really bad performance

[bowkatt]

Hey guys, first time posting here. My game's been running terribly. Like really bad. I'm running around at 10 fps, and it's just set on standard graphics. I play Doom on this computer, and Skyrim Special Edition on full settings, but I'm running 10 fps on City of Heroes? Is there like one of those 4gb patches I need to do or something like that? What am I missing? I'm running Windows 10 with a GTX 950M

[Tahquitz]

We were talking about how Windows 10 substitutes the Microsoft Display Adapter Driver on older cards, but the GTX 950M isn't that old, so that wouldn't make sense to me.

Ideas:

-- I've noticed post processing effects in City of Heroes tends to misbehave more than recent games.  For example, Depth of Field and Bloom I keep on the lowest settings in City of Heroes for a minor performance hit (60FPS looking at the ground, around 45-50 looking at the sky), where Star Trek Online, I can crank them to max on my 1050Ti and it keeps pace at 60FPS no problem.  If I turn DOF and Bloom to full on City of Heroes, I get crashes.  Bad ones where I need to restart.  And it was a brand new card at the time.

-- OpenGL support tends to hop around from driver to driver when it comes to NVidia and AMD cards.  Especially when most OpenGL chipsets were hovering around the 4.X spec and City of Heroes (if I remember correctly) is OpenGL 2.0 (Original Recipe)/2.1 (Ultra Mode).  Most of the optimizations aren't headed in the 2.X direction these days.  (You can buy a 1080 Titan, and still get the same performance in City of Heroes as the 950/1050 roughly.)  If the performance change has been recent and you've updated drivers, you might want to consider if leaving a driver at an older version may help, or if playback on Doom and Skyrim is worth more attention and shrugging off Paragon Chat.  That's a judgement call on your part.

That's what I can think of.  If none of those are it, I'm all ears on further ideas.

[bowkatt]

We were talking about how Windows 10 substitutes the Microsoft Display Adapter Driver on older cards, but the GTX 950M isn't that old, so that wouldn't make sense to me.

Ideas:

-- I've noticed post processing effects in City of Heroes tends to misbehave more than recent games.  For example, Depth of Field and Bloom I keep on the lowest settings in City of Heroes for a minor performance hit (60FPS looking at the ground, around 45-50 looking at the sky), where Star Trek Online, I can crank them to max on my 1050Ti and it keeps pace at 60FPS no problem.  If I turn DOF and Bloom to full on City of Heroes, I get crashes.  Bad ones where I need to restart.  And it was a brand new card at the time.

-- OpenGL support tends to hop around from driver to driver when it comes to NVidia and AMD cards.  Especially when most OpenGL chipsets were hovering around the 4.X spec and City of Heroes (if I remember correctly) is OpenGL 2.0 (Original Recipe)/2.1 (Ultra Mode).  Most of the optimizations aren't headed in the 2.X direction these days.  (You can buy a 1080 Titan, and still get the same performance in City of Heroes as the 950/1050 roughly.)  If the performance change has been recent and you've updated drivers, you might want to consider if leaving a driver at an older version may help, or if playback on Doom and Skyrim is worth more attention and shrugging off Paragon Chat.  That's a judgement call on your part.

That's what I can think of.  If none of those are it, I'm all ears on further ideas.

so, I'm running on the "recommended" setting, which has bloom and depth of field turned off, reflections are off, shadows are set at lowest, no motion blur. It's pretty much bare bones as it gets, and it's still running terribly. I tried turning stuff like textures down but then a lot of costume pieces were missing textures and just showed up all white. The thing I thought it was is that a lot of older games when played on new systems cap the memory they have available at 2gb, so I ran the 4gb patch on the city of heroes application but it didn't do anything. As to the drivers, I played this game like a year ago and performance was still pretty bad back then, so if I were turning to an older driver it would have to be a heck of an old driver.

[Tahquitz]

Some of the costume textures appear all white on mine, but they're costume parts from I24, so the textures were never finished.  All the rest appear for me.

Sorry I'm not much help. 

[Codewalker]

Some of the costume textures appear all white on mine, but they're costume parts from I24, so the textures were never finished.  All the rest appear for me.

That probably means you're not running the modern shader that was introduced for ultra mode. Some of the I24 pieces didn't have fallback textures created for the old renderer created yet, so if you're running in non-ultra they'll show up white.

Highly recommend turning on ultra mode even if you turn off all of the individual ultra features. Even integrated graphics chips can handle that now, and anything made in the last 8 years will probably perform better with that than the old pipeline anyway.

bowkatt, can you go into the Paragon Chat options panel and add "-console" to the client options? That will cause the COH client to open up a console window and spit out a bunch of debug output the next time you run it. Once it finishes loading, use edit/select to select all the text and paste it here on the forums. That'll let us see if there's anything obviously wrong.

