• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

Fire Causes FPS Drops in Source Games

R

Rock_Lobstah

n00b
Joined
May 21, 2012
Messages
47
Got the Orange Box for free a few weeks ago and started playing all of the Half-Life 2s. Great game, by the way, can't believe I never finished it the first time around. Anyway, My computer absolutely tears it a new anus and rightly so considering my specs and the game's age. i5 Ivy, EVGA 670 FTW 2gb, 8gb RAM, and regular HDD.

Everything was fine until I got to Episode One and confronted... FIRE. Argh, kill it with fire! I took a shot of my settings and I disable vsync for the quick video I made.

Settings: http://screenshot.xfire.com/s/126777230-4.jpg

Video: http://www.xfire.com/video/5d41ce/. I don't have FRAPS, sorry. FPS is top right.

I don't remember fire doing this in regular HL2, just started with Ep. 1. In regular HL2, I never, EVER saw my FPS dip under 120 dps (monitor refresh). According to a quick google search http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1306796, many people have confronted this, even in Portal. But, no one has produced a solution. I tried messing with my memory heapsize and it actually made things worse. I've seen my FPS go as low as 30-40s, all because of fire.

Has anyone else experienced this? Is it a problem with the Source Engine itself? From what I've read it occurs in all Source games, yet I never had this problem in regular HL2, such as Ravenholm. I just think it's kinda silly how my FPS can go from 250-300 to 30-40 in a split second because of one graphical effect.
 
Last edited:
I've had issues with fire effects causing drops in other games, especially STALKER.
Ever tried using an FPS capper? That seems to have helped my issues.
 
Interesting, just noticed a similar large FPS drop in a cut scene in DA2, small flame but a close-up frame, the only noticeable GPU lag while playing the game so far. Rig in sig.
 
Domingo said:
I've had issues with fire effects causing drops in other games, especially STALKER.
Ever tried using an FPS capper? That seems to have helped my issues.
Click to expand...

Well I tried EVGA Precision to set a frame cap. Didn't stop the fire lag and even caused screen tearing as a result. Tried adaptive vsync in Nvidia controls and still didn't stop it. Haven't heard my GPU fan rev up much at all either. About the warmest it's gotten in HL2 is low 50s with about 450mb used. 1080p, all settings maxed. I guess Source simply doesn't like fire because I'm out of ideas. I'll have to lay off on torching zombies to avoid stuttering. Kinda funny that such new tech gets throttled down by an old game.
 
Did you check to make sure your card is at full clock speeds? My 570 always downclocked in 3d mark and gave me shitty results.
 
Fire and smoke has always been killer on every engine. Try walking up to a burning tank on BF3 and watch your FPS die.
 
Rock_Lobstah said:
Well I tried EVGA Precision to set a frame cap. Didn't stop the fire lag and even caused screen tearing as a result. Tried adaptive vsync in Nvidia controls and still didn't stop it. Haven't heard my GPU fan rev up much at all either. About the warmest it's gotten in HL2 is low 50s with about 450mb used. 1080p, all settings maxed. I guess Source simply doesn't like fire because I'm out of ideas. I'll have to lay off on torching zombies to avoid stuttering. Kinda funny that such new tech gets throttled down by an old game.
Click to expand...

You're having problems in L4D also? How do you turn on FPS...? I'll check the next time I play.
 
jwcalla said:
You're having problems in L4D also? How do you turn on FPS...? I'll check the next time I play.
Click to expand...

I haven't tried L4D yet, just the Half-Life 2 games so far (Orange Box). But, from what I've read on various forums, fire also causes major FPS drops for people in Portal, specifically some level that has a pit of fire.

The Source command line for FPS is cl_showfps 2. I would imagine it's the same across all Source Engine games. Normally I would use another on-screen display, but PunkBuster kicks me from another game for it.
 
If you're feeling spunky, you can enable sv_cheats and use +showbudget to see where all the rendering time is going.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top