playing_it_bogart

Uncharitable Spy
For a month or two now, I've been experiencing performance lag, specifically a 50-75% drop in frame rate, after ads are loaded. The lag only used to last for a minute or so and then was back to normal, however, most recently, it seems to keep my frames down until I completely restart my computer. I'm used to close to 299 fps most of the time and as low as 120 fps in heated battles on 32 player servers.Even with this bug or glitch my frames may still go over 100 but it just seems kind of "slow-mo," for lack of a better word. Half the time it's not even possible to pause the ad and hitting cancel doesn't do anything (I'm guessing the ad may continue to run muted).

I understand that ads these days are used to help pay for the servers, although back in my day we didn't have them (video ads within the game).

I am not the only one suffering from this issue, so on behalf of all those who do, I ask that this be looked into and resolved ASAP as it definitely affects the enjoyment of the game on the skial servers.


My system:

Windows 7 Professional 64 bit
Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2600 CPU @ 3.40GHz (watercooled)
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 590 3 GB GDDR5 RAM (1.5GB per GPU), lastest driver 301.42
8 GB DDR3 RAM
2 x 1 TB HDD in RAID 0 (7200 rpm)

My TF2 settings:

Resolution: 1920 x 1200
Model Detail: High
Texture Detail: Very high
Shader detail: High
Water Detail: Reflect all
World Detail: High
Color Correction: Enabled
Antialiasing Mode: 16xQ CSAA
Filtering Mode: Anisotropic 16x
Wait for vertical sync: Disabled
Motion Blur: Disabled
Field of View: 90.00
Multicore Rendering: Enabled
High Dynamic Range: Full

As per Ruelel's advice, I already updated my flash player and "disabled html motd" in-game.

Thanks!
 
This is why I run ad blockers on my browsers, the vast majority of ads are unoptimised and can potentially cause crashes. Same thing is happening here, the ad loads and causes my game to crash. HTML MOTD disabled from here on out. Sorry guys, but how can I play on your servers when I can't even join a team or spectate after entering the server before it crashes.

I know I'm running this game on a bloody laptop with integrated graphics, but if ads are causing even the more powerful systems problems, this needs to be addressed.
 
Did you update the right flash? http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/otherversions/ Though I honestly doubt it would make any difference.

All I've been getting are the pinion sweepstakes ads, I have not seen a video ad in weeks.

Yea I updated it recently. Before that this issue would occur with the video playing but without me even being able to see anything or click, the rather useless, "cancel." I only heard the sound of the video. The video that caused this earlier played back kind of slow and was advertising pans or something. No way to pause or cancel it. Other people in the server complained of a significant frame drop as well, so I said I'd make a thread. This has been an on-going issue and I don't know if TF2 updates are part of it. At first I thought the latest Nvidia driver, which I had to install about 2 months ago to be able to play Max Payne 3 was the reason for all of this; I don't think it is -- too many people are experiencing this now and it's very aggravating, to the point that you can't play and don't even wanna play on the skial servers.

I hope Bottinger can look into this and find a solution.
 
...
I hope Bottinger can look into this and find a solution.

Pinion Customer Support said:
Hi John,

Thanks for getting in touch. We take end user experience really seriously and if there's anything going on that's affecting that, we absolutely want to know about it.

In order to stop the ads once a user has clicked continue we use our Sourcemod plugin. When Valve updated their HTML rendering engine recently they also made some changes that affected both Sourcemod itself and our plugin. We're scrambling to get those problems sorted out, though, and I expect to have something to release within a week.

Cheers,

David
 
until this gets resolved, if you type !forum into chat it will clear out the advert. This has resolved the frame drop in the 2-3 people that have dealt with it that i talk to.
 
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I can't say I've experienced the same FPS drop and my laptop isn't particularly fast.

When you join a team, the webpage should close in the background.

I do keep everything updated though. Flash updates should not be ignored because drive-by exploits on flash are common.
 
Thanks for looking into it. I'll post again if it continues to happen. The ads don't come on often but when they do it's usually after a team change or upon advancement to the next stage at the beginning of the round, as on pl and cp maps.
 