[Bitters]

Someone else was having this issue last week and noticed that their FSAA was set to 32x or something. Full screen anti-aliasing is probably the only single setting that will produce a massive hit to performance. Just a thought.

[bowkatt]

here's that debug thing:

done.                                        (0.39)
ERRORLOG STARTING IGNORE:
OpenGL vendor string: Intel
OpenGL renderer string: Intel(R) HD Graphics 530
OpenGL version string: 3.0.0 - Build 21.20.16.4550
console 1
CPU: 2592 Mhz / Memory: 4095 MBs / Available Memory: 2456 MBs / OS Version: 6.2.9200 /
Command Line Arguments:
 / Video Device 0: Intel(R) HD Graphics 530, ID: PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_191B&SUBSYS_11301043&REV_06, Flags: 0x00000005 (PRIMARY) / Video Device 1: Intel(R) HD Graphics 530, ID: PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_191B&SUBSYS_11301043&REV_06, Flags: 0x00000000 / Video Device 2: Intel(R) HD Graphics 530, ID: PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_191B&SUBSYS_11301043&REV_06, Flags: 0x00000000Driver Date: 11-11-2016 / Video Memory: Unknown / VideoCardVendorID: 0x8086 / VideoCardDeviceID: 0x191B
OpenGL vendor: Intel
OpenGL renderer: Intel(R) HD Graphics 530
OpenGL version: 3.0.0 - Build 21.20.16.4550
Render settings: VBOS 0
Render path: ARBVP ARBFP GLSL
Render features: WATER* MULTITEX* MULTITEX_DUAL* HQBUMP* MULTITEX_HQBUMP* WATER_DEPTH* BUMPMAPS* BUMPMAPS_WORLD* AMBIENT CUBEMAP* SHADOWMAP* WATER_REFLECTIONS*
Acceptable video card driver
Initializing fragment shaders...
Initializing vertex shaders...
Renderer initialization complete.
Caching relevant folders.. done                                       (0.00)
loading sounds.. done                                                 (0.01)
loading tricks.. done                                                 (0.15)
Loading texture headers..                                             (0.57)
loadFonts...                                                          (0.18)
Networking startup...                                                 (0.00)
loading grouplibs..3227 files, 75482 names                            (0.07)
loading lod infos.. done                                              (0.03)
loading sequencers...                                                 (1.56)
Loading misc...
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  Loading powers..
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    loading badges..done                                              (0.01)
    loading supergroup badges and pophelp..ERROR: Can't open server/db/templates/pophelp.attribute
done                       (0.01)
    loading misc..done                                                (0.01)
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    loading salvage..done                                             (0.00)
    loading recipes..done                                             (0.23)
    loading text links..done                                          (0.19)
    loading arena maps list..done                                     (0.00)
    loading costume weapon stance list..done                          (0.00)
                                                                      (1.61)
  Loading items..                                                     (0.09)
  Loading FX info.. done                                              (0.65)
  Building FX string handles.. done                                   (0.03)
  Loading Loyalty Rewards.. done                                      (0.00)
  Loading FX behaviors.. done                                         (0.06)
  Loading villain defs.. done                                         (0.20)
  Loading FX capes.. done                                             (0.00)
  Loading body parts.. done                                           (0.00)
  Loading NPC defs.. done                                             (0.33)
  Loading ent_types.. done                                            (0.02)
                                                                      (3.23)
Preloading particles..                                                (0.30)
loading Costume bins...done                                           (0.21)
ERRORLOG FILEERROR: texts/English/menus/quickchat.mnu
File: texts/English/menus/quickchat.mnu
Last Author/Status:Perforce.cpp failed to connect to Perforce.
Tokenizer: no end of string found in texts/English/menus/quickchat.mnu, line 989

Loading Player Created StoryArc Data...done                           (0.01)
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Loading Custom Villain Groupsdone                                     (0.00)
Loading Mission Commentsdone                                          (0.00)
Generating Mission Maker Data...
  StoryArcTemplate...done                                             (0.35)
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  BossTemplate...done                                                 (0.25)
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  done                                                                (1.22)
Pre-loading character animations...done                               (0.00)
Pre-loading fx geometry...done                                        (0.04)
Creating Auction Data...done                                          (0.57)



as to the graphics settings, any specific settings recommendations? I've set it to ultra, and that did actually seem to make things a little better, but it's still pretty bad. What specifically should I be turning down and by how much?

[bowkatt]

omg, just turned the FXAA down to 4x and that made a gigantic difference