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Framerates locked a 64 FPS and no DirectX 9?

JackOfOwls

JackOfOwls

Powder Monkey
Took a look at this game recently and discovered that on my i5 3.8 GHz, GTX 660 Ti-based system, the framerate is locked at 64 FPS whereas POTC runs at frequently over 200 FPS (!) with vsync off. Is this normal? Even in the unmodded vanilla game it does this. Also, according to my MSI Afterburner OSD, it's running in DirectX 8. Isn't it suppose to be DirectX 9? I'm a little confused by this. Is there a way to force DirectX 9 and unlock the FPS? Thanks
 
Haven't got the foggiest. @Hylie Pistof?

Do you even see a difference between 64 and 200FPS? Regular films are 24-25 FPS and I've never heard anyone complain about that.
I have heard complaints about the 48 FPS Hobbit films though. So that all strongly suggests that incredible framerates don't actually serve much purpose.
 
Pieter Boelen said:
Haven't got the foggiest. @Hylie Pistof?

Do you even see a difference between 64 and 200FPS? Regular films are 24-25 FPS and I've never heard anyone complain about that.
I have heard complaints about the 48 FPS Hobbit films though. So that all strongly suggests that incredible framerates don't actually serve much purpose.
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On my 120Hz Samsung LED monitor, with gaming at least, I can tell the difference between 60 FPS and 120 FPS but not anything beyond that. I think most people can easily detect a difference between 30 FPS and 60 FPS in games. POTC does run noticeably smoother than CoAS on my system at 120 FPS (I have vsync always enabled to prevent screen tearing) as opposed to 64 FPS with the latter. 60 FPS is usually good enough for me (something I'm very happy to I get with the latest DirectX 11), affording a smooth playing experience but if I can get twice that - and actually notice the difference - why not? It's an old game. Yes, I'm an eye candy & framerate whore. This is my folly.
 
Both games run at 60 fps for me tops. I have never found a way to get them any higher and I do run with vsync off. How do you do it?

COAS is based on a DX8 engine but does run in DX9. There must be a DX9 wrapper in there somewhere. Play both games and look at the scenery on land. COAS is much more colorful and detailed than POTC even when you are looking at the same things. Both games do use many of the same textures.

I can clearly see the difference between 60 fps and 120 fps. 120 fps is much smoother and the mouse feels snappier too. That is my sweet spot as higher fps just adds heat to the video card. But 60 fps looks stuttery to me in fast moving games.

As for movies, when I go to one the wife loads some booze into her purse and I buy the biggest box of buttered popcorn they have. I am there to be entertained, not be impressed by the stuttery graphics. People complain about the 48 fps Hobbit films? In gaming that is a bad spot and looks worse than 30 fps.
 
Hylie Pistof said:
Both games run at 60 fps for me tops. I have never found a way to get them any higher and I do run with vsync off. How do you do it?
Click to expand...

As you can see, my system specs are fairly high (but not the highest) so maybe that's the reason? I can't get a constant 120 FPS with PotC but it does get there a lot, less so on open water. Do you have an Nvidia card? I make certain power management in the Nvidia control panel is set to Prefer Maximum Performance in Power Management instead of Adaptive otherwise I noticed the game tends to run at lower clock speeds than my MSI card is capable of, say 324MHz to 833 MHz when I normally run at 1175 MHz in boost mode. Right now I'm running it with 8X anti-aliasing so it runs a bit slower for the sake of the extra eye candy.
 
No, the games only go to 60fps for me. The video card settings have no effect on frame rates so I run it with everything maxed out. For instance I'm running 24 xEQ AA and 16x AF on this AMD R9 280X. I used to get a constant 60 fps but the latest AMD drivers have killed my frame rates, but it should still get high fps in COAS.

It gets 250-300 fps in HL2 and the DX8 IL2 series gets 30-220 fps.
 
I remembered! :monkeydance

When POTC is put into windowed mode it releases the frame rate. At one point on land I saw over 300 fps. But the mouse goes wonky and the characters are moving in slow motion like they are under water.

Windowed mode in COAS is much better but the frame rate is still locked at 64 fps even though I have it set to 120 in engine.ini.

Le sigh..... If only the wizards could get POTC to run as well as COAS does.
 
Hylie Pistof said:
Le sigh..... If only the wizards could get POTC to run as well as COAS does.
Click to expand...
Still the performance issues, is it?
I'm not sure how to measure the framerate in PotC; all I know is that it seemed smooth enough in the tests that I did.
So I don't know what's going on and have no way to check. :facepalm
 
Ya performance issues.

1300 fps in some menus, 300 fps on land, and 22-59 fps at sea.
 
I discovered that windowed mode disables vsync in these games, which I like to enable since I have a 120Hz monitor. Enabling vsync frequently keeps things from going wonky in older (and sometimes newer) games. I remember the infamous Skyrim bug where if you didn't lock your framerates at 60 or below, the physics in the game's engine took a huge dump on your fun with flying utensils, books, pans and porcelain chamber pots. Okay, no porcelain chamberpots in Skyrim, at least not in the unmodded release ;)

I used to use ATI/AMD cards but couldn't take their frequently poor driver updates. Got sick & tired of searching for that one driver that worked without issues and being forced to stick with it, and have to wait for another stable release, sometimes for months. I never get issues with Nvidia drivers and feel much more relaxed in experimenting with the latest drivers.
 
AMD has a history of dropping support for obsolete software and that looks like what happened to DX8. They also dropped support for obsolete X87 code which kills games like Skyrim, which is loaded with X87 code.
 
That's a shame about AMD no longer supporting older hardware & DirectX features in their newer drivers because they've always been solid & fully competitive with Nividia on the hardware side. I must admit, I almost bought an R9-290X recently when i saw it on sale for a ridiculously low $119.00 USD (after rebates) because of the extra horsepower and twice the video ram (my significantly slower MSI GTX 660 Ti costs $300+ three years ago) but decided I didn't want to go back to the hassle of flaky drivers.
 
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