Hah. People have said this EXACT crap since 2004 with every update Valve ever pushed out. Remember the new T and CT models? Remember when they messed with the AWP recoil? Eventually people get used to the changes, the mod writers fix their code and life goes on with this game.
The difference is while the past updates may have been confined to a few niche setups, or lowered performance overall by like 5%, this new update is a pile of shit for at least half of people.
I'm not one of the people that bitch about every little change to the game, because I love to see changes. Even though I'm a competitive gamer, I welcomed dynamic pricing for public servers because I believed it would have balanced the game out more for public players.
There are a few things about this update that I do absolutely love. Bringing back the awp scoping speed of 1.6 is very nice, and the new OJ Box flashlight is the shiz. Bunnyhopping is absolutely insane now, although most people would consider that a bug. While I'm impartial about the achievements, I think they would be a nice touch for the casual player, and they arn't really that obscure as to hinder gameplay.
On the flip side to that we have the game breaking bugs: Invisible players, wrong team player models, and inability to alt tab (only for a few). My biggest complaint about the update is all in all performance issues, where things arn't just a 5% drop in fps. To see where I'm coming from here are my specs:
Core i7 920@ 4ghz HT Off
3x2GB DDR3 @ 1200mhz@6s
HD 4890
WD Black 640
Now refer to the following graphs:
On the first graph we have unrestricted FPS
On the second graph we have fps_max 121 set
On the third graph we are using default settings of fps_max 300
To be honest, none of these look bad from your point of view, but unfortunately they are not as fine grained as I would like because ATT does not refresh faster than around 40ms.
All three of these were taken just sitting in T Spawn, not moving the mouse, not hitting any buttons on the keyboard, not clicking, no other players on the server, nothing entered in console....Just sitting in spawn on an empty server basically AFK.
The first graph basically shows the theoretical maximum framerate of the new engine on my setup. It looks great, but you can't see the whole story, ATT misses basically all of the drops due to not having a fine enough resolution. The actual minimum in this ~10 second test was 43, with it dropping under 100 multiple times per second via the in game fps counter (which I unfortunately cannot record).
The second graph shows my preferred settings of fps_max 121, matching the refresh rate of my monitor for more consistency. This is where things start to look wrong on the graph. The average framerate looks to be around 100 now with a minimum of 73. Actual gameplay performance between fps_max 121 and fps_max 0 remain the exact same. This reveals the engine is thrashing all around being extremely inconsistent. One frame will be computed in less than a thousandth of a second, and the next will take 50ms. When the maximum framerate is lowered, minimums start making more of an impact on the graph.
I cannot explain exactly what is happening, but something is not right. During actual gameplay the game will just randomly start to stutter horribly for a few seconds, then resume micro stuttering.
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