SupCom - changing graphics settings helps with CPU limitations??

[Jax Omen]

Ok, obviously SupCom is a beast of a game, destroying rigs left and right.

But please explain to me why dropping the graphics settings in such a painfully CPU-limited game results in drastically better framerates? Does this have to do with the game's simulation speed scaling or something?

 

[Smilin]

Although your GPU handles most computations for graphics the CPU is still involved.

 

[Jax Omen]

I understand that, but I'm talking about like a 50% framerate improvement and a drastic improvement in game responsiveness, going from high shadows to low and dropping the rest of the settings from high to medium.

It can't possibly be a GPU bottleneck, my GPU is BORED in SupCom unless I turn on AA (which, and 1920x1200, is brutal on the framerate). So wtf is going on? Does SupCom scale the physics down with the fidelity setting? What's being scaled down that make it run so stupidly much better with lower settings?

 

[Smilin]

Originally posted by: Jax Omen
I understand that, but I'm talking about like a 50% framerate improvement and a drastic improvement in game responsiveness, going from high shadows to low and dropping the rest of the settings from high to medium.

It can't possibly be a GPU bottleneck, my GPU is BORED in SupCom unless I turn on AA (which, and 1920x1200, is brutal on the framerate). So wtf is going on? Does SupCom scale the physics down with the fidelity setting? What's being scaled down that make it run so stupidly much better with lower settings?

Shadows are a huge deal by itself. Going from high to medium settings across the board is too. A 50% improvement isn't surprising to me.

"high" shadows often do softened shadows or shadows from multiple light sources both of which are very demanding. Multiple light sources for instance can cause the whole scene to get rendered multiple times per frame. Your GPU may be able to render a scene at 1920x1200 just fine...but not 3x over.

Going from high settings to medium you're probably doing things like dropping from 16x to 8x or 4x AF. You may also be reducing polygon count on the units which will help the CPU immensly. Your GPU may render it, but the CPU has to setup the verticies. Vertex shaders on the GPU get more use with complicated objects. SupCom is using massive numbers of simple objects.

I don't have SupCom installed any more. If you want to rattle off the individual settings I can give you a pretty close estimate of which ones are more CPU demanding vs GPU demanding. There's probably a site out there with tweeks too.

 

[Jax Omen]

I tried looking for tweaks and the only significant one was to turn off shadows, then water, then everything else, in that order.