded game and it favours AMD as well.

[AceMaster]

Oprindeligt skrevet af yeeyoh:

Just to mention it. I'm not even sure if they update or patch the single player. It's a very multi-player oriented game. When I first got the game the A.I. on single player was so bad I quit trying it after about 20 minutes.
(As far as switching off page filing, most windows tweak guides do not recommend it. Windows does more with the page file than just use it to swap ram. With 16Gb it would probably never use it for that.. It's used to speed up boot times and other tasks... Here's an excellent guide to setting up an SSD if you ever feel like getting into it. http://www.overclock.net/t/1156654/seans-windows-7-install-optimization-guide-for-ssds-hdds The site is not just for 'over clockers' as they offer a lot of great advice for anybody.)

From Wiki

The primary benefits of virtual memory include freeing applications from having to manage a shared memory space, increased security due to memory isolation, and being able to conceptually use more memory than might be physically available, using the technique of paging.

Now with todays advances GB or RAM and multiple LANS of communication between CPU RAM it really isn't required as there is enough RAM in the system to load it all into your Physical RAM for future access and there shouldn't be any bottlenecks. Only difference is when you shut down your RAM clears and starts fresh on next boot up. But systems today are relatively fast that loading your app on a fresh start and loading it for the 10th time since being up impact will be minimal to non existent).

One of the problems with VM is the following which is also from the wiki

Thrashing[edit]

When paging and page stealing are used, a problem called "thrashing" can occur, in which the computer spends an unsuitably large amount of time transferring pages to and from a backing store, hence slowing down useful work. The phenomena is associated with the concept of a working set which is the minimum set of pages that should be in memory in order for useful progress to be made in a task. Thrashing occurs when there is insufficient memory available to store the working sets of all active programs. Adding real memory is the simplest response, but improving application design, scheduling, and memory usage can help. Another solution is to reduce the number of active tasks on the system. This reduces demand on real memory by swapping out the entire working set of one or more processes.

[AceMaster]

Oprindeligt skrevet af HerZeLeiD:

His CPU is future proof for gaming though, even if it means a very old game will run just as good or better on a fast dual core. It's worth having that 8 cores for stuff coming out now and tomorrow. Battlefield 4 is a great example of a multithreaded game and it favours AMD as well.

Of course I'm all about future proofing so I accept the fact that there are things that come out today or yesterday that will not take full advantage of what I have under the hood but may one day down the road. Quad cores have been out for a while now and games still don't take full advantage so technically at the rate of implementation he's future proofed for the next 10 years as far as cores go (maybe not speed wise but you can always OC to an extent).

[yeeyoh]

Oprindeligt skrevet af AceMaster:

Oprindeligt skrevet af yeeyoh:

Just to mention it. I'm not even sure if they update or patch the single player. It's a very multi-player oriented game. When I first got the game the A.I. on single player was so bad I quit trying it after about 20 minutes.
(As far as switching off page filing, most windows tweak guides do not recommend it. Windows does more with the page file than just use it to swap ram. With 16Gb it would probably never use it for that.. It's used to speed up boot times and other tasks... Here's an excellent guide to setting up an SSD if you ever feel like getting into it. http://www.overclock.net/t/1156654/seans-windows-7-install-optimization-guide-for-ssds-hdds The site is not just for 'over clockers' as they offer a lot of great advice for anybody.)

From Wiki

The primary benefits of virtual memory include freeing applications from having to manage a shared memory space, increased security due to memory isolation, and being able to conceptually use more memory than might be physically available, using the technique of paging.

Now with todays advances GB or RAM and multiple LANS of communication between CPU RAM it really isn't required as there is enough RAM in the system to load it all into your Physical RAM for future access and there shouldn't be any bottlenecks. Only difference is when you shut down your RAM clears and starts fresh on next boot up. But systems today are relatively fast that loading your app on a fresh start and loading it for the 10th time since being up impact will be minimal to non existent).

One of the problems with VM is the following which is also from the wiki

Thrashing[edit]

When paging and page stealing are used, a problem called "thrashing" can occur, in which the computer spends an unsuitably large amount of time transferring pages to and from a backing store, hence slowing down useful work. The phenomena is associated with the concept of a working set which is the minimum set of pages that should be in memory in order for useful progress to be made in a task. Thrashing occurs when there is insufficient memory available to store the working sets of all active programs. Adding real memory is the simplest response, but improving application design, scheduling, and memory usage can help. Another solution is to reduce the number of active tasks on the system. This reduces demand on real memory by swapping out the entire working set of one or more processes.

