Running Solus on extreme old machine (P4 + AGP)

[himmler1]

Hello. Today i've started mad experiment - Solus on my second old machine:
-s478 P4 3,4 Ghz (@3,7 Ghz) with HT
-AGP HD 4670 1Gb
-4GB DDR400

And you know what ? It works on DX10, it's even playable sometimes (about 20 FPS at the first location (near the space ship on the beach)). But there is huge performance loss in the caves (about 2-3 FPS).
Render resolution doesn't matter on FPS - the bottleneck is CPU.
I think if to disable or simplify some CPU-intense tasks (like physics) it will be more playable.
I know it's a madness, but does anybody know what can i try to disable in configs to increase framerate and unload my CPU ?

[Kitsune]

Maybe low the resolution screen. Sometimes that works.

[himmler1]

As i said - bottleneck is CPU.

[Dillinja187]

In defaultgame.ini disable ocean update and lighting update and have a poke around in there to what else u think might gain performance, if your not sure leave it standard :)

When i said disable its changing from true to false or vice versa. open .ini with notepad :)

U can even set the scroll speed of PDA in there, i find really handy

[sjoerd]

If the bottleneck is CPU I don't really know how you'd go about this. All of the settings and all of the commands are GPU based. There is nothing to really toggle on the CPU side.

Type "stat unit", it will tell you for sure if it is CPU or GPU.

[himmler1]

Thanks for the advice. My stats looks like:
Frame: 55ms
Game: 54ms
Draw: 50ms
GPU: 29ms

GPU-Z shows about 60-75% GPU usage during playing, Task Manager shows 95-100% CPU usage. So CPU - it's a bottleneck.

Maybe it's possible to simplify some physics, or grass animation or something to unload CPU?
For example this physics parameters:

MaxPhysicsDeltaTime=0.033333
bSubstepping=True
bSubsteppingAsync=True
MaxSubstepDeltaTime=0.016667
MaxSubsteps=6

Are they causes CPU-intense computations ?

[sjoerd]

The grass is also running on GPU.

What might be CPU is occlusion, there is something somewhere called HZB Occlusion. You might want to try enabling/disabling that (opposite of whatever it is now).

Also the updating of particles is probably CPU. You could try typing "show particles".

You could try disabling substepping, or keeping it on but messing with the delta time. That is how frequently it updates physics I believe, so a larger number I think means fewer updates.
Also the MaxSubSteps could be lowered, gives a similar outcome.

I strongly doubt this will help though. I don't have any other ideas. Like most games it is not designed to deal with a bottleneck CPU, and I don't even know how I'd add in support for that. Whatever I could have done to make it smoother on the CPU I did already.

[A JANITOR]

tweak windows as best as possible use msconfig in win 7 to disable the crap that loads on taskbar on boot
windows 8.1/8 use task manager startup tab to disable everything windows doesnt need at boot like itunes that chews the cpu
norton turns any pc into worlds slowest brick
can give system a bigger page file not too big or it ruin the hdd(increase virtual memory)
ccleaner disk cleanup and disk defragmenter also speed up windows=pc run like its new out of the box even if theres 600 games installed on pc
disable windows areo theme use classic lower the screen size for desktop to 1048x1048 instead of max size
exit remaining stuff on taskbar leave steam sound app and gpu settings app running
maybe that help get the most out of the cpu to free up extra memory for solus
if ya lucky it might iron out the bottleneck
chuck in some old 8gb ram if have some old ram cards laying around

in the games settings or config turn off
ambient occlusion
turn off antialising
turn off vsync
set everything to low
screen size 800x600 or 640x480
try that as it might boost fps enough to play the game with no lag or at least 40+fps
thats if old cpu and old gpu can take it
dont overclock your pc it probly fry the cpu and gpu:)
also try what sjoerd said
btw sounds like a fun experiment:)


my pc low end but im happy with solus jammed on 60-62 fps everywhere with a 1gb AMD video card it also likes ue4 editor:)
another friend bought solus gotta love steam chat:)

[himmler1]

引用自 A JANITOR：

Sorry, but your advices are useless. Everybody know this common things. I asked for game-specific tweaks.

