CS:Source -great graphics but fps-killer

[CoCoNUT]

Hi, just had the chance to play CS:Source on a friends machine. Also bots are encluded, so I was very excited and played with them a lot (offline, listenserver). They are the "normal" CZ-CS-bots, so they play exactly like them (I don´t like it very much).

Man, Source looks GREAT, but when I turned on the fps-display I saw only about 50 max-fps on de_cbble without bots, 10-25 fps with about 10 bots ingame. The comp was a 2400+Athlon, 512MB-DDR, Geforce FX5200 128DDR. Detail-settings at medium-low, 800x600x32 (directx. The machine is really optimized so I wonder how this could be. 30fps might be enough for a single-player-game, but for CS?

I won´t buy it before I have a next-generation-computer. But overall it was awesome to see the great graphics, it seemed like a graphics-demo, not for cs-play-and-feel (it feels a bit different and needs a monster-computer). A few screenies below.

[stefanhendriks]

well i have a Geforce FX 5200 , glad to hear it works fine without bots. I did not know it had bots installed ?!

[biohazerd87]

what???!!!! where did you get the bots????? and depends totaly on your settings... i have the 9800XT and would pull crappy frames if i put everything on medium and better when everythign on high

in this comp i have a
P4 2.8 1M LVL 3 Cache Presscott Core OC 3.2
ASUS P4P800 E - DELUXE
ATI RADEON 9800 XT
512MB KINGSTON 3200 DDR RAM
and i pull a steady 70 frames

[Pierre-Marie Baty]

Nothing wrong with 30, or even 15 FPS with the Source engine !

Remember, it makes extensive use of the level of detail technology, which makes it draw only what's needed and save a lot on polygons. 30 FPS on this engine is roughly equivalent to 100 FPS on the HL1 engine. At this rate, I guess you can play, right ?

Remember, the human eye can't do captures at more than 15 Hertz, that with the Shannon law means that below 30FPS any flickering is not discernable ; and furthermore the human brain thinks at 10 hertz (i.e you can't take more than 10 ideas per second, be them chained or not). Hence the limit of playability with the source engine is 20 FPS. Skilled players and people with high reflexes may prefer a higher value, but requiring more than 30FPS is inhuman

[TruB]

fps killer?.. i didnt think of frame per sec.. i thought first person shooter..

[>BKA< T Wrecks]

lmao @ TruB... there are so many ambiguous postings here these days... Whistler would agree.

@ CoCoNUT: Thx for the little insight. What I like most about the new gfx engine and the Source version of the well-known standard CS levels is that they look much more realistic. duust, for example, always looked kind of generic - what was it? A village? Some kind of base complex? You couldn't really tell...
Now, you can see all those houses with windows and antennas on the roofs, and the skyboxes look much more realistic, too. In that screenie yopu posted, office really looks like an office complex somewhere near a city. Somehow the maps and their backgrounds blend together a lot better than before.

[biohazerd87]

Where Did You Get The Bots

[@$3.1415rin]

@pierre : with that fps, 20-25 might be sufficient when you have motion blur, otherwise the eyes won't feel comfortable ...

[Exilibur]

Pierre, I didn't really understand your explanation on the source engine.. when you turn around, doesn't all polygons need to be redrawn in order to change the angle they're viewed from?

Dunno bout the eyething either... First of all, try seting your monitor on 50hz and then on 100hz afterwards. Imo it's pretty easy to spot the difference.
Even though the eye technically can't see a lot of hz's, the fps difference from ie 30 to 50 is definately affecting your game. I'm not high skilled, but nevertheless i can feel the difference in how the picture on the screen reacts to me moving my mouse at different fps levels. I think there's more going on with those fps's than just the updaterate of the eyes and brains.

about the bots. Bot's are indeed included in cs:source, but in the legal version they aren't activated yet. In two cracked versions the bots are activated, but it's obvious that they're not finished yet. They can't shoot a window in order to get through it, for example.

I'm aware that warez discussion is not allowed here, so please don't ask me why i know this

[Pierre-Marie Baty]

@asp: yep, that's what I meant, when you apply Shanon, you get 30 fps as the optimal lowest value. But the actual sampling made by the eye will be roughly 15 (half).

@Exi: the 'flickering' you see when you put your monitor at 50fps is not the actual 50hz, but a combination its harmonics. With a game engine it's a completely different thing, because it's about the rate of the data that is sent out of the video card, not the rate at which the electron beam refreshes the screen. You can very well play CS:Source at 30fps and have your monitor refresh the image at 100 fps.
When your player turns around, all the walls need to be redrawn, that's for sure, but the difference is that with a non-LOD engine, the video card will also be asked to redraw ALL the polygons that make little model objects in the background. For example, if a player model is made of let's say 2000 polygons, be it 2 kms far or 3 feet away, the video card will have to cope with these 2000 polygons, which compared to the 200-300 polygons that make up the walls you can see, are quite a lot. Add this other entities and a lot of players, and you have an horrible feeling of lag, no matter how high your average fps claims to be. Remember that in HL1 the fps is an average, in fact most of the frames last no time, only some of them which last longer are cause of the lag. I think the HL2 way of computing the average display frame rate is much more representative of the reality than the HL1 way.