That's great but the first words "The primary benefits," say right there, freeing up shared memory is the primary (not the only) use. Most of that first paragraph has not been relevant since about Windows 98.
I've been following tweaking windows for quite a while (since about windows 95/98) and (like I said.) most tweak guides do not recommend turning off pagefiling as windows longer makes over use of it because of all the extra ram we now have. There are also interviws you can find with actually windows programers that say the pagefile has become an integrated part of how windows works now and has less to do with what that first paragraph from wiki is talking about.
Most guides I've read have said that making the smallest and largest file size the pagefile can be the same has some benefits but even that was before windows 7, after which they said you can make it pretty much any size you want with very little difference, but still they recommend leaving some (if even a small amount) memory for it. Some older programs send calls to the pagefile automatically.
Anyway, turn it off, leave it on, it makes little difference to me. I use wiki a lot as a source for information, but I'm not sure I'd completely agree with it this time, especially with so many versions of windows.

[Boizaum]

Thanks for the input everyone, I appreciate that all opinions. The issue I have is motly bound to single player campaign, i guess it could had been more optimized for weaker single threaded cpus. I can understand it though, not every game is smooth on my system, and not every game utilizaes every core at the same time. Mostly games that go for multithreads are current generation titles like far cry, metro, battlefield... I do feel sometimes that it would be nice to have a faster single threaded cpu like the phenoms, or a intel 3570k, but it's not that bad performer most of the time really. It seems my page file is usually around 2g? I can see that the ssd will shrink and grow about 2g with fresh reboots, not that big for whatever benefit the developers designed it I guess.

[AceMaster]

Oprindeligt skrevet af yeeyoh:

Oprindeligt skrevet af AceMaster:

From Wiki

The primary benefits of virtual memory include freeing applications from having to manage a shared memory space, increased security due to memory isolation, and being able to conceptually use more memory than might be physically available, using the technique of paging.

Now with todays advances GB or RAM and multiple LANS of communication between CPU RAM it really isn't required as there is enough RAM in the system to load it all into your Physical RAM for future access and there shouldn't be any bottlenecks. Only difference is when you shut down your RAM clears and starts fresh on next boot up. But systems today are relatively fast that loading your app on a fresh start and loading it for the 10th time since being up impact will be minimal to non existent).

One of the problems with VM is the following which is also from the wiki

Thrashing[edit]

When paging and page stealing are used, a problem called "thrashing" can occur, in which the computer spends an unsuitably large amount of time transferring pages to and from a backing store, hence slowing down useful work. The phenomena is associated with the concept of a working set which is the minimum set of pages that should be in memory in order for useful progress to be made in a task. Thrashing occurs when there is insufficient memory available to store the working sets of all active programs. Adding real memory is the simplest response, but improving application design, scheduling, and memory usage can help. Another solution is to reduce the number of active tasks on the system. This reduces demand on real memory by swapping out the entire working set of one or more processes.

That's great but the first words "The primary benefits," say right there, freeing up shared memory is the primary (not the only) use. Most of that first paragraph has not been relevant since about Windows 98.
I've been following tweaking windows for quite a while (since about windows 95/98) and (like I said.) most tweak guides do not recommend turning off pagefiling as windows longer makes over use of it because of all the extra ram we now have. There are also interviws you can find with actually windows programers that say the pagefile has become an integrated part of how windows works now and has less to do with what that first paragraph from wiki is talking about.
Most guides I've read have said that making the smallest and largest file size the pagefile can be the same has some benefits but even that was before windows 7, after which they said you can make it pretty much any size you want with very little difference, but still they recommend leaving some (if even a small amount) memory for it. Some older programs send calls to the pagefile automatically.
Anyway, turn it off, leave it on, it makes little difference to me. I use wiki a lot as a source for information, but I'm not sure I'd completely agree with it this time, especially with so many versions of windows.

I understand that it has other functionality and the integral part is the memory dumps they don't generate if you don't have page file on that I've noticed when the system BSOD's. I'm sure it has other benefits for Windows but when it comes to gaming how much of windows are you really using other than having it as your platform to launch your games which in this case turning it off is more of a benefit to gaming. (last game that wouldn't launch due to it was Dawn of War 2 again this was integrated due to RAM at the time not being where it is today) And I found that I have more stability with my games not running page file (I'll admit it might be more anecdotal but still from observation seems valid) and when it comes to gaming Thrashing will cause some performance issues with gaming as it tries to swap out data from VM to Physical when and if it gets corrupted which happens more often than not.