MultiSkin, significant performance drop when enabled

[SaimOn]

Hi all,

back to BoB after buying a new puter.
I'm now on my 4's Computer with BoB II and have to ask a question about Multiskin.
In the past, I had Multiskin always disabled because in the big Battles (i.e. instant action) with Multiskin enabled my frames dropped to around 20 or below. Every time I was sure that my computer was the culprit.
Now I’m on a SandyBridge i7 with 3.4Ghz with 8GB Ram and a Nvidia GTX570 etc. bla, bla...
Fresh install and still the exact same behavior

I’ve read many many times, that MultiSkin is demanding on Videomemory but should have no effect on performance.

Disabling Mutiskin and all is running smooth like silk and even in the biggest Battles I’m getting over 50 FPS with a full hd resolution of 1920x1080 in all it’s glory (AA/AF etc).

So is it only me? And if so, what could be the reason?

P.S. It looks like that the Bomber Skins are making the biggest problem. Would be nice if we can choose to install only the fighter skins in the future.

[Buddye]

Hi SaimOn, welcome back to BOBII. It has been a long time. Your new PC looks super.

How much video memory do you have on the GTX570?

I get drops on my PC during the very large battles but I always thought it was just processor power vs work load.

The guys added alot of new stuff on the bombers and maybe it is having an impact on performance. Most of the multiSkin guys have moved on or they are having some job/family commitments (not around much). I think you have some control over which MS but I am not up to speed on how.

[SaimOn]

yep, it's been a few years, family, work, you know the stuff…
I hope all is well for you.

Still have a lot of work but needed at least a little window into another world, BoB that is
Last time we were in contact I was chasing the mystery AI-Warps for you.

The Nvidia has 1280MB of Videomemory. I think that should do it.
Yes there is a thread somewhere discussing how to modify MultiSkin. Guess I’ll have to look at it a little closer.

P.S. Your development on the AI is superb!

P.P.S. Perhaps someone else can chime in and share some experience with MultiSkin and FPS?

[PV]

You've probably already found this post in the BoB2 FAQ forum, as it is quite prominently visible there
http://www.a2asimulations.com/forum/vie ... 48&t=23195

[Osram]

That is quite surprising. I am not sure what can cause it, especially as you had the issue with several computers.
A very long shot here but you have nothing running in the background? It would be surprising if a background app interferes in this way, but maybe what programs you run is the thing that is identical in all your computers.

[SaimOn]

Hi Osram,

I tested again with MultiSkin on and off, with only Bombers or Fighters and it's definitely a big difference in FPS.
Nothin in the background, antivir off.
So it's MultiSkin off for me...

P.S. Thanks for the link PV.

[Buddye]

Hi SaimOn,

I did some testing and just focused on the Bombers as they had the most stuff added for multiskin (new color spinners, stuff above and below the wings, and side/Tail stuff. My PC specs are in my sig at the bottom.

I flew the Historic London Mission and I selected the HE111 and waited for the FPS to settle down after mission start.

Results:

MS Disabled, I got 55-60 FPS.

MS Enabled, I got 40-49

I tried 3 of each and FPC seems to vary with the amount of fighter action.

Conclusion in the London Mission is that MS cost is about 11-15 FPS which for my PC is really not a problem for me.

[SaimOn]

Hi Buddye,

thx for testing!

It's true, the London mission is more fps friendly and I'm getting similar fps like you, sometimes in the 30s.
Take the Historic "Black Thursday afternoon" mission and you'll drop under 20 frames at times.
Sure, there is no other mission with so much planes in the air that I'm aware of.

I'll let MultiSkin off by now, not only because my FPS is constantly at 60 (not going higher because I use vsync on), but also because the planes are moving smoother (no micro stuttering).

But of course, I would love to have MultiSkin enabled...

[heinkill]

Another thing you could try is to run a previous version of multiskin. I think 2.06 was quite a complete version, with most of the 109 and RAF fighter skins in it. If you google you should be able to find it on a download site, if not, I have it.

H

[SaimOn]

thx heinkill.

I've tried your suggetion and it is a compromise.
But for the big battles I'll still disable Multiskin.

[Bader]

I am rather late here, but perhaps this could help. There is bound to be some hit with hundreds of individual skins. Generally you don't have hundreds in the same frame, of course..

You can selectively disable Multiskin for each aircraft type if you wish. so you could keep the fighters and remove selective bombers, for example.


