Poor performance in the demo.

**Arvuti** · 09-05-2010, 09:17 AM

When I first started Amnesia demo, I maxed everything out, only to be greeted by terrible lag. I finally managed to get some decent frames per seconds when turning line smoothing, paralax and SSAO off..I understand that they all are pretty performance heavy, but.. My computer can run mafia 2, crysis, metro 2033 on all high. Why cant I run this maxed out ? Undecided

Specs : Ati Radeon HD 5770, AMD athlon II X4 635, 2gb ddr3 ram.

**jens** · 09-05-2010, 10:13 AM

If your are running vista/7 try and see if it helps to disable Aero. Please post if it helps.

If it does not help, check the ATI control panel for any settings that are "forced" or optimized, turn them off and see if that helps.

**Arvuti** · 09-05-2010, 10:22 AM

Disabling Aero did not help, going to check the ATI control panel. Optimizing the 3d options in ATI control panel did not help. But disabling SSAO boosts my frames per seconds from 11 to 60. So, its probably because of that.

**membrain** · 09-05-2010, 11:45 AM

Hi Arvuti,

i don't think that your system is too weak. I believe it's your resolution and at the same time a too high SSAO samples level. Try reducing it to 8 or 16 or reducing the resolution while keeping the SSAO samples value. The resource consumption of SSAO multiplies with each higher resolution you set.

I run the game fine (about 30-60 fps) with all quality set high except SSAO samples (set to 8) and the resolution (set to 720x576). And my system is not even as powerful as yours.
Here it is:
MSI K7N2 Delta L
Athlon XP 2600+ @ 1,9 GHz
3 GB DDR 1
Slightly overclocked GeForce 7900 GS 512 MB DDR3

membrain

**Arvuti** · 09-05-2010, 11:54 AM

My native resolution is 1680x1050, wouldnt it look bad when I use an lower resolution ?

**membrain** · 09-05-2010, 11:58 AM

I have the same native resolution and yes, it looks a bit crappy with such huge pixels. Big Grin

But now it's running fluidly. And as i said, you should try to keep the resolution and turn down SSAO samples (to 8 oder 16). This might work as well. It depends on what your priorities are: high resolution or high quality. Smile

membrain

**FreonTrip** · 09-05-2010, 04:05 PM

Gotta say, performance on a GeForce 6800 with 128 MB of RAM, a dual 2.2 GHz Core 2 Celeron, and 2 gigs of DDR400 under 32-bit Windows Vista Ultimate has left something to be desired. Autodetected performance settings were unbearable - probably below 10 fps. Shunting things down to 640x480 and turning off all detail settings was marginally playable, but still chugged in wide open areas and hallways. Is it a question of available video memory? Or has this old graphics board finally reached the end of its useful life?

**jens** · 09-05-2010, 04:09 PM

Try turning of Aero in Vista before running the game and see if that helps. During the whole development of the game I have used a GeForce 6800 GT on a 2.0 Ghz Athlon with only 1 GB RAM and have had the level editor, model editor running at the same time as playing the game. So it really should be behaving quite nice on your computer unless there is some specific conflict making it slow down.

**membrain** · 09-05-2010, 06:50 PM

hi,

On the one hand, 128 MB of video memory seem to be bit too less for this game, especially while having turned on shader effects, blur and SSAO. But on the other hand, Vista is the point. It reserves huge amounts of system memory so the 2 GB will slightly match Vista's demands. On an untouched Vista system there go about 800 to 1200 MB of RAM straight to the system. In your case Amnesia would have about half a GB. And there are surely some more programs running like firewall, antivirus and so on. Try to close unneeded programs and then run Amnesia again.

membrain

**FreonTrip** · 09-06-2010, 02:41 AM

The system's actually on the trim side - other than Microsoft Security Essentials, nothing ostentatious is rampaging about. The Left 4 Dead games, the Penumbra collection, and F.E.A.R. have all run with varying degrees of success, so I'm keen to get to the bottom of this problem. I'll perform a thorough performance audit, starting with disabling Aero, and update this tomorrow with results. It bears mentioning that the game's run beautifully on an Athlon X2 5050e with 2 gigs of RAM and a 512 MB 9600GSO, running Slackware 13.1, and was creepy enough that it kept me up until 3 in the morning...

Incidentally, is Amnesia multithreaded?

Edit: Updated drivers, disabled Aero, and lo and behold, performance is pretty bearable at low-to-medium detail settings at 800x600. Aero's the culprit - I estimate performance dropped by at least half when it's enabled. Thanks for the help, all!