Really poor performance | Forums

[rlmergeuser]

Hi there!
I bought Trials 2 a few days ago and really enjoy it overall. Still, I seem to have a performance issue with the game.

My PC:
Core 2 Duo E6600
GeForce 8800GTX 768MB, ForceWare v180.48
2GB RAM
XP SP3, latest updates etc

Whenever I set the graphics quality to "normal" in the launcher (which is the highest option available to me, don't know if that is supposed to be that way), the game's performance ranges between completely unplayable (very noticable stuttering) and just playable (noticably low frame rate, probably somewhere around 15FPS). Enabling / disabling options in the in-game graphics menu barely changes that, changing resolution from 1920x1200 to 1680x1050 doesn't seem to have any effect at all.
For testing purposes I tried the map "Construction Work" and the performance drops noticably whenever those scaffoldings are on the screen.

Playing on low setting works pretty well, although the game still has some noticable performance drops then.

[sebastianaalton]

Have you overclocked your graphics card? Many players have reported bad stuttering and frame rate drops on overclocked cards (including some factory overclocked ones, expecially BFG OC models).

[rlmergeuser]

nope, nothing OCed in my machine. Both CPU and GPU work at factory defaults, and it's none of these fancy "Extreme" graphics cards for a ridiculous price.
Also, FSAA and anisotropic filtering are set to application-controlled in the drivers, so that's not it either (ran into that with Fallout 3 )

[sebastianaalton]

Hmm... strange. Are you running the game on full screen or in Windowed mode? Do you have installed a custom window/desktop manager to your computer or are you running other programs that use your graphics card on the background? We have noticed that some (badly coded) instant messenger programs for example are drawing popups over the whole screen (even on full screen mode), and causing massive stuttering when active.

Are all your settings from your graphics card control panel set to defaults? No transparency AA for example active, and you haven't disabled support for DXT compressed textures?

[rlmergeuser]

I have several programs running in the background, of course. None of them have caused issues with other games so far, though. Programs running and displaying something are:
- Rainlendar
- Miranda IM (exiting that didn't affect Trials 2)

Programs running without displaying something, except the tray icons, of course:
- Gigabyte EasyTune 5
- WD Drive Manager (for external HD)
- Spybot S&D
- COMODO Firewall agent
- AVG

Just checked the nVidia control panel again. Transparency AA was set to supersampling, I just disabled it and will try the game without it. I'll report back with results.
I didn't find any option to enable / disable texture compression support.

edit:
Okay, just tried. Disabling transparency AA didn't change a thing. Still unplayable, no matter what I set the in-game options to.

Oh, I forgot to say: None of these fancy desktop enhancements is installed. Just XP SP3 with Windows Classic look. I prefer it that way.

edit2:
Just to be sure I killed Rainlendar and turned off the second screen I have. No change.
The fun part is: Switching from "multiple display performance mode" to "single display performance mode" after disabling the second screen improved performance a bit... although that might have just been my imagination. Not sure, really. Either way, the increase in performance was only slight and not really helping.

[rlmergeuser]

Okay, I just used FRAPS to record min/max/avg fps for a run through "Construction Work" (first level). The results are odd, but match the in-game FPS counter (which I just found today ):
With high quality ambient lighting I get 33 / 61 / 47.359 FPS, without high quality ambient lighting it's 44 / 78 / 55.430.
Both would be acceptable for me. It seems like the game is rendering fast enough and there's something else lagging. I had the same slowdowns to unplayability when the scaffolding came into view during these two benchmarks, btw.

[rlmergeuser]

Any ideas what might be the issue? I'm completely stumped. The FPS are okay, still the game is unplayable.

[sebastianaalton]

You can try forcing v-sync (wait for vertical refesh) on from your graphics card control panel. That has helped some players having stuttering on Trials 2.

[rlmergeuser]

No success
I also tried running the game using only one core of my CPU. It might have been my imagination again, but I thought the game stuttered a bit less then... but, similar to multi-display performance mode vs single display performance mode in the nVidia control panel, the benefit definitely wasn't enough to make the game playable.

[rlmergeuser]

Are you sure it couldn't be settings in the Nvidia control panel (16x antialiasing for example) it happened to me and that was the cause had extra settings on for midtown madness...