To remove an aircraft from MS disable/remove its associated .fx file(s) (Some have more than one). It'll revert to a non-Multiskin version.

the files are (pretty self-explanatory, I think) here:

FOLDER: \cockpm16\
spit.fx
hurri.fx
Bf110.fx
he111.fx
he11nalf.fx
ju87Tmpl.fx
ju88skin.fx

FOLDER: \imagemap\
M109ULF.fx
d17eng.fx
D17RFLAP.fx
D17ulflp.fx

[Tanyrhiew]

I too am seeing significent drop in FPS with Multiskin enabled. The following pic shows what my PC is doing in the Black thursday Afternoon IA mission with MS enabled:



My PC although a laptop has a i7-740QM, 6GB 1333Mhz DDR3, GTX 460M with 1.5gb VRAM and 7k RPM HDD. The following review of the model of laptop I have shows performance with other games:

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Med ... 717.0.html

From the above it should be clear that the bottleneck is not the PC but the game itself. My CPU is not maxed out (the i7-740qm has a base frequency of 1.73Ghz rising to 3Ghz with turboboost when using a single core at maximum). The graphics card is using less than a third of the total RAM available and the GPU itself is at 20%.

Hope this helps with optimisation as it looks like BoB needs some!

Note: I excluded the BoB.exe and folder from MS security essentials so its not down to conflicting with the antivirus. The screenshot was taken with the ENBseries mod enabled but performance is identical with it disabled.

[Buddye]

Hi , nice PC but I am not believing all the PR about it's capabilities based on the Black Thur Afternoon mission which we have used for 6 years as a bench mark. It is possible to always improve the performance of software but you do reach a point of limited returns which is where I think we are with BOBII.

The black Thursday afternoon is BOBII's most Processor heavy IA mission with well over 200 A/C in the air requiring processing and updating. Your PC shows a min FPS of 13 which is very good. Your processor is the limiting bottleneck in BOBII and not your Video card. Your Processor speed is 1.73 GHz which is the bottleneck, I think. Sorry, I do not understand nor do I believe your PC's turboboost capability with respect to the BOBII Black Thur Afternoon mission that it is delivering the promised speed or you would be getting better performance than my PC (maybe the turboboost time period is too short to impact the mission's processor load, do you know the max time that it stays in turboboost?).

Here are two pic's of Black Thursday Afternoon on my PC (spec's in sig). My processor is a 2.66 GHz which is about 65% faster than yours. In your Pic you are getting 18 FPS at that instant in time and I am getting 34 so I am getting about 53% more with a 65% faster processor. I run the mission smooth without any issues. Yes, the MultiSkin is an impact to the processor on my PC about 10-12 FPS and longer loading times. This mission will demand a very fast quad or dual core PC to run on high settings with good FPS (> 40 average, > 10 min) but you do not need that many FPS to enjoy the mission. The key is to not let the min FPS drop too low. As you can see my PC permits a low min FPS for a very short period during loading.

What do you get without MultiSkin?

[Tanyrhiew]

Based on the info i have the i7-740QM default is 1.7GHz on all 4 cores. Dependent on load and temperature, Turbo boost operated as follows:
At 3 cores via turbo boost it goes to 1.86Ghz.
At 2 cores via turbo boost it goes to 2.6GHz.
At 1 core via turbo boost it goes to 2.9GHz.

In the first pic you see that while loading one core was momentarily maxed out before it dropped:



In the second pic you can see the FPS with MS disabled is OK. Oddly the graphics card is actually doing something this time. Note on a second run I gained an extra 10fps when i closed paint with a max of 71 and average of 50.



There is no thermal throttling going on as temps were in the region of 50-60 deg C. I've only seen temps in the high 70s once and that was under a benchmark program. Usually they are in the 60s in the most CPU intensive games I own (RoF and SES Jutland). In jutland in an equally busy scenario with 250 ships and an awful lot of shells being tracked individulally, the CPU runs at 2.4-6 on one core for hours. In Rise of Flight I can quite happily have a 30 plane dogfight at >30 fps. In that game its the graphics card that is the limiting factor (as I knew it would be).

On a related note I have also noticed in the London IA when flying near the ground with full object density that the fps oscillates very rapidly between >25 and <10 fps.

I maintain that something is not quite right with BoBs renderer or rather possibly how the shaders are implemented with respect to multiskin.

[Buddye]

Thanks for the data. First , during BOBII loading the bottleneck is harddrive I/O and not CPU which is why it mostly a single core and sinle thread, I think.

It is interesting that your MultiSkin performance hit is about 20 FPS which is higher than I have experience (my MultiSkin hit is 10-15 fps depending on the mission but Black Thur Afternood is the worst).

A data point for you. Here is a Pic of my thermal system monitor. The hightest temps I have seen are 31C when running COD while dog fighting over London: