February 18th performance patch for Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Beta

From the Article (click here):

This update is about performance and stability again. We are not doing any changes to the game’s datafiles.

Reduced input “lag”
On machines where the CPU would out-run the GPU, sometimes the GPU would queue up several frames’ worth of rendering commands.
This could lead to the game having a high framerate, but input still feeling very sluggish.
Now there’s a limiter on how many frames the CPU is allowed to be “ahead” of the GPU.
Control this setting via Settings.ini. Default setting: RenderAheadLimit=2

* Performance optimizations with biggest improvements on dual-core machines
* Fixed black “masks”

The soot on buildings with holes in them had a bugged renderpath. We switched that over to a more well-tested renderpath.

* Improved hit-detection

We’ve gone through the hit detection logic, and client+server will now give more consistent results.

* Fix for some “rubberbanding” issues

C4 should stay attached to vehicles and not rubberband around

* Reduced spikes/dips in framerate
* Various fixes for alt+tab related CTD on Dx9
* More fixes for random CTD on Dx9
* Fix for crash when you’re in a vehicle that gets destroyed

There was a race condition in the code;
System 1 thought “oh hey, you’re leaving vehicle X”
System 2 thought “the vehicle got destroyed, let’s remove it”

If system 2 ran before system 1, chaos would ensue.
This was actually fixed in the retail version since a month, but it was only when we got detailed crash reports from the community that we understood *why* the Beta was crashing.

Likely bugs in this build
I wouldn’t be surprised if it (still) has trouble remembering your settings between rounds. It would be nice to have that fixed too, but it’s better to get a patch out now, and look at the settings issues afterward.

-Mikael Kalms