[Fix Summary] Problem:massive framerate (1fps) variations on gf560ti when using TressFX in Tomb Raider. Solution: Game was maxing vram. Check with GPU-Z and then turn down textures to "high" - all good. Heya, Right if you aren't a techie graphics card nerd this won't be of much interest to you. If you are, though please read the details before posting. I got Tomb Raider (the new one) back in March or whenever it came out. Had a short go and AFAIK (or remember) it ran pretty good (benchmark was possibly max 50fps) on my nvidia gf260gtx 800mb on win7 32bit with 3gig ram. What I can't remember is if I was able to use the tressFX for the hair though... I suspect Tessellation was disabled as it wasn't a DirectX 11 graphics card (and I think that is a dx11 feature). Anyhow that's the history (I ought to test with the old card really). To get to the point, I am now on gf560gtx 1024mb on win7 64bit with 6 gig ram (fresh install) and I have an issue with TressFX. So if TressFX is off I have no issues, avg 40fps on benchmark I think. If I turn it on things get "interesting". What happens is that typically I go into the game, run the benchmark and I get about 25fps. That is fine, I know TressFX is an ATI/AMD tech that isn't really optimised for nvidia cards so I can accept "not the best performance". It looks great and I can live with the performance. The odd thing is though that if I run the benchmark a 2nd time I get about 1 frame per second! Try going into a new game and you can't even get passed the bit where she pulls the stick out cause the frame rate is so abysmal. This is where it gets really weird though... if I load up a save game and start playing the frame rate is initially kinda pants. Its about 15fps at normal distances from Lara and about 1fps if I get close to her with the camera (essentially the same performance as shown in the 2nd run of the benchmark). The weird thing is though that "at some RANDOM point" maybe within 5 to 10 mins of playing its like the computer has a cup of coffee or something and suddenly everything is super nippy!, probably >25 fps at all times even when getting close up. Its not to do with a specific area of the game either as I walk back to where I was with the bad frame rate and its still super fast. This stays the case till I next load a game or run a benchmark, whereupon I'm back to pants frames per second. So essentially, I KNOW the computer CAN perform at a workable frame rate with TressFX turned on but it only does it randomly.... Does anyone have any ideas? The closest I found to a person with the same issue is: http://forums.eidosgames.com/archive/index.php/t-137938.html maybe I should contact that guy? Things I've tried: going back to March release drivers that were supposed to address TR issues turning on maximum performance on the graphics card. the things suggested by the guy in the linked thread Turning off v-sync Using "nvidia experience" recommended settings (+TressFX) lots of other messing around with graphics options in game. Moving the game install from a HDD to a SSD Reinstalling Things I've not tried yet: Pirating the game (a friend suggested I try this as it would "take steam out of the equation") - I have a pirate copy ready to have a go with. (please note I DO own the survival edition of the game already) Trying my old gfx card. Thanks for reading and thanks more if you can help or suggest anything! Cheers Wistrel
oh about the video ram thing... I can't really see how it could be that but does anyone know how I check how much video ram is being used?
OK so sometimes all it takes to solve your problem is to methodically write it down and consider what you have tried and have not tried. I had a look into finding something to check the video ram and made some interesting discoveries. First, a great little (I mean little too) program called GPU-Z tells you everything you need to know about your graphics card even how much the fan is being used. Using this I did some experimentation. I discovered that the benchmark was pulling about 1010/1024mb of my vram with 27% mem controller load on the first run and was getting avg 25.7 fps. 2nd run it would fail altogether to pull anything above 1fps. Interestingly on that 2nd run it would only pull 800mb and about 3% mem controller load... suspicious. Exiting and re-loading the game seemed to always reset things. I then tried going straight into the (fairly intensive) opening scenes at the start of the game. This was what gave the game away so to speak. I was watching the intro (after the initial video bit) where Lara is thrashing in the water and it was doing a reasonable job at keeping up frame rate wise. I was also keeping an eye on the vram which was around 1010/1024mb. Somewhere round there though I think it topped 1020 then suddenly everything went choppy and didn't recover. So I concluded it was "running out of ram" that was causing the issue. The solution therefore was to drop the texture detail down from ultra to high. This seems to pull 800-1000mb typically so suddenly everything is now working fine and dandy and the game is 100% playable 100% of the time. I guess before, the reason why things would randomly speed up was cause there must be a point in the game where some sort of clean up happens and it resets whatever has messed up with the memory allocation. So to conclude: On a 560ti with 1024mb ram, to have TressFX on you can have everything maxed save for Textures which need to be on high rather than ultra. If you don't want TressFX you can have everything maxed. In the end I took down SSAO a notch and Anisotropic filtering since I couldn't really see the difference and got 16.5, 40.8, and 27.6 for min, max and avg fps respectively. I can live with that Wistrel
