My friends and I finally had a chance to play Battlefront last night (partly due to schedules, partly, GMG delaying everyone's pre-order...).
I am still waiting on some parts to come in for my PC, so I had to cannibalize a bunch of parts to throw something together. Ended up with:
G3258 (overclocked to 4.5GHz)
2x4GB 1600C11
R9 290X
Fired up the game and ... black screen. Still had audio from the main menu and it seemed like my mouse clicks were doing something to the menu, but nothing video wise.
Google'd it quickly and found a hack to fix it. Create a file called user.cfg in the root Battlefront directory and paste the following into the file:
Thread.ProcessorCount 4
Thread.MinFreeProcessorCount -2
Apparently, they hardcoded the game to not work with dual core CPUs.
Reloaded and the game fired right up. Menus were choppy, so it was already looking to be a meh experience. I went ahead and switched monitors with a friend for the evening, going down to 1600x900, since it was clear that the demands of 1440P weren't going to help the already-struggling Pentium.
That decrease in resolution gave me at least some relief from the freezing menus. Jumped in-game with video settings on Auto and it was pretty terrible. Probably 20 FPS average with a lot of 0 FPS dips
Decreased everything to Low and that made it at least moderately playable. I didn't check with fraps, but I would guess average FPS at Low/1600x900 was in the neighborhood of 30-40, with some drops to 15-20.
Basically, this chip is bottlenecking the crap out of the 290X. Reading up on it later, there's plenty out there discussing this, just thought I'd share it here along with that quick hack in case anyone else needed a quick fix.
I strongly discourage anyone to play with game with a dual core CPU. The G3258 @ 4.5Ghz is quite admirable in Windows tasks. I honestly can't tell much difference between it and an i5/i7 when using it for browsing, but in Battlefront, at least, it just isn't up to the tasks. I am honestly okay with that. I'm glad they're writing new games in such a manner as to take advantage of more threads/cores.
Can't wait for my "real" parts to get here
I am still waiting on some parts to come in for my PC, so I had to cannibalize a bunch of parts to throw something together. Ended up with:
G3258 (overclocked to 4.5GHz)
2x4GB 1600C11
R9 290X
Fired up the game and ... black screen. Still had audio from the main menu and it seemed like my mouse clicks were doing something to the menu, but nothing video wise.
Google'd it quickly and found a hack to fix it. Create a file called user.cfg in the root Battlefront directory and paste the following into the file:
Thread.ProcessorCount 4
Thread.MinFreeProcessorCount -2
Apparently, they hardcoded the game to not work with dual core CPUs.
Reloaded and the game fired right up. Menus were choppy, so it was already looking to be a meh experience. I went ahead and switched monitors with a friend for the evening, going down to 1600x900, since it was clear that the demands of 1440P weren't going to help the already-struggling Pentium.
That decrease in resolution gave me at least some relief from the freezing menus. Jumped in-game with video settings on Auto and it was pretty terrible. Probably 20 FPS average with a lot of 0 FPS dips
Decreased everything to Low and that made it at least moderately playable. I didn't check with fraps, but I would guess average FPS at Low/1600x900 was in the neighborhood of 30-40, with some drops to 15-20.
Basically, this chip is bottlenecking the crap out of the 290X. Reading up on it later, there's plenty out there discussing this, just thought I'd share it here along with that quick hack in case anyone else needed a quick fix.
I strongly discourage anyone to play with game with a dual core CPU. The G3258 @ 4.5Ghz is quite admirable in Windows tasks. I honestly can't tell much difference between it and an i5/i7 when using it for browsing, but in Battlefront, at least, it just isn't up to the tasks. I am honestly okay with that. I'm glad they're writing new games in such a manner as to take advantage of more threads/cores.
Can't wait for my "real" parts to get here
