Frame Rate Drop Findings

[fortyeight 24]

Since all I have seen on the forums are people bitching about the frame rate issue and posting some fixes I am going to report my findings on the matter:

 

TL;DR will be at the end so you can just scroll down now if you want.

 

Computer Specs(To avoid posting an entire DxDiag):

 

OS: Windows 7

Graphics Card: Geforce GTX 560 Ti

Motherboard: MSI MS-7758

CPU: Intel i5-3750K @ 3.40 GHz, Quad Core

RAM: 8 gigs

 

Testing Conditions:

• Several Areas around the map - both high density and low density
• With people and without people
• Three completely different characters on Regular and Hardcore hives
• Two characters were pre-patch, one character is a fresh spawn.
• A multitude of different severs
• Nighttime and Daytime testing
• With rain and without rain
• Playing near small groups (less than three players) to large groups (greater than three players)
• I do not run fraps in the background, so I cannot give exact frame rates
• I run Teamspeak and the DayZ DB map on a second monitor at all times
• I only render players about 400m away without the use of a long range scope

Places and conditions I DID NOT experience any loss of frame rate

 

I have been almost everywhere on the map and have not experienced any frame rate loss. The only place I can confirm that I have not been with a normal frame rate is in Elektro during the daytime. However, when I am not experience any frame rate loss I am "alone" or far removed from other players. I have experienced completely normal frame rates during rain and in fully un-looted cities to include Elektro at night. Both of my pre-patch characters had nearly identical load outs except food and cases: Camo Mosin Nagants with Long Range Scopes, Bi-pods, compensators and bayonets. Both we were wearing a green tactical shirt and green cargo pants with a helmet. My fresh spawn character was loaded out completely differently and has no items that are pre-patch.

 

Places and conditions I DID experience loss of frame rate

 

The first place I noticed the frame rate loss was in NWAF. It did not happen immediately but as I met up with people in my clan in the firehouse my frame rate began to drop. Eventually I crashed, along with numerous other people in my clan. The frame rate very quickly deteriorated until windows task manager said that DayZ was not responding. It was raining at this time

Later I loaded in and began to move to Vybor to meet up with another group from my clan. As I approached Vybor it began to rain and my frame rate began to deteriorate and I logged out with a truly awful frame rate about 350m from their location.

The next day I had moved on top of the apartments at Chapaevsk. While I was providing over watch to my clan mates, I was experience some frame rate loss, but nothing consistent. It seemed to be more of rendering issues and my computer chugging (although I had never experienced that before). I eventually moved down to the south side of the airfield across from the prison to cover a door that bandits were holed up behind. During an hour stand-off I experienced completely normal frame rates with 9 other players at distances of 100m to 300m away from my location. After the engagement was over, I moved into the PD with the rest of my clan and experienced a "slideshow" of DayZ. I began to run away from the prison in the woods and crashed out. I rebooted my computer to find my character dead. No body was found in the woods so I can only assume I fell through the ground and the sever registered me as dead.

As a fresh spawn, I geared up and met about 15 clan members in Elektro for an operation to hand out food to fresh spawns. We were located in teams of five in various locations around Elektro. The other two teams were 750m to 1000m away on a 40 population server. When I logged in with my team, my frame rate was fine for about 2 minutes, it then quickly dropped to a slide show and what I can only assume to be 1-5 frames per second. I am convinced that none of the players in my team had flickering items because we had already ditched all of them and I wasn't experiencing any performance issues. And before we logged in, we had all met up on a 0 population night time server to scope out position and to find where we should be embedded, during this time I had 0 frame rate loss and completely normal gaming experience I had pre-patch.

 

Conclusions(TL;DR)

• The frame rate loss appears to be linked to players within your vicinity but also out of rendering distance. My best guess is players within 1km
• The frame rate loss can be caused by flickering items in the inventory
• Even if your character does not possess any items that are flickering it will affect players in the vicinity
• The bug seems to happen independent of your location in the game
• It is possible that some new or old item that is spawning is causing this glitch, i.e. the servers are spawning flickering items

This is all that I can think of to post in here. I know I am forgetting a few experiences and such. Hopefully we can give enough data and specifics to the Devs, so they can narrow down and find what the actual problem is. I have a hard time believing, one little item not skinning right is draining every bit of processing power my computer has.

Edited February 10, 2014 by FortyEight

[kuma8877 39]

Pretty thorough test! Thanks for taking the time. It does seem to clear up some of the questions why a fresh spawn with no gear could bog and CTD also.

[Etherious 907]

Servers only register players up to 1,000 Meters if i'm correct. :P

[fortyeight 24]

I had no idea that the client had registered players with 1km, that was just a best guess considering the entire clan's location from my squads location. Interesting how the power of deduction works!

[TIC 1050]

I believe this could be a possible overload on the network bubble from what I can see from your gatherings here.

[Judopunch 523]

Since all I have seen on the forums are people bitching about the frame rate issue and posting some fixes I am going to report my findings on the matter:

 

There was someone else that posted a couple days ago with similar findings. I believe it was the MP but-stock if it was spray-painted. But also some loot from before the patch that may be corrupt causing either an error or memory leak.

 

There was a thread yesterday about it being really obvious if you take all your gear off and run away from it, than run back to it.

 

Thanks for the research, please make sure you add to the bug-tracker if you have not already!

Edited February 10, 2014 by Judopunch

[BL1P 252]

Me and some friends ran some test about the player bubble.

It is defiantly 1k and the player model is not rendered at >1k.

 

I reduced my view distance and object draw distance to 1k because of the findings of our tests.

No need to draw farther once you know the map well enough to not need the objects for navigation.

I think the default client view distance is 3k ? cant remember.

Before someone jumps in and says view distance is server side Ill answer this as well.

View distance is server side but only the MAX allowed you can go lower than the server side setting just not higher.

Whereas grass is the opposite. 

 

Not related to the fps bug but was just a reply based on your :-

"The frame rate loss appears to be linked to players within your vicinity but also out of rendering distance. My best guess is players within 1km "

 

Great post some good points.

Edited February 10, 2014 by BL1P

[fortyeight 24]

I'm not totally sure that the bug is only related to a particular item though. I know a friend had an Old Testimate Bible that was flickering and causing the bug. I have been in the close proximity of players without an M4 and still had the bug. I'm guessing that there is a very high likelihood of the MP butt-stock being one of the causes. But I hypothesize it is independent of the individual item, just a certain batch of items.

 

The hard part about this bug, is once you can start collecting data on the bug, it's too late and the game starts crashing. That and most people don't want to read out their inventories over teamspeak laboriously.

 

I do know the bug does not affect all computers equally either. Some people just lose a few frames while I am seeing a slideshow of DayZ before crashing. I think the problem may be attributed to people that have bugged items and aren't affected by the bug and people who don't have any of these items and are getting affected by the bug.