Question about fps limit.

I've recently gone from 4 to 6 clients for my lotro set, and I had to tweak some settings because I had somewhat of a performance drop after adding 2 more clients.

I currently run stacked on fullscreen, with the fps 60 for the focus window and 20 fps for the backgrounds. Will a big difference in fps make it harder to do mouse broadcasts and general sync? I'm thinking of lowering the background windows to 10 fps, because obviously, there's no need for additional fps when I'm only looking at one window at a time.

Also, will it help performance to run only the main client in dx11 and the rest in dx9? I'm not even sure if it's possible.

Any help appreciated.

[bob]

It all depends on your hardware.

I tend to use a 60/15 setup for a 6 man team. No specific reason for it though. I have a dxnothing set to 30/30.
I also run DX9, and low graphic settings on all clients, including my main (although I do have high draw/distance settings). This is more of a noise reduction factor than anything. This tends to sit the GPU at about 10% and 1.2GB vram.

I have no issue with broadcast sync. The programming in LOTRO makes a 6 man team fairly annoying with NPC interactions anyway as not all team members will be able to interact as the NPC is "busy" so I've got a round robin mouse click (SHIFT+Mouse1 for me) to get around that, and I've never had an issue with the mouse movement, but then I also have a cursor sync as part of the first step of my mouse round robin, so I don't actually need broadcast except on the odd occasion.

[lax]

Mouse broadcasts will work fine. In an MMORPG you're not typically going to be moving your characters together via broadcasted mouselook, you're going to be using auto-follow and only turn on mouse broadcasting to click on UI stuff. A slight difference in timing/fps is not really going to affect you for this type of mouse usage. In Diablo 3 the effects of FPS differences on mouse broadcasting can be more apparent because you move with the mouse and want as much precision as possible.

I don't think you'll have a problem with 60/20 or even 60/10.

Also, will it help performance to run only the main client in dx11 and the rest in dx9? I'm not even sure if it's possible.

Yes it is possible., but dx11 is supposed to be more efficient at the same things as dx9. However it really depends on the game's optimizations, so you would have to try it in order to really get an idea of which performs better for you.

[bob]

As a test I loaded all clients up on DX11, and saw no difference really.

I've since upped every graphic setting in the game to Ultra High/Very High, and ticked every box I could find (except for Vsync).
This make my GPU run at about 30%, 3GB vram, with overspill into system ram of about 1.5GB. The main client runs between 30-50FPS. I would probably do better with a 4GB card here, but the CPU isn't too busy it can't cope, and there is plenty of system ram left.

This is only running around in the environment. A big battle would probably kill my FPS.

BTW I'm using a 3GB 7970 driving 6 2560x1200 lotro on one screen, and a couple of other screens I use for other stuff, like this forum .


edit:

It seems that you don't really need triple buffering under the Adv Graphics. This just takes more vRAM. And the Antialiasing under std Graphics settings is what causes me to bog down. I can run all 6 clients @ 2x without issue, and still get decent 30+ FPS on the main, but it can get boggy when going higher. All depends on how fancy you want it to look. I've played for years with no antialiasing and fairly low settings so at the moment everything looks super pretty

Thanks a lot for the help, both of you. I didn't know AA had such an impact, I will for sure disable it for the 5 backgrounds, currently on 16x for every character lol. I do have a pretty good computer, but running at 2560x1600, so it obviously takes its toll on the system.

I*ll try to go 60-15x5 then. I did try to change the dx too, but same as you, noticed no change in fps, so I'll keep it at dx11.

[bob]

Well, they're not clear about which implementation of AA is in force, so if we assume the worst, then 2x AA generates twice as many pixels than that displayed , and 16x will generate 16 pixels for every one displayed. This generation and ultimately merging and smoothing and resulting display calculation is all additional work for the GPU. There is also 16x the frame buffer size and additional processing space required. There are of course optimizations to stop GPUs from generating pixels that will never be displayed, but AA is still a load of overhead that you may or may not want or need. As you said, I'd turn it off for mostly background toons, and leave it running for the one you look at the most.

You can of course do the same observations yourself with a tool like Open Hardware Monitor. It's only looking at simple stats to see how busy your GPU is and how full the GPU memory is. If there is available GPU/Memory, you can tick some more boxes and set stuff higher. As a general rule you want about a 20% clearance, so 80% utilization is the max you are aiming for during "normal" play.


p.s. I've written a really simplified (and sozzled) interpretation of AA. Don't quote me on it .

[MiRai]

Well, they're not clear about which implementation of AA is in force, so if we assume the worst, then 2x AA generates twice as many pixels than that displayed , and 16x will generate 16 pixels for every one displayed. This generation and ultimately merging and smoothing and resulting display calculation is all additional work for the GPU. There is also 16x the frame buffer size and additional processing space required.

p.s. I've written a really simplified (and sozzled) interpretation of AA. Don't quote me on it .

With such an old game I think it's safe to assume that it's MSAA, and not SSAA like in your simplified explanation. I don't think any mainstream MMO uses SSAA because it's incredibly expensive (hardware-wise) to do so, and MSAA was "the norm" for the last decade. If they give an option for 16x it's likely CSAA which is a deprecated method of AA and is no longer even available in nVidia's current-gen hardware, but it's just 8x MSAA with 8 extra coverage samples.

To elaborate (for others that may stumble upon this post), MSAA does not increase the amount of pixels on the screen and 2x/4x/8x are just the amount of samples that are taken in order to help smooth out the jagged edges -- I'll also mention that MSAA does not affect transparency, so even by choosing 8x MSAA you're likely going to still see plenty of aliasing. SSAA, on the other hand, does increase the amount of pixels on the screen and generally comes in flavors of 2x, 3x, or 4x -- Where 4x SSAA would actually render a resolution of 1920x1080 at 3840x2160.

TL;DR - All forms of AA increase the level of load put on your hardware, and it's generally recommended to disable all AA methods in order for the best performance while multiboxing.

[bob]

Quoter!!

So I lowered the AA on all but my main and got a nice improvement in performance, much less stuttering.

I have encountered another issue though. Sometimes when I mount up (mount key is x, always on) The whole game starts stuttering every 2 seconds in an infinite loop, fps dropping to 10, even on main. Only solution is to quit every toon and reload. I've checked my cpu/gpu usage and it stays at normal values. I've also noticed even the inner space menu starts stuttering and freezes for 2 seconds at a time. This does not seem to happen with my other "always on" keymaps. Any idea what this might be?

It happened again, now just completely randomly. My cpu goes into some kind of loop. I checked the usage and it's jumping from 30-40% down to 0% every second or so making the whole computer stutter for a second at a time.

I don't know if this is related to the isboxer software/inner space or not. My cpu is not overclocked atm, control panel settings are set to performance mode, so shouldn't be a problem with power saving.

EDIT: I noticed I have selected all 12(6) cpu cores for all characters. Gonna try giving them 2(1) each and see how it goes.