ways to make game run better

[catb0mb]

I've had this game ever since it hit steam, yet it seems the latest update made the game not run as good as it did. I've put almost everything on low, yet every 10 seconds I get a gigantic framedip. Any suggestions?

[The Doctor]

What are your specs? It might just be that your PC isnt good enough to run the game at best quality. I have had no problems with the games performance on max settings. Letting us know your specs will help narrow down the issue

[catb0mb]

Originally posted by The Doctor:

What are your specs? It might just be that your PC isnt good enough to run the game at best quality. I have had no problems with the games performance on max settings. Letting us know your specs will help narrow down the issue

Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-6500U CPU @ 2.50GHz

Video Card Intel(R) HD Graphics 520

Video Card #2 NVIDIA GeForce 940M

RAM 16 GB

Operating System Microsoft Windows 10 (build 16299), 64-bit

I'm able to max out every other source engine game, and I was able to max this out as well back when it first released but now it just doesnt work, dunno if this is due to the xen engine update or what.

[DIGITAL SPORTS]

Unfortunately being able to max out other Source games doesn't really mean much for Black Mesa. Our game was always more demanding than other Source engine games, now even moreso with our new deferred renderer.

Getting massive frame dips every 10 seconds is an oddly specific problem, though. What's your average framerate, and what does it dip to? Perhaps there's some kind of system specific issue that can be addressed.

Are you sure your system is actually running BMS on your 940M? It's possible (happens a lot on laptops), that it might be trying to run BMS through the Integrated Graphics, which could be why you have poor performance. On your system I would expect decent performance, which is why I say that.

[Forward Bias]

Is your monitor plugged into the motherboard video output, or the 940M? Is your default video card the 940M?

[Nathan]

Yeah you should be getting decent performance with that laptop, it's more powerful than mine and I run the game on Ultra-High settings minus AA (and motion blur) and resolution at 720p, getting mostly 60fps 80% of the time.
You should of course make sure in the Nvidia Control Panel that your preferred graphics processor is set to high performance Nvidia and not intel.
Could be a windows 10 issue, both its updates, and how win10 can mess with resolutions and fullscreen settings of games, try switching around with windowed mode, making sure it doesn't start alt-tabbed, giving admin rights to the game executable and steam executable (there's another compatibility setting there worth checking out, overriding high DPI scaling behaviour, application versus system).
Also of course updates, and driver updates.
With win10 you might need to disable a lot of starting programs, both in the Task Manager and in the Services tab of the "msconfig" utility. Win10 basically hates all programs that aren't Microsofts that they get a cut out from.
I had a horrible Win10 issue where the firewall would eat up my cpu usage massively all the time in the background, all because the updates messed with the saved firewall settings, needing to default them back to factory settings, something I only discovered after a lot of google attempts.

Lastly, just to be safe, maybe verify integrity of game cache and unsub from any potential mod you might have, couldn't hurt.
I can also post my autoexec file cvars for you to experiment with, and run the game with the launch options "-high -autoexec"

[catb0mb]

Originally posted by BMS DIGITAL SPORTS:

Unfortunately being able to max out other Source games doesn't really mean much for Black Mesa. Our game was always more demanding than other Source engine games, now even moreso with our new deferred renderer.

Getting massive frame dips every 10 seconds is an oddly specific problem, though. What's your average framerate, and what does it dip to? Perhaps there's some kind of system specific issue that can be addressed.

Are you sure your system is actually running BMS on your 940M? It's possible (happens a lot on laptops), that it might be trying to run BMS through the Integrated Graphics, which could be why you have poor performance. On your system I would expect decent performance, which is why I say that.

Firstly thanks for the reply!

Secondly I've checked already, the game is running on the 940m. I verified the cache and unsubbed from the mod I had installed, and it seemed to run somewhat better. Running it on reccamended settings at 1080p it runs normally fine at 70-80fps, but at some of the more intense parts of the game (ie. first part of unforseen consequences, surface fight in we've got hostiles!, etc) it dips to either the 20s or single frames almost every 30 or so seconds. The most consistant performance i've seemed to have gotten so far is playing the game at Med-to-low settings at 4:3, normally at about 170+fps but getting small dips, usually for about 2 or so seconds (at 1080p these dips tend to last about 5 seconds or so).

[Tilen]

Point a gun at it and say "Run."

[DIGITAL SPORTS]

Do you have MSAA enabled? It's a real performance hog (and isn't really working properly at the moment anyway), I would try with it off.

Those dips are REALLY BAD and definitely not normal. Our game has sections which perform worse than others, but not by that significant a margin. Have you tried running the game in borderless windowed mode? In some cases this can dramatically improve performance, for reasons I don't quite understand.

Something's not quite right here, at any rate. Your spec is decently similar to my laptop, which has zero issues and zero performance dips.

[catb0mb]

Originally posted by BMS DIGITAL SPORTS:

Do you have MSAA enabled? It's a real performance hog (and isn't really working properly at the moment anyway), I would try with it off.

Those dips are REALLY BAD and definitely not normal. Our game has sections which perform worse than others, but not by that significant a margin. Have you tried running the game in borderless windowed mode? In some cases this can dramatically improve performance, for reasons I don't quite understand.

Something's not quite right here, at any rate. Your spec is decently similar to my laptop, which has zero issues and zero performance dips.

MSAA's always been off, yet boarderless window mode seemed to help at 1366x768! I still get some dips, but they are definetely not as frequent as they were before, thank you!

If I may ask, is there any way to permanetely turn off god rays? Idk why but it keeps reenabling itself whenever I boot up the game.

[DIGITAL SPORTS]

The graphics settings in the current version of the UI are kind of hacked together and pretty screwy. There may not be a way to solve that, unfortunately. You could try with the console command:

np_gr_quality 0

Try just inputting this on a menu, it might stick. Our put this in your autoexec.cfg.

This will be a problem that is solved in the future, as we have a UI overhaul planned with proper options that work correctly.

[GordonFreeman(Muted)]

Originally posted by ♥♥♥♥ urkel:

I've had this game ever since it hit steam, yet it seems the latest update made the game not run as good as it did. I've put almost everything on low, yet every 10 seconds I get a gigantic framedip. Any suggestions?

Try disabling CSM / MSAA / Vsync / Godrays/ Dynamic shadows and Motion blur.
Set light quality mode to medium or low.

Use np_gr_quality 0 to disable godrays. Add it to launch options or cfg file.,