How to Improve performance and stability

[jeoshua]

The best way to improve overall performance I have found is, quite paradoxically, to limit the frame rate of the game in the Video options. Bear with me:

There is far more to performance than maximum achieved frame rate. There is also system lag, stability, and frame pacing. All of these are improved by limiting the frame rate.

To properly set this up, install all mods and set your graphics options up how you like them, being mindful of frame rate hogs. Keep vsync and RTX/DLSS/FidelityFX off for now. Find a good balance in playability.

Once you find that balance, save and exit the game. Go into Steam's options and turn on the FPS counter. Restart. Now look around your environment and see where the frame rate is. What's the lowest it gets to for the first few minutes? In combat? In traffic? You're looking for what's known as the 10% low frame rate. 90% of the time your frame rate will be better than this, but it will dip to this level very often. If this is too low, mess with your graphics settings, restart the game, repeat.

Once you've found the 10% low fps, do three things:
- In Graphics options, turn on DLSS Auto/FidelityFX Dynamic. In FidelityFX, set the target to your 10% low fps, Min Resolution to 50, and Max Resolution to 85.
- In Video options, turn on VSync and set it to your monitor's refresh rate.
- Also in Video, set Maximum FPS to that 10% low number. Round this to some clean fraction of your refresh rate (20,30,45,50 for 60hz, for example). Keep it BELOW your refresh rate.

Doing this means that your computer will get lower average fps in the game, but every frame that does come will have completely even pacing, and the game will be smooth as glass.

Tell me if this works for anyone else. I really think I've cracked it, in my case. All my settings are near high and I'm running 50 fps with absolutely no stuttering or crashing for hours and hours. Before I did thus, I couldn't play for 5 minutes before the game took a dump and hard locked my computer.

My working theory is that instability and memory leaks are occurring when a frame in processing is cut short, not every time but enough that uncapped frame rates are problematic. However, the frame rate limiter doesn't have that problem. As long as every frame is cut off by the frame rate limiter, you will have fewer issues.

[jeoshua]

Bumping for visibility. Really would love to hear if this ends up fixing someone else's game.

[miguel2099]

It for sure did help m! Thanks a lot!!!

[GoMeZ-T.T ™©®]

makes sense. but I also have constant frametime without any single stutter on 14900k and 4090. I changed nothing that you said. game should run stutter free on highend systems anyway. but yeah for low/mid machines this could help. but not sure. did not test it. only the 2.01 update that came in the past tanked my fps by 20 fps around. which nobody knew where that came from. like 20fps avg lost. in 2.0 this was not there.

[Zoid13]

i lock my fps to 60 even though my system can push way past that. i like the consistency. hate the feeling when fps is constantly changing from 75-120.
all ultra
2 crashes while playing in 430 hours :)
handful more crashes when playing around with path tracing in photo-mode it eventually crashes after a handful of photos. no path tracing no crashes (standard RT is fine).