There have been multiple complaints about performance so i thought to myself, why not have a thread in which the performance is discussed and tips and tricks on how to improve performance is shared.

For this purpose i've made a stand alone of the demo game MMS and played a little in order to gather some information on what is going on.

Gameplay on different settings.



I'm actually quite happy with the performance on highest settings, it is playable without problems.
There is quite a gain in fps on medium settings, however, only little gain in fps is experienced on low settings.

As you can see, i've used afterburner in order to gather information and it shows that GG is quite heavy on the GPU, even on lowest settings the usage is 100 percent.

For reference i've used Euro truck 2 which is also known to be quite heavy on the system.
As you can see, even on ultra (1080p), the average usage of the GPU is 80, on a lower resolution (720p) it is around 75 percent.

See attachments for results.

I've not touched any shader settings before making the stand alone file of MMS, but that is something i will do this week, first find the optimum settings and than make a new stand alone file to test with.

What i do miss in the stand alone is the ability to choose between resolutions, but since my memory usage is only 1.4 gb it would not make much difference anyway.

The question is "why is the GPU usage so high"?
Even on a blank map it is already at 100 percent, not very green because it also means that the power draw is quite high.
Have a look at this video, Bloom is zero and only that gave me some effect to lower GPU usage.
The funy thing is, when i press tab, the framerate reduces which i would expect to happen, but notice how the GPU usage seems to normalize at the same time.



My system is not high-end, so, to be getting about 50 fps average at highest settings in MMS is quite decent.
Specs:
AMD FX-6300 (notice how low the CPU usage is, see attachments)
16 gb ram (yes overkill)
Geforce GTX 960 (mid range card)

My next step will be to first find some optimized settings and see if i can change the resolution that the game is played at, that will be the next video i'll share in this thread.

I've changed the screen resolution from 1920x1080 to 1280x720, quite a difference which goes accompanied with high fps.
As you can see, the average GPU usage is around 70 percent.
This is on highest settings, only the resolution has been changed.

Tonight i'll visit my brother and see how MMS performes on a R390, my estimate is that i will get about 70fps average on highest settings.

I've been playing around with the shaders but there is one question running through my mind, "what am i doing"?

So the question, is there any info about the shaders in GG, what effects they provide and how to use them?

If i want to find the best optimized settings for a game, i have to know what i am doing.

Well, Lee has done quite a good tutorial about the shaders, i should have looked at the tutorials first

The fps was about 55/60 frames average with a R390, so while indeed higher, certainly not a big improvement compared to my graphics card.

For me the CPU is more of an issue, although both are taxed quite a lot in GG. I have a Q6600 CPU and a GTX970 video card. In my case my CPU is a bottleneck, but I imagine once you get to much faster CPU's it will then be more a GPU issue. I've seen an I5 with a Nvidia 660 outperform my current setup for instance, the faster CPU and related items such as faster memory making a bigger difference than adding the 970 to my system. I include a screen shot of my CPU and GPU usage. This was the result after running through Morning Mountain Stroll. Very high CPU usage, and fairly high GPU, but the CPU is certainly struggling a little here.

You will certainly see a huge improvement after upgrading your system.
I did not think that the gap between the Q6600 and the FX-6300 was so big but apparently it is.



In your case this probably means you'll need an upgrade set.

Yes, an upgrade is certainly overdue, not gonna happen anytime soon though The only benefit I have with this sort of setup, is the knowledge that if I can get things to run well on my system, most other people will not have any issues Well, if they have a reasonably modern desktop, laptops, well they are normally very under-powered, despite their impressive sounding specs. It's had a good run, I've never had a processor for so long ever, the quad cores giving it a longer life span than prior single core CPU's I've owned. But yes, it's time to upgrade, but I've been saying that for 2 years now

You certainly made quite some progress in that area
I am curious what the results would be with an updated system so i have send Belidos a pm to ask him if he can do a similar test with your demo map like i did with MMS.
More interesting is that he also has win10 of which it is said that it boost performance in games.

As you say in the other thread, changing a few sliders is not going to cut it, my plan is to keep using MMS to find improvements by ways that i hopefully find to optimize it.
Quite a good way to learn some more as i am new to this.
Hence i'm reading and trying things, a few days back i've used Lua protector, they are indeed not edible anymore, also not findable
No problem, i'll have to make a new stand alone file anyway with any optimizations i hope to find.

A little program which is quite similar to MSI afterburner is hwm64, download it here.
Very easy to use as you can see in the video below, no need to install, simply download the portable file and run it.

Great profiling tool and video help, thanks!!