I'm 99% sure it's related to the fog that these maps have, and I think there is no way to disable it.

Even with a perfectly capable PC, I have noticed that certain bloom settings can cause fps drops on these 2 maps, but I don't know which settings they are, or if any other settings not bloom-related can also cause this.

hmm, could be but it only seemed to start a week ago - and on my other computer using a v similar cfg i dont seem to get it, as i say - post process is off and as a result, bloom is also disabled ; (

Well the one thing that sets asylum and quarantine apart from the other maps is the fog I mentioned, which basically consists of a shitload of almost transparent layers that are spread out at intervals from the players pov to create the effect:

http://i.imgur.com/dUdmLTX.jpg

In theory the layers by themselves shouldn't pose too much of a threat to FPS but I'm guessing that they are being "processed" by something.

The fps drops don't happen to me usually, but they did happen on these 2 maps when I was messing around with the bloom settings.

We need an expert!

Edit: Apparently Siberia also causes this, and Siberia also features fog!! Coincidence? I think not!

God I hate this stupid fog effect. It's really noticeable and annoying. The "sun rays" that are part of the windows on Asylum are annoying too but I understand that's part of the map; this fog effect isn't, so why can't we disable it?

worst thing is, when u cant play the map because people vote against it because of fps drops. quarantine its a good map

Indeed, it's strange for id software to not allow something as superfluous as ambiental fog to be removed, especially considering how resource-intensive it's turned out to be.

"it's strange for id software".....
no, it doesn't really feels strange

:D

Yeah, there is something about fog which causes a lot more FPS hit than it should.

I don't know how hard it would be for the game to remove the fog. All I know is for level wide fog, all you have to do is make a cube, textured in a fog shader, that fills the entire map. But ofc you can also just fill holes with fog (eg pit of death). I haven't tried loading a map up which has level wide fog, but with the fog shader deleted. But if it simply makes the fog go away, then maybe an option could be made in the game to simply ignore the fog shaders. I've got a feeling though it'd break the map :D

But it seems like the fog effect in these maps are not a fog brush, but something like quads rendered perpendicular to your viewing direction. Or something. :D

This seems to be the case.

The thing is if you make a cube textured in a fog shader that covers the entire map in QL engine, (I think) it just gives the whole map the same degree of fog no matter what the distance. The deal with more realistic fog is it's supposed to get more and more opaque the further away you look, so in order to achieve this they have made multipe parallel 2D layers or "walls" of semitransparent fog appear at regular intervals perpendicular to the players pov (like this), so it has to constantly recalculate the wall's positions in regard to the rest of the map every time the player moves, or moves his mouse, or both.

If you load up asylum or quarantine and find a large dark-floored area and move around, you will see that the layers of fog remain perpendicular to the player at all times and at the same intervals, they are not fixed to the map.

Maybe this constant recalculation of the layer's positions as the player moves around the map isn't what causes the fps drops, because in theory they're just a load of 2D surfaces that could be recalculated in an instant... however I've already seen that they can be subject to special effects processing and rendering because I suddenly got fps drops on these two maps while messing around with bloom settings.

id software either needs to make sure these layers aren't affected by any rendering or processing effects, or add an option to disable the layers completely (or ideally, both). I don't think it would break these maps if removed, because the fog effect isn't strong enough to be that noticeable, not even on Quarantine when looking from one side of the map to the other.

Maps like Fatal Instinct however would be broken if it was removed because the fog is the most integral part of the map... so they would also have to force the fog on this map regardless of it being "disabled" or not.

I'm also curious if people affected by fps drops on quarantine, asylum and siberia are also affected by fps drops on fatal instinct... because this map has a very low poly count.


Hopefully syncerror sees this post and gives us some info!

I think maybe you misunderstood me, I have made a map with the cube method and it comes out exactly like Quarantine etc. I got some FPS drops when I tried it, too. Maybe theres a bug in the game code or some fog shaders which cause it... I don't know if the same thing happens in Q3 but it would be interesting to find out.

That's weird, because if the cube method works (gets more opaque at more distance) then why they bothered to implement this way more complicated method on asylum and quarantine is beyond me.

Or maybe....... asylum and quarantine DO use the cube method and it just LOOKS like there are layers given the way the player's pov intersects with ....... something....

I'm confused.

Ye, thats what I'm saying, using a cube is pretty much the only way to do it. If you wanted to make the fog thicker, you just adjust the values in the shader file, there isn't any need to add lots of fog brushes everywhere. Basically the cube tells the game where to put fog, and the shader tells the game what kind of fog it is (colour. thickness, etc).

