HBS Battletech Technical Discussion thread

[deathshadow]

I had to back out one driver version on my GTX 1070 as it was running flat-out burning itself up to deliver just 5 fps. This isn't anything 'new' when it comes to nVidia drivers.

Back on Witcher 3 when it was released nVidia dropped "game ready" drivers for it that same day that were uber-optimized for Maxwell and later CPU's. Sadly in doing so they utterly broke Keppler support -- like the GTX 770 I had at the time.

Which was REALLY stupid since the GTX 770 was the recommended card on the box for the bloody game.

I do wonder given the relatively primitive graphics, low draw distances, almost outdated looking 'glossyness' on units much akin to Doom 3's engine, just what the devil it is doing hogging so much GPU. I mean I know unity is a bit of a pig but... just... I mean this machine can run Witcher 3 at 2x DSR on ultra delivering 60+ FPS solid, what's making "BattleTech" chew MORE GPU and CPU time, generate more heat, for graphics that are mediocre at best?

Though I'm hearing from more and more people with lower spec systems that it runs great, and people with high spec systems complaining that it's chopping them off at the knees so... Poor optimization? Lack of testing platforms?

[Cyc]

I had to back out one driver version on my GTX 1070 as it was running flat-out burning itself up to deliver just 5 fps. This isn't anything 'new' when it comes to nVidia drivers.

Back on Witcher 3 when it was released nVidia dropped "game ready" drivers for it that same day that were uber-optimized for Maxwell and later CPU's. Sadly in doing so they utterly broke Keppler support -- like the GTX 770 I had at the time.

Which was REALLY stupid since the GTX 770 was the recommended card on the box for the bloody game.

I do wonder given the relatively primitive graphics, low draw distances, almost outdated looking 'glossyness' on units much akin to Doom 3's engine, just what the devil it is doing hogging so much GPU. I mean I know unity is a bit of a pig but... just... I mean this machine can run Witcher 3 at 2x DSR on ultra delivering 60+ FPS solid, what's making "BattleTech" chew MORE GPU and CPU time, generate more heat, for graphics that are mediocre at best?

Though I'm hearing from more and more people with lower spec systems that it runs great, and people with high spec systems complaining that it's chopping them off at the knees so... Poor optimization? Lack of testing platforms?

Wasn't that one of the one reasons cited for agreeing to Paradox publishing, to help fund testing?

[Daryk]

Is there , by chance, a way to shut off the animations that seem to be causing the pain to the GPUs?  I'm thinking back to older versions of Civilization where you could have animated combat, or not if you just wanted the result...

EDIT: Missing word.

[Bedwyr]

Wasn't that one of the one reasons cited for agreeing to Paradox publishing, to help fund testing?

Probably. One reason I’m copacetic is that Paradox has a strong reputation for iteration and long term support. Most of these performance issues will be worked on.

[Vehrec]

Is, by chance, a way to shut off the animations that seem to be causing the pain to the GPUs?  I'm thinking back to older versions of Civilization where you could have animated combat, or not if you just wanted the result...

There's a guy on Rock-Paper-Shotgun who's bored to tears by the animations and the inability to turn them off.  In his words,

Even through the stodginess, the ruleset makes BattleTech thoughtful and distinctive, and most all ensures that it’s definitely about giant machines rather than simply standard TBS units with robot skins.

It’s just… well, I want to almost immediately find out what happens when I make those shots, or when those shots are made at me, rather than sit through all those unhurried firing, staggering and stomping sequences, and all those giant laserbeams that just remove an armour blob or two with about as much sense of impact as throwing a frozen pea at a window.

Seeing BattleTech mechs precisely-recreated in high definition isn’t a long-held fantasy of mine, so as source material-accurate as it may be, I feel nothing much of anything when I watch these rather indistinct walkers and their various weapons go about their achingly slow business in a lifeless landscape they leave little mark upon. I want to know what happens, and get immediately on with doing something about it. Maybe I’d find it easier to stomach if the battles didn’t look quite so sterile.

So for him, the problem isn't that the peformance is bad and framecount low-it's just that the game itself is too damn slow with any animations at all, and since he can't turn the animations off to make the game go faster, I don't think you can turn them off to make the performance better.

[Daryk]

Thanks!  At least I won't be wasting time trying to find an off switch that isn't there (assuming my ancient machine only needs a bit more RAM to make the game work at all).

[Kibutsu]

My rig was having heat problems before this game was released so I have been leaving the side panel off until I can fix the issue. I have a GTX970 GPU and a Phenom II 965 CPU and this game runs just fine, no crashes or any of the other issues I'm seeing reported, though the GPU is screaming which is compounded by the fact that the case is open. It's using far more GPU than GTAV or Arkham Knight ever did. Curious.

