PC Suggestions on 'mitigating' lag spikes...

[ricp]

Just to clarify this isn't me saying "my god, the game is unoptimised get your act together TFP", if anything A20 runs far better than I expected it would considering some of the comments from the dev streams before it's launch.

No, this is a thread to get the best out of A20, and in particular the .2 release as, for me, I find it spikes far more than both .0 and .1 although I appreciate that fixing and balancing any full point alpha sometime sees a slight drop in performance.

In regard to my PC, it's very mid level. I run a Ryzen 5 2600, a RX580 card and 16gb of RAM. I run the game at 1080 and I play using video settings that is pretty much set to medium with a few tweaks so things like crates look "in focus". When doing so I'm sitting roughly at anywhere between 60-80 fps in the wider world with that dropping to 40-60 in some of the really big cities.

With .2, though, these values fluctuate quite a lot. I'm not just meaning the mass spawning events when you enter a new area/PoI, but in general. So I can go from 60 to 20 then to 30 then 40 then 20 then 60 again, and continue in that fashion dependent on the rendering being done around me.

One thing that I have increased is the mesh processing, from the options menu, from 3 to 6, and that adds a good 20fps to the wider world, less so in cities as you'd expect.

What I'd like to know is what other things people do to mitigate frame drops. We all accept the game could do with optimisation, but I don't really want to dwell on what could be done in future and what people are doing now.

Thanks in advance..

 

[Kyonshi]

I have the same three components you mention. The. Exact. Same. (funny odds right?)

Unfortunately I'm not home right now, I'm at work but once I get back tonite, I can let you know in details about my settings. But keep in mind, at some point it's not on us and our rigs, the game needs to be optimized. Because even if we both have mid-range gear, it is well good enough to run most current games with pretty decent visuals and performance, including Cyberpunk 2077, which I'm also playing.

 

[ricp]

I have the same three components you mention. The. Exact. Same. (funny odds right?)

Unfortunately I'm not home right now, I'm at work but once I get back tonite, I can let you know in details about my settings. But keep in mind, at some point it's not on us and our rigs, the game needs to be optimized. Because even if we both have mid-range gear, it is well good enough to run most current games with pretty decent visuals and performance, including Cyberpunk 2077, which I'm also playing.

Yeah, funny about the specs.

It would be interesting to know the settings you use and the frame rate you get.

As for the optimisation? Yeah, I'd say most agree with what you say, but until that happens I'll work around it the best I can. After all, it's probably what we've all done during the journey "up the alphas".

 

[Kyonshi]

Yeah, funny about the specs.

It would be interesting to know the settings you use and the frame rate you get.

As for the optimisation? Yeah, I'd say most agree with what you say, but until that happens I'll work around it the best I can. After all, it's probably what we've all done during the journey "up the alphas".

I can definitely tell you that my fps count is almost identical to what you get, after testing on my side as well. So id say you've reached a ceiling just like I did. I'll get into more specifics once I'm home.

 

[ricp]

Just to update this with a couple of things, although it's a shame more people haven't replied as I can't believe I am the only person to suffer these issues.

My current video settings:

As I say pretty much medium, with a few tweaks.

I should have mentioned the Dynamic Resolution Mode, as that would be an obvious thing to suggest. It works fine with a constant frame rate that is lower than the one you specify, but with a fluctuating FPS it only compounds the issue with it being triggered on and off all the time.

Edit: I was doing some testing last night, the longer I played the worse the FPS got, I started out at 90 in the open world, within an hour it was 70 at exactly the same place. Could this indicate a memory leak? Might explain why .2 is so choppy (for me, at least).

 

[ElDudorino]

I did see someone say elsewhere that there are memory leaks. I was following this thread but not posting because I have no solution for you. The game usually maintains 60fps for me with occasional dips to 50ish but I have Dishong and Higashi skyscrapers as next door neighbors and at one point in Higashi Pharmaceuticals my frame rate dropped to like 12 and stayed there for a little while, which made combat super wonky. I'd love to see a solution if one presents itself.

(I have an i7-9700k and GTX 1070)

 

[meganoth]

Nobody mentioned dynamic meshes yet so I'll do that now. That option is in a new tab in the video settings and turning it off is currently neccessary for stable framerates on many PCs that aren't top of the class.

NOTE: That's dynamic meshes, not dynamic resolution!!

 

[BarryTGash]

Dynamic meshes (as meganoth says) plus, I think, this new zombie behaviour to randomly go in to destroy area mode will also have an effect, especially on cpu performance. I've witnessed, over the course of several nights, groups of zombies gradually bring the side of a neighbouring poi down. They weren't targeting me - they just wanted to beat @%$# up and for some reason that wall was high on their list. The point being that little bits of damage being done over time to lots of individual blocks might be causing too much work for the dynamic mesh system if it's not turned off or set to landclaim block only.

 

[ricp]

Nobody mentioned dynamic meshes yet so I'll do that now.

I mentioned it in my first post, and said I had upped it from 3 to 6, which gave me an extra 20 fps across the board.

Sadly it doesn't help, or hinder for that matter, the frame rate fluctuations for me, still the same no matter the settings I use.

I will admit, I don't really have any great in depth knowledge of how or where the meshes would positively/negatively affect the frame rate. If you, or anyone else, could shine some light on that it would be appreciated. I'm a coder, btw, so you don't need to spoon feed me the info..

