Frame Rates
What parks are you running? Are you getting bad framerates in-editor or in the simulation?
Mainly the simulator. Editor is fine! And just my own parks. I don’t use many lights etc either which is odd!
Try the Double Loop Corkscrew park in the included library. What frame rate do you get on that park?
-Ride_Op
NL2 doesn't tend to force the GPU into high frequency since it doesn't demand much. Same goes for my GTX 1080 the Nvidia Driver "thinks" the demand is low so it keeps the clocks in check. What I do is I force "Prefer Maximum Performance" for No Limits 2 in the Nvidia Control Panel and I'm not sure if AMD has something similar you can do. This setting forces the GPU to stay at it's high clock speed regardless of demand but the trade-off is heat and power consumption. You can do the same thing with your CPU but setting your power mode in windows to High Performance which depending on the percentage you set will have more preference to keep the CPU at or near it's max frequency. Mine runs at 4Ghz.
I notice a pretty much locked 60FPS at 4K with my latest project "Aventador: The Revisit" with this setting enabled.
Heh. So I have built quite a machine here lately as I have it doing a lot of crazy functions (Database, Video Editing, heavy Excel Calculations in the millions, etc)...but anyways...
A park like Terra absolutely killed me, even in 2560x1440p with everything maxed.
Now, you might think "Well, duh! That park is detailed and huge!"
But heres my PC:
Threadripper 1950X OC 4.0ghz
32gb 3200 GSkill TridentZ RGB
TWO 1080Ti SC2 Gaming
Now, before you elaborate on why I don't need two 1080Ti's for gaming (and youd be right), I got a second to do gaming while my original one is mining me cryptocurrency while I work. I'm just 2 months in, already paid half of it all.
But that aside, even with ALL that horsepower and 32 cores of multi-threading power (Cards were in SLI today, turned off mining), I still could barely hit 30 on a park like Terra.
Assuming that NL2 probably doesnt use more than 4 cores or so at max (didnt check that yet) and doubt its taking advantage of SLI. However, even what I have split in half is still more than capable.
@Ride_Op - what are the most intense settings that smash your FPS in NL2?
I don't have quite the horsepower you do, and I still get around 30 fps mostly in Terra. It is very well optimized to run as well as it does with how much it has in it. Some parts dip a bit, others are higher. Try some additional parks as benchmarks and see how you do.
-Ride_Op
Disclaimer: Just my two cents about that from what I read and heard about these topics, I'm not an expert so I would be happy to be corrected, I also know there are many more factors contributing to the final framerate than this one aspect:
The problem is often that in many parks the objects are created / exported in a way that the CPU is very busy with transferring the data to the GPU, that means the CPU is having a hard time transforming all the different objects pieces until they get send to the GPU which has almost no workload since it just waits for the data from the CPU. A quick demonstration scene. In both variants there are exactly 49,920 triangles for my GPU to transform and shade.
In this first picture the GPU is bored because 4.992 different elements are sent by the CPU, so the CPU is slowing the FPS dramatically (which I guess could only be improved by overclocking it way over the 4 GHz at which my core was running):
Iin the second example it's just one element that is sent by the CPU to the GPU, so the GPU is happy and can work "hard", to draw and shade the 49,920 triangles:
There are probably other factors like the amount of materials and textures used per object that can have a probably (I never measured it) important impact. I know from reading about optimizations for other game engines that poor texture management (using many single texture files instead of combining them in one large atlas) can have a huge impact on how fast the data can be transferred to the GPU, I guess that's also true for NL2. Unfortunately many projects do not do that very well or the designers do not know / care about which results in these relatively low framerates (I'm happy with having 30, I have limited mine to 60 usually anyway ;-)) while the amount of polygons that are visible would probably no problem for the GPU to draw.
I guess in these cases only overclocking the CPU dramatically could improve the framerate. I also don't know if it would be possible to get more CPU cores transferring the data to the GPU, I read from another simulation software that they have about the same problem but the "old" graphics APIs like OpenGL or currently used DirectX versions were not made for that.