[Bedwyr]

Quick note. RPS reports that gpu prices are maybe finally falling:

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2018/04/26/graphics-card-prices-finally-coming-down-gtx-1080-deals/

[deathshadow]

For laughs I tried it on my workstation -- Celeron J1900 with a GTX 560, and it ran BETTER than my media center / gaming machine which is a i7 4770k with GTX 1070.... so I started playing with hardware configs from my scrap pile and found something odd.

The crappier your CPU the LOWER the GPU load and better the game performs... AHA Jason said, since I've seen this behavior before just only with single-threaded games. Lo and behold ANOTHER telltale is present in that even the MENUS max out the CPU and GPU and the more powerful the CPU, the more overloaded the GPU becomes.

Physics/animation/input is all tied to the frame rate instead of leveraging a separate event / timeout. Solution?

Turn vSync on.

BOOM, media center only using 20-25% cpu evenly distributed across all cores, GPU use at ultra settings in 4x DSR (3840x2160) only 45%, rock solid framerates with no animation dropouts.

Normally I turn sync on as a matter of habit, and assumed it was on since I have it enabled as the default in the nVidia control panel, but for some reason the geForce "experience' default for the game forces it OFF. Turn it on in game, and boom, runs fine, no more strange pauses and massive dropped frames (to the tune of second or more worth) in the animations, no more crashes, no more bringing a machine five times more powerful than the game should need to its knees by drawing max power on every piece of hardware.

Seriously, chained to the frame rate when it's multithreaded?!? What is this 2003? OH wait... Unity... and that's where I saw this behavior before -- Firewatch.

[Daryk]

So there's a way to turn down the frame rate somewhere in the settings?  That sounds like good news for those of us with ancient machines...

[Bedwyr]

Hey guys. For those few of you who *might* have the Steam Controller (I play games with it exclusively from the couch), I uploaded what I think is an intuitive controller scheme. Look for my moniker when looking for community schemes. I have the left touch pad doing horizontal/vertical camera control with an alt-mode doing touch-menu for all the pilot abilities. The right touch pad is mouse with alt-mode doing scroll wheel for faster menu navigation. Everything else is pretty similar to other K&M configurations in other games.

[Luciora]

I'll have to check when i get home, but i thought there was a setting for combat animations in the main menu you could set change animations.

[Daryk]

Please!  That will be most helpful (when I eventually get my new RAM card...).

[Feenix74]

I updated the driver for my GTX 550 ti, the latest Nvidia driver update released yesterday does not support the older GPUs but there was a updated driver released for older GPUs in late March. It appears to have dropped GPU loads by 2-5%, not perfect but at least it is not going 100% all the time anymore. Temperature seems to be holding 70-75 deg C during missions and in the mid-high 60s at other times.

I did some more googling this morning and I am going to try forcing v-sync on to see if that will reduce the fps, which appears to be the main culprit for high GPU load. I have also turned off most combat animations and will try turning off all the combat animations.

[deathshadow]

I did some more googling this morning and I am going to try forcing v-sync on to see if that will reduce the fps, which appears to be the main culprit for high GPU load. I have also turned off most combat animations and will try turning off all the combat animations.

In my case forcing vertical sync lowered the excessive CPU use, it was pegging all 8 cores (4 + HT) to max with vsync off, EVEN IN MENUS.

... and honestly killing the goofy animations not only helps with load, it makes the game more enjoyable to actually play. It's one of those artsy cutesy bits that is cool the first time you see it, but by the 100th time it's like "for {expletive omitted} sake, just let me finish the bloody turn!!!"

[Feenix74]

Thanks, that is good to know, I hope at some stage I can bring it back up to Medium graphics level and maintain a sustainable GPU temperature - I am finding the Low graphics a bit uninspiring. I am still enjoying the melee combat animations but I turned off the rest after the first mission to both conserve GPU load and, like you, I found the cutting to animation intrusive on the flow of the game turns.

[Moonsword]

Feels like optimization issues from a team on a short budget. As if greater granularity to force 30fps out of the engine required technical budgeting that just couldn't be justified in production. So they did some graphical reductions that were cheap to implement but not as effective.

