How to reach maximum framerate in our loved game

[Nerima 61]

Hello!

 

I would like to disqus quite interested topic that i haven't yet seen raised on the forums

And first of all I want to metion that this is not "help me to choose hardware", this is more of a research "which configurations are best for apb, and which not so much",  and which not-so-obvious things, tips and tricks have an impact on performance.

We all know that APB has pretty poor optimization, but there always been the ways to achieve the cherished 120fps (or even more) 
I personally went in this direction quite a long way which began in 2012 in parallel with the beginning of my passion for PC hardware
Two things I learned for sure - APB need a SSD and single-core performance
Because of the second, I never even looked in the direction of AMD cpus (ryzen was not even a thing at that time)

Then in 2017 I sold my PC and moved to Mac due to the work and forgot about APB and hardware market for 2 years 
And now when I decided to return I realized that the market has changed a lot 

I've already purchased all the hardware for my new build except the CPU and motherboard. Now i'm choosing between 6700k 7700k and 8700k, of course, many will say "just buy 8700k", but I'm afraid that quad-core processors can show a better result in the APB than the six-core + I have a chance to hook 7700k for $200, of course cpu will be watercooled and overclocked, goal is 5.0ghz, but im not sure if its possible (especially on 8700k). I'm also considering 2th and 3th gen ryzen, but, of course, it is not possble to find any test with ryzen in apb.

 

So, the question and main purpose of this topic is to know everyone's opinion and own experience about how to get maximum out of APB  (of course without resorting to cfgs with destroyed graphics) 
On what builds did you manage to squeeze more than 100fps? What builds perform well in other games but don't reach 100fps in APB? Is Ryzen relevant for apb? 

My last build in 2017 had 16gb ram, i7 4790k watercooled and overclocked to 4,7ghz and gtx980, apb was installed on samsung 850 evo ssd, and guess what? Even then i wasn't able to enjoy my stable 120fps, more like 90fps average with drops below 60s and sometimes maxing out on 120

And something interesting for all folks living in a bunker and having no idea why I care about overclocking so much. Pretty old but still relevant video from Lilu, showing how cpu frequency affects actual in-game performance:

 

[ninjarrrr 255]

dont waste ur money on intel

[RegenanceE 3]

AMD much better than Intel, and the game seem to be hating AMD processors. 

[CookiePuss 5378]

If you want increased fps without the advanced launcher or a config, try lowering your resolution in fullscreen mode. Should see a significant increase.

 

Also, for what it's worth OCing my CPU from 3.7Ghz to 4.5Ghz yielded little improvement.

Edited August 15, 2019 by CookiePuss

[Nerima 61]

13 minutes ago, CookiePuss said:

If you want increased fps without the advanced launcher or a config, try lowering your resolution in fullscreen mode. Should see a significant increase.

 

Also, for what it's worth OCing my CPU from 3.7Ghz to 4.5Ghz yielded little improvement.

Why shall I on i7 and top-of-the-line gpu make manipulations with resolution? This is not the case here. Especially with the fact that I'm making videos and my goal is to make the game look as good as possible. 

I do use advanced launcher to adjust explosions and particles, to reduces framerate drops. But now I want to discuss hardware side of performance. 

Talking about overclocking, when i had 4790k going from 4.0 to 4.8 increased fps by like 15%

[cheater 296]

This post doesnt matter no more cause LO broke the performance for the 4th time within this 2 months, doing the same thing 4 times within 1 month. crazy.

[Nerima 61]

1 hour ago, ninjarrrr said:

dont waste ur money on intel

I wouldn't "waste", but yet I dont see any advantages of team red. lets be honest, before ryzen amd cpus were pretty outdated and had nothing to oppose to intel.

And if something has changed with ryzen (directly in apb), I will be happy If anyone would share it. 

 

Merged.

 

12 minutes ago, cheater said:

This post doesnt matter no more cause LO broke the performance for the 4th time within this 2 months, doing the same thing 4 times within 1 month. crazy.

We're suffering from it for 7 years now, cmon dude, g1 wasn't different. God knows how possibly both graphics and performance would get worse at the same time, but it happens again and again. Yet, this does not devalue information I'm looking for in this topic. 

[CookiePuss 5378]

2 hours ago, Nerima said:

Why shall I on i7 and top-of-the-line gpu make manipulations with resolution? This is not the case here. Especially with the fact that I'm making videos and my goal is to make the game look as good as possible. 

I do use advanced launcher to adjust explosions and particles, to reduces framerate drops. But now I want to discuss hardware side of performance. 

Talking about overclocking, when i had 4790k going from 4.0 to 4.8 increased fps by like 15%

I see what you mean.

Have you tried removing fog?

IMO it makes the game look better and it can boost framerate by as much as 20 FPS.

