LOW FPS - CPU bottleneck?

[Photonboy]

I just got the update and discovered my framerate is about 60FPS instead of roughly 90FPS. My GPU Usage is about 60%. I have no FPS cap (normally I cap to 80FPS and it's rock solid).

So something in the UPDATE seems to be causing a huge CPU bottleneck. I turned DLSS off. I turned graphics preset to LOW. Nothing fixed it.

My specs:
R7-5700X3D
RTX4070
32GB DDR4
W11

[Digimortal]

try dlss swaper and upgrade your DLSS Version of the game from 2.4.2 to v310.2.1

[Photonboy]

Originally posted by Digimortal:

try dlss swaper and upgrade your DLSS Version of the game from 2.4.2 to v310.2.1

I said disabling DLSS didn't fix the issue. I tried TAA instead so it's not related to DLSS. I've got a massive CPU bottleneck with DLSS off and graphics settings set to LOW.

There's no setting where I can get above 60FPS where I normally got about 90FPS at the same spot. The FPS is low in the startup before I launch my SAVE so it's not even a location issue.

Pretty odd. Nothing I can do to fix it on my end.

[Photonboy]

Originally posted by Midadol:

same statters after patch. at 100% load i5 12400

Just FYI, for anybody reading this post, but normally you go by "GPU Usage" because the CPU is inconclusive (since usually not all of the CPU cores/threads can be utilized).

If a program is using 100% of the CPU, which is rare, then the fact that it's a CPU bottleneck is certain.

A game has a MAIN software thread that it steps through. This thread spawns off branching threads that run in parallel and report back (i.e. Physics). So normally the branching threads don't consume all of the CPU cores. But it seems with the i5-12400 (6c/12t) it runs out of processing power. Probably waiting on one of the BRANCHING threads in this case.

(not that any of that helps us diagnose the issue)

I would guess there's some sort of weird glitch since the FPS drop (and thus seemingly CPU bottleneck) is pretty massive for me and I would assume others.

Maybe some branching thread, Windows, driver or whatever interaction is taking too long then holding up the main code thread.

Brute forcing with a faster CPU would help, but my guess (and I could be wrong) is that it's a coding issue that could be easily resolved by Larian.

I would have thought this would have shown up in testing.

[Sundancer]

i think if the issue would be Widespread by Now more ppl would be posting here. ^^

[Photonboy]

Originally posted by Sundancer:

i think if the issue would be Widespread by Now more ppl would be posting here. ^^

You could be right. I can't speak for others, just speculate. All I know is I suddenly have a massive CPU bottleneck after the update but not before. That's clear.

[Br4en]

mee too

[Sundancer]

Originally posted by Photonboy:

Originally posted by Sundancer:

i think if the issue would be Widespread by Now more ppl would be posting here. ^^

You could be right. I can't speak for others, just speculate. All I know is I suddenly have a massive CPU bottleneck after the update but not before. That's clear.

did you had any Mods Running or Maybe an Script extender ? it was the issue from another Person after he got rid of it the Game was smooth.

[Photonboy]

Originally posted by Sundancer:

Originally posted by Photonboy:

You could be right. I can't speak for others, just speculate. All I know is I suddenly have a massive CPU bottleneck after the update but not before. That's clear.

did you had any Mods Running or Maybe an Script extender ? it was the issue from another Person after he got rid of it the Game was smooth.

No mods. NEVER any mods.

[Photonboy]

SOLVED!
It was the in-game VSYNC setting. I turned that off, rebooted the game and my FPS shot from 60FPS to 100FPS.

I only tried the Double Buffer VSYNC.

It happens if I have VSYNC on OR off in the NVidia Control Panel. Something seems to be busted with the in-game VSYNC for me

Update:
I had to retest and modify this comment. Anyway, VSYNC in the NVidia Control Panel seems to work fine. So I'm OFF in the game and ON in NCP.

(I'm using ULLM in the NVidia Control Panel so I don't think I'd need VSYNC anyway. I clamp to 138FPS in the menus on my 144Hz monitor (so ULLM is working) so I think ULLM would just supercede VSYNC... I didn't test turning ULLM off in NVidia Control Panel to see if it fixed the VSYNC in-game issue. But to me it's a solved issue.)

[Sazie]

Originally posted by Photonboy:

SOLVED!
It was the in-game VSYNC setting. I turned that off, rebooted the game and my FPS shot from 60FPS to 100FPS.

I only tried the Double Buffer VSYNC.

It happens if I have VSYNC on OR off in the NVidia Control Panel. Something seems to be busted with the in-game VSYNC for me

Update:
I had to retest and modify this comment. Anyway, VSYNC in the NVidia Control Panel seems to work fine. So I'm OFF in the game and ON in NCP.

I hope I don't have this issue but since I have Nvidia, I probably will. Thanks for sharing this, I'll try this if I get the same issue after the update.

[Photonboy]

If anybody cares, I monitor my GPU usage and FPS using the NVidia App. So I just use "ALT+R" to toggle that information on or off in the game.

[Photonboy]

UPDATE 2:
Okay, it was sort of my fault. Live and learn.

I had the following GLOBAL settings in NVidia Control Panel:
- Low Latency Mode-> ULLM
- FPS cap-> 138FPS

I set the 138FPS cap because that's the same FPS cap (really 1/138th second frame minimum to prevent tearing) as ULLM but sometimes ULLM doesn't work in some games so I'd get 144Hz (which would basically just use VSYNC).

I thought the NVidia drivers would use ULLM or the 138FPS cap but I guess that's not how it works.

And I didn't seem to have any issues in other games.

Well, I guess VSYNC in BG3 doesn't like that combo. I set my Global FPS cap to none because clearly I still can do stupid things.

Anway, VSYNC works in the game now.

Probably not even related to the recent UPDATE, but rather a coincidence that I reinstalled the NVidia driver 566.36 to fix issues recently.

*But also, despite that I got an odd TRIPLE IMAGE in the game in motion. I turned off DLSS and it went away. I turned DLSS back on and it was gone. That's with the FPS cap disabled. So weird stuff is still happening with the way frames are synchronized under certain conditions.

Probably very few people would have the same FPS issue I had but hopefully some of this is informative.

[Photonboy]

Update 3 (final)
Playing with settings my FPS plummeted again from about 90FPS to 60FPS. I had VSYNC OFF in-game, no FPS cap in NCP etc.

I restarted the game WITHOUT changing any settings and all was fine.

So changing settings seems to screw things up for some reason until you restart. I'm done playing around. Got a mostly solid 90FPS with DLSS Balanced (4K) (in-game FPS cap) and will stay there.

[Revy]

Since this patch i'm having huge stutters and fps drops, tested in ACT 1-2-3 and game performance is just terrible.

[Maelle]

use vulcan it helps