Massive performance hit from Alpha 17.4 to Alpha 18 [R5 3600/RX570]

[Dosu Kinuta]

But it does run better, for at least some (most?) people. It isn't as though they lied. I am sure that the devs and QA team experienced better performance.

"Opinion"? It's strange that your "opinion" looks like an absolute statement of fact, one which runs contrary to other facts. *shrug* I think I see where part of the problem is.

Fair enough, I think I called them liars because I was a bit too enraged about performance since I remembered that one guy attacked TFP for using high performance PC to test the game instead of using low performance and I used the same argument since I believe it's true. My mistake here on my part by getting angry, I'm not afraid to admit it (even tho my argument about them using high-end PC to test the game remains the same). I usually don't get angry fast but oh well, guess it happens sometimes. :smile-new:

 

[Ashron20]

It's illogical that you as a developer say "Oh hey, this newer alpha is running better than all previous alphas" and as a player you expect to run better, but in fact it runs worse than all the other alphas. Hell man, I can run Alpha 1 with no problems, and Alpha 1 was so poorly optimized.
Never mind, you keep your opinion, I'll keep mine...and that is that A18 performance sucks and I'll wait for a fix. I'm glad I'm not the only one with performance problems, so you guys can't tell me "Oh, for everyone else it runs better, you are the first person that complains about this, so your pc must suck".

- - - Updated - - -

So that's how long it's going to take them to fix performance issue? Haha, nice sarcasm there.

Is it true. alpha 18 has very poor optimization compared to alpha 17, I've tried both and alpha 17 is better. I can play graphically better games with more fps than alpha 18 with 30-40 fps. why the alpha 18 graphics must work 100% that's the problem. people who claim that Alha 18 is better optimized by is lie

 

[RolandDT]

Fair enough, I think I called them liars because I was a bit too enraged about performance since I remembered that one guy attacked TFP for using high performance PC to test the game instead of using low performance and I used the same argument since I believe it's true. My mistake here on my part by getting angry, I'm not afraid to admit it (even tho my argument about them using high-end PC to test the game remains the same). I usually don't get angry fast but oh well, guess it happens sometimes. :smile-new:

At least two staff members use an RX570 and an RX580 in their own rigs, and Gazz runs it with a 1060 - hardly what I'd call "high end." The game is designed to run on a wide variety of machines. That some players are experiencing some issues is to be expected - it happens with all games, especially in "alpha" state. If you are having issues with your specific hardware, it's worth posting the support forums for advice on how to resolve it. If that fails to resolve your issue, you can either wait for further fixes in patches, or try submitting a bug report.

Having performance issues is definitely frustrating, especially when "it was working fine before" is your personal experience. Many others have found performance in this latest version a vast improvement, while some have found it about equal, and some others have found it worse. They have been diligently working on improving performance through both optimizations and bug fixes. I can tell you from my own personal experience with a modern high end computer (i7 9700k w/ 32GB RAM and an RTX 2060) it was virtually unplayable with settings maxed out during the initial phase of A18 experimental, and that improved with each patch to the point where now I get a solid 60 FPS (v-synch locked) throughout with the same settings. Give it time, give them information, and it will get resolved.

 

[ShivanSps]

@ShivanSps did you try turning off or reducing AF in the meanwhile, as suggested?
How a18 does AF is performance wise completely broken..

Yes it helps, i can now play at 2K with texture resolution in half and no AF... 30-40 fps. It is still very far of 17.4 performance but its something.

 

[warmer]

Guys it runs perfectly fine at Alpha 17.4 at those settings, i tested by rolling back, it is something with Alpha 18.
Is not the GPU memory, at texture resolution FULL it uses 3750MB at 2K.

Dropping to half it lowers to 3300MB

As you can see the GPU is at 100% all the time. Thats the problem, not the memory.

You do realize your are showing stats for texture memory is the LEAST heavy texture biome. SNOW BIOME?! Try a big city near a forest. I am sure it is going to be quite a bit different.

 

[Gipothegip]

No, the issue is that performance sucks in A18, it has nothing to do with his PC or his rams or anything. If he has the same PC that allowed him to run A17.4 smoothly and now he has problems in A18 (which TFP praise that is BETTER optimized) then TFP lied, the game is even more poorly optimized.
STOP DEFENDING TFP (which a lot of people do),really, the game runs much worse, saw it myself. I could run A17.4 smoothly (40-50 FPS), and now comes A18 that is "better" optimized...and instead of getting even more FPS with the SAME SETTINGS that I had in A17.4, I get around 20-30 FPS with the same settings. Please, don't try to find some "logical" explanation about his PC, it's not his fault. So this is the end of story.

This enrages me a lot. I see nothing wrong with A18 other than this performance issue. The only thing to do is hope that TFP will wake up and try to test the next alpha versions on lower PC, not on a good one.

"Oh hey, we got a 2000$ PC and we get 60 FPS and now we get 62 FPS with the new optimization setting". That's not optimization, that's total BS.

In my experience performance is way better in buildings, but worse outdoors. Probably due to occlusion culling, which I assume was the biggest optimization they did.