引用自 sjoerd：

Thanks again for fast reply. I'll check this parameters.

[himmler1]

So, i've tested some tweaks - and now it's pretty much better. It's almost always more than 20 FPS (outdoors), but framerate extremely drops when i go to the caves (less than 2 FPS). I don't know why, but it looks like some huge calculations (for example software tesselation or something like that)

My settings are:

[/script/engine.physicssettings]
MaxPhysicsDeltaTime=0.033333
bSubstepping=True
bSubsteppingAsync=True
MaxSubstepDeltaTime=0.05
MaxSubsteps=2
SyncSceneSmoothingFactor=0.000000
AsyncSceneSmoothingFactor=0.990000
InitialAverageFrameRate=0.05

[/script/engine.renderersettings]
r.MobileHDR=False
r.MobileNumDynamicPointLights=0
r.MobileDynamicPointLightsUseStaticBranch=True
r.AllowOcclusionQueries=False
r.MinScreenRadiusForLights=0.030000
r.MinScreenRadiusForDepthPrepass=0.030000
r.PrecomputedVisibilityWarning=False
r.TextureStreaming=True
Compat.UseDXT5NormalMaps=False
r.AllowStaticLighting=True
r.NormalMapsForStaticLighting=False
r.GenerateMeshDistanceFields=False
r.GenerateLandscapeGIData=False
r.TessellationAdaptivePixelsPerTriangle=1.000000
r.SeparateTranslucency=False
r.TranslucentSortPolicy=0
TranslucentSortAxis=(X=0.000000,Y=-1.000000,Z=0.000000)
r.CustomDepth=0
r.DefaultFeature.Bloom=False
r.DefaultFeature.AmbientOcclusion=False
r.DefaultFeature.AmbientOcclusionStaticFraction=False
r.DefaultFeature.AutoExposure=True
r.DefaultFeature.MotionBlur=False
r.DefaultFeature.LensFlare=False
r.DefaultFeature.AntiAliasing=0
r.EarlyZPass=0
r.EarlyZPassMovable=False
r.DBuffer=False
r.ClearSceneMethod=1
r.BasePassOutputsVelocity=False
r.WireframeCullThreshold=5.000000
r.MSAA.CompositingSampleCount=1
r.WireframeCullThreshold=5.000000
r.HZBOcclusion=0
r.BloomQuality=0
r.AmbientOcclusionLevels=0
r.DepthOfFieldQuality=0
r.SSSSS=0
r.TranslucencyVolumeBlur=0
r.TranslucencyLightingVolumeDim=8
r.MaxAnisotropy=0
r.LensFlareQuality=0
r.SceneColorFringeQuality=0
r.FastBlurThreshold=0
r.ShadowQuality=0
r.TonemapperQuality=0
r.ssr.quality=0
FX.MaxCPUParticlesPerEmitter=0
r.rhicmdbypass=0
r.FinishCurrentFrame=1

[wrenchse]

Love this experiment. :)
It might sound silly, but have you made sure you have not accidentally turned VR on? Check settings, special. We have had quite a large number of reports where people accidentally have pushed F11 which toggles VR. If no Oculus is connected this would tank the framerate.
I can't help you any further as my other suggestions would already be on your list.

[Ypulse]

try lowering view distance if u can somehow
thats the most cpu intense thing in games

[sjoerd]

The caves tend to render lighter on the GPU due to no sunlight and short view distance, but because of the number of models and enclosed nature the occlusion tends to go up. Did you try the HZB thing?
Also the view distance is indeed a good one too. That could lessen the occlusion calculation impact since distance culling is lighter to calculate than real time occlusion. There is a command or property somewhere like r.viewdistancescale or something. I forgot the exact wording.

The caves also have AI, so if it is really CPU that kills you the AI might add extra overhead. Not sure how you'd go about that.

If the public build still has stats you could try typing, in the console in game, "stat scenerendering" or "stat game" or so for more info.