Has anyone else seen a massive performance dip since switching to the steam version? I moved to the steam version today to play the latest build, noticed my once silky smooth gameplay become really jerky and it looked like 25-30fps going on, sometimes worse. But the confusing thing is that FRAPS is telling me I'm getting 70-100 fps, which would fall in line with where I was before. So why is what I'm seeing on screen not matching up with the FPS I'm apparently getting? Hmm.
I don't know if there is or isn't a difference, but what you are experiencing are most likely frame drops. Or better said the frame time increases for a single frame that is being calculated.
It might be a new insight to some, but next to the amount of Frames-Per-Second these days we also have another calculation method called Frame-Times. With this you look at the time each frame took to be calculated inside one second.
What this means is that if a single frame takes too long to calculate it will disrupt the flow of frames and you will see a tiny stutter in the image produced.
This does not mean that you will see a massive drop in the amount of FPS by definition, because in that second the other frames might not take long too load at all.
What could be happening in this case is a couple of things.
One thing what I noticed in the past when I ran a GTX480 on a Core2Duo E6600 was that with the Mafia 2 benchmark, which shows average and minimum FPS, I noticed that if I ran without my X-Fi soundcard (so onboard sound) or X-Fi card in anything other than "Game-Mode" I had a considerably lower minimum FPS than when I used the X-Fi card in Game-Mode.
With this I at the time (not knowing about frame-times) concluded that my CPU was still working on calculating audio and/or waiting for the audio chip(s) to say it is ready and has received all data. After that was done the CPU had time for sending data again to the graphics card.
So as the graphics card had to wait for the cpu to send data due to a delay in the cpu order chain, the frame time of the frame it is working on obviously goes up and eventually the minimum FPS achieved goes down. All resulting in a stutter or a sequence in stutters in the image produced.
Conclusion/in short:
The advancements in the audio department could have put an extra strain on the CPU, resulting in that the graphics card has to wait for the audio and thus has an increase in its frame-times.
There isn't really a way to get rid of this other than buy a soundcard that can offload your cpu. The X-Fi game mode activates the X-RAM and thus buffers a lot of commands and data needed, removing strain on the cpu.
Another way is to ask Stephen, Greg or Martin what is going on instead of coming to GTP to complain, which maybe will result in improved audio performance or that maybe Martin notices a reason for the increased frame-times with that high FPS.
In any case, good luck and I hope this kinda answers your question.