IDK, performance is worse in some ways but they improved the graphics, and the patch notes mentioned they upped the detail with distant terrain and some of the textures. It's a visible difference. So of course it's going to run worse at the "same" settings, because they're still higher / more resource intensive than the graphics in A 17.

Looking at resource usage (in MSI Afterburner) suggests that the game is way more GPU intensive now. That's been my bottleneck every time.

On the other hand, CPU usage has not been a problem for me. VRAM usage seems to be higher so that may be an issue on lower spec systems, but I haven't had too many issues with that either. I did have to turn on texture streaming though as 6 GB VRAM is hardly enough for full textures at 1080p now. That's probably why they recommend lowering textures and resolutions, because VRAM seems to be a bottleneck now.

This game has also had problems with AMD GPUs for a while, so whatever issue is causing that might not have been addressed.

I don't think TFP lied about optimization, it's just some of the other changes made the game more resource intensive which resulted in a net loss in some scenarios.

 

[Ac75]

I feel like some people in this thread have a much better grasp on graphical aspects that incur problems than the developers themselves.

Some of you should apply for a job to help.

 

[erlgrey]

Yes it helps, i can now play at 2K with texture resolution in half and no AF... 30-40 fps. It is still very far of 17.4 performance but its something.

yeah, i would never call this fix for this issue, but at least it helps (us) getting in a somewhat playable region, until tfp hopefully does more performance optimizations. you also can try to find a af setting forced in driver, which is still a bit more crisp than 0 af and with okayish performance, 4x af is okay on my rig.

I noticed other performance issues too, if i'm in my (desert) base at 4am i drop from something around 70 fps to 20fps, due to shadow madness. Even if i'm in my house, have no clear view to the exterior, this seems to not get caught by occlusion culling.

And tbh. even if i would be outside at this given time, the performance impact from shadows at this time is just insane.

snow biome performs also way worse than all others, funnily the best performing biome (even with ultra trees, grass far) is the forest biome. In 17.4 this was was a bit different for me.

everything is fine.

 

[dex314]

I am running a GTX 970 and never had a problem running all settings on max, 1440p on a17. With all the settings on low, when im facing the wall i get 100 fps, but the moment i look at terrain it drops to 3-12 fps. So nah please don't tell me everything is fine. Lots of people on my server are having 0 issues, but some of us are definitely having real problems. There is something wrong with the new terrain textures.

 

[Technech]

I have a simular setup to the OP, and I 'm having steady 60 fps. I'm using a older driver though, as the newest adrenalin drivers give my PC BSoD.

 

[Skullfracture]

The game runs pretty well for me, except the Desert biome. Entering (or getting very close to) Desert turns into a stuttery mess, and my GPU spikes to 60-65 degrees (about 15 degrees higher than ususal).

Going to use Nitrogen to gen maps with no Desert Biome until this gets fixed.

Windows 7 Professional 64-bit

Intel® Core i7-5820K CPU @ 3.30GHz (12 CPUs), ~3.3GHz

32768MB RAM

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti

 

[warmer]

There is something wrong with the new terrain textures.

Nahhh. Something wrong with your settings. Your GPU can chew through it, it is just doing it in an inefficient way with the settings that you are using. Not saying TFP has no hand, but the textures are fine. HOW your GPU is interpreting them is settings/configuration based and that is the issue.

 

[RolandDT]

I am running a GTX 970 and never had a problem running all settings on max, 1440p on a17. With all the settings on low, when im facing the wall i get 100 fps, but the moment i look at terrain it drops to 3-12 fps. So nah please don't tell me everything is fine. Lots of people on my server are having 0 issues, but some of us are definitely having real problems. There is something wrong with the new terrain textures.

Part of the issue is your specific card. This game will struggle with framerates on any GPU equipped with less than 4GB of RAM. Your card technically has 4GB installed, but full-speed access is limited to 3.5GB - the other half gig has a lower priority access, thereby gimping it. You may want to lower texture quality from full to half to ensure smoother framerates, as well as turn anisotropic filtering off (or to some low number, instead of full like it is by default). That should help a bit.

 

[ZehMatt]

Part of the issue is your specific card. This game will struggle with framerates on any GPU equipped with less than 4GB of RAM. Your card technically has 4GB installed, but full-speed access is limited to 3.5GB - the other half gig has a lower priority access, thereby gimping it. You may want to lower texture quality from full to half to ensure smoother framerates, as well as turn anisotropic filtering off (or to some low number, instead of full like it is by default). That should help a bit.

My card GTX 1070 TI has 8GB VRAM and I have no idea how this rumor spread that its all related to VRAM, the game runs pretty bad on my end as well, even after using "gfx pp enable 0" and "gfx af 0" there are still a lot of scenes that make it dip down to 20 FPS, like looking into a direction that has a bunch of trees planted, a game restart did not help.

Also with the new occlusion culling theres no wonder people get decent frame rates inside buildings as it should dramatically reduce draw calls by leaving things out of the render pipeline that you can not see, but outside its pretty useless. I was switching back to A16 2 days ago and it did run like butter with 120+ FPS in almost every situation, A18 came with a huge regression towards performance.