I did see someone say elsewhere that there are memory leaks. I was following this thread but not posting because I have no solution for you. The game usually maintains 60fps for me with occasional dips to 50ish but I have Dishong and Higashi skyscrapers as next door neighbors and at one point in Higashi Pharmaceuticals my frame rate dropped to like 12 and stayed there for a little while, which made combat super wonky. I'd love to see a solution if one presents itself.

Yeah, I think we all accept things like the towers or other large PoIs, and especially those in cities, to treat our frame rate with utter contempt.

For me, I can deal with a low FPS, or a high FPS, just not when it fluctuates between the two so much.

Perhaps .3 (or a subpoint build) will patch over any leaks should there be some - and I'm not suggesting there are, just the symptoms suggest it could be.

 

[meganoth]

This is just a theory:

Beside CPU and GPU, who can be easily measured and often seem to be not the bottleneck, I can think of a few possible culprits for fps drops:

1) data paths, between RAM and CPU, CPU and GPU, RAM and disk, GPU and RAM

2) the CPU caches flowing over

3) special CPU instructions getting used too often creating a bottleneck with specific ALUs.

4) garbage collection or some other design problem of the graphics engine

I don't have expert knowledge of current CPU design but would think 3 to be rather improbable as TFP are programming their game in a high level language and that should prevent "unhealthy" code combinations being used if they even exist.

4 can be measured with profilers. So I would say Faatal would already know and told us if unity has unexplainable spikes. And the garbage collection he already handled so it is happening at a less unfortunate time and we know its fps drop pattern is different

My bet is on 1 or 2. And lets see what dynamic meshes do: They add another background task that needs to access data on disk a lot (disk to RAM cache or data path), and calculates stuff from data that the display routine would have not accessed because of occlusion (CPU data caches).

As I said, just a theory.

 

[ricp]

This is just a theory:

Good post.

Out of interest, has this been raised already regarding .2, or do you feel it's perhaps something my end (either hardware or settings) that is the cause? I appreciate I've not put up a video, and apologies I probably should have. I only really started the thread down to the noticeable change between .1 (and whatever build that was) and .2, and again, I completely understand why performance may drop (or increase, of course) as you progress through bug fixes and balancing.

 

[meganoth]

Everyone has different subjective limits for FPS... I actually haven't checked how my FPS drop at the moment (i.e. in .2) with the F8-counter but subjectively I don't have the impression I go below some critical value, it runs smooth for me. And it runs smooth since the moment I turned off dynamic mesh.

I suspect the difference between us is also coming from me having turned shadows off completely. Gives my machine more headroom in exchange for a too bright world

By the way, did you turn off vsync? If not, you absolutely should try it. And if you still have turned down dynamic mesh only, try it completely off.

 

[ElCabong]

I lag in the big cities. Not so much anywhere else although occasionally will get a lag spike that is over quickly

 

[ricp]

Everyone has different subjective limits for FPS... I actually haven't checked how my FPS drop at the moment (i.e. in .2) with the F8-counter but subjectively I don't have the impression I go below some critical value, it runs smooth for me. And it runs smooth since the moment I turned off dynamic mesh.

I suspect the difference between us is also coming from me having turned shadows off completely. Gives my machine more headroom in exchange for a too bright world

By the way, did you turn off vsync? If not, you absolutely should try it. And if you still have turned down dynamic mesh only, try it completely off.

vsync is always off, I've never been in a position where my kit was that good I had to limit things! :lol:

As for shadows? Yeah, they are one of the first things I do to improve the FPS, as you'll see from the settings image I posted above.

As for the dynamic mesh, I actually increase it to give me more FPS, not sure why that would be when you are saying it should be turned off in order to get the best results.

I lag in the big cities. Not so much anywhere else although occasionally will get a lag spike that is over quickly

I am happy as such with it being "laggy", I just need to be a "constant laggy", for me just now it jumps between being so and not. If it was consistent, either consistently good or consistently bad, I could work around it.

 

[meganoth]

vsync is always off, I've never been in a position where my kit was that good I had to limit things! :lol:

As for shadows? Yeah, they are one of the first things I do to improve the FPS, as you'll see from the settings image I posted above.

As for the dynamic mesh, I actually increase it to give me more FPS, not sure why that would be when you are saying it should be turned off in order to get the best results.

From the description "max mesh processing" setting influences how many meshes are processed in the background and it says that it influences how much ram is used.

 It might be a bug in the conversion of that setting to internal behaviour. It might mean that mesh processing is finished faster, not running all the time and leads to more stretches of normal performance but also more pronounced stutters(?). Maybe the developer added a routine that gives less time to each mesh processed the higher that setting is, but for some reason the routine is overcompensating.

In other words, I don't have a good theory for that behaviour.

 

[ricp]

In other words, I don't have a good theory for that behaviour.

Heh, yeah, no worries.

I do have 16Gb of really good RAM, so maybe that's helping out.

Ultimately, if this isn't something others are experiencing then it has to be something my end. That'll either get sorted, no doubt by accident when I'm dicking about with the settings, or the next build will even things out for me.

Thanks for your input though.

 

[Vampirenostra]

Dunno how you manage it, for me Vsync actually helps to keep my laptop cooler = run smoother as I use it as a fps limiter, I noticed it is working fine for me at half sync my laptop runs almost quiet producing quality 30fps, but it is barely playable with 30 fps, disabling vsync produces 80-90 fps for a few minutes and then dumps to 70ish and poor MacBook sending me waves of noise telling me what kind of a*hole I am and temp get up to late 90-100.