I worried this would happen. The problem with a negative result (ie, one that doesn’t
find what it was testing for) is that people immediately assume you’ve done something
wrong with testing. If I was to say ‘hey guys, this texture streaming update increased
my framerates by 20%!’ then that would have been accepted without question. But because
I said it DIDN’T change anything, not only do people not watch the video because it sounds
boring, but of the people who do, a lot of you immediately assumed there must have been
something wrong with the test in some way. Since from it, I’ve received hundreds of
-maybe well intentioned- but quite annoying suggestions for why my test was wrong.
Just for the record- it was over on reddit where people were claiming it was improving
their framerates. It seems like it helped those with onboard graphics, but a few with
proper graphics cards also saw minor framerate boosts. And maybe it did for them! But when
it didn’t improve mine, nor the maximums, nor the minimums, suddenly according to the
comments I got, it was the frametimes that mattered and hence, my test proved insufficient.
To get you up to speed, CS:GO’s got a new texture streaming beta, which I tested on
my low-powered Ryzen 2200G system to see if it would improve performance. I didn’t find
a difference. So just for you, I did it again. But with
a few changes. First, I underclocked my RAM to 2133 Mhz,
since I was told that 3200 Mhz is too fast for texture streaming to make a difference.
Second, I only tested it with a single stick of 8 GB, since that’s the least I can get
and will bottleneck the system as much as possible.
Third, you guys said that the Ryzen 2200G’s onboard graphics wasn’t suitable because
it used system memory. So I installed the slowest graphics card I could find and used
that instead. Unfortunately, my 12 year-old, passively cooled Radeon 4670 with half a gig
of RAM has finally died, so I had to use a Radeon 250 instead. This graphics card is
about the same performance as a Radeon 7750, which itself is a mid-range graphics card
from 8 years ago. And even back then, I quote: The Radeon 7750 ‘is not a fast graphics
card’. Unfortunately, mine’s the 2 GB model, it would have been better were it the
more limited 1 GB version instead. But then I thought to myself: wait, even the old graphics
cards I’ve recently picked up on ebay for £60 have had at least 4 GB of RAM, there’s
no excuse to have less than 2 these days. Oh and last, I swapped out the SSD for a hard-drive,
to really slow down how quickly it can load textures. It took literally a whole day just
to install and to update Windows on it. It’s torture, if you’re still running Windows
on one, then please get an SSD instead, they’re also cheap these days.
SO: on my hard drive-powered operating system, artificially nerfed RAM, and the slowest GPU
I have that still works, I tested to see if texture streaming made a difference. I used
high settings at 1080p, to really make those textures as big as I could. I ran each test
3 times, restarting between every run. Which, on a hard drive, is a painfully slow process.
I forgot the days when the longest part of loading your PC up was AFTER it had reached
the desktop. On a fresh windows installation. It took 6 minutes to reach CS:GO’s main
menu, at which point another painfully long loading time could begin.
But I did it, and these are the results of the benchmark. Uh… yeah. Turns out CS:GO’s
a remarkably consistent game! All 6 of my runs managed the same average, minimum and
maximum framerates. Had I not seen different decimal endings, even I’d have thought I
had done something wrong. I even tested the frametimes. The 1% minimums were almost all
identical, and the .1% minimums were ever so slightly worse when texture streaming was
enabled. But only by a tiny bit. The second test I did was on Sirocco, doing
the same route I’ve done dozens of times already. Yes, there probably is still a bit
of variance between the runs. But as you can see from these results… it didn’t exactly
make much of a change, did it. This time we even see that on one of the runs with texture
streaming enabled, the maximum framerate is one FPS higher than the other ones! How exciting.
But not as exciting as this. When looking at the frametimes, the .1% minimums were consistently
higher with texture streaming enabled! Most of the time, it makes no difference. But on
those odd occasions when it does stutter, it’ll stutter worse. At about 66 ms instead
of 56, and only in the .1% minimums, it’s hardly noticeable. But it’s there. There
was a system restart between each of these results, so there’s still a possibility
that this change was from my low-powered PC getting marginally hotter as the testing progressed,
and not because texture streaming makes it slower. The more I look at this result, the
more I want to test it on other maps to see if they’d be the same. Maybe I’ll try
it later and will post my findings in the comments section. But let’s be real about
what we’re seeing here. Now that I’m using an artificially nerfed
system, scanning the .1% minimums for minor changes… even though I’ve found changes,
I wonder how much value these results have to the average person any more. It’s certainly
not something you’d feel in gameplay. I wonder if texture streaming isn’t meant
to make a difference just yet. Maybe it’s here to prepare CS:GO for another update that
WILL make it more worth-while. Half-Life Alyx got its editing tools rolled out the other
day. And with rumours of Source 2 for CS:GO floating about, MAYBE this is what this update’s
all about. I don’t know. I’ll wait and see, and I suggest you do too.
I feel I’ve done my bit. If you think there’s some way in which texture streaming could
improve performance, then by all means, test it how you see fit and let me know. At the
end of the day I want to know the truth, I just feel like the last 2 days of my life
could have been better spent.