Frame rate issues in Core City

[player1]

Yes, you heard it. Frame rate issues in 2D retro looking game. 

Since I'm using my laptop for playing games and this is 2D game, I left it to use integrated Intel HD Graphics 4600 (from my i7-4720HQ CPU). No need to stress dedicated GPU for 2D game. Right?

But there was some strange jerkiness in the Core City. Most noticable for me was the area around elevator right after train station you use to enter in the city.

Activating FRAPS confirmed my suspicions. Game was capped at 30fps (!!!). When going near edge of that map, it restores back to 60FPS.

It seems that vertical sync is turned on by default, with no in game option to change it. When on more GPU intensive maps it leads to frame rate switching between 60 and 30 fps, leading to jerkiness.

I assume vertical sync is enabled by default to probably to avoid rendering like 500FPS and stress more powerful GPU without reason and any benefit.

Still, it would be good to leave option to just cap framerate to 30/60/120/144fps, without use of vsync and have vsync as configurable option.

Also some optimizations in graphics code would not hurt.


Anyway, I worked around this by enabling my dedicated GTX 960M to run the game, but there are surely other players that play the game on old hardware or integrated graphics.

After all, it is a 2D game, and minimum GPU system requirement from the Steam page are:
Graphics: GPU that supports shader model 2.0

Which would imply that many cards much weaker then integrated Intel HD Graphics 4600 should be able to play the game.

[Wildan]

I have a HD Graphics 4000 and the same issues so I simply play on the dedicated GTX 660m and use Nvidia Inspector to downclock the core from 950 mhz to 500. Laptop stays somewhat cooler than on stock clock and I still have steady 60 fps.

Those integrated cards are so useless. The only game I use it for is Jagged Alliance 2.

[player1]

As with current status of the game, this is still an issue, most noticeable in Core City lower level, map with the elevator.

And the center of performance issue is the flaming barrel near the Gantlet commercial. The moment it is out of the screen, FPS restores to 60.


EDIT:
I occasionally, still use Integrated Intel when playing on battery, to save power.