The client is wasting ressources!

The game performance after the Riven patch was just plain horrible. It was caused by the client doing **** while playing a match. Some of the latest mini patches seems to have fixed this issue for most people, but some people seem to still have that problem.

And if that problem is fixed, it's still a general problem: Why does the client do *anything* while playing a match?

WORKAROUND:
1. Get Process Explorer from Sysinternals(Microsoft)
2. Start a match
3. Alt tab out of the loading screen
4. Start Process Explorer
5. Find the 3 processes from LoL that are not League of Legends
6. Right click each of them and suspend them
7. Close Process Explorer
8. Go back to the loading screen
9. Before clicking continue after the mach, undo the changes(resume the 3 processes)

Which processes??? WTF?
rad_user_kernel.exe (<- not needed while playing a match)
- LoLLauncher.exe (<- not needed while playing a match)
- - LolCient.exe (<- not needed while playing a match)
- - League of Legends.exe (<- this is the actual game, do not suspend this!)

SOLUTION:
Make the game suspend the processes that are not used. When a process is running, it's using CPU time (-> slowing down the game) and it's actually using its memory(-> the "unused" memory can't be moved completely to the virtual memory on low memory systems).


Reading **** from HDD while the game is running and the system has ENOUGH memory

There's no reason for the game to read from the following files:

LoL\RADS\projects\lol_game_client\filearchives\0.0 .0.37\Archive_66209360.raf.dat
LoL\RADS\projects\lol_game_client\filearchives\0.0 .0.43\Archive_66209680.raf.dat
LoL\RADS\projects\lol_game_client_en_us\managedfil es\0.0.0.52\DATA\Sounds\FMOD\VOBank_en_US.fsb
(the files might be changed now, it's always the most recent VOBank_en_US.fsb and 2 others)

over and over again, but the game does it anyways. HDDs slow, RAM fast...
Does this really need to be explained better?

If somebody want to check this for himself, get ProcessMonitor from Sysinternals(Microsoft), and run it while the game is running. You should see what i mean then.

More info:
http://na.leagueoflegends.com/board/....php?t=1643508

UPDATE:
The files are not accessed if all audio is disabled. With all audio set to mute each and master volume, the files are accessed. So the audio code is messed up!

WORKAROUND:
Defrag the HDD to ensure the files are read as fast as possible. Some defragmenting tools allow to defrag single files(WinContig), so the above files can be targeted alone. This makes the defrag(which is required after every update) faster and it also allows to check if the files could be defragmented.

SOLUTION:
USE THE MEMORY! The audio code is the culprit, get to work already!


Certain skills and events lag the game

Known examples are:
Malzahar's 1st voidling
"Welcome to Summoner's Rift"
The 1st tower shot
Opening the shop for the 1st time

More info:
http://na.leagueoflegends.com/board/....php?t=1940428


Playing with only 16 Bit color depth is not possible

In theory 16 Bit colors should require less video memory, and increase the video performance slightly. So it would be nice if it was possible.

Actually it is possible to edit a config file to "force" the game to run with 16 Bit colors. But there's no performance gain, and it causes some bug. The recall bar and the health bar at the bottom(not the one over your head) are always displayed as full.

Update: It's not possible to force 16 Bit colors anymore. When trying this the game crashes with a bug splat.

Some comment would be nice.


H A C K S

Open the game.cfg in
LoL\RADS\solutions\lol_game_client_sln\releases\0. 0.0.103\deploy\DATA\CFG

1. There are options you can't change in the GUI, but that are saved in the config file.
AdvancedReflection
PerPixelPointLighting

changing the values of these 2 might change something, maybe not. Possible values should only be 1 and 0.

2. There are a few more hidden options(hacks...) in that file you can mess around with. Add [Hacks] to the end of the file and then add one or more of the following options:
DefaultParticleMultithreading=0
EndOfFrameBehavior=0
GlobalLogLevel=FATAL

The 1st 2 should change some compatiblity stuff, i forgot if =0 or =1 is the more compatible setting, just try both for both. The 3rd one is supposed to make the game log less, since logging is useless anyways.


