The lag spikes and a missing ceiling

[Cranky Old Man]

I have a minimum requirement setup (with a ATi Radeon HD 5870, not much RAM, and fairly old graphics drivers) but I know what my lag spikes come from after half an hour of testing.

It's not from SSAO or any of those graphics settings, because I tried turning ALL of that off and walk around a lot. The lag spikes depend on the quality of the textures, and they happen mostly when you load up the game, or when you load something - either new textures or audio. More on that later.

With high textures, even my regular frame rate takes a hit, so I don't know why those are recommended settings for my card. Maybe it would improve with updated graphics drivers.
With medium textures, the game runs okay, but lag spikes can still occur sometimes.
With low textures, the game seems okay.

...but I don't think the lag spikes has to do with my graphics card, to be honest. I think it has to do with the reading speed of my hard drive (that can take two minutes to save a simple LibreOffice Calc document), and the game loading in textures MID-GAME.
When I start the game, extremely low quality textures are loaded, and I have to wait awhile for the textures I ordered to load in all around me. This can take a few MINUTES, and you get lag spikes for every texture loaded in.

This also happens in between chapters, probably because new textures are loaded in at that point. I don't get why you won't load in the correct textures all at once at the loading screen, because if you did that, the lag spikes would be gone (at least for me).


My second "issue", I tried to screencap, but the game just took a picture of my Steam instead. It's about a missing ceiling, just outside of Cath's new lab (where you run a simulation on a dummy and find out that you're Reed). It's a bit in a corner in the dead end to the right, just as you exit the lab.


Thank you.

[Filizitas]

You dont know much about that stuff, since you would instantly see two things you said that dont work together:

not much RAM

and the game loading in textures MID-GAME

Do you know what texture streaming is? Its the mos advanced technique out there that is supposed to keep memory clean and stop game from lagging. But its bound to a PC that actually has the min req RAM.
So if you dont have 8 gb of ram delete your thread, cause thats the min req of the game. Anything else is your problem.

[Cranky Old Man]

You dont know much about that stuff, since you would instantly see two things you said that dont work together:

not much RAM

and the game loading in textures MID-GAME

Do you know what texture streaming is? Its the mos advanced technique out there that is supposed to keep memory clean and stop game from lagging. But its bound to a PC that actually has the min req RAM.
So if you dont have 8 gb of ram delete your thread, cause thats the min req of the game. Anything else is your problem.

I only have 6 GB, but the game works fine AFTER all textures have been loaded in, which makes me question the minimum requirements. I guess the game tries to load all textures at load time, then fails, and then loads the game "without" textures, but then streams it back in. ...so why can't it, at load time, begin loading the textures that the player can see, and then the textures local to it, and then the textures furthest away? ...and settle for the textures that it managed to load in? That would make the game run on a 6 GB machine or lower.

Also, a missing ceiling bit is still a missing ceiling bit.

[plutomaniac]

6GB of RAM is more than enough. From personal experience I can tell you that the problem is the slow hard drive. When the game got out I tested it on an old SATA I (5400RPM) hard drive and the game was lagging whenever I dropped an object or moving fast, basically upon loading of a new file. I moved the installation into another proper drive (faster HDD or SSD) and these issues disappeared completely. You should also update your AMD drivers to the latest possible for good measure though.