Don't expect godlike graphic from that game, This game is bad optimised and thats all to it. Don't compare new triple AAA games to NS2.

^

Nevertheless the game is actually quite beatiful on high settings including AA, even though it is "older"... so that excuse doesn't really work... the devs are still working on improving on performance of the game... anyhow my thoughts about your setup:


3,3ghz is actually pretty weak and NS2 needs more CPU power compared to other games... basically you can run "r_stats" (console command) to see what the bottleneck is GPU or CPU... you see 3 values with r_stats:

Wating for ...
a) world update thread
b) gpu
c) render thread

Basically if you have a number higher than "0 [0]" ... even flickering either zeros to one... if this happens on GPU (b) that means your GPU is the bottleneck with your current settings to get more stable FPS. If you have a) or c) then the CPU is to slow

For most players that have a decent GPU it is mostly the CPU, since NS2 can currently only utilize about 1.5 cores of your CPU. That is why it is for the most setups crucial to get the highest single core performance you can get to have the highest FPS possible.



I had once a setup like yours and the CPU was certainly the bottleneck. Upgrading my CPU (now using i7-7700K with 4.5Ghz without OC) it runs pretty smooth if I don't stream^^

One note, if you use the AlienVision from NS2+ called CrazyAV - that AV from that Mod is quite unperformant and sucks quite a lot out of the GPU.

Don't ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ me with things like your pc can't handle a game from 2012, on an i5 3.3GHz 4GB VRAM 8GB RAM, how dare you?. They pay you to do this otherwise you wouldn't be a moderator.

I can run 2016-2017 games on the highest possible settings just fine, and what do you know, my pc can't handle a game from 2012.

Yeah I wish moderators got paid to trawl the steam forum. What you've been told is right, NS2 has a pretty big CPU bottleneck compared to most other games. When it was initially developed it would only utilise one physical core. Some of the engine routines have been updated and I believe it will utilise multiple cores now. I'm not sure if it supports hyperthreading.

Regardless, don't be rude here, especially when people are trying to help you or you won't be posting here much longer. Thanks.

I wonder in what unicorn country some people live, to think that moderators generally get paid to check these forums. Thus giving you the right to insult me, seriously!?
I give an anwser in technical detail and then this...

It doesn't change the fact that these days 3,3Ghz is still weak and with a proper CPU you can get much better results. If you try play with 144Hz the GPU isn't that strong as well in any game too... but as I've seen from your profile your screen might only get 75hz max.

@Foxy, yeah NS2 now utilizes multiple cores by now, but the bottleneck will usually always be the "strongest single core CPU".
My i7-7700K for example would without OC run hot within a minute if all cores would be stressed close to a 100%. but in NS2 it is only one core and the other cores have relatively low stress... so it is fine.

I get a solid 60fps with GTX 970 4GB and i5 3.2 ghz on mostly high settings so it's maybe something on your end?

Hi,

to help with perfomance issues we really need to know your exact specs. There are a number of i5 cpus with a base or turbo frequency of 3.3 Ghz that perform quite differently from each other. Furthermore it would be great if you could provide a performance log so that we can look into what exactly is slowing down your system:

Type "p_logall" without quotes in the console (~ key or whatever is above tab and next to 1) whenever you want to begin recording in game. Please wait until you at least have spawned before using the command. To end the performance logging you can either use p_endlog in the console or just wait for the round to end.

Afterwards navigate to your appdata/home config folder ( e.g at windows %appdata%/natural selection 2/)
You should now see a new profile log called < timestamp >.plog .
Please zip/compress it and attach it to your tech support post.

This will give us a frame by frame analysis of what is going on, so try to pick a time when you can best reproduce your lowest performance.
Please don't record for shorter than 5 minutes.

But I want to note that the tutorial is a worst case scenario if you are limited by your cpu. To play the tutorial your client has to process the server game logic as well which is normally handled by the dedicated server. That can result in a fps decrease of at least 20%.

Additionally as others have allready mentioned ns2 behaves technically more like a rts game than a fps. Which means it relies primarly on your cpu's power. So if you have a setup with a low/mid tier cpu and high end gpu you will end up with a low/mid tier performance whereas in other fps games you may have a high tier performance result.

Just saw your "bad review" talking about 5 fps... if it were that bad then you should've told it in your first post in the first place. Because "running like ♥♥♥♥ " doesn't necessarily mean that it is literally unplayable for you.
How about trying to do what Ghoul told you, so you get a solution?

This game is demanding. I need to disable shadows for decent FPS sadly.
On the other hand, it's running much better than few years ago.