64 replies to this topic

[Saint_The_Judge]

I'm coming back to this thread I began till someone who is having this terrible and game-ruining issue swears it's fixed. Beta will be over within about 12 hours, but for me it's over now. My patience has finished. I'm tired to this mediocre game experience. After watching some footage on this beta a kid posted, I definitely quit. The bottom line is being skilled is a half, having a smooth gameplay is the other half.
Yeah, I'm starting to get angry.

Edited by Saint_The_Judge, October 30 2012 - 08:15 AM.

[Scrimshaw]

Snoof, on October 28 2012 - 01:11 PM, said:

qtulu, on October 28 2012 - 10:22 AM, said:

Might as well post this here too:

AMD Phenom II x2 550 @3.1 GHz
4GB DDR3 @1333
Radeon HD 6870 1GB
Samsung 1TB HDD
Windows 7 x64

Those are the bare minimum requirements, your Dual Core is outdated, you got 4gb 1333 RAM which is quite a low amount and is rather slow, your GPU is an ATI card ( need i say more_), and it doesnt look like a SSD drive to me either, in other words your entire system is old and needs upgrading, id start with a CPU and slowly work my way up to the GPU

My specs:
AMD Phenom II x4 955 3.2Ghz
2x 4GB G-skill 1600 RAM
ASUS GTX 550ti DCU, OC to 560ti levels
fuzzy bunny non-SSD drive

game runs fine for me dropping to maybe 35 at worst with max settings, with things like motion blur and radial blur being hard-removed with ini tweaks since i hate the artificial blur created by games, i let my eyes do the blurring, and if they dont then no blur was needed

Snoof, you are massively uninformed.

Hawken is a 32 bit application that doesn't use more than 4GBs of RAM. Check your Task Manager performance monitor when you play, and his frequency is manageable (small differences between 1300 and 1600mhz).

His card is superior to yours on larger resolutions, and judging by benchmarks, generally equal

"Your GPU is an ATI card, need I say more _" Need I even comment on the inanity of this statement _ - speaking as someone who runs an nVidia card.

This game is not particularly stressing on the CPU, though I've seen surprisingly heavy FLOP per second when there are 16 players on Titan. His CPU can run the game fine.

And what does the SSD have to do with anything _ Do you even know how storage works in a computer _

The undeniable fact is that the game is poorly optimized. Computers than can run Metro 2033 on DirectX 10, with medium to high settings, struggle heavily on this game on low.  

My GTX670 drops to 40 FPS on Titan during intense fighting (all on ultra). I'm not going to whine about it because I'm able to play the game rather smoothly, yet the poor hardware compatibility will ultimately restrict the accessibility and popularity of Hawken. If they ain't fixed, of course.

And what's up with anti-aliasing _ The edges are jagged as a steak knife, and there's virtually no anti-aliasing on the textures. I can force it with my nVidia control panel, nonetheless FXAA looks artificial in Hawken. The game itself has minutely designed aesthetics and an immerssive visual environment. I'm actually surprised of how well it looks, even compared to the trailers; but the poor optimization borders on carelessness. All being said, I'm sure the devs are doing their best, taking into consideration there's still development time left.


PS: Can anyone tell me if they noticed any PhysX particles _ I see no difference with the option enabled versus disabled, except the 3-4 FPS cost.

Edited by Scrimshaw, October 30 2012 - 08:25 AM.

[Elix]

Saint_The_Judge, on October 30 2012 - 08:15 AM, said:

Beta will be over within about 12 hours, but for me it's over now. My patience has finished. I'm tired to this mediocre game experience.

The game is barely playable for me... if I join a server with nobody else on it I get 40fps as long as I don't look into large parts of the map and focus on narrower spaces. In actual play, it's closer to 10fps. My computer is old and very fuzzy on the bunny. So I know what you're talking about. I've been playing the beta a lot less than I would if I had a beastly machine.

But, to be fair to the devs, Saint, there have been several massive issues that've come up this weekend where hundreds of people were unable to play for a day or longer. This is a closed beta testing environment, and there are a number of problems in the code that the devs are trying to shake out.

Us beta testers aren't required to have any sort of software development experience, but I have a bit (nothing that's been released publically). No matter what you are coding, the first priority is to make it work. Then you make it fancy. Optimizing the game's performance is not at all simple and requires a strong grasp of both math and programming logic, as well as a strong working knowledge of the code. It's not a trivial step, and it's quite important, and I really hope that Hawken sees major improvements here.

But optimizing performance is not as important as fixing the bug that prevented hundreds of beta testers from being unable to download the game files because the manifest file is broken. It's not as important as fixing the bugs that prevented almost everyone from joining servers. It's not as important as fixing mech exp levels being reset to 0 randomly.

So, I hear where you're coming from, but... we need to give the Hawken team patience and time. Nobody's forcing you to continue testing, of course, so don't pile aggravation and frustration on yourself.

Edited by Elix, October 30 2012 - 09:04 AM.

[Saint_The_Judge]

That's the point. They need to review and improve the code. That's what turned the unplayable BLR into a "pleasure to play maxed out game". I didn't mention the code before for not looking like a noob trying to give an advice to pros.
Of course, yeah, let's wait, sure thing!! I know devs know what they are doing. As a beta tester, it's our obligation to tell them what are the weak points, though.
Thanks, mate!

[Elix]

A number of people on the forums don't get it, so even if you do (which is great), I hope some of the people that don't will see my post.

Feedback's quite important, yes. I never meant to imply, "hey, stop posting about this already, the devs don't need to hear this". Just trying to explain their side a bit more thoroughly, since you were letting it get you worked up.

[Puru]

My friend has problems running, and she, yes, she, uses this.



My computer is a bit more up to date, however, and uses this.



Judging from this, I say most of the problems people have actually come from them underestimating the amount of RAM required for the game. That said, there's a definitive difference between our machines. I just want her to be able to play smoothly like we can, but she struggles while bottomed out on the settings, whereas mine chokes only in intense fights on max.

[Elix]

Seeing as Hawken is a 32-bit game at the moment, it can't see more than 4GB, max, of RAM. In my play, when I checked, Hawken seemed to sit around 2GB. Which is a pretty decent amount.

In its current, mostly-unoptimized state, Hawken relies heavily on the CPU, regardless of graphics settings. I would not be surprised if some of that is overhead from testing routines that won't be present in the final game, but suffice to say, the GPU is not the only consideration. And if you have 4GB+ of RAM, it's not going to be a problem unless you're running a lot of RAM-hungry junk (like, say, Firefox with a billion tabs open for a week).

Edited by Elix, October 31 2012 - 10:58 AM.

[JuiceBox]

One thing that helps with nvidia is making sure it's running in performance mode not power savings

[Saint_The_Judge]

4GB RAM is enough to run any game to date. More RAM will increase loading time, not gameplay smootheness.

[JuiceBox]

Saint_The_Judge, on October 31 2012 - 12:06 PM, said:

4GB RAM is enough to run any game to date. More RAM will increase loading time, not gameplay smootheness.

Wrong. 4gb is not enough anymore unless you run games in fuzzy bunny quality. Firefall, hawken, bf3,bl2,crysis 2 can all very easily chew up 1.5 to 1.8gb of ram and on a 32bit system with 4gb of ram your going to have crashes.

It's the time where 6gb and a 64bit OS is becoming more needed as more people are running resolutions that are far larger than before.

[Elix]

Um, JuiceBox, you realize that the graphical quality of a game is more heavily dependent on the GPU's available RAM supply (which may be a part of the entire system RAM if it doesn't have its own dedicated memory, I'll grant you) as opposed to the RAM sticks sitting on the motherboard for the CPU to use, right_ Unless you have rediculous loading distances and lots of physics objects in the scene, 4GB (assuming a 64bit OS to maximize the available RAM for programs) should be more than adequate at good quality.

A 32bit OS will present a bit of a bigger problem, but the allocate-3GB-to-user-apps startup option will help put a buffer around the memory requirements for Hawken and similar contemporary games.

However, I'll agree with you that 64bit OSs are pretty much necessary these days. If you went to a general-purpose computer store (or the computer section in any large store), I think you'd really have to try very, very hard to buy a 32bit CPU that didn't have EMT64 extensions these days, so everyone's basically going to have 64bit machines going forward until (if_) the next jump up the bit ladder occurs. Just a matter of getting the appropriate version of their chosen OS on there to make use of it all.

[JuiceBox]

Load up any graphically intense game and max the settings and watch your ram usage.  Turn down those settings and watch your ram usage.

You will see that lower graphics is less heavy on ram than intense graphics because your overall system still has to stick extra data somewhere.

[Saint_The_Judge]

My son runs Hawken maxed out 1600x900 with his modest 4GB RAM DDR3. Better than I do with 6GB, by the way. He's got an NVidia GPU and I got an ATI, which maybe is having incompatibilities with the game. This could explain my stutterings, but what to say about his smooth gameplay with 4GB_

[Manoloco]

Saint_The_Judge: depends on what model of ATI/AMD vs NVIDIA  card you are comparing, what model is yours and what your son´s_

still there may be optimizations for NVIDIA cards since this is an TWIMTBP  game ("the way its meant to be played"- an NVIDIA support phrase), i just hope this doesnt mean the game will ultimately run with deficiencies or loss of performance on AMD/ATI cards (i am using a 7950)

didnt check with the stat_fps command during the closed beta, though i admit i didnt have problems playing, but have no baseline to compare as this was the first time i played and wasnt aware of the command. after the beta i could only check in the garage, my fps were around 170 there but thats indicative of nothing.

im using an i5 750, 8GB RAM, amd 7950 3GB vcard.

can anyone with a similar setup than mine share their garage fps and in-game fps_


Edit: forgot to add, all settings on ultra during the CBE1

for the garage, same settings but i disabled film grain and uncapped the framerate in the .ini

Edited by Manoloco, November 04 2012 - 10:09 PM.

[Lord_Trent_Kellan]

It's weird for me.  My game plays really smoothly for a while, then starts sloooooowly lagging more and more after a couple of hours.  It works, works, has a slight framerate drop but nothing unworkable at all (I can still go perfect no-death games in siege with it assuming there's no ridiculously skilled individual I can't outmanuever on the enemy team, at any rate), and then I start occasionally literally warping around the battlefield by short distances(disorienting both for myself and the enemies as we try and aim at each other, but randomly toggles off and on, and doesn't tend to occur further back in the cycle), and then finally, the game decides it's going to hit a low point and FPS drops suddenly below 1 per second, fast, and hard.  After game restart, the cycle continues again, always taking a couple of hours.
This leaves me to wonder-- does the game just continuously use up more and more and more RAM_

[Manoloco]

L_T_K,

Have you checked the temperatures on your CPU / GPU_, some protection features on the bios include downthrottling the clock speed to preserve the processor.

I have a cousin that had a PC that was ridiculously slow for the processor he had, i dissasembled it and when i took out the heatsink, the sticker on the copper disk of the heatsink was still on it....

The person who assembled the pc thought it was part of it since the sticker was metallic, after i removed, cleaned, and applied new thermal paste it ran great, he didnt notice in all games since some didnt elevate the temperatures that hard, it was the Pentium 3-4 era.

I am not saying this is your same issue, but when performance goes down after a while of playing, its worth checking the temperatures, it might be related (fans not working properly is another common issue)

I dont think its a bad memory management issue, if it were, everyone would be having the problem sooner or later.

Edited by Manoloco, November 05 2012 - 10:22 AM.

[Dr_Manuscript]

I also am having terrible frame rates. Sahara being the one map where that doesn't stutter constantly - getting really bad frame rate stutter on Titan and Andromeda.

At best, I'm getting around 40 fps on Sahara and dips down to 20s fairly frequently. And on other maps, I'm always in the mid 20s dipping down into the teens all the time - very close to unplayable.

I'm running on a Q6600 quad core, 8 GB RAM, and geforce 460 GTX. Perhaps the hardware is somewhat outdated_ It runs other games pretty good though. For Hawken I have everything set to low and all advanced settings turned off. I even tried playing at the lowest resolution, but I still get the same fps - can't see any noticeable increase.

[Manoloco]

Q6600 might present 2 problems:

C2Q is an older processor
Runs on a motherboard that might cause a significant bottleneck in bandwidth for memory and graphic card.

Edited by Manoloco, November 05 2012 - 03:06 PM.

[Lithium03]

Are any one you running other programs that interact with Hawken_ (e.g. fraps or xfire for fps display) After I stopped running xfire my fps greatly improved. You can use "stat fps" from the hawken console to display fps, and that doesn't cause issues.

[SGRock]

Dr_Manuscript, on November 05 2012 - 02:30 PM, said:

I also am having terrible frame rates. Sahara being the one map where that doesn't stutter constantly - getting really bad frame rate stutter on Titan and Andromeda.

At best, I'm getting around 40 fps on Sahara and dips down to 20s fairly frequently. And on other maps, I'm always in the mid 20s dipping down into the teens all the time - very close to unplayable.

I'm running on a Q6600 quad core, 8 GB RAM, and geforce 460 GTX. Perhaps the hardware is somewhat outdated_ It runs other games pretty good though. For Hawken I have everything set to low and all advanced settings turned off. I even tried playing at the lowest resolution, but I still get the same fps - can't see any noticeable increase.

I'm on a Q6600 but my video is a GTX570.  I only see bad framerates when the map first loads, then it runs just fine.