You could try loading Quarantine in Q3 to see if there are FPS drops, then you'd know if it was something specific to QL. I don't get FPS drops on those maps though so I can't test it easily (I only got it on a really complex map I was making when I added fog).

I can't test it either because I only got fps drops when I tried out a certian combination of bloom settings that I can't remember :/

Thoose lines are directly a consequence of the mipmap filtering. I can't say much about the fog fps drops.

i thought the same as i saw the lines: r_texturemode "...mipmap_nearest".
by the way, adding fog by spaming the map with a bunch of multidirectional fog-objects seems stupid. i have all 3 settings of r_enable... set to "0" and get no fps drops on asylum/fatalinstinct/quarantine.

Yes you can actualy see the correlation. The mipmaping subdivision can be seen with this command :
r_colorMipLevels [0|1]
0 = disabled
1 = enabled.
A mipmap texture visualization tool – colors surfaces by distance from view.

wow

i have the same problems. In my old CFG i dont had so mutch FPS drops on these maps. But the problem is i dont have the CFG anymore. It was an old CFG from 2010 i guess,

btw what does r_finish do?

its an old setting brought over form q3 (im not sure if its even in use in ql, it used to make a big diff back years ago in q3).

essentially affects things like shiny surfaces, on tourney4, it i used to make the metal surrounds to the doors reflective etc and had a huge impact on fps.

r_finish - sync ev.frame if 1 Improves response screeen/keyboard/mouse -1-2fps

This explanation is the closest to what I remember r_finish doing.

http://tremulous.net/wiki/R_finish
http://www.excessiveplus.net/forums/thread/do-you-use-r-finish
http://www.crossfire.nu/threads/view/id/6750 (bottom post)

..evidence in the q3 source suggests that this is what it does:

case ID_SYNCEVERYFRAME:
trap_Cvar_SetValue( "r_finish", s_preferences.synceveryframe.curvalue );
break;

// sync with gl if needed
if ( r_finish->integer == 1 && !glState.finishCalled ) {
qglFinish ();
glState.finishCalled = qtrue;
}
if ( r_finish->integer == 0 ) {
glState.finishCalled = qtrue;
}

it doesnt improve response time on modern PCs, actually vice versa makes the game more jerky. It did help on very rare old singlecore PC configurations by pausing the thread and as a side effect letting input be processed, but nowadays it only makes everything worse(with the game still being singlethreaded and paused every frame)

r_finish 1 is based on glFinish function of OpenGL, it basically pauses the whole game thread to wait till all operations in OpenGL buffer are completed. Generally you shouldn't use it if you don't have a veeeeeery old PC, huge noticiable input bugs or vsync enabled

Yes, except I was under the impression that it didn't work in QL at all. When I last tested it I couldn't get any difference.

I'd always had such a problem on my laptop, never seen any salvation.

I just never liked this two maps so it was ok for me.

i have the same problem with my current laptop in those maps and especially in terminus where i even get 10 fps or so, dunno how to fix it...

It may be a recent background process you've added.

I do not know why, but the hp tool that sits in the taskbar for my scanner causes a much higher cpu usage when quakelive is running; only thing I can think of is it polls an update server, odd idd.

I also noticed that whenever my SSD (OS disk) is under heavy usage, it could cause stuttering as well (yet remain at a steady 125fps with drawfps 1 (transferring large files over to my NAS for example).

I'd just keep task manager open and see how high the cpu usage is when in game, get rid of any startup programs via msconfig, then have a think from there.

i would tend to agree with you except this is a fresh install, with nothing else on the machine at all and nowt been installed : )

Oh, that is idd a bit odd/concerning :S

Could be i/net related; have at look at the lagometer and see if there is any packet loss; it can have a similar affect at times.

Sounds like ql's fault tbh :(

i've had the issue too on those maps.
I once used the cypher config from i think it was adroits.
resulted in a lot of cvars that i didnt need and make my fps drop (in the same way you described)

deleted repconfig en qzconfig, executed my own and the problem was gone :)

i also had this problem but it was actually internet related. for some reason, to all servers at the time, i was getting very minor jitter and packet loss but it was making the game feel like there was a huge amount of input lag and "fps drops."

it was an exceptional pain in the ass because i thought it was my config. after countless tries of deleting qz and repconfig, and after countless cvar_restarts, what have you, the problem persisted.

i finally deleted my config and started over from extremerz's config and the problem vanished.

coincidentally, the config had absolutely nothing to do with it, and i realized it was an internet issue after i deleted the config that i loved so dearly. i recognize that some of the things i said in my post may seem contradicting, but i cant quite remember the ins and outs or chronology of the events so i apologize if it's convoluted or impossible to understand. good luck finding a solution.

