Hey guys,

a question that has been bothering me for a while.

In old HL1 we used the r_speeds of a map mainly to measure it's playability for the community.

How's that done in games and mods using the source engine?

One possibility would in my opinion be to find out whether there is or is not a kind of "late 2006 average gaming machine".

Some video games magazins do that aswell to make a game's performance comprehensible to the players.

Currently I'm trying to achieve more than 50 FPS on every corner of my maps on an AMD Venice 3000 with a 7600GT and a GB of RAM - and I'm wondring whether this might be too high or too low as a standard.

Well, what do you people think?

Cheers,

Albatros

That's too high a standard. I'm on a PIV 2.4 with 768 Mb of Ram and a 9500 Pro, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was closer to the average PC. There are steam stats available for everyone to determine what steam users run.

http://www.steampowered.com/status/survey.html


As you can see almost half of steam users run with in between 512 and 1 Mb of Ram. I'm right in the middle. The Intel CPU speeds show the over 60% of Intel users are still in between 2 and 3 Ghz, with single core processors.

Your fx card is closer to "the norm" but you'll see the extremely wide array of cards available.

With your kinda setup, go for 60-70 fps all over your map (with full action, not running around on your own) and you'll be good to go.

With that said, we all need to remember that the fact we invest time in posting on an official forum makes us leave the "casual gamers" group. We're the guys with the biggest comps in the whole DoD:S community because we care about our gaming experience. And we're also the ones that will play custom maps.

Casual gamers join a quick deathmatch on official maps, they don't download our stuff. Based on that, your custom map can be a little harder on performance than stock maps and still be popular.

Hey Furyo,

thanks for that info sheet, it's very close to what I was looking for!

Only problem I see is that it apparently is six and a half months old with new generations of CPUs and video cars having been released in the meantime.

But I suppose you're nonetheless right about me cruising around on a higher-than-average level.

I'll just have to go for maximum optimizing. ;)

Oh, and... do you know if there is some kind of benchmark comparable to the hl1 r_speeds for source?

A tool like that would be a great aid.

Thanks,

Albatros

P.S.:

I almost forgot my second idea - using stock maps for comparison.
Usually I try to get a few more fps than Anzio or Argentan which run slowest on my machine.

Originally posted by [AoS]Albatros
Oh, and... do you know if there is some kind of benchmark comparable to the hl1 r_speeds for source?

bind x +showbudget

Hi skdr,

well yeah, thanks... I do in fact know +showbudget, but is it of any use for knowing how fast a map will run on other player's pcs?

I don't think so...

There's only one tool at your disposal: http://www.dod-federation.com

Ask for a playtest, we'll get you a full server to try your map on. If people during the test complain about FPS, you know you have some work to do still. Happened to TheSurgeon and me this week end :)

Heh,

agreed. As soon as it is done, which might be the case rather soon...

Thanks for the offer :).

But I think I'll have to ask a couple of further questions later on specific issues... so I can increase the framerate to a perfect level.

Greets,

Albatros

1. Run around a stock map empty w/+showbudget on or (cl_showfps 2)

2. Then open your map and do the same thing.

3. Compare.

:)

If that was a perfect way New_b, you wouldn't have complained (rightly so) about rive's FPS this week end.

If I run around in it, I never go below 50 FPS on my own. Add some guys and I drop way lower. That kinda difference isn't felt on stock maps though. That's due to the rather big areas along the river in Rive, which offer plenty of space for massive firefights (sfx, particles and physics galore) and players seen at one place. That isn't the case in stock maps (though I remember back in the beta days, we'd already mention the fps drop on ava's plaza.)