Question regarding performance

[joacoleon]

Hi everyone.

 

Im running the game with the following specs:

 

Phenom II x4 840

AMD HD 6870 1 GB DDR5

8 GB Kingston Hyper X (1333 mhz)

 

Fullscreen

1920x1080

Distortion: Off

Bloom: Off

 

The game ran perfectly smooth during my first 2 playthroughs, i was running the game on windowed mode. Then i messed with the graphical options, turned the fullscreen, small textures, distortion and bloom on, and everything got blurry. I reverted the changes but it was still blurry so i tweaked some things in my graphic card drivers and it fixed it. But other than that it was running just fine.

 

I then installed the Minimap HUD mod and after a bit i started to get fps drops and the screen was choppy at times. I figured it was either the mod or due to revealing a good % of the map. Now its happening more and more often. But it should still run fine with my specs, right?

 

Any ideas? How should i setup my game and graphic card?

 

Thanks in advance.

[JanH]

Hiya @joacoleon, for the FPS drop could I get you to try disabling any mods that you have installed to see if that fixes your issue? It may be the mod that's causing the slowdown.

Other than that, have you encountered any other blurry graphics issues after you tweaked the settings on your graphics card?

[Nebulous]

The game does tend to redline crappy systems. Like mine!

 

It's gotten a lot better over the course of updates. At the moment Woodie's rampages are the only cause of overheats of my system.

 

I suggest turning distortion off since that seems to add to CPU load. I also run with bloom and small textures turned off because they've caused problems for me before. It does lead to see-through watchers but meh.

 

Also netbook mode set to NOOOOOO. I ran an experiment with that before and gave myself second degree burns thanks to hot laptop.

 

Other than that, mess around with your system until it works. Use the scientific method on that bad boy.

[the truthseeker]

I'm using currently a lower end system and it often runs very well even with that. However, it can have issues (like massive forest fires can cause a slowdown but nowhere as bad as the halting it used to do when reported a while back.) 

 

Still, from what I have seen others report, often the issue is either a graphics card firmware conflict/update needed or a mod conflict, Do make sure everything is updated and default to the most current specs (including the game default graphics settings)  and any mods are completely disabled and check if the issue still persists. I'd recommend the firmware/graphics  first, and if that doesn't solve it, try disabling one mod at a time and see if one of them is causing that blur issue still. 

 

I'm sure Klei can suggest the quickest way to get back to default graphics settings if you don't remember what they are. 

 

That written, i wouldn't recommend running it on a Netbook without it being in default Netbook mode and nothing else.  

[aredshroom]

Also netbook mode set to NOOOOOO. I ran an experiment with that before and gave myself second degree burns thanks to hot laptop.

Actually. what does netbook mode do? When it was first implemented, I was so happy and tried it out, gave myself burns too lol. Now it seems to run better, but I'm still skeptical. Has it improved the heating problems, benefit the performance in any way or should I just run  without it? :s

 

Aside from dusk/precipitation lag, the game runs fine on the last update for me. (w/ Small Textures).

[the truthseeker]

It's a lowered resolution as per this link on  their Support site:

 

 

 

 

My Game's Graphics Are Blurry

Last Updated: Sep 10, 2013 01:14PM PDT

If you are playing on Steam or on the Standalone versions and you find that your graphics are blurry, that may be because the "Netbook mode" and "Small Textures mode" options are enabled in settings.

We added the toggleable "Netbook mode" and "Small Texture mode" options in order for lower spec machines to be able to play Don't Starve. 

To Disable Netbook and Small Textures modes, you'll have to:

• Load up Don't Starve, and go to the main menu.
• Choose "Settings" 
• Disable "Small Textures" and "Netbook Mode."
• Play Don't Starve.

[aredshroom]

Well, I know Small Textures uses less memory for the resources/images (?) and that works very well. But Netbook Mode seems to do more than lower the resolution...Kevin did say this but I don't understand how that overheats a laptop (which apparently doesn't just happen to mine!). Does it just skip frames whenever the "Windows sleep function" works?

 

I should probably test it again after the changes, but like I said I'm skeptical after trying it when it was first implemented, and without knowing exactly what it does (could be me being over-demanding though, sorry).

[Nebulous]

Kevin offered some answers when I first posted my data.

 

Netbook mode at that time decreased frames per second at the expense of adding to CPU load, essentially. Since all of my problems have always been CPU load, Netbook Mode just made a bad problem burninatingly worse.

 

I should look at the memory usage while playing the game now and compare it to then.

[the truthseeker]

Kevin offered some answers when I first posted my data.

 

Netbook mode at that time decreased frames per second at the expense of adding to CPU load, essentially. Since all of my problems have always been CPU load, Netbook Mode just made a bad problem burninatingly worse.

 

I should look at the memory usage while playing the game now and compare it to then.

Ouch, my mistake if I thought it decreased (not increased) CPU load. 

[Kevin]

The nature of Netbook mode changed an update or two ago. It should in theory help with overheating issues now. For the technically minded, netbook mode runs the physics and rendering updates 30 times a second (down from the usual 60), and uses a less-accurate but less cpu-intense method to do its frame timing. Small textures mode is... well... just using smaller textures (we don't load the top mip level).

 

I would guess that the OP problem is probably related to the minimap mod - our map rendering is relatively expensive, and if you're trying to do it at the same time as playing it will probably overtax some systems. The reason you don't notice it being slow is that the map screen doesn't really update.

 

We're planning on pushing a hotfix next week that brings together some of the optimization and bug fixing that we've been doing for the past couple weeks. You may (or may not) see improved performance from that (depending upon what in particular is slow for your machine right now).

[simplex]

rendering updates [...] down from the usual 60

I don't mean to hog this thread, but then why does

assert( FRAMES == 1/30 )

hold without netbook mode?

(where FRAMES is the global variable with such name, representing the delay of a frame)

[gnarlytreeman]

Klei, thanks for continuing to work on the overheat fixes. Looking forward to the graphics patch!!

[Kevin]

I don't mean to hog this thread, but then why does

assert( FRAMES == 1/30 )

hold without netbook mode?

(where FRAMES is the global variable with such name, representing the delay of a frame)

 

 

The sim runs at a fixed timestep of 1/30, and all of our animations are authored at that rate. Without netbook mode, the physics system uses extrapolation to make things look smoother. Wallupdate runs at 1/60 or 1/30 depending upon your mode, and can make the code UI animations look nicer if it's running at 1/60.

[aredshroom]

The nature of Netbook mode changed an update or two ago. It should in theory help with overheating issues now. For the technically minded, netbook mode runs the physics and rendering updates 30 times a second (down from the usual 60), and uses a less-accurate but less cpu-intense method to do its frame timing. Small textures mode is... well... just using smaller textures (we don't load the top mip level)...

 

We're planning on pushing a hotfix next week that brings together some of the optimization and bug fixing that we've been doing for the past couple weeks. You may (or may not) see improved performance from that (depending upon what in particular is slow for your machine right now).

Ah, okay. Thanks for sharing the details. I guess I'll try using it again.

 

Thank you for all the effort on getting DS to run on lower-spec machines!

[the truthseeker]

Thanks Kevin and Simplex, I learned something today! 

[joacoleon]

Sorry, i just came back home. I was only using the map HUD mod, disabling it fixed the problem. It still bothers me that the most popular mod (and a pretty useful one) is giving me troubles, ill test some more and tell you how it goes.

 

Thanks guys!