Plugins kill my frame rate.

[hawkeye666]

Plugins kill my frame rate.

I have found an interesting problem with plugins. Whenever I load plugins my frame rate immediately drops by 20 to 30 FPS. Unload them and the frame rates go back up to normal. I have a Radeon 6970 and can reproduce this on any of this years Catalyst versions including the pre-release 11.4 that is available.

Because of this I have had to stop using plugins all together.

Am I alone in this? Anyone else seeing it?

This only started when I replaced my CrossfireX dual 4890s with a single HD 6970.

I still need to troubleshoot each plugin one by one, but I was using Manager, Palantir, Tonic Bars and Buff Bars.

I have tried each separate, and it seems that Palantir is the biggest impact.

[D.H1cks]

Yes, plugins can (but not always) have an impact on your framerate, and the most powerful video cards are not going to help.

The problem comes from the update procedures being used by the plugins. If the plugin updates itself too often, or has too much work to do during the update, then that will lower the framerate of the game.

I try hard with the travel window to ensure the framerate is not too badly affected, knowing users will likely be running a number of plugins. The less my plugin affects the framerate, the better.

[lunarwtr]

Another thing to consider, which can kill framerate is memory consumption. If you are pushing the memory limits of you machine, your pc might have to swap memory to disk, which cuts frame-rate. I not convinced this is the case based on the plugins listed though. However, this is one of those fears I have with Compendium, because it is hefty in size with all the data it has to load.

[geo111]

My gaming PC has a XFX5970 (Eyefinity 3x1) and I see no reduction in framerate. I think the resolution is 5120x1600.

Gaming PC 2010

Main Board: MSI 790FX-GD70
CPU AMD Phenom II X4 965 BE
RAM: 4GB Corsair XMS3 DDR3 1333
Video: XFX HD 5970 BE
Sound: Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Fatal1ty
HDD1: 300GB WD VelociRaptor SATA
HDD2: 1TB WD Caviar Black
SDD1: 25GB Intel X25-M
Power Supply: Antec Signature 850
Display: 3ea. Dell 2001FP (Eyefinity 3X1)

[hawkeye666]

I have 8GB of RAM and a Phenom 2 x4 running at 3.4. I almost never hit the swap file what with an 8 GB Ready Boost drive and the swap file is on a three drive stripe set.

[hawkeye666]

I went ahead and loaded each plugin I use individually and have found two of them are without question having negative impacts on my frame rates.

Ctime when loaded dropped my FPS from roughly 160 while stationary to about 80 FPS. This is while standing still in Ost Haer with only one NPC and no player characters.

Palantir dropped them from the 160 down to about 100 in the same area and circumstances.

So when both are loaded and I am in a high traffic area like Bree my normally healthy 80 to 90 FPS falls into the mid to high 20s, or worse.

At least now I know what not to load. But it still seems strange that I did not seem to have this problem prior to the new video card and/or the latest content update.