NVIDIA PERFORMANCE GUIDE.

[sammykneen]

So after playing around a little I'm getting really fantastic performance, very smooth 60fps, including during exploration in the game's open-world segments which had severe framerate drops on the Playstation 4 Pro.

Whilst it makes me sad that I had to spend a while tweaking and downloading two lightweight external tools, I'm at least really happy I've got the game running great, so I thought I'd make a thread to help anyone on a similar setup to mine:

Windows 8.1.
GTX 980ti.
i7-4790K.
8GB RAM.
Installed on Samsung 840 Evo SSD (Reinstalling on an SSD surprisingly resulted in a noticeable performance increase for me, likely due to the way the game streams data).

IN-GAME SETTINGS:

IMPORTANT:

- Screen: Windowed. (As borderless windowed fullscreen, read below for why).
- Vsync: ON (Strangely this actually seems to work in windowed mode for this game as a framelimiter of sorts, with Vsync OFF I get worse stuttering in windowed mode).

OTHER SETTINGS: (Adjust lower or higher depending on your setup or performance).

- Resolution: 1920x1080
- AA: OFF (Uses MSAA which affects performance severely, and causes pop-in issues when uses in conjuction with Ambient Occlusion).
- AF: x16 (Huge visual improvement for minimal performance cost).
- Shadows: High.
- Ambient Occlusion: ON, or OFF and FXAA enabled in Nvidia Control Panel instead for nice cheap post processing AA.

- As it's been discussed before, unfortunately the game does have issues for some users with true fullscreen mode, performance is worse for me in places and the resolution caps at 1600x900 even when a higher resolution is selected. Until the developers either patch in a borderless windowed fullscreen option or fix the fullscreen mode, I'd highly recommend running the game in windowed mode at your desired resolution and downloading Borderless Gaming to run the game in borderless windowed fullscreen mode, it can be purchased from Steam or found online.

- Another issue is the game's framepacing. The frametimes are extremely erratic, meaning that even if you can keep 60fps, you will still get stuttering due to frames being delivered unevenly. To fix this set your monitor refresh rate to 60hz, or preferably 59.94hz if you have the option, download Riva Tuner Statistics Server and set a framelimit of 60 frames per second (Which is truely 59.9fps). This will cap the frametimes at 16.6ms, meaning that in conjuction with Vsync, the frames will sync smoothly with your 59.94hz desktop refresh rate and prevent stuttering.

Unfortunately this does NOT fix the stuttering during the 30fps locked pre-rendered cutscenes, this is another issue that needs to be fixed by the developers sadly.

- You also want to make sure you add your NieR; Automata exe to your Nvidia Control panel and set Power Management Mode to Prefer Maximum Performance, this seems to actually prevent crashes, and gives all round stable performance. All other settings I keep at default, except FXAA I have turned ON for a lightweight form of Anti Aliasing.

- Windows' Balanced power plan works well for me with this game as it doesn't seem to be CPU-bound, but you can try a custom High Performance power plan too.



I hope this helps some of you guys out there.

[SenMithrarin85]

Nice tips, man. Hopefully this won;t end up as abandonware like all square's other ports. Platinum games have also never patched a pc port before either, so I doubt any support coming any time soon.

[Quantum]

Glad someone acknowledges not everyone is having issues with fullscreen mode. Great thread though, keep it up.

[sammykneen]

Originally posted by SenMithrarin85:

Nice tips, man. Hopefully this won;t end up as abandonware like all square's other ports. Platinum games have also never patched a pc port before either, so I doubt any support coming any time soon.

They've been pretty good at keeing the console version up to date with patches so let's hope so. Seriously love this game though.

[SenMithrarin85]

Originally posted by sammykneen:

Originally posted by SenMithrarin85:

Nice tips, man. Hopefully this won;t end up as abandonware like all square's other ports. Platinum games have also never patched a pc port before either, so I doubt any support coming any time soon.

They've been pretty good at keeing the console version up to date with patches so let's hope so. Seriously love this game though.