General tips to increase the performance:
- Set all detail settings to lowest, disable the shadows, disable wait for vsync, set the fps to benchmark
- Disable all sounds and music from the game you don't need. (for me it's only the background music i wouldn't miss)
- Disable all autostart programs that are not required(uninstalling programs that don't run at all is a waste of time). This also includes not required windows services, but only if they are really not used.
- Before playing close all programs that are not used. Especially any p2p software needs to be closed.
- Use cable based and not wireless network. Less connection problems and a much more stable ping are very desirable for any online game
- Defrag the HDD(see above)
- Suspend the not needed processes(see above)

Fixed issues and non issues:
The HUD is eating strange amounts of fps[being worked on, see page 7]
(fixed on the Darius patch 05-23-2012)

Disabling the HUD gets unexplainable fps boosts. Sometimes it's just 28 to 30 fps[water before Baron], sometimes it's 28 to 43 fps[minions fighting at mid], and sometimes it's 43 to 85(!) fps[between Nexus and Inhibs, no units]. All values from the same low end system, with all settings to lowest.

If somebody wants to test it himself, the button combo to deactivate and reactivate the HUD is "Alt -". If your keyboard layout is not english, it's Alt plus the button where "-" would be if it was english(it's ß for a german keyboard for example).[2 different routines checking the keyboard input with different methods might be a another performance issue...]


Missing bones / large logfiles
(moved here because it's only about the harrowing map)

The harrowing minions did reduce the perfomance for many people, because they were missing some bone. If problem was caused directly by the client not being able to handle this or by the large logfiles it caused, is unknown. But giving the minions a complete skeleton was reported to fix the issue. How to:
http://na.leagueoflegends.com/board/....php?t=1417159

If the performance in one match is worse than it regulary is, then it might be worth it to look at the *r3dlog.txt of the match. If the logfile is big(>1MB), it might be the same problem or a similar problem. Posting the logfile in this thread might help to identify perfomance issues that are related to certain champions and/or skins only.


N O C T U R N E
(moved here because i haven't seen any thread about it for weeks now. And the fps drop when Noc's ult ends seems difficult to fix. When the ult ends, the game regains sight of all minions and has to load all of them again. If the game knew about their positions, it would be exploited by hackers.)

Does this need to be explained? A lot of people are still waiting for at least an official statement.

Well, i haven't seen a thread about this lately. Is Nocturne still a problem? Or do all people with the problem use the workaround now? Or have all of them left the game?

Workaround:
http://na.leagueoflegends.com/board/...d.php?t=726603
(the version number where to find the file is changed now, but the file is unique, so it shouldn't be too hard to find it)


Objects and animations are eating some fps
(moved here because the new animations from the Darius patch 05-23-2012 seem to require less resources than the old ones)

In Summoner's Rift, the water animation(and possibly the torches too) eat some fps, making team fights in the river a nightmare. And in Dominion there are a lot of background animations which are possibly big fps killers.

SOLUTION:
Static animations on the lowest detail setting and the current lowest setting as the new low setting would be nice. Even if it would only be used to determine if the animations are fps killers or not.

3rd page bump.

I'm sorry, but i really think looking into these issues is in the best interest for riot games. The better the performance, the more people are able to play the game. More people = more money?

If i had had the Nocturne fps issue the 1st time i played, i would have stopped playing immediately for sure, thinking my notebook is just not good enough for the game. It's not a gaming machine afterall, so i wouldn't been surprised if it's not fast enough for such a hardcore game.

If i had had the slow fps you get with fragmented game files + the "new" patcher from the beginning, i'm not entirely sure if i would be a player now. In fact, i stopped playing for some weeks, because i thought the new patcher is completely performance breaking, while it just slows down. And it slows down hard, if the HDD is fragmented.

So i wonder how many people left the game after becoming unplayable, or didn't really start at all. And that just because there might be some small optimisations missing.

Bump.

Nobody has any other perfomance related issues to add?

Post this to general discussion. No one, not even Riot checks the other forums

General discussion would be even more pointless, there it gets to the 2nd page in 5 min, here it's a bit longer. And theoretically the actual devs should read this forum, the graphical designers, storytellers, champion designers, marketing people and whatnot are people i expect to read the general forum.

But thanks for the suggestion, i'll consider it anyways, maybe it helps.

Iam bumping this till its red (pun intended)

BUmpiddity