Quick CS: Source Tweak

[ailevation]

:dozey: Heapsize tweaking makes my shit crash anyways, i'll be fine with it off. Maybe it's the 8.07 Beta's I am using?

 

[AgentSmith]

6x af???

Typo - I meant 8X.

 

[Yombi]

Open up task manager, see how much free ram is avaible.. Dont set heapsize above that or it will crash

 

[Gunner]

Increasing heapsize will mostly make loading times faster.

 

[BigWalnutZ]

Ok, here are my results. My specs are:
1.16 Ghz Athalon
896 RAM
ATI Radeon 9600xt
Everything Maxed except AA and AF @ 1200x1024

Before
35.54 fps in stress test

With Tweak
35.03 fps in stress test

After tweak removed
35.30

Result is it doesn't seem to help me at all.

I don't understand people like you. why would you run 1280 just to decrease your frames...? Thats basically what your doing...if you don't have the comp for it just run normal 1024 or even 800...30 frames is damn near unplayable for me. i have a a64 3200+ 1 gig corsair xms and a 6800gt oc and i run 1024 as to not lower my frames...

Are we sure heapsize is not Video memory and is definately System memory...?

I did this before and it did seem to help...not in frames but physics issues (ie: grenades exploding) and other stuff of that sort.

 

[rammstein]

I don't understand people like you. why would you run 1280 just to decrease your frames...? Thats basically what your doing...if you don't have the comp for it just run normal 1024 or even 800...30 frames is damn near unplayable for me.

Unless you have an LCD and want to play at the native res

like me

 

[BigWalnutZ]

Unless you have an LCD and want to play at the native res

like me

thats understandable...but why an LCD for gaming...? Unless it is a good one.

 

[sage]

I don't understand people like you. why would you run 1280 just to decrease your frames...?

I have a widescreen laptop, any other resolutions look like shiot

 

[rammstein]

I actually have a samsung 172x

17" 12ms response

this is a beast

 

[sage]

This tweak id more for cpu depentant things... ei. Physics
making my heap bigger done away with all the slowness and stalls when sphysics occured.

 

[sage]

Use this tweek for physics slow down problems not fps. Your viseo card handles the graphics your cpu(processor) handles the physics. If a guy throws a he-nade in a pile of garbage you wont have a stall/slow down where a guy could come around the corner and head shot you with a knife.

 

[Shadow-warrior]

I used heapsize 256000 on a 512mb, 1400 Athlon, 9800 pro machine graphics maxed out, 2AA, 4AF, 1024 res and my stress test went from 52 to 64.

Nice improvement.

 

[John Romero]

I dont know what the hell makes you guys think increasing the ram available to cs:s is gonna give you a big boost in framerates or how giving all your available ram to cs:s isnt gonna be detrimental to your system (for 512 ram use heapsize 502000) lol. but go right ahead. but if you really wanna boost your framerate i suggest you turn off some eyecandy. like AA who needs AA in a fast paced multiplayer game where framerate is the most important thing? are the jaggies on your gun really gonna make that much of a difference when you will be spending most of your time moving around too fast to even notice or care? or how about turn of some of those reflections theres no mirrors that you need to use to peek around corners for enemies coming so aside from cuz it looks pretty why have it on in the game? the one easiest way to improve your framerate is lowering your resolution. the higher the res the more work your card has to do to render each frame.

playing at 1280x1024 with everything on high then complaining about low framerates. lol you guys slay me.

 

[smsKONG]

I actually have a samsung 172x

17" 12ms response

this is a beast

172v for me only 21ms update (might even be 24), but aside from slight tearing when you spin thru 180 it works a treat. It was also cheaper than a decent CRT at the time (used to love my old CRT tho, aside from the fact that it would shatter my new glass desk(!), it used to have a burnt out spot slap bang in the centre of the display..fantastic for sniping unzoomed :E . Unfortunately it wasn't long before the burnt out spot turned into a burnt out screen ).

 

[Dekstar]

I really don't see the need for constant 100fps to be honest. I can really pown good servers and play well with my 9800 pro with plenty of eye candy turned on (I like eye candy ). I get about 30fps. So? I still see enemies as they walk round the corner, and I don't need to see them 1ms quicker either. There's no point, they probably get about the same FPS as me, so why should I turn off things i like to do exactly the same thing as I always do?

my heapsize is 256000 on my 512mb ram , really helps physics too.

 

[JBrown03]

Increasing heapsize will mostly make loading times faster.

Glod star (or gold HL2, whichever you prefer) to that man!

