My Fps Is Teh Sux0r

[BobTheJanitor]

I've been enduring this for months and finally I'm bored enough here at work to try and do something about it! My problem is thusly: in won HL I easily got 100 fps everywhere. In steam HL, it caps out at about 60 fps. This is any game, not just NS, so it's not the uber NS maps that are doing it (except frickin' co_rebirth with its 20 fps max in some areas... but I digress) it's probably something in my config.

Now in WON HL, I know I had a few command line tweaks that were making my FPS more happy. In steam, it seems impossible to put in any command line arguments. Your options seem to be 'run the game', and that's about it. If I were at home right now, I would probably mess with it myself, but since I'm stuck at work for a bit longer, I decided I would post here and let some of you geniuses tell me your magic tricks. This way, by the time I get home I won't have to work at it nearly as hard.  :p

Oh, and the vid card is an Nvidia GF4 TI4200, 64mb. I know it's not that great, but this is still the HL engine we're talking about. It shouldn't need all that much. Now, fix my problems for me! (ahh, it feels so nice to be the one saying that for once, instead of the one having that yelled at him)

[Uranium - 235]

Learn what a 'refresh rate' is and why you should never go over it.

[Keyser59]

Refresh rate doesn't improve your fps, but it only increases the maximum amount of fps you can possibly get (unless you have v-sync off).

I have also noticed a significant FPS drop in steam. Do you by any chance have FAT32 file system? I heard steam and FAT32 don't exactly get along well together, and that seems to be the case in many situations where there are large fps drops from won to steam, including mine.

But yes, my fps never used to go below 40 in won, but in steam I wouldn't be suprised if I got below 20 in certain situations.

Oh yeah, I have a geforce 2, 1 GHz processor with 512 MB of RAM. Not exactly the most up to date, but it *used* to run half-life fine, and I rarely play other games.

Another reason why I dislike steam.  <_<

[devicenull]

You can use commandline arguments, right click half life in the steam games list, choose properties, then Command line options

[Uranium - 235]

Refresh rate doesn't improve your fps, but it only increases the maximum amount of fps you can possibly get (unless you have v-sync off).

Well, you're right, and wrong :p


Refresh Rate is the amount of 'refreshes' your monitor makes in a second. Really, your monitor doesn't display infinity frames per second (as nice as that'd be), and are constrained by what is called the 'refresh rate'.

The rate is labeled in 'hertz'. 85 hertz is my refresh rate. This is also the number of frames per second that your monitor is capable of displaying. I have Half-Life therefore set to cap my FPS at 85.

Exceeding the refresh rate (for example, going for the 100 fps) will actually degrade performance. Much like an internet connection being sent more data then it can handle and resulting in Packet Loss, your monitor will show 'tearing'. Tearing is when it displays only part of a frame because it's being sent data faster then it can display it. The easiest way to tell if you're tearing is to look down at a grated floor, and strafe back and forth, walk around, and spin. Grated floors work best since they are parallel lines of contrasting colors.

If the floor appears to fracture, and textures are misaligned for a brief second (that second will be your fps / 60, to be exact...), then you've screwed something up. The higher your FPS to refresh rate difference is, the worse, and more frequent tearing will be. In games where FPS can go higher then 100 (like... all of them besides half-life) you can actually get two or more tear fractures on the screen at once.

Keep your FPS at 60 if you don't know your monitor refresh rate. Once you figure it out, then adjust it up. But it's better to leave it low then to brag you have 100 FPS, while all the geeks and nerds are laughing at how stupid you are :p


For some reason on mine, setting my FPS lower then my refresh rate still gave me some form of tearing. I know not what causes that, but setting it to my refresh rates gives me absolutely no tearing, and fast performance.

A Radeon 9800 128 MB pro helps too.


So if you're exceeding refresh rate, you're a fool.

[Satiagraha]

I also have noticed significant FPS dropage in HL on Steam, although I have always played with V-Sync off (don't mind the difference in quality compared to the performance jump), that seems to help my fps. Also, I disable Anti-Aliasing and mess with a few rate and command related cvars in HL.