So from my understanding it's often more up to the park designer than to the NL2 software, that the performance is how it is and the available hardware power cannot be fully used.
Im running a single GTX 1080 an an i7 6700k and get around 40 - 60 fps in Terra on max settings, depending where i am, so it seems strange that you are getting less performance with that monster of a system.
I do see peaks up around 40-50 but anything higher is when you look away from the park. Entering it, it's struggling.
Again though, I'm running at 2560x1440 144hz with literally everything maxed.
that might be your problem, it consumes more processing power to have a monitor response rate at 144hz. Most monitors are at 60
bestdani posted on February 25th, 2018
Disclaimer: Just my two cents about that from what I read and heard about these topics, I'm not an expert so I would be happy to be corrected, I also know there are many more factors contributing to the final framerate than this one aspect:
The problem is often that in many parks the objects are created / exported in a way that the CPU is very busy with transferring the data to the GPU, that means the CPU is having a hard time transforming all the different objects pieces until they get send to the GPU which has almost no workload since it just waits for the data from the CPU. A quick demonstration scene. In both variants there are exactly 49,920 triangles for my GPU to transform and shade.
In this first picture the GPU is bored because 4.992 different elements are sent by the CPU, so the CPU is slowing the FPS dramatically (which I guess could only be improved by overclocking it way over the 4 GHz at which my core was running):
Iin the second example it's just one element that is sent by the CPU to the GPU, so the GPU is happy and can work "hard", to draw and shade the 49,920 triangles:
There are probably other factors like the amount of materials and textures used per object that can have a probably (I never measured it) important impact. I know from reading about optimizations for other game engines that poor texture management (using many single texture files instead of combining them in one large atlas) can have a huge impact on how fast the data can be transferred to the GPU, I guess that's also true for NL2. Unfortunately many projects do not do that very well or the designers do not know / care about which results in these relatively low framerates (I'm happy with having 30, I have limited mine to 60 usually anyway ;-)) while the amount of polygons that are visible would probably no problem for the GPU to draw.
I guess in these cases only overclocking the CPU dramatically could improve the framerate. I also don't know if it would be possible to get more CPU cores transferring the data to the GPU, I read from another simulation software that they have about the same problem but the "old" graphics APIs like OpenGL or currently used DirectX versions were not made for that.
So from my understanding it's often more up to the park designer than to the NL2 software, that the performance is how it is and the available hardware power cannot be fully used.
So basically you're saying that objects that are combined into a single 3DS file tend to have less real-time load but will possibly bork the load times and memory usage?
I don't really know what you mean by element from your 1st and 2nd examples. The 1st example is each building is a separate 3DS and the 2nd is that all the buildings are one 3DS?
No in the first example in the model file (collada in this case) are multiple sub elements that for example can be clipped or moved by scripts individually while in the second example these have been combined into a single mesh. You don't notice a difference in the NL2 editor since it is still a single Scene Object.
This quickly made graphic maybe clearifies this a little bit:
You can download the test park to see (and maybe share the results) how it behaves on your systems (since the results might also depend on more aspects like number of CPU cores and single core clocks, GPU speed, bus rates on the mainboard for data transfer and so on...): Download
But these behaviours for example are a reason why I strongly recommend to not use certain more CAD like software for designing objects for NL2 since it is usually hiding these rather important aspects from you while modelling.
There is maybe room for improvements on the engine side, like NL2 could probably automatically optimize models / parks with high element counts when there is no need to treat them separately like when these elements don't get clipped, use no scripts or material rotation effects and so on. But I guess this is not a thing that could be quickly done by the single person who created and maintains the NL2 engine. So one is on the safe side when one takes care of this when creating models anyway.
Hi Guys,
I’m having problems with FPS. I don’t seem to be getting a decent frame rate with the below system:
AMD RYZEN 1200 3.1 GHZ CPU
16GB RAM
4GB RADEON RX 560 GRAPHICS
Not a bad system. Is it preferred to enhance graphics through an external programme such as NviDia Inspector?
Cheers!