Its hard to give advice on hardware as APB seems to run differently on every PC running it. (Unless you want to copy someone's full build, in which case I would ask @SKay to give you his specs)

[Nerima 61]

1 hour ago, CookiePuss said:

I see what you mean.

Have you tried removing fog?

IMO it makes the game look better and it can boost framerate by as much as 20 FPS.

Its hard to give advice on hardware as APB seems to run differently on every PC running it. (Unless you want to copy someone's full build, in which case I would ask @SKay to give you his specs)

why him?

[Aeronaut 647]

12 minutes ago, Nerima said:

why him?

he owns intel

[vsb 6171]

14 minutes ago, Nerima said:

why him?

i think because skay's various pc configurations are being used to benchmark the current spct otw, but once we get the engine upgrade there shouldn't be a need to directly copy another player's pc because half the point of the engine upgrade is performance increases/optimization

[CookiePuss 5378]

11 minutes ago, Nerima said:

why him?

He is the one player whose benchmarking info I have seen that outperforms everyone else's benchmarks Ive seen.

(We use MSI Afterburner to Benchmark both the current APB engine as well as 3.5)

[Nerima 61]

3 hours ago, CookiePuss said:

He is the one player whose benchmarking info I have seen that outperforms everyone else's benchmarks Ive seen.

(We use MSI Afterburner to Benchmark both the current APB engine as well as 3.5)

Well, sounds interesting. Ask him then, please. I think he knows pretty much everything i want to know.

[CookiePuss 5378]

1 hour ago, Nerima said:

Well, sounds interesting. Ask him then, please. I think he knows pretty much everything i want to know.

Yeah SKay knows a crap ton about this subject. I'll ask him to DM you if he doesn't pop up in this thread.

[Glubbable 41]

Sadly, due to the nature of single threading in software, the performance of the program is at the mercy of the current work load that the program has to process.

Everything in single-threading basically runs similar to single lane road, which can be overwhelmed more quickly if enough cars pile onto it at once.

 

Overclocking only helps mitigate this problem by allowing for faster processing times. But no amount of sheer compute power is going to resolve certain functions or systems in the game that are causing excessively long compute times. As a result, the framerate drops are the result of the program having to wait for the process to finish, long wait times from this can easily be caused by external factors, such as the hard-drive being unable to complete the task of suddenly writing several MB of error messages into a log file within a split second. This can easily be witnessed as either frame drops or (in my case) extreme stutter lag and freezes.

 

Ultimately though, the only solutions to this kind of performance problem is to either optimize the hell out of your code or work towards multi-thread support. Which is the goal they are aiming for with the Engine Upgrade anyway.

 

On a personal note, I would love to know if there is a launch command option to disable game logging as I don't like how a play session results in a 300MB log file full of error messages that are only really useful to the developers. While yes, it can be helpful in support cases, most of the time these logs are pointless to collect if they are not needed most of the time.

Edited August 16, 2019 by Glubbable

[Seadee 107]

this is why i've always had a smooth experience in APB, overclock the shit out of my CPU regardless of requirement, last build was a Intel Core i5 4690K Processor (3.5 GHz, 6 MB Cache, LGA1150 Socket) which i have overclocked to 4.5ghz  (a quick google shows i could get it to 4.9ghz) couple with decent ram and an SSD, ive never had a single issue playing APB, even from RTW days i had a core duo overclocked to 4ghz...

so i've only been saying this for about 9 years ...

[Nerima 61]

12 hours ago, CookiePuss said:

Yeah SKay knows a crap ton about this subject. I'll ask him to DM you if he doesn't pop up in this thread.

Any updates? I was supposed to buy myself new CPU today, but decided to wait for SKay's advice before.

[SKay 207]

1 hour ago, Nerima said:

Any updates? I was supposed to buy myself new CPU today, but decided to wait for SKay's advice before.

 

Hi Nerima

 

Sorry about the delay. Just got alerted by @CookiePuss to this thread, even after tagging me in it days ago. Sorry about that. Hopefully the in depth explanation and discussion to nerd over makes up for it :P.

 

If you haven't seen it already, I would recommend looking here to see the work I did for performance testing Ryzen CPU's in action in APB @ 4K in both the current engine and the upcoming Engine Upgrade. Spoiler: they work quite well.

 

The graph listed is the same graph provided in the thread linked above but just a bit higher clarity.

 

Now with this graph, I can say personally that either AMD or Intel for your CPU choices would be equally valid, depending on if you're using the system just for gaming, or for more. There are anomalies that both Intel and AMD suffer from, which I will go into once appropriate. Before all of that, I have to go through the current situation.

