All,
I came across an article a little while back while I was tuning my system for BF3 and I thought I would share what I learned with you. Before I read the article, I didn't really know what I was looking at with respect to the performance meter, but now that I know I've found that it can be a handy tool and useful for providing insight into how your system is performing with the Frostbite 2 engine. Although I haven't seen it yet, I suspect Frostbite 3's performance meter will be similar.
Variable used to show the performance meter:
(entered using either the console (~ key) or by inserting the lines into your user.cfg file)
Render.PerfOverlayEnable 1
Render.PerfOverlayVisible 1
Green line = GPU (video card) performance
Yellow line = CPU performance
Bottom red horizontal line = 0ms (time zero)
- Vertical (from zero) = increasing response time
Red horizontal lines = 20ms
Red vertical lines = 3-second intervals
What this example chart shows is that this guy's GPU lags his CPU in average processing time by about 8ms. In other words, his GPU is his system's bottleneck. Also, no lag spikes are present during this roughly 3.5 second time window. From what I can see (based on the average GPU processing rate (in milliseconds), this guy is churning a smooth 55.5 FPS (a nice picture on a 60Hz monitor).
Later, I will post a screenshot of my performance meter for comparison (can't b/c I'm @ work right now ;) )
war
FPS = 1/processing time in seconds (in this case 1/0.01803) 18.03 ms = 0.01803sec