Performance on Snow maps

Is it just me or is the 3v3 performance on snowy maps like Rhzev Winter fast degrading.
My laptop is:
RX 580
Ryzen 5 1600
8GB RAM
SSD + HDD (installed on HDD)

3v3 performance generally degrades fast for me. Especially if there are a lot of artillery bombings. However, snow maps degrade even faster. By min 20 I'll play with 20-40 FPS fluctuations.
Is anyone else getting such degradation in 3v3s? Any tips on how to improve performance?

Snow often causes problems.

Turn down graphics is the only thing I can recommend, maybe move it to HDD, invest in additional RAM (although no idea what your real bottleneck is, 8GB were completely fine for me, so it's probably not the RAM), otherwise no clue.

I still remember that my previous PC was so bad that I was literally trailing behind in the match. And that delay build up over time. I had to ask my buddies at which time stamp they were, zoom to the border of the map so that the game has less to display and can catch up before I could continue playing...

https://www.coh2.org/topic/103910/why-do-snow-maps-kill-my-fps/page/1

I have not tried to optimize snow performance. I would look for Cyanaras posts here or on steam. He may have something.

One major FPS killer you can control is SNOW DETAIL.
The terrain mesh (triangle group) that makes up the terrain is about 28 times more triangles per meter than normal maps. That is a huge amount. When you turn the snow detail down the game stops using this dense triangle mesh to show footprints. It still places small textures on the map where foot prints are. But it does not deform the terrain mesh.



As a side note, I have a feeling that many bug splats come from terrain deformation code. As a summer game goes on the terrain gets adjusted by bombs, mortars, etc. So you can play a few games before you run the risk of a bug splat. Winter maps also deform the terrain for foot prints and vehicle paths and the terrain meshes are much larger. So you should always restart after a single snow map game. And of course playing larger team games will increase your chance of long terrain changing games and the possibility of crashing. The game also has to place textures on the terrain to show bomb damage etc. This creates new meshes on the fly also.

Some people say they have older PCs and never crash, so maybe how the triangle meshes are dealt with on newer cards is the issue? I am not smart enough for that question.

I never crash. The worst thing COH2 can do to my laptop is the black screen where I have to force shutdown.
3v3+ games drop FPS like crazy, the longer the game is. Snow maps even more so. I would start off with 60 fps and end up with 15-60 constantly fluctuating. The optimization is horrible. Also, I never play more than one game before restarting.

I play on a 4th gen Pentium and don't have much trouble, you either have some problem affecting coh or you just need to turn down graphics.

How much fps you get in the benchmark?

Min 28
Max 60 (fps cap on rivatuner)
Avg 50

Image and Texture on HIGH, rest settings OFF or LOW.

Mind you that I am talking about teamgames. In 1v1 and 2v2 the performance degradation is almost nonexistent but teamgames become a chaotic mess. Even more so on snow maps where the FPS will just tank.

https://www.coh2.org/topic/103910/why-do-snow-maps-kill-my-fps/page/1

So you should always restart after a single snow map game. And of course playing larger team games will increase your chance of long terrain changing games and the possibility of crashing. The game also has to place textures on the terrain to show bomb damage etc. This creates new meshes on the fly also.

Some people say they have older PCs and never crash, so maybe how the triangle meshes are dealt with on newer cards is the issue? I am not smart enough for that question.

Pc handles the game just fine. But i noticed that as well. Better restart the game instead of getting mad for the bugsplat

Min 28
Max 60 (fps cap on rivatuner)
Avg 50

Image and Texture on HIGH, rest settings OFF or LOW.

Mind you that I am talking about teamgames. In 1v1 and 2v2 the performance degradation is almost nonexistent but teamgames become a chaotic mess. Even more so on snow maps where the FPS will just tank.

in my experience image settings is the option that kill fps, from the lowest to the second lowest my game get so much smoother, I think it is the shadows. I run everything on minimum except textures (I have 4gb vram), try this to see if you get better performance. Check your video driver settings too, sometimes changing them may break some games and give you awful performance.

in my experience image settings is the option that kill fps, from the lowest to the second lowest my game get so much smoother, I think it is the shadows.

I never paid any attention to this setting and wondered what the hell it could be. Since there are so many post render things going on.

But I think you are right with shadows. In order to render real time shadows, the whole scene is rendered to a texture from the perspective of the light source. This is then compared to the actual render to determine if the pixel is in shadow or not. So the image quality may have different shadow texture sizes which would kill FPS for sure.

Lower settings would have more pixelated shadows. Higher settings for smoother shadows. There are also several techniques that try to smooth the edges of the shadow and all of these may add time. So they may add them as your selection quality goes up.

I will have to test this now

EDIT: I did not play a game on each mode.
But minimum settings = NO shadows.
Each setting from there increases the shadow map resolution (texture size).

As I stated there are other things going on like ambient occlusion that may turn on/off at different settings as well.

Cyanara and others state that particle effect density is adjusted here also (another FPS killer).

EDIT 2: If anyone starts testing these settings look for SSAO (Dark regions where objects meet) and see when it turns on/off. May only show up on certain maps since there is control over it in the map editor lighting settings. See example screen shot for dark region example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_space_ambient_occlusion