That's pretty much what it feels like to me, too.  Even lowering the settings doesn't really seem to nudge the workload on the card although I haven't done a lot of experimenting.

ok for life of me i cannot figure how to fix the problem. my copy works fine my buddies does not we both have gog versions.
problem is this after tutorial mission the ship appears on my copy of game just fine with user interface  on my buddies there is no user interface just ship.
i tried few things from reinstalling changing resolution to both windowed and full screen and as per suggestions i found on paradox site i even disabled the av and put game in exceptions.
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/what-am-i-supposed-to-do-after-the-tutorial.1091421/
btw gog has similar thread
but to date i had been beating my head against the wall and my buddy is POD for 40 bucks he had spent and not able to play with...btw he is not a gamer
his specs are better than mine and are double over recommended settings keep in mind not the minimum but recommended settings

Try making sure all the drivers are up to date.

[Reldn]

Well, the game ran perfectly fine on Tuesday, however, today I went to start it up and I get the Paradox logo and all the intro stuff, after that though all I get is a black screen with the cursor visible and music playing, but, nothing else.

Has anyone else encountered this, and know of a fix for it? Thanks in advance.

[Luciora]

Here's the screen shot.  I think it helps.

[Lorcan Nagle]

I'm playing on an older laptop - 8GB RAM and I think 2GHz processor, and I found turning resolution down to the lowest setting and detail to medium helped the game load and run much faster. Like I can get an extra mission or two in a night faster

[Moonsword]

Turn vSync on.

BOOM, media center only using 20-25% cpu evenly distributed across all cores, GPU use at ultra settings in 4x DSR (3840x2160) only 45%, rock solid framerates with no animation dropouts.

Thank you!  That brought the thermal behavior right back into line.

[Daryk]

Woo!  My memory card showed up early!  Now to shut this thing down and install it...

[Daryk]

*sigh*  Well, it ran better after I shut off all the animations possible, but on my 4th attempt at the tutorial, it crashed again.  That's enough frustration for the moment...  If not later tonight, then I'll try again tomorrow.

As far as the tutorial, I have to say it's extremely frustrating that they disable various commands while they're trying to teach you others.  If you position yourself poorly (in my case, due to some kind of interface wonkiness), you end up stuck when you can't shoot the target you're supposed to shoot, or reach the hex you're supposed to jump to.

[Daryk]

It took six tries, but I'm finally past the tutorial!  Now it's stuck on prepping for combat for the next mission...

[guardiandashi]

It took six tries, but I'm finally past the tutorial!  Now it's stuck on prepping for combat for the next mission...

if you don't mind, would it be possible for you to post your system specs? I'm kind of curious
For instance, my system is:
I7 960, 18gb ram 2x 1tb 7200rpm drives, 1 7200 4tb drive and a 970gtx gpu
With a 750 watt power supply

I need to take the time to shut down and migrate 1 of the 1tb , the 4tb, and the 970 gpu to my new system, which is right now, just an i7 8700, 32gb ram, a 1tb sata 6 ssd, blue ray and 500watt power supply

[Daryk]

Sure, but I'll warn you it's ancient...

Intel Pentium G630, 2.7GHz with (as of today) 8 GB of RAM.
The video card appears to be "Intel(R) HD Graphics".  It's almost written like it uses the CPU for the graphics processing.

[monbvol]

Possible as that is a built in to the motherboard GPU if I remember right.  That would be the next thing I'd address funds permitting, getting a dedicated video card.  Even if it is an older/cheaper one the dedicated video card should still see a notable performance boost.

[Daryk]

The $30 I dropped on the 4GB of extra RAM is about the limit I can go right now.  Three tuition bills, a mortgage, rent, and room and board for one of the three kids in college pretty much sucks up the free cash around here at the moment.  It's tortuous, but the game is running (at least right now, though I'll say I alt-tabbed while the processor was taking a little nap on whatever the enemy turn is doing).

[guardiandashi]

Sure, but I'll warn you it's ancient...

Intel Pentium G630, 2.7GHz with (as of today) 8 GB of RAM.
The video card appears to be "Intel(R) HD Graphics".  It's almost written like it uses the CPU for the graphics processing.

quick hint if it doesn't say Nvidia xxx or ATI Radeon  something it's integrated graphics another clue is Whether or not  it lists blah dedicated graphics memory.

Was it a pre built system and who made It? If so we can relatively quickly look up the actual specs and configuration and let you know if you can add a dedicated gpu, or recommend what is your best path for the future.

I'm suspecting that if you just upgraded the ram you don't want to hear you should see if you can get a refund and start over with a new system.

[NeonKnight]

Might I recommend this site:

https://www.systemrequirementslab.com/cyri/

Search for battletech, and it could help point out any failings you may be worried about.

Oddly for me it keeps saying the drivers are out of date for my graphics card  ???