I didn't know about putting this in the hard'n'software forum or here, but WHAT THE FOK.

SO! I recently accidentally deleted my steam. YES, YES EVERYTHING on steam. So I recently installed it all again. (gotta love the retail!!)
Anyway! Now, in TF2, everytime I enter a new.. "Area", or "Place". Like going from B to A, and in the moment I look into A through the doors, huge fps-drop. EVERY-TIME!, EVERY-MAP! It's starting to bring my nerves to the max! My fps is okay-high (not >9000 like yours but I'm satisfied) when I'm staying in B and watching 2 soldiers on fire exploding meanwhile a heavy is eating a sandvich and the pyro plays a cool tune on his axe.

All my settings are almost on the highest (Yes, I fucking like eye-candy to the last bit). Multicore rendering is disabled (felt more a downgrade than an improvement). If anyone need details I will find them ASAP!!!

Cheers! (Lim)! (As I expect you to reply this as you reply everything else (SO YOU BETTER FUCKING DO IT) )
Again, seriously CHEERS

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motherfuckin rabbits ejaculating sunshine

enable v-sync is the first thing that comes to mind, but I'm not sure why. it just seems to fix alot of stuff. and put on mulitcore threading again while you're at it.

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ュ~ちゃんgamer.jp Pinky: true genius
ュ~ちゃんgamer.jp Pinky: doesn't make sense
ュ~ちゃんgamer.jp Pinky: till you're senseless

Try one of these configs too, if you want eyecandy then go for the high qual one or if you want performance go for the high fps one

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/s ... p?t=879367

If you enable V-Sync (which should always be enabled unless you're doing benchmarks or experiencing driver problems) also enable Triple Buffering.

However, I must disappoint you in that I will probably not be able to help much - there are SO many factors that influence FPS and could potentially induce low FPS that it's very hard to give an answer to that question...

What GPU do you have, what drivers and OS are you using? That could be relevant...

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War does not determine who is right - only who is left. - Bertrand Russell

I disagree. Basically what Vsync does for me is setting my fps to 60 and as soon as they'd drop to 59, it limits it to 30 until its 60 again --> very, very, VERY gay.

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All roads may lead to Rome, but all Wikipedia pages eventually get you to the Third Reich. - m3n

Well - you have bugged out drivers or something. Like I noted above VSYNC should be always enabled UNLESS it gives you problems and I assert you that limiting FPS below your monitor refresh rate like in your case is not the way it's supposed to work. ;-)

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War does not determine who is right - only who is left. - Bertrand Russell

My drivers are fine o: (at least they should be q:)

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All roads may lead to Rome, but all Wikipedia pages eventually get you to the Third Reich. - m3n

V-sync can have adverse effects, it can make your crosshair feel laggy etc... When I disabled it (after it sorted my problems before) I stopped getting random slowdowns on the crosshair (my fps was almost ok in most occasions).

Doesn't it lock your fps to the normal multiple values, like 30, 60? So if you drop below 60 it will reduce it to 30 so you don't have a fps of 43 and get screen tearing? I have a really awful fps, but just lowering my graphical settings, turning vsync off, and setting fps_max 61, means its practically always 60, except in large servers (I don't care, I just need good fps in pcw's and matches).

This is especially the case in CS:S, it makes your crosshair lag insanely, I had the same sensitivity in CS:S as in TF2, but in CS:S my crosshair was much slower and it felt like fps lag, turns out disabling vsync solved the problem.

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a bird in a bird in a bird in a bird in a bird in a pig

Nah, it doesn't reduce your FPS using multiples of your refresh rate - at least it's not supposed to. As long as the FPS stay below your refresh rate the monitor will be able to handle it and it shouldn't lead to tearing (so desyncs) with VSYNC on.

Anyways @ Minimoose - while I'm not saying that your crosshair isn't less laggy with VSYNC turned off I'm always reluctant to accept such arguments because theoretically it shouldn't affect things like that (provided it isn't bugged in the particular game and Source Engine games have been known to bug out with VSYNC and e.g. certain drivers - I experienced it myself) and there's SO much incredible bullshit being spilled by "pro tweakers" on various forums about configs, reinforced by the always present placebo effect, that I'd always double-check before doing something like that [disabling VSYNC].
This is also supported by the fact that VSYNC seems especially prone to myths since to the unschooled eye your FPS might sky-rocket if you disable it without any FPS limit - even if your monitor can't display them - and this lead people to believe that it's a very vital setting affecting your performance, which in turn lead them to attach various strange properties to this, frankly speaking, quite simple mechanism.

But yes, manually limiting your FPS to your monitor's refresh rate should also work even though it could lead to tearing in certain cases because the game isn't truly waiting for your monitor's vertical blank signal.

