CS:Source -great graphics but fps-killer
 

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 (directx8). 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.


http://people.freenet.de/3016/coco/de_dust2.jpg

http://people.freenet.de/3016/coco/de_chateau.jpg


http://people.freenet.de/3016/coco/cs_office.jpg

Re: CS:Source -great graphics but fps-killer
 

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

Re: CS:Source -great graphics but fps-killer
 

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

Re: CS:Source -great graphics but fps-killer
 

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 ? 8)

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 :)

Re: CS:Source -great graphics but fps-killer
 

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

Re: CS:Source -great graphics but fps-killer
 

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

@ 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.

Re: CS:Source -great graphics but fps-killer
 

Where Did You Get The Bots

Re: CS:Source -great graphics but fps-killer
 

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

Re: CS:Source -great graphics but fps-killer
 

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 :)

Re: CS:Source -great graphics but fps-killer
 

@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.

Re: CS:Source -great graphics but fps-killer
 

that pretty much makes wallhacks ineffective, doesn't it?

but anyway as i understand it, you're saying that the hl2 engine is somehow faster because it only draws visible stuff. Why should the fps displayed should be any better because? I mean, you might get higher fps, but if you have 30fps in hl2 and 30fps in hl1, are one of the games then really running at a higher fps than the other, because some polygons aren't being drawn?

Re: CS:Source -great graphics but fps-killer
 

no. I think peopl emess up FPS and Hz here.

FPS is literally "Frames per second" , more specificly the more 'screens' are drawn at a second. When i write my own games i have a simple counter, every second it counts the amount of screens i draw on the screen buffer. Hmm, i see this is a bit confusing. See it like this:

- you have a bitmap the size of your monitor resolutions
- your video card has a screen buffer (what you see on ur screen)

The engine draws everything probably on the BITMAP first , and at the end the BITMAP gets drawn on the screen. I wont get into details, as there are many manners to draw parts on the bitmap , and not redrawinfg things that have been drawn already (dirty rectangles, etc).

The amount of HZ is the amount of 'refresments' on the hardware size of ur screen buffer. Meaning, your CRT monitor will 'draw' that buffer on its screen. Everything below 72hz (on a CRT) will give u a headacke.. ur eyes will see a steady screen at 72 hz! (and i am a living proof + dozends of people i have helped with this problem).

On TFT screens u wont have this flickering btw..

anyway, unless the HL engine clears the bitmap everytime and then redraws all (which is stupid IMO) , it will calculate everything and then draw it. Drawing itself is probably not that CPU intensive, though the LOS and 'visibility' checks do. This causes a slow down.

Meaning, you can have 50 FPS, meaning the game does 50 cycles in one second. But your screen can do 100 Hz.

The FPS do probably not differ in HL1 and HL2. HL1 just uses an 'old' way of drawing the world compared to HL2. The FPS will probably be the same. In fact, strictly taken, FPS has nothing to do with polygons, or whatever you do in the game. It just means the amount of cycles. Meaning, in HL2 , 30 fps means it probably does MORE stuff, then in HL1 on 30 fps. In HL1 there is no physics engine for instance. Lets say the cycles in HL1 you can run your game at 60 fps. In HL2 that could be 40. Meaning that one cycle in HL2 costs more. Simple as that.

Re: CS:Source -great graphics but fps-killer
 

Interesting. I have a Geforce 4 TI 4200 and AMD Athlon 64 3200 (1 MB cache version) and I get 40 FPS at the least at 1024*768. Try cranking down some of the detail levels. Try going to options->video->advanced options and set them like this:

model detail: medium
texture detail: medium
water detail: simple reflections
shadow detail: high
anti-aliasing mode: none
filtering mode: trilinear
shader detail: high
wait for vsync: disabled

Also, in the console, try typing mat_dxlevel. It if is set at 90 and up, set it to 80. If it is set at 80, you can set it to 70 and disable shaders and use Direct3D 7.

About FPS and hertz, there is a relationship. Hertz is a measure of frequency. 1 hertz is one instance per second, whil 3000 is 3000 instances per second. Your monitor will always hit 60 Hz, but the problem is that your computer might not render it fast enough, so your FPS will be lower. You should usually limit your FPS to the refresh rate of your monitor, which is usually about 60 or 70 Hz, I always use 60.

As for FPS the eye needs, an image must be flashed on and off 30 times a second for it to appear solid (this is how monitors work) and 15 times a second to appear to be in motion. NTSC TVs (like used in the US and Japan) get a refresh rate of 60 Hz, but they are interlaced to reduce flicker.

More info here -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlace

Also, I don't think computer monitors use interlacing. They are a lot more perfect than TVs.