Frame rates & settings

[Tornado]

Help - I need your advice real quick, to keep or a return brand new high spec ( Intel ) pc.

1. What frame rate should a new, current generation high spec pc be able to get on vsk 3 and 4?

Magazine tests of the new gaphics cards, SLI etc, give phenomenal rates like 80 or 90 fps. (But these were on water cooled AMD based systems.) at medium resolution.
( Have cable, and am using a Sony 21” crt F 500 (22dp, capable of 2048 x 1536 ) to try out diff. resolutions. )
Admiral ref'd me to fraps, thx.

2. Is a fast frame rate critical in VSK say, for rounding a mark with a lot of otherboats when you want to avoid contact/pens, or controlling Melges in f7?

3. All all you guys racing in Windows mode or Full Screen?

4. What resolution do you typically set at to race?

5. Do you set at the highest and best settings, or do you scale back a bit on Anti aliasing, shadows, etc.

Any advice appreciated, bob

[CAN Knot]

Hi Tornado,

1. I can't help you here. I don't have a new high spec PC, and it's been a number of years since this machine was "high spec" <sigh>. However, the human eye doesn't notice any difference bove 25 fps or so, and the ultimate determining factor is the refresh rate you've set your monitor to. Most people use 60-85Hz, which means the monitor is only going to display 60-85 fps regardless of how many frames the video card is generating.

2. A good frame rate is critical, but you will find that network latency is just as much a determing factor (if not more) than your CPU/GPU. Frame rates as low as 15-20 fps are fine for close racing in VSK. VSK isn't a finger twitch shooter and boats don't move that far in 1/15th of a second!

3. I usually do all my racing in full screen mode. However, I frequently use Alt-Enter to toggle back and forth between windowed and full screen mode between races.

4. I think I'm using 1280x960 or something like that now. I should give 1600x1400 another try though.

5. Turn up the settings as high as your PC can handle. The only thing you might want to do is to turn down the shader from PC3 to PC2 as this makes it easier to see the wind effects on the water.

[admiral 1]

Hi Bob,

Can KNot's right and you don't need a highspec to run VSK to the limit. (BTW what is high spec?) I wouldn't want to miss out on the shaders in PC3, motion blur, geometry, and the complex shadows. A fast processor will be big help in big fleet races. (AMD dual core?)

A modern midrange graficcard should be able to give you 25 frames (that's as fast as your eyes can do) with all settings maxed out AA x 4 /8 AF x 4/8 and all the shaders etc at 1024 x 768. A high spec should be able to give you 25+ with all settings maxed at 1600 x 1200.

BTW. Only go for high spec if you get to buy a new system every 6 months...., else smear out funds over your personal upgrade cycle. On average over time you will be better of doing smaller regular upgrades, then getting highspec once and not having the capabillity to upgrade when your "highspec" is getting outdated.

Bringing your system to its knee's still is pretty easy by fiddling the grafics driver to drop all optimisations, and use the biggest resolution available. Like stop using mip maps, etc. or try 16 x AA AFAIK that needs a 7800 GTX or 2 i'm afraid for that it'l give you razor sharp stays on the rigging. Forget watercooling use heatpipes and big vents. And if you really want high spec get fase-changecooling.

best strategy: save money on the equipment, work less and sail more

[Tornado]

Thx for your advice Can Knot, and Admiral –very much appreciated.

Ran an interesting test using frap on a new 840 3.2, HT Intel dual core, 2 MB ram, dual 7800 gtx with SLI. The frame rates seemed to be about the same whether Nvidea was configured for one gpu or two.? Must be doing something wrong. Also don’t know if a new Nvidia SLI game profile has been created for vsk.

So it would be interesting to hear from someone at Nadeo Techncial ,or who tried a similar pc and who knows way more than me ( easy to do), whether VSK, as written, can even exploit any benefit from SLI.

Anyway, enough tech stuff, time to just learn and enjoy sailing and team race in vsk. Thx again.

Bob

[CAN Knot]

The frame rates seemed to be about the same whether Nvidea was configured for one gpu or two.?

That is not uncommon; I know that in BattleField2 after a certain point the frame rates are the same for people with a single 7800GTX and those with 2x7800GTX in SLI. That just means other sub-systems (CPU, memory, I/O, etc.) are the bottleneck, not the video.