[Keyser59]

Well, to keep your FPS from exceeding your refresh rate (and thus prevent tearing, as uranium put it), you merely need to turn v-sync on. However, if you want the maximum possible amount of frames, you need to turn it off, since I don't believe monitor refresh rates go above 85 Hz.

You shouldn't be playing at a refresh rate of 60 Hz. That is really rough on the eyes, not to mention you'll get headaches after playing on that.

I keepy my max_fps low for a reason though. When in high-density areas, my fps tends to drop consistently to the same. The drop from 85 fps to 30 fps is much more dramatic then the drop from 60 fps to 30 fps.

If you have a state of the art computer that can get 100 fps all around, knock yourself out and turn v-sync off for that 100 fps. It doesn't hurt performance, but you will see some tearing.

When playing with v-sync off I really don't mind the occasional tear, but since my computer isn't the best, there really is no reason to play with it off.

It all depends on you and your computer.

[BobTheJanitor]

While all the discussion is interesting, and I now know about the place to put in the command line arguments, I was rather hoping someone knew the actual arguments that would help with the situation... And my refresh is 75, no problems there. And I'd still like to have my fps maxing at 100, even if nerds will be laughing at me, as that means that when I enter a turret farm or the hive on co_rebirth when it's full of players  my fps will only be dropping to 50-60 instead of 10-20 as it is now. So, anyone know those magic commands?

Edit: after a bit of searching, I find that it's actually a windows XP problem. Turns out XP locks your refresh rate in games to 60 fps. HOW NICE! Turns out there's also a fix for it in my nvidia drivers, so I just enabled that and now I get 75 max instead of 60. I tried turning vsync off, but that looks absolutely terrible. I'm sure it's about time to look into a new video card. I had a radeon 9800 128 pro for a while there actually, but not permanently unfortunately... long story.

[Uranium - 235]

I tried turning vsync off, but that looks absolutely terrible.

Terrible how?

[BobTheJanitor]

Terrible like shaky, grainy, lots of jaggedy edges showing up like multiple frames are trying to eat each other. If this is the tearing you describe, I must say it was tear-ifying.  

[Uranium - 235]

like multiple frames are trying to eat each other

:p That's exactly what happens too. Set your refresh rate to as high as you can on your monitor (might be a setting on the monitor, might have to go into display settings) without breaking it, then cap your FPS at that. Since your refresh will be up there around 70-90, really, you'll be getting smooth performance (Really, you don't NEED anything more then 60 fps, but it is nicer) and it'll look great too


Wait a tic... something's wrong.

We're having a discussion on FPS and maximum performance, and some ignorant sod didn't come in and say how the 'human eye can only see 50 FPS maximum' or something. C'mon, where is he!

[BobTheJanitor]

The human eye can only see-- ACK!!

Ahem. Well, at 60 fps and/or 60hz refresh, I can still see a visible flicker. It's not bad, but after a long session it can get pretty painful on the eyes. I think I see what's happening though. With vsync on, steam is auto-capping the FPS at the same level as the refresh rate. Without vsync, it's not stuck at the same spot, but it does look crappy. Wonder how it always managed to work fine under WON? Oh well, gg steam as usual. I'm guessing I'll manage ok with the 75 fps I've got now. Although co_rebirth remains a mess. I reeeeeally hope another new version is released in b4.

[Ulatoh]

fps_max 100 in console

if that doesnt do it, disable vsync

if that doesnt do it, time for a new monitor

[STEALTH EDIT:] you should also know that for it to work at 100, vsync must be off, AND fps_max 100

get net_graph 3, and then restart  if you get 100 fps on the menu screen, it should work

[Uranium - 235]

I just put fps_max 85 in my autoexec...


Bob, tinker with the buttons on your monitor. If it has a GUI that pops up, then you most likely can adjust the refresh rate there. Otherwise, in 'display settings' you can tweak it as well. If you go over the refresh rate, it'll go black and NEVER WORK AGAIN! That is, until the timer runs out and reverts...

[lolfighter]

Setting a higher refresh rate than your monitor can handle can also cause damage to it. At least that's what the warning messages say. Definitely won't yield higher refresh rates anyway, so my advice is figure out what the maximum is, then set it to that.