Bridge Commander Central

BC Forums => BC General => Topic started by: Matt Williams on August 08, 2011, 02:18:28 PM

Title: Performance Limitations?
Post by: Matt Williams on August 08, 2011, 02:18:28 PM
Hi Everybody,

I'm experiencing lag within QB while using a power house of a machine. I imagine BC is 32-bit and cannot support more than 2GB of ram however I can't be the only one who plays with a combination of high end mods and I haven't seen any mention of this.

I guess my question is has somebody created a 'fix' so BC can make use of a computer's full potential?

Thanks for your time,
Title: Re: Performance Limitations?
Post by: moed on August 08, 2011, 02:56:55 PM
As for creating a "fix" so BC can make use of a computer's full potential, no, not that I know of.

What are your system specs, maybe there's some setting(s) that you may be able to change in order to optimize BC running on your PC.
Title: Re: Performance Limitations?
Post by: Mario on August 08, 2011, 03:01:51 PM
Quote
I guess my question is has somebody created a 'fix' so BC can make use of a computer's full potential?

No.

You could also provide a few details about the machine and the QB setup when the game lags and finally the ingame graphic settings.
Title: Re: Performance Limitations?
Post by: Defiant on August 08, 2011, 03:06:29 PM
I suggest to disable graphical damage.

Also it should be 3GB limit.
Title: Re: Performance Limitations?
Post by: Matt Williams on August 08, 2011, 04:26:44 PM
Machine:
AMD Phenom II x6 Core 3.2Ghz CPU
ASUS NVidia GTS250 1GB PCI-E x16 Video Card
16GB DDR3 PC3 (PC3 12800) RAM
Western Digital Black Caviar 1TB Sata 6G/b Hard Drive
ASUS M5A88-V EVO Motherboard

BC Graphics Settings:

1600x1200
High Color Depth
High Model Detail
High Texture Detail
High Visible Damage
MipMaps On
Glow Effects On
Enhanced Glows On
Specular Highlights On
Motion Blur On
Space Dust On

Quick Battle Setup:

Wiley Coyote's Excelsior Family Pack
HQ Planets and Asteroids 1.2
Nano FX V2 Beta
Kobayashi Maru v1.0

I also have my NVidia controls overriding application settings for the anti-aliasing.
Title: Re: Performance Limitations?
Post by: moed on August 08, 2011, 07:21:27 PM
You're machine is definitely powerful enough to handle BC at it's highest settings but, to make things a bit smoother:

- Turn off Space Dust (this is an annoying feature anyways)
- Turn off Motion Blur (this is a cool effect but usually used for nice screen caps)
- Turn off Enhanced glows (also a neat feature but, more system intensive)
- Leave everything else on its current settings

Bare in mind that BC is not a multi-threaded game (too old) so it can't take advantage of the multiple cores in your Phenom. However, 3.2GHz is a fast base speed so, your machine still has some good horsepower to run the game pretty well.

Another thing is that your GTS 250 is an excellent card but PCI-E does not use system memory to supplement its on board memory like the older AGP standard did. So, it's a fast card but even though 1GB of video RAM is generally quite good... when you have high poly mods with high res textures (and several iterations of them) on screen, you're going to start chewing up that video RAM like crazy. What I have found to be the real "system killer" when it comes to playing BC are the quality of the textures. The higher the res on the textures, the more video RAM is taken up. The textures are loaded/stored on to video RAM and when you have a lot of high res textures (in the 2048 range or higher) I've seen even really beefy systems take a hit on performance.

My best recommendation is to sometimes use the "medium" res textures on some of the high res mods. The medium res on those mods usually have textures in the 1024 range and that's still quite good.

Bottom line, it's all about finding that right balance.   
Title: Re: Performance Limitations?
Post by: DJ Curtis on August 09, 2011, 12:22:55 AM
The biggest draw on performance is the specular texture size.  If it is over 1024x1024, it's going to start hogging resources quickly.
Title: Re: Performance Limitations?
Post by: Morgan on August 09, 2011, 12:25:32 PM
You might be interested in this article I wrote over at the BC Wiki, it provides several suggestions on how to improve BC's performance.

http://bridgecommander.wikidot.com/getting-the-most-out-of-modded-bc
Title: Re: Performance Limitations?
Post by: tiqhud on August 09, 2011, 01:50:56 PM
good set of suggestions.
Title: Re: Performance Limitations?
Post by: Matt Williams on August 09, 2011, 08:14:49 PM
I'm disappointed I can't make full use of my hardware but I suspected as much.

Thank you very much guys!
Title: Re: Performance Limitations?
Post by: 086gf on August 11, 2011, 02:02:10 PM
Have you checked out Excalibur yet? Its basically BC 2.0.