<1 FPS - Quad Core I5 - nVidia GTX 260

Crusade · Jan 18, 2017

FYI Shadows render the entire scene a second time from the view of the lightsource to create a depthmap to use as a shadow map - this pretty much doubles vram use theoretically. I'm unsure what framebuffer does exactly - but I imagine it's a screen space shader manager, or it pushes rendered frames to vram to apply effects on it - this also could use a lot of video memory - I suggest using afterburner or rivatuner to monitor vram usage and troubleshoot. Procedural Background can also be rather memory intensive - and the textures the game use are ALWAYS loaded - depending on the texture pack you're using, this can be a very big vram eater. My old gtx560 (1gb) used to cap out vram if i enabled procedural backgrounds @4096 resolution alone.

_ArkAngel_ · Jan 19, 2017

I can't recreate the issue. WTF.

This was bothering me for hours and now... it just works.

Steps to reproduce:
1) Install Windows Server 2008 R2 on a computer like 6 years ago.
2) Play games on it. Serve me some games, Windows!!!!
3) Try to play StarMade after uninstalling all javas and installing 64-bit Java 8.
4) Get 1 FPS - Try reducing settings, but it doesn't help.
5) PC Master Race tells you your GTX 260 isn't going to cut it.
5) Finally, disable Framebuffer, Shadows, and bloom all at the same time.
6) 900 FPS.
7) Enable framebuffer, shadows, and bloom. They work great! The game looks awesome! Super smooth!!!
8) Let your daughter crash your large ship with various turrets into a planet and watch the physics engine flail endlessly.

That last part is optional. I missed this game. Now I have 3 machines capable of running the game. Kids and I will never leave the house again!

_ArkAngel_ · Jan 19, 2017

OK. I reproduced it. I remembered that in troubleshooting, I disabled hardware rendering in chrome.

I re-enabled hardware rendering in chrome then ran StarMade - 1fps.

That's the first part of the graph. Now the memory maxes out the 890MB of VRAM because Chrome puts it over the top.

Then I quit StarMade, disabled FrameBuffer, Shadows, and Bloom. Everything is great again. The second part of the graph is me enabling frame buffer, then enabling shadows, then enabling bloom, then increasing shadows from simple to best.

Running fine.

So, bug-wise, I wonder if StarMade is looking at the RAM available on the card, assuming it has all of the 890 to play with, then proceeding to use that up - which doesn't work if Chrome is also using up 90MB on it's own.

Or maybe Starmade just happens to need nearly 890MB of RAM by happy coincidence and as long as I disable hardware rendering in Chrome, all will be fine? What happens when I want to run a web-gl app?

Crusade · Jan 19, 2017

I'd say it does used 890mb+ coincidentally. Lowering resolution will help reduce the memory footprint, but who wants to do that amirite?
But for serious, I have a 1gb card a few years ago and it fell over when I enabled ultra shadows, 256 textures, and 4096 procedural backgrounds @ 1920 x 1080.

So yeah, I'd say you're hitting the upper end of your vram limitations entirely by coincidence, I guess you could run webgl apps on a separate machine or tablet? (I know i do!)

Batavium · Jan 19, 2017

_ArkAngel_ said:
So, bug-wise, I wonder if StarMade is looking at the RAM available on the card, assuming it has all of the 890 to play with, then proceeding to use that up - which doesn't work if Chrome is also using up 90MB on it's own.

It would appear that Chrome takes a hold of the GPU and does not surrender it when an other application wants to use it to. By disabling and enabling the Framebuffer you seem to force Chrome of the GPU thread and StarMade can take control.

_ArkAngel_ said:
Or maybe Starmade just happens to need nearly 890MB of RAM by happy coincidence and as long as I disable hardware rendering in Chrome, all will be fine? What happens when I want to run a web-gl app?

StarMade does not use a lot of VRAM on my machine. But it appears you can fill it by enabling all the max settings like Crusader. I run StarMade on a much lower resolution and most if not all candy options are turned off. The game looks fine to me. But this is a highly subjective point of view offcourse. But if memory is tight lowering some options might keep you out of the red. Though in your case with the added use of some of the Systems RAM for VRAM this should not really be needed. Unless some applications can not use Shadowed RAM and require dedicated VRAM.

Either way 900 fps is something most people can only dream about. Well done in tracking this down.

<1 FPS - Quad Core I5 - nVidia GTX 260

Crusade

_ArkAngel_

_ArkAngel_

Crusade

Batavium