I have the same problem on these maps, and on Siberia as well.. I've heard that my laptop is too old for high resolution textures used in these three so I simply don't play them.

Siberia also has fog!

turn off nvidia threaded optimization
no problem

What if you use an ATi card?

buy nvidia gfx LOL

I had trobles with nVidia quite a few times in the last 17 years, unlike ATi. LOL.

you just meet your first ati problem... gratz


hahahahahahah3h3h3h3hh3h3h

so ownd

This is probaby not VGA related at all, because it was the same with 8600 GTS, GTS 250, 9800 GT and even HD 4890, both under XP and Win 7. And not just Quarantine and Asylum - map doesn't matter.


hahahahahahah3h3h3h3hh3h3h


roflmao

call me when ATI cards get good

I just did.

told you to call me when they good, not when you finish blowing me

Ok, nVidia fanboy, you gave excellent techincal support, like good fanboys do. Universities in Fagtown must be pretty elite to provide such a high level of education in IT. Thanks again.

was just about to reply to this, and I am using an AMD 5850 ; ) - only reason i didnt bother was the obvious reply "buy nvidia" - but seems thats already happened.

why use shit gfx when you got nvidia for same price? ;0

think your on the wrong forum for a fanboy battle ; )

nah, just screwing with them :-)

try tweaking Multi Thread Support through ATI Tray Tools, though i got no idea if that helps

Also happens on Siberia and on qzpractice1/2 (near the spawn, atleast), and to my knowledge those also have fog.

Those maps work fine for me and I run a low-end PC with post-process and bloom. I use picmip and r_subdivisions 80. vertex is off.

They're big maps, they got a lot of brushes. And it's reasonable to assume the fog is going to increase the burden. Still, why would cg_drawfps be incorrect? Surely if that's what it's displaying, then that must be what it is rendering at! No?

At any rate, without hearing from an expert or knowing more about this specific case, I would agree with Something that you need to tune your operating system.

I think the cvar in WolfcamQL is cg_fog 0.

its a fresh win7 install, with barely anything on the machine, literally a minimal install while i was working on something else.

to be honest dont get me wrong this pc isnt amazing, but with a core2quad and 5850 it shouldnt struggle with quakelive regardless of settings really ; (

have you recently changed settings, cfg, drivers or any hardware? could you check if you have the same problem on open aereas in furiousheights and toxicity?

havent changed anything, was literally as the map pool switched over for this month i started to notice it.

just pld a few games today on window pain, and that was worse than ever oddly enough.

will take a look on those - although t7 seemed ok as i remember.

I also get fps drops on asylum down to around 80 fps since the last update. doesn't sound like much, but it's pretty notable and annoying. never used to happen before.

finally someone with a similar issue - did this start literally since they changed the map rotation?

if it were q3 maps, someone would make a tmp version, and if enough players were having problems, tmp would be default, but with ql, meh. Petition someone? would think it's an easy fix, but sync would need to know the demand.

afaik there have been widespread complaints about fps drops on these specific maps ever since they were introduced

there has indeed, ive read them many times and laughed about the fact that any one with a reasonably recent pc shouldn't struggle... and now im having the issues, on a reasonably decent pc ; )

karma

well i've had em too with my 8400gs, but changing driver solved it. since changed to a 8800gt but nvidias driver after 158 seems to be a gamble if it's gonna work or not(fps drops on the most recent driver)

still, it's a ql problem related to those maps, maybe we SHOULD start a petition, and have a thread about it on ql forums? it seems like an easy fix, for those maps, and since ql is what it is, it's just to push those out and replacing the broken ones?

slunge, i get low fps on those maps with postprocessing on. if i turn that off, i get 125fps.

hey, post processing is already off, and oddly it sits at 125 fps but just occasionally flickers in certain areas... its bs really as the computer is more than capable and never experienced this a month or so ago : (

As per dopeys post above yours, ive tried new drivers and two different gfx cards - neither helps.

Interesting fact!
I've got the Asylum and Quarantine lag on a computer that havn't had it before! I have another computer with the exact same gpu and a cpu that scores the same as this one and on the rig I dont play games on its rock stable at 125fps and on the one I do play on i got drops down to about 50-60 fps on Asylum and Qarantine.

Have tried different stuff. Set all the clocks to default in bios and the gpu and i still get the same result. Re-installed the QL plugin. Tried QLprism. Uninstalled the onboard sound drivers. Resetted the settings to default.

NOTHING WORKS!
Im sure its NOT related to fog settings or anything like that. Could be related to motherboard chipset maybe. I've got the G31 chipset on the computer with lag.