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War does not determine who is right - only who is left. - Bertrand Russell

True dat, but I'm just saying from personal experience, that vsync seriously made a massive difference in CS:S (Although maybe they fixed the problem in the TF2 engine update).

Weirdo, do you have 16x AA and 16x AF on? (Since you said max graphics), you really don't need them that high :3 I think they do create quite a strain on hardware.

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a bird in a bird in a bird in a bird in a bird in a pig

This was my graphics settings.


I've now set anti-aliasing to 4x and enabled Multigaycore Rendering
THAT REMINDS ME! Meanwhile I was reinstalling all the stuff, Windows Update forced a update for my 8600GTS driver down my throat! My current driver is 7.15.11.8250 and date 27-03-2009. Not THAT old, is it?
My OS is Vista Premium SP2.

And what's Triple Buffering???

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motherfuckin rabbits ejaculating sunshine

Download the latest drivers I guess, and you really don't need 16x AA, it doesn't make as big a difference as upping texture quality etc... Your graphics card isn't top notch, so you can't really be a major graphics freak :3

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a bird in a bird in a bird in a bird in a bird in a pig

Latest drivers can be found here:

http://www.nvidia.com/object/winvista_x ... _whql.html

Just to add to what Lim-Dul has said; turning vsync on will in fact co-incide with your monitor refresh rate which is ok if you have a rubbish graphics card, but if your graphics card can handle more fps then you should turn it off and set the max_fps in the config files. If you don't know what to set the max to then I suggest recording a game of TF; you can set record and variable name in the console, and at the end of the recording it gives you a report on your fps plus frames and seconds etc which will give you a good idea of what your max fps can be.

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Classy is when a woman has everything to flaunt, but chooses not to show it!

vsync on fucks with my mouse in every game lolz

Uhm - if your graphics card can handle more FPS, then this is precisely the situation where VSYNC should be on - if FPS are lower it usually doesn't matter.
The additional FPS above your monitor's refresh rate can't be displayed anyway and hence will always lead to tearing artifacts.

fps_max should NOT be determined via demos or whatnot but simply by looking at your monitor's refresh rate - then it should be set to that value plus one. E.g. if your game is running at a refresh rate of 60, it should be 61 etc.

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War does not determine who is right - only who is left. - Bertrand Russell

Well I found that turning on vsync didn't give me much fps as it restrains it to what the monitor is set at not what the monitor is capable of doing, so by doing a demo I was able to calculate that my fps was over 90 therefore I was able to set my max at around 80fps and it works like magic with no tearing. Also bearing in mind I cannot use the multicore render because it keeps crashing otherwise I could probably get much more fps.

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Classy is when a woman has everything to flaunt, but chooses not to show it!

What do you mean by "what the monitor is capable of"? If it's set to e.g. 75 Hz then that's precisely what it is displaying, so it refreshes the picture 75 times a second, no more, no less - if you had 300 frames per second on a powerful computer, it would still display only 75.

The demo doesn't display what your "monitor is capable of" - only what the engine/your hardware can handle, which is good for benchmarks and pretty much only that. These are two completely different things. Even if you ran the demo and had a max of 90, only 60 or 75 (I assume you have an LCD monitor) were in fact displayed so setting your FPS higher is pointless.

I assume the reason you see no tearing is that you didn't set the FPS much over your refresh rate and to a value that was displayed as "max" in your benchmark, so you usually have far fewer FPS and hence no tearing.

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War does not determine who is right - only who is left. - Bertrand Russell

What I mean is that turning your vsync on means it will go to the default monitor settings where it will reduce your fps. So if you are fps hungry then you can turn vsync off and max out the fps. Some people experience bad tearing without it so it is just a matter of experimenting.

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Classy is when a woman has everything to flaunt, but chooses not to show it!

Yeah well - I'm saying that it's the correct behavior because FPS above your monitor refresh rate are completely wasted as in "not displayed". It also doesn't do anything under heavy stress since VSYNC doesn't affect performance when the FPS drop below the refresh rate. If you have VSYNC on you will still get the same performance since in places you e.g. had 90 FPS in the demo you will still have the full 60 or 75 without them dropping below that threshold.

However, there's an instance where you might want to turn off VSYNC - for me every second driver NVIDIA releases causes the FPS to jump back and forth between OVER the refresh rate and the correct amount. Perhaps this is the crosshair lag Minimoose has been talking about because then the difference is really noticeable but that's a bug.

Hence I repeat: unless you got some troubles with VSYNC like crosshair lag, jumpy FPS or something it should ALWAYS be on since it doesn't affect the performance when it comes to visible FPS at all.

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War does not determine who is right - only who is left. - Bertrand Russell

I'll second that

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Classy is when a woman has everything to flaunt, but chooses not to show it!