11 réponses à ce sujet

[vipe155]

Ok, I just bought ME1 a couple of weeks ago.  I always thought it looked good, and decided to play the first game and then go on to ME2.  I have a pretty decent system.  Better than the recommended settings, and I run all of the games I own pretty well (except for this).

My Specs are:

Windows 7 64-bit
AMD Athlon 5600+ Dual Core, 2.8ghz
4GB DDR2
512MB Geforce GTS 250
Soundblaster Audigy2

It doesn't matter what resolution I play in, whether it be 640 x 480 or 1280 x 1024, nor does it matter what settings I have on or off, I generally get a framerate that goes anywhere from 28 to 45.  I have tried turning off framerate smoothing, forcing AA, disabling AA and AF, etc. but I never seem to do very well with this game.  I have other games that are newer and look better than this that run in the 70's and 80's or more.  I just hate to be walking around the Presidium and the game is running at 30fps.  It's just not smooth enough.  Anything I can do to improve performance?  Shouldn't my system do better than this?

[cluelessnewbie]

The presidium level is never smooth for anyone. It's probably running at less than 30 fps for me and I have a 3Ghz Core 2 quad and an ATI 5870. I think the size of the level strains the game engine to its limit. The frame rate is probably limited by the CPU, which is why changing the graphic settings won't make a difference.

[vipe155]

Even so, it's not as if Eden Prime or the Normandy first level ran at 60 fps or anything either.  Do you think that a quad core vs. dual core CPU makes a difference in this game?  Would it be worth moving up to a quad for this Unreal Engine game?

[cluelessnewbie]

I haven't looked at how many cores it uses, but I'm pretty sure quad cores make no difference. There are few games that benefit from it. A faster processor might make it smoother but you shouldn't upgrade your hardware for one badly ported game. I'm not sure what's going on. Maybe the frame rate is caped at 30 fps, or maybe the presidium level is badly designed causing the game engine to chug and sputter. I know in Mass Effect 2 they reused the presidium from the first game and there are also problems with it. Eyes bugging out and weird graphical glitches. (Z-fighting, caused when the size of the game world overwhelms the precision of the z-buffer).

[eshrafel]

I'm running at 3.6 GHz Core 2 with SLi GTX 285, also Win7 x64 and the Presidium isn't smooth. The Unreal 3 engine is one of the few games I've found that really does like CPU however, but my quad i7 system isn't fantastic on some Mass Effect levels either. Sometimes I found that turning film grain off helps when exploring planets for some reason. Otherwise, just the usual disable things like dynamic shadows and update your graphics drivers. I do feel your pain, as I just cannot agree with people who claim one cannot see the difference between 30 and 60 frames per second, as I can clearly see the difference between 60 and 120 frames per second. If you went from a dual to quad of the same frequency (expensive) you would likely at best see a 10-20% improvement. It may be less than that depending on the level. I honestly do agree there is a hard engine limitation with Mass Effect that means it will simply not improve in some circumstances unless you throw an enormous amount of hardware at it.

[vipe155]

I was kind of afraid of this. It seems that Unreal Engine games on the PC do not have a very good graphics to performance ratio, i.e. you require a lot of hardware for only above average graphics. I have other games that look better than this that run much better. What do you get on the Presidium with the 3.6 ghz/GTX 285?



I'm not sure what to do.... I hate stuttering around at 28-30 fps on parts of this game.

[eshrafel]

I can't get to the 3.6/285 rig until thursday night, but I just did a 'stat fps' on the 3.2ghz i7/GTX 260 here and my low is 30fps, average is ~43fps and peak is 55fps on the presidium. Usually only 55 when facing a wall :-) That's with high resolution textures and dynamic shadows off. No anisotropy etc.

Edit: driver version is 195.62 Windows 7 x64 international WHQL

Modifié par eshrafel, 29 mars 2010 - 09:43 .

[Dangirdas]

I bet i laggs becuase you all run windows 7. I have that to laggs the pc ass off when i play Mass Effect. You can't fix it. I have seartch on google. None that have Vista or xp laggs.

[Rogue Wookie]

I ran into this very same issue. Loaded up ME1 for the first time and was amazed at how slow the framerate was. The thing that seemed to help for me was to play the game in a 'window' instead of across the full monitor. As recommended above I also turned off the dynamic shadowing and film grain.

[eshrafel]

I run dual-boot Windows XP SP3 x64 and Windows 7 x64 and I can confirm the frame rate is at least as good on Windows 7, and the sound is better.



Dynamic shadows look terrible anyway :-)



I have honestly never tried playing it in a window, I will do a few tests.

[vipe155]

I wondered about Win7 as well, but compatibility mode for XP doesn't seem to do much. Is it a 64-bit vs. 32-bit thing? Dynamic Shadows and film grain don't add anything for me, but disabling them doesn't really effect my fps.



This seems to be a problem with cross-platform RPGs. I was testing Fallout3 last night, and while it runs better than this (50 fps or so average), that still is worse than my similar quality games in other genres.

[eshrafel]

Yes I can confirm that dynamic shadows and film grain appear to make zero different to FPS on the Presidium. I like film grain though



Windowed mode actually made it slower by around 4fps.



It is basically a hard limit of how the engine is coded or implemented, or so it seems. Just like how you could make old "Doom" levels as big as you liked, there was a hard limit on the number of visplanes, or sectors that could be displayed at once -- leading to all sorts of glitches.