A modder you may have heard of (Kaldaien) has taken a deep look at the game's code, and its not pretty. He's seen drops to 15fps and he's running a gtx1080. It's also blurry as hell which indicates its likely using some form of termporal filtering to keep the framerate higher (likely another concession from the ps4 version :()

[sammykneen]

Originally posted by SenMithrarin85:

Originally posted by sammykneen:

They've been pretty good at keeing the console version up to date with patches so let's hope so. Seriously love this game though.

A modder you may have heard of (Kaldaien) has taken a deep look at the game's code, and its not pretty. He's seen drops to 15fps and he's running a gtx1080. It's also blurry as hell which indicates its likely using some form of termporal filtering to keep the framerate higher (likely another concession from the ps4 version :()

That's strange, the lowest drop I've had so far outside of the 30fps locked pre rendered cutscenes is one to 58fps when loading in a large part of the open world map, everything else has been extremely smooth and I'm an obsessive framerate counter watcher.

Image quality is also very sharp when using borderless windowed fullscreen.

[Yamislayer]

Works perfectly... frame pacing removed... thanks thanks thanks! (GTX 1060 6G)

[sammykneen]

Originally posted by Yamislayer:

Works perfectly... frame pacing removed... thanks thanks thanks! (GTX 1060 6G)

No problem, glad it helped!

[OneJLimit]

Thanks for the link onto here. I have a 1070 and I'm sure it'll run swell. I don't have the Pro but while playing I had almost 0 instances of framerate dropping outside of 6+ large foes exploding at once. If I could want for anything, it'd be an even more stunning place to gawk at.

[I use Windows 11 btw]

Originally posted by SenMithrarin85:

Nice tips, man. Hopefully this won;t end up as abandonware like all square's other ports. Platinum games have also never patched a pc port before either, so I doubt any support coming any time soon.

Just realized this is true. fml.

[MrFrengLitch]

Works pretty well. Except I use x4 AA. For some reason it feels smoother with x4 than FXAA or SMAA. I do get occasionnal stutters still but I need to pay attention to those to notice them.

GTX 980, i7 3770k, 8GB RAM.

[Old_Albert]

Anti-shatter thing worked, thanks. Tho enabling vsync in the game while helps with shutters seems to add imput lag, tho it's what vsync does.

[THE ENTIRE POPULATION OF CHINA]

Originally posted by sammykneen:

- Another issue is the game's framepacing. The frametimes are extremely erratic, meaning that even if you can keep 60fps, you will still get stuttering due to frames being delivered unevenly. To fix this set your monitor refresh rate to 60hz, or preferably 59.94hz if you have the option, download Riva Tuner Statistics Server and set a framelimit of 60 frames per second (Which is truely 59.9fps). This will cap the frametimes at 16.6ms, meaning that in conjuction with Vsync, the frames will sync smoothly with your 59.94hz desktop refresh rate and prevent stuttering.

I don't know if it's a placebo effect but I've found this tip very helpful. I didn't why I was finding the game so jarring even though it was apparently at 60FPS the whole time... now even when it drops to 55 it seems smooth. I put my monitor on 60 refresh and set the Riva to limit 60fps with vsync and it all seems pretty good

[sammykneen]

Originally posted by OneJLimit:

Thanks for the link onto here. I have a 1070 and I'm sure it'll run swell. I don't have the Pro but while playing I had almost 0 instances of framerate dropping outside of 6+ large foes exploding at once. If I could want for anything, it'd be an even more stunning place to gawk at.

No problem, you should get on great with your 1070 with these small tweaks. :)

Hope you enjoy it.

[Kisamefishman]

What if you have windows 10? Not trying to booast or anything, just asking if windows 10 would have any conflicts on graphics. I'm currently on a laptop, do you think I should go with Meduim settings?

[sammykneen]

Originally posted by KisameFishman:

What if you have windows 10? Not trying to booast or anything, just asking if windows 10 would have any conflicts on graphics. I'm currently on a laptop, do you think I should go with Meduim settings?

I'd try the same steps that I posted even if you're on Windows 10 and see how you get on. Performance will depend more on your hardware.