Performance is bad on fast PC

Black Mesa Archive In-game Issues (Mod)
#1

I seem to have bad performance with BM. There’s stuttering every 1 second, and smoke effects result in an FPS drop (prime example is looking at the smoke right after the resonance cascade occured; the FPS drop is very heavy there.) Turning on the flashlight also makes things worse.

Lowering the graphics details and resolution has no effect. Weirdly, it makes it worse. I’m normally using 1920x1080. Dropping it to 1280x720 (the lowest resolution listed in the options), results in even more stuttering.

The suggestions in the sticky threads don’t have any effect (like changing the affinity settings of hl2.exe.)

I have a Core i5 2500K CPU (3.3Ghz), an NVidia GTX 560 Ti GPU (using the 306.23 driver) and 16GB of RAM. This is well above the recommended system requirements of BM. The OS is Windows 7 x64.

#2

I have nearly the same setup (Core i7 2600k, same vidcard, same RAM, same OS) but I have none of the issues you describe. I’m still using the 306.02 driver, though; try downgrading to that and see if it still stutters.

#3

Did you try the FIX listed at the top of this bug-report forum? To make sure it’s not stuck on single-core processing?

#4

Looks like you’ve been in a great hurry to post a reply. That much hurry so you forgot to read OP message:

2OP: Try rolling back drivers to latest stable release for your videocard (304.x series for most nVIDIA cards), remove all and any custom settings you had applied in nVIDIA CP and/or third-party tools like nVIDIA Inspector. Most importantly: turn off Ambient Occlusions, turn off FXAA, turn off Adaptive Vsync, set vsync to be forced off by default, set antialiasing to be controlled by application, set anisotropic filtering to also be controlled by application and set power mode to be “Use maximum performance”.

Then, edit command line parameters for BMS and all “-dxlevel 98” there. Start it up once (it should reset all the renderer settings and screen resolution to safe defaults), configure output resolution to your personal preferences, then go into advanced gfx settings dialog and there chose not to use AA, not to use Aniso (i.e. set filtering to “Trilinear”), use HDR, do not use motion blur, do not use vsync and max out all other settings. Then quit the game and remove “-dxlevel” parameter you had added to game command line startup parameters.

Make sure you have no dxwrapper apps running around like MSI Afterburner, DXoverrider and various types of SMAA/FXAA injectors. And turn off Steam In-Game Community in global steam preferences.

Then start up the game and check if stutters persist. If they are: proceed with budget panel like described here: https://forums.blackmesasource.com/showthread.php?p=494535#post494535

If not: start to enabling back settings like steam community and Co one by one testing the game after enabling each of them. You would either end up with the problem-causing setting or would get the game working normally with all the things turned back on.

P.S. And, first of all, check the value of the in-game cvar mat_queue_mode, it should be set to 0. If it’s set to 1 or 2 - you’d end up with huge amount of stutter/jitter and frequent crashes here and there.

#5

The particle effects (smoke and stuff) are VERY costly in BMS. The lack of multi-core rendering support doesnt help either. Have you tried launching with command +mat_queue_mode 2 in launch options? It can drastically increase performance by forcing multi-core rendering, but it can be unstable and may result in crashing. It works for some people but crashes for others. Give it a shot.

#6

a) In 2007 Source SDK mat_queue_mode other than 0 is broken. Expect sudden crashes or extreme jitter when moving if you have vsync turned on.

b) Multicore rendering won’t help if you’re in GPU-constrained situation (which you are in case of smoke particle effects - fillrate is a limiting factor there). Multicore rendering could help if you’ve got a lower-end multicore CPU which have not-so-fast single core performance and the benefit it provides is not due to “accelerating GPU to draw things faster” bur rather by having the engine perform pvs and other geometry and texture uploading/mapping stuff in a faster way. In case of BMS you won’t in general be constrained by the latter stuff - most of the troubles come from either something strange happening with the dlights calculations (they require way too much CPU power compared to the original HL2) or from having highly-detailed geometry like prop_static and other models being rendered in a huge amounts (CPU constrained and GPU triangle setup constraided). Couple that with alpha-blended particles effects like smoke being GPU fillrate constrained and you could say “hello” to numbers like 10-30 FPS even with pretty powerful GPUs like GTX 460/560.

#7

Driver downgrade didn’t change anything. (Btw, latest stable release is 306.23). The previous stable is 301.42, and that version didn’t help.

Using -dxlevel 98 doesn’t do much either. All my NVidia settings are set to “application controlled” anyway.

It seems that BM is simply overdoing it with the particle effects. I’m holding off playing this for now, and hoping for a patch that will improve on it :slight_smile:

One thing is for sure though: there’s no way the listed recommended requirements for BM are even close enough to running the game in a satisfactory manner.

#8

This.

Agreed. I don’t find playing it with my GTX 560 Ti a “problem-free experience”, but I still find it pretty fun to play. And on another PC I have which is equipped with GTX 550 Ti playing BMS is really painful at some places - FPS drops to 20-30 range which is show-stopper for me. Then again, there are a lot of people out in the wild who find FPS in 25-30 range pretty satisfactory to play. As a former QW player I can’t understand it but there are people like that.

As for holding off playing - there’s a workaround I had implemented and currently using for playing BMS on my 550 Ti rig. Add the following to the autoexec.cfg:

bind "u" "incrementvar r_dynamic 0 1 1;incrementvar r_dynamiclighting 0 1 1;" bind "j" "incrementvar r_WaterDrawReflection 0 1 1;" bind "m" "incrementvar r_drawparticles 0 1 1;"

Then, as soon as you get into an area with major FPS drop - press u. If it hadn’t helped - press j. Still not? Press m. Then, after clearing up hostiles in the area, press all these keys again to turn the effects back on. Most of the times it is enough to use only “U” or only “M” to get the FPS back to the acceptable level. So far “j” had helped me only at two places - one with a flooded icy floor in the “We’ve got hostiles” and another is a place where you met bullsquid for the first time.

#9

Same thing happened to me when trying to play COD MW2. It was to do with smoke/dust particles and post-processing.

Try a reinstall of your drivers. In the end I gave up on trying to play the game, and reinstalled it 2 months later after I had updated my drivers. No problems at all after that.

I had the exact same problem. Putting everything to ‘lowest’ and even trying to play the game at a ridiculous 800x600 still resulted in about 5fps on a PC with almost the same specs as yours.

#10

Strange I wonder what would cause a performance discrepancy between similar PCs.

I’m running BM with 301.42 drivers and it’s running great so far, no stutters, rarely drops below 60fps (currently at On a Rail).

This is with everything enabled & at there highest in BM settings plus 32X CSAA / 8X supersample & no .cfg edits.

i7 920 @ 3.36ghz / 12GB / GTX 480 (301.42) / Creative X-Fi audio / Win 7 64

#11

GTX 480 is a pretty powerfull card and your CPU is also not the worst one ever. Thus you have no fillrate-related problems with smoke clouds (overdraw is huge for them in BMS) and combined powers of your CPU and GPU handle dlight and complex geometry + water reflection with a less FPS drop. Don’t forget that your GFX card costed at around 400-500 USD at the moment when it was “on the rise” and this card is not that old - it is very similar to GTX 580 and is not so hugely worse than nowdays GTX 680.

#12

I’m running an:

i7-2600k overclocked to 4.2GHz
16GB Corsair Dominator 1333
2x SLI GTX 560Ti 448 Core Edition. ASUS Direct CU II

Playing maxed out in-game settings, with no .cfg edits or extra modifications from the Nvidia panel.
I never go under 60fps no matter what. Even if I lob grenades like a freak and blow stuff up everywhere.

No problems at all, but I did have that issue I explained with COD MW2.

I’d suggest to upgrade, not downgrade your drivers. Also don’t install that 3D driver unless you play games/and have a 3D capable monitor. I found those 3D drivers to throw all sorts of bugs in games even when not enabled. Especially in games that have ‘HDR’ rendering options.

In short, don’t install anything you don’t need.

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