I noticed when I was in a combat zone my game would randomly drop from ~120fps to 15fps or lower. With huge frametimes that jumped all over the place. It seemed totally random. Made all the more frustrating due to the ~15fps or so makes my ship handle really poorly. I ended up losing my asp in a very bizarre fashion where a python appeared to "scoot" right into me and instantly blew me up. I say "scoot" because it wasn't normal movement, it looked like rubber-banding from a shooter game. The python was going one way then just swooped over to me like a magnet and boom. All at a glorious 15fps, so I couldn't even turn away. Anyways, I decided to try and figure out the cause of the huge fps drops. Jumped out and back into the combat zone and just watched my framerate go from the hundreds to 12 then back to hundreds. Back and forth like that in a comical way. Then I noticed it dropped only when there was a ship chaffing. Which there is lots of in a combat zone. Every 5 seconds or less if you're watching the whole battle from afar. In close going after ships it seemed random, but it happened whenever I was to point my ship in the direction I could see chaff(from the ship I am after or in the distance) hence as your pitching/etc to follow a target you pan around the background battle and sweep through chaff effect in view several times constantly. So it seemed random. But I made a quick youtube video clearly showing the culprit is the chaff effect alone.
Fitted chaff to asp, SC away from station good bit, drop out of SC in the middle of no where, in SOLO mode, facing nothing but the skybox. Start flying backwards and deploy chaff and instant lagfest.
So the interesting thing is that both my GPUs drop down to 18% usage from 98% and the framerate from 170fps down to 25fps. 25fps would be marginally bearable for a moment except that the thread is so locked up the frametimes are jumping all over the place and it "jutters". Basically a frame every second or so takes way longer to render than the rest. So it appears to lockup a lot.
[video=youtube_share;qsZyxZCTkvI]http://youtu.be/qsZyxZCTkvI[/video]
i7-3770k @ 4.7ghz, tried HT on and off
2x R9 280x in xfire
As if that wasn't interesting enough, here is another tidbit. I suspected that for some reason the thread doing particle effects on the CPU was bottlenecking....well maybe but get this. CPU usage for the ED process goes from 36% to 26%. So CPU drops 10%, GPUs(both) drop 80%, and fps goes from 170 to 25.... what is going on here.
Graphs!: (cause graphs are awesome)
Test results:
Theory:
Initially I began to think this was caused by a possible hardware combination. However with more results coming in from people I'm starting to think it's a software thing. Testing on my end is limited, I appreciate greatly the people posting results and hardware for me.
Fitted chaff to asp, SC away from station good bit, drop out of SC in the middle of no where, in SOLO mode, facing nothing but the skybox. Start flying backwards and deploy chaff and instant lagfest.
So the interesting thing is that both my GPUs drop down to 18% usage from 98% and the framerate from 170fps down to 25fps. 25fps would be marginally bearable for a moment except that the thread is so locked up the frametimes are jumping all over the place and it "jutters". Basically a frame every second or so takes way longer to render than the rest. So it appears to lockup a lot.
[video=youtube_share;qsZyxZCTkvI]http://youtu.be/qsZyxZCTkvI[/video]
i7-3770k @ 4.7ghz, tried HT on and off
2x R9 280x in xfire
As if that wasn't interesting enough, here is another tidbit. I suspected that for some reason the thread doing particle effects on the CPU was bottlenecking....well maybe but get this. CPU usage for the ED process goes from 36% to 26%. So CPU drops 10%, GPUs(both) drop 80%, and fps goes from 170 to 25.... what is going on here.
Graphs!: (cause graphs are awesome)
Test results:
| Drop | CPU | GPU | RAM | SSD |
| 170 ⇒ 20 | Intel i7-3770k @ 4.7Ghz | AMD 2x R9 280X xfire | 8GB 2100Mhz | ✔ |
| ✔ | Intel i5-3570 | NVIDIA GTX 760 | ? | ? |
| X | AMD Phenom II x4 955 @ 3.65Ghz | AMD HD7970 3gb | 16GB 1666Mhz | ? |
| X | Intel i5-2500k @ 4.7Ghz | NVIDIA 2x GTX 680 | ? | ? |
Theory:
Initially I began to think this was caused by a possible hardware combination. However with more results coming in from people I'm starting to think it's a software thing. Testing on my end is limited, I appreciate greatly the people posting results and hardware for me.
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