 

The current situation

 

As of right now, APB is a tightrope. A lot of the problems that players face today are from how tight some of the constraints are, and how the main game thread is tied up as soon as something happens, and with little relief until the task executed is complete.

 

The biggest problem is the Garbage Collector, which is one big double-edged sword. On the one hand, it allows the game to run. On the other, it can make the game run extremely poorly. It's necessary for the 32-bit memory constraint to work, but at the same time strangles the main game thread every sixty seconds as it does a fly-by. Unless you are willing to edit the GC settings in the files (don't, it's very easy to get it wrong), you will suffer with everyone else on the matter and soldier on. This is something that all platforms suffer from, you're not getting around it.

 

But more than likely an even bigger core problem to APB is that it does not support multi-core. It can use more than one thread, however it cannot scale past two main threads, used by the game executable itself for the main game thread and the render thread. This does not include child processes like Vivox Voice Service and the APB Exception Handler (APB_Catcher). APB historically prefers clock over cores, but can benefit from running on unique cores. This, again, is something that all platforms suffer from, you're not getting around it.

 

The two issues I've listed above would be rectified with the Engine Upgrade, that much can be said. So you're going to need to look ahead...

 

The look ahead

 

In the future -  APB will largely be a much more "fair game" situation, where the user will be able to not experience drops every time they look at LeBoyce's awesome afro. Oh and also not crash every time the memory map is exceeded. So your choice should be influenced by that.

 

With that in mind - looking ahead to your potential CPU choice would be moving to a new platform regardless of what you do. Unfortunately that is the way of the world since forever for Intel, and a move to AMD would require it anyway for AM4. Let me outline very quickly some bullet points on both CPU manufacturers (i.e benefits and drawbacks, with APB specific items marked)

Intel

Pros:

• (For APB) It is currently seen as the best CPU for the current engine, and it can push high framerate.
• Up until recently was still superior to AMD for gaming in general
• More established second hand market

 

Cons:

• You are required to purchase a new chipset & motherboard if you want to upgrade
• Prices are very high compared to AMD offerings
• 14nm++++++. 10nm has been so slow to market, that 14nm was recycled again and again. Aged well, but it's not worth it.
• Expand-ability via PCIe (for NVMe SSD's etc.) is limited on the budget side drastically. You need to fork out hundreds for more PCIe lanes.

AMD

Pros:

• You are not required to purchase a new chipset & motherboard if you want to upgrade.
• Ryzen 3000 is essentially holding parity to Intel for single core performance
• Multi-core Ryzen is vastly superior to Intel multi-core.
• Much cheaper CPU's for much more cores and now similar performance

 

Cons:

• (For APB) Can have inferior performance by a few percentage points (Ryzen 1st Gen)
• May not have an organic second hand market yet (it's getting there though)
• Overclocking is essentially not possible past a certain point. Mild overclocks are possible but more substantial offsets are limited to LN2 cooling.
• First Gen X370/B350/A320 motherboards can be junk in terms of quality. 3rd/2nd gen boards are A-OK.

As you are going to a new platform in any regard, I would personally recommend you get a Ryzen 3rd Gen CPU (3600, 3800X or the 3900X depending on your budget), simply because for the price, you will be getting into a platform that can be upgraded past one single generation which would be very important if you just want to upgrade a CPU down the line for instance. Intel for the price really isn't competitive and even though the 9900K can be competitive in gaming, if you do content creation (I assume you do since you got a Mac), the performance of the AMD CPU's in that space is second to none. Again, it is down to what workloads you do.

 

Hopefully that helps a little bit. If you need me to answer any questions past that just mention me and let me know specifically what you want answered. And that goes out to anyone in this thread.
- SKay

Edited August 16, 2019 by SKay
.exe went to program :(

[Nerima 61]

@SKay whoa, that's actually quite a lot of useful knowledge! Thank you for taking your time, took me a while to digest all the information.

 

But I have one last (i hope so at least) question

 

If at the end we got into "help me to choose hardware" anyway, then i want to clarify something:
1)You're perceptive, i'm actually a graphics and clothes designer, so my pc is not a toy, but tool.

2)I'm a hardware geek, "building  future-proof PC with opportunity for easy upgrade" is not about me. I do enjoy rebuilding my whole pc at least once a year. At least it was so.

3)I'm not on tight budget, but as any other man, i don't want to pay more than i have to. As a mentioned in my first post, i have a chance  to hook new 7700k + strix z270e for 300$ and overclock the hell out of it. This is cheaper than 3800x alone, and even cheaper than 3700x. But the old excitement of hunting for framerates makes me doubt. And this was the reason of creating this topic. To know what specs are ultimate in the current apb state. And this is the question you did not answer.

 

What's your PC specs? And what results it shows in a current apb version? If Cookie was right and you got as far as it gets.