Well still no different. This shit gets me every time, makes me not even wanna play on the skial servers anymore. This time I even watched the entire ad till the Pinion Pot of Gold appeared and then clicked continue. The game was noticeably slower, best described as slow-motion because that's what it feels like. I checked the console and took a few screenshots of some of what's going on during the loading and playback of the ad.

I don't wanna play a game for as little as I am playing anyway on my favorite servers, dreading the moment an unoptimized ad pops up to ruin my experience, making me quit the game entirely and restart the computer. I do miss the days when we didn't have ads to support the funding of the server but rather just donated directly to whoever rented it. I'm sure Valve's constant updates don't help track down the source of this problem, either.

http://i236.photobucket.com/albums/ff215/inextirpable/2012-08-12_00003.jpg
http://i236.photobucket.com/albums/ff215/inextirpable/2012-08-12_00004.jpg
http://i236.photobucket.com/albums/ff215/inextirpable/2012-08-12_00005.jpg
http://i236.photobucket.com/albums/ff215/inextirpable/2012-08-12_00006.jpg
http://i236.photobucket.com/albums/ff215/inextirpable/2012-08-12_00007.jpg

EDIT: Just happened again and I played another round despite the break in performance. Was about to shut everything down but decided to go back in game and on the same server -- performance back to normal. Ergo, the ad must affect something within the game but a restart fixes it. Despite this, one shouldn't be forced to quit the game on account of an ad completely stomping in-game performance.
 
Well still no different. This shit gets me every time, makes me not even wanna play on the skial servers anymore. This time I even watched the entire ad till the Pinion Pot of Gold appeared and then clicked continue. The game was noticeably slower, best described as slow-motion because that's what it feels like. I checked the console and took a few screenshots of some of what's going on during the loading and playback of the ad.

I don't wanna play a game for as little as I am playing anyway on my favorite servers, dreading the moment an unoptimized ad pops up to ruin my experience, making me quit the game entirely and restart the computer. I do miss the days when we didn't have ads to support the funding of the server but rather just donated directly to whoever rented it. I'm sure Valve's constant updates don't help track down the source of this problem, either.

http://i236.photobucket.com/albums/ff215/inextirpable/2012-08-12_00003.jpg
http://i236.photobucket.com/albums/ff215/inextirpable/2012-08-12_00004.jpg
http://i236.photobucket.com/albums/ff215/inextirpable/2012-08-12_00005.jpg
http://i236.photobucket.com/albums/ff215/inextirpable/2012-08-12_00006.jpg
http://i236.photobucket.com/albums/ff215/inextirpable/2012-08-12_00007.jpg

EDIT: Just happened again and I played another round despite the break in performance. Was about to shut everything down but decided to go back in game and on the same server -- performance back to normal. Ergo, the ad must affect something within the game but a restart fixes it. Despite this, one shouldn't be forced to quit the game on account of an ad completely stomping in-game performance.
Did you even read the message I quoted you on, or do you just have a problem with the concept of a week?

Or hay look! A way to temporarily solve the problem,
until this gets resolved, if you type !forum into chat it will clear out the advert. This has resolved the frame drop in the 2-3 people that have dealt with it that i talk to.
 
Forgive my frustration, this has just been going on for quite a while. I don't see how typing !forum in chat would close the ad but I'll be sure to try that next time. I used to run servers years ago and we didn't have built-in ads or anything, then I went offline completely for 2 years, came back last October and have been a skial regular since then, so I'm getting a tad vexed when this happens. It seems these ad issues are still uncharted territory, but I'm confident there will be a resolution soon. Thanks for staying on top of it.
 
To be honest, I have been hearing many complaints about the ads and how it fucks up people fps, not like it does anything for me, my computer is shitty enough
 
the !forum window uses the same window to go to the forums as the ad loads in. ^_^

Yea I tried it earlier as the video was trying to load and it seemed to prevent the subsequent performance drop/slow-down. Not sure if it'll always work, and even if it does this would only be a quick fix in my opinion; beats restarting the whole game, tho.
 
Yea I tried it earlier as the video was trying to load and it seemed to prevent the subsequent performance drop/slow-down. Not sure if it'll always work, and even if it does this would only be a quick fix in my opinion; beats restarting the whole game, tho.
yep, i think there's like a plugin issue as a whole though, so until the mod gets updated it's something.