Pre-allocating more RAM, which is basically what setting the heapsize in this way does, will only have the effect of decreasing load times. Doing this means that whenever a resource on disk needs loading in to memory, the OS will not need to be asked to allocate more memory for it. Allocating memory is a slow process (relatively), and the less times memory is allocated for new resources the more efficient loading resources becomes. One large memory allocation when the process is started will mean, hopefully, not other memory allocations will be needed while running. If this has an effect on FPS, it will only be during the times when resources are being loaded in to memory, where the FPS should not drop as much as they might otherwise.

 

[cadaveca]

try setting it to the same as your agp aperature, not to the amt of ram. this allows the max size of the precache of textures being sent over the agp bus to be maximized...if you have a fast enough system.

Could be wrong, but that's how it should work, i would think.

 

[scully]

i know.. **** it! just go down the pub... that'll give you the edge

 

[WazMeister]

For those who dont believe...

1200x800 resolution
all maxed except the af/af

on a dell insperion laptop
3.2gh p4 ht
9700 ati radeon mobile
512mb ram

Hard core
I got a Xp3000, 1gig ram, radeon9800xt 256 and CS Source runs like shit, I aint only one who gets problems..........According to valve their aint no perfomance issuses... yea my arse!

 

[WazMeister]

just about the only thing valve is good at is optimizing their games to work well on a wide range of system, trust them and dont **** with settings other than those in the options menu

That was a 1 hit line joke right?
Tell me your guding with that sentence? Or you meant were still waiting for the optimiaztions?

Because bluntly put Cs:Source has more performance issuses and bugs than my Grans knickers and shes got skids too.

 

[SkiZy]

How do you become a advanced user...?!

 

[SkiZy]

goto "Play Games"
right click "Counter-Strike: Source"
click "Properties"
then click "Launch Options"
now enter "-heapsize "
then enter the amount of kilo-bytes of ram you have minus say... ~10000

so: 512mb of ram = "-heapsize 502000" note: without quotes
or 256mb of ram = "-heapsize 246000" etc..

Effects:
More ram available to the game overall performance goes up. Physics have more memory to work with.

note: I got a 20fps boost on the video stress test.

You can also do this by going in your hl2.exe in steam apps/[email protected]/counter-strike source and do properties on it and put it there

 

[sage]

I see this has helped quite a few people. We shoudl try to find the optimal setting for each amount of ram. So far the "1/2 your max ram" is working fine.

128mb 64000
256mb 128000
512mb 256000 (anything over this is probly moot)
1024mb 512000

 

[rdytorave]

Will typing in "-heapsize default" set it back to default? If not then how do I change it back to it's original size.

I set it to a conservative 256k even though I've got 1 gig of ram. The video stress test loaded quicker, but framerates dropped by 2-3 frames.

 

[frusion]

i get about 120+ fps with 1600x1200 on all high

 

[DvS]

Will typing in "-heapsize default" set it back to default? If not then how do I change it back to it's original size.

I set it to a conservative 256k even though I've got 1 gig of ram. The video stress test loaded quicker, but framerates dropped by 2-3 frames.

Remove -heapsize to default it.

 

[ªÑ†I~ƒ£åG]

i changed it and everything but it didn't help my fps...i didn't notice any difference at all...but ill keep just because you people are smarter then me ;-)

 

[Carnage_333]

i know.. **** it! just go down the pub... that'll give you the edge

sounds like a plan.

100% with u all the way.

 

[Slik]

wow... I got a 10 FPS increase in the stress test. from 38 to 48 with 4 AF, High Quality settings at 1280 by 1024 resulution.

it was heapsize 256000 :farmer:

 

[Aaron Lee]

Who the hell cares how I play CS:S? I never complained because I run at high resolution with everything maxed only to bitch about my framerate. 35fps seems to suit me fine. I don't lag, and I get just as many kills as I've ever needed. If I was that concerned about fps, I'd just drop some things. I only posted my fps in the first place to show the differences I was getting with the tweak.

 

[TheEdge|Jinx]

I'm having a hard time to believe that people with say a 9800XT videoboard are complaining about performance issues. I have a 9200 SE 64MB and the game runs fine in 800*600. Sure I don't have >60FPS all the time but its absolutely playable with average FPS's around 30-40.

 

[evilchickenking]

aaron: try setting it to half of your available ram size

ei. note: without quotes
256mb of ram = 128000 or "-heapsize 128000"
512mb of ram = 256000 or "-heapsize 256000"
1024mb of ram = 512000 or "-heapsize 512000"

hazar: im not sure if you did something wrong but i have no problems.. infact by doing this tweak I got rid of those pesky physics-slow downs. I would try decreasing your heapsize till it clears up. Maby try using the above settings...

i think you have your math wrong. i have 1024mb ram.
in one kilobyte there are 1024 bytes. so, 1024 * 512 = 524288. that would be half of my memory. just a heads up there. :thumbs: