I didn’t find that texture streaming improved my framerate. But it might improve yours,
so you might as well enable it because other people in the community are claiming that
it’s helped them. So what it is is CS:GO’s got a new video
option, known as ‘texture streaming’. This beta is compatible with matchmaking and
stuff so you might as well activate it by right-clicking on csgo in steam, properties,
betas and by selecting ‘texture streaming beta’.
This isn’t enough, though. You must also enable it in the video options, it’s the
third one down, hidden between Texture Detail and Effect Detail.
This beta does… this. It just means that it loads stuff in a more optimised way, hopefully
allowing for smoother framerates with fewer stutters. Or at least, that’s what I assume
it should do. But it had no impact on my PC. The only difference I saw was that, when teleported
to a new part of a level, textures would take a split second to load in. Stuff would look
all blurry and smooshy, before it’s quickly swapped out for higher quality textures. This
sort of optimisation is common-place in games these days, and normally once this has happened,
it’s loaded for the rest of the game. Of course, this is assuming the implementation
is good. It would be horribly noticeable and common in the early days of RAGE, and maybe
from time to time in games like the new Doom. The plus-side is, it ‘might’ yield better
performance if your system is old, slow, or using normal RAM instead of graphics Vram.
I didn’t even bother to test this on my main setup. I instead jumped over to my 2200G,
since if any computer’s going to see an improvement, it’d be this one.
But it didn’t. The 2200G is an APU. That means it’s a CPU
and GPU, all in one. The beauty of this is that it enables you to build a gaming PC on
a super low budget. It cost me about £90 a few years ago. The down-side is, you can’t
expect high-tier performance from it. The CPU is a 4-core Ryzen, and its graphics comprises
of 8 Vega cores, integrated into the same chip. That’s a lot of stuff in a small space.
And that’s why most APUs and integrated graphics are so slow, you wouldn’t bother
gaming on them. If you broke into my house, got up in my face and whispered ‘Integrated
Graphics’, I’d recoil in horror as I suffered traumatic flashbacks of experiences with gaming
on 10 year old laptops or an office PC somewhere. But these days, the experience doesn’t have
to be bad! And they can certainly be powerful enough to power CS:GO smoothly. The 2200G
was one of the first to be powerful enough to be considered a budget gaming option…
and I still believe it’s good enough. If I had to buy 8 PCs for an upcoming LAN then
this would make it financially feasible, whilst still allowing people to play whatever game
they wanted, albeit with lower graphics options. Although it might sound like it, this video
is not an advert for AMD. It’s just that you need to understand this stuff for this
video. So when you’ve got a CPU and GPU crammed
inside something this small, there’s not a lot of space. Some things have to be left
out. Among others, the memory. A graphics card tends to come with RAM of its own. This
is super fast stuff. Modern GPUs normally have about 8 GB of the stuff. But APUs have
0! They have to share your PC’s memory, which is much slower and further away. If
it has to load, say, MORE TEXTURES, that’s going to impact performance more dramatically.
That’s why you’d expect texture streaming to make a big difference on an APU like the
2200G. Especially if I use the bare minimum amount of memory. But it didn’t.
I tested it with 2 sticks of RAM, totalling 16 GB, and just 1 stick, totalling 8. Not
only is 8 smaller, but it totally cripples the 2200G because it halves the memory bandwidth,
making it even slower to load textures and stuff. Which I thought would be perfect to
see how much enabling texture streaming would be able to help!
More on that in a bit. Let’s discuss how I chose to benchmark the game. When testing
something new like this, I don’t really know what to expect, so I did 4, 60-second
long tests: me running about dust2 at low settings, the benchmark at low settings, the
benchmark at high settings, and me running about a huge map like Sirocco, with bots.
You can see just how much slower it gets if I switch from 16 to just 8 GB of RAM here.
If you’re gaming on an APU, get dual channel memory.
So that’s the difference the RAM configuration makes, out of the way. Onto the difference
texture streaming makes. When I had just 1 stick of RAM, it looked like enabling this
beta option might even have slowed the game down in a number of the benchmarks! We’re
only talking about 2 or so fps here, but when the framerates are so low in the first place
that can equate to 5%! …but when I redid these, any differences between the results
disappeared or changed completely, so I was happy to write that off as random noise.
The only other interesting result I got was on Dust2, with 16 GB of RAM, where enabling
texture streaming gave me significantly higher performance. Wow! I immediately tested it
on Inferno, and although it didn’t improve it quite so much, it still seemed somewhat
faster after this update. That was great news, because it’s difficult to justify a video
like this when no change was found, even though ‘no change at all’ is still a result with
value. It’s just that, as a viewer, negative findings don’t exactly help you to improve
your game. So these Dust2 and Inferno results, they look
promising, don’t they. If I had only tested them and got these results, I’d be shouting
how great this update was all across reddit! …so I tested them again, just to be sure,
along with some other maps, because why not. I reset between every run, testing before
and after the beta update (And of course, ensuring that the video option was enabled
when it should have been). …and suddenly there was no performance boost
any more. The average, minimum and maximum framerates came within a few frames every
time. Sometimes, having no texture streaming was the marginally faster one! That’s really
disheartening to see. So all in all, even on a slow Ryzen 2200G
that should be the sort to benefit most from texture streaming, it didn’t help at all.
I’m sorry for the boring result… but don’t let that stop you. If you’re getting sub-par
performance, this might be the miracle update you need! Let me know in the comments section
how you get on with your own testing.