Dogtown performance is terrible.

[Angrypillow]

I just got here and it's really bad. The intro was flawless(as is all of night city) but as soon as I got to the first dogtown market area my fps tanked(and crashed less than a minute later). I won't be able to play the whole expansion like this.

[Waves]

why not just lower the texture quality

[Majestic]

You are probably just hitting some sort of memory cap. Because I dont notice a big difference in performance between Basegame and Dogtown. But thats because I have 16GB of VRAM and 32GB of system memory.

CPU load is a little higher, but not enough to create such a stark contrast that you're suggesting. That can only happen if you run out of memory.

[Angrypillow]

I'm leaning towards some sort of memory leak, because when I restarted the game it was fine.

[Majestic]

Originally posted by AngryPillow:

I'm leaning towards some sort of memory leak, because when I restarted the game it was fine.

No what happens is that you clear your active memory. Meaning it has some wiggle room. But as you continue to play, more assets get loaded in and it overflows. What you'll likely see if you enable Afterburner, is that you will see it creep to 8GB, drop down to 7200-7500 and raise to 8GB again. Because it chucks out a bunch of data, and then fills it again. This cycle causes your fps drops, since this is going through a very slow 16GB/s PCI-E interface, instead of the 500-600GB/s internal memory speed.

The fact you can fix it by restarting pretty much solidifies my theory.

Unfortunately, this will become a thing for most Nvidia users. Because they didnt even outfit their 899 MSRP 4070TI with more than a measily 12GB. Planned obsolescence at its finest. I know hardware unboxed caught a bunch of flak for making such a big deal about VRAM usage, but... here you go. This is the problem.

This is not a stab at you by the way, this is me being annoyed that this is yet another issue that shouldnt exist because Nvidia got greedy again. Every customer now has to be extremely techsavvy in order to buy a product that will actually last a while. It's sad.

[TwinChops]

Originally posted by AngryPillow:

I'm leaning towards some sort of memory leak, because when I restarted the game it was fine.

You play with Raytracing?
In my game Lag Town with Raytracing is sub 10fps (everywhere else in night city its 45-60fps) turning it off catapults the fps to around 50fps (everywhere else 60fps+).

[Angrypillow]

Originally posted by TwinChops:

Originally posted by AngryPillow:

I'm leaning towards some sort of memory leak, because when I restarted the game it was fine.

You play with Raytracing?
In my game Lag Town with Raytracing is sub 10fps (everywhere else in night city its 45-60fps) turning it off catapults the fps to around 50fps (everywhere else 60fps+).

I gave up on RT just days after the original launch. I'm on a 2070s and the visual wasn't worth the performance hit. The game looks fantastic on its own.

[Zoid13]

Originally posted by Majestic:

Originally posted by AngryPillow:

I'm leaning towards some sort of memory leak, because when I restarted the game it was fine.

No what happens is that you clear your active memory. Meaning it has some wiggle room. But as you continue to play, more assets get loaded in and it overflows. What you'll likely see if you enable Afterburner, is that you will see it creep to 8GB, drop down to 7200-7500 and raise to 8GB again. Because it chucks out a bunch of data, and then fills it again. This cycle causes your fps drops, since this is going through a very slow 16GB/s PCI-E interface, instead of the 500-600GB/s internal memory speed.

The fact you can fix it by restarting pretty much solidifies my theory.

Unfortunately, this will become a thing for most Nvidia users. Because they didnt even outfit their 899 MSRP 4070TI with more than a measily 12GB. Planned obsolescence at its finest. I know hardware unboxed caught a bunch of flak for making such a big deal about VRAM usage, but... here you go. This is the problem.

This is not a stab at you by the way, this is me being annoyed that this is yet another issue that shouldnt exist because Nvidia got greedy again. Every customer now has to be extremely techsavvy in order to buy a product that will actually last a while. It's sad.

i have an 8gig card (3070 TUF) and played PL for over 100 hours everything maxed out including textures never closed the game during the day it just sat there running (10+ hours at a time) while i was making lunch and whatever else. never crashed once and its been a solid 60 fps (locked to 60) the entire time including dogtown.(RT off)

but
with RT and dlss on the base game runs at 60 no probs. dogtown however ranges from 60-20 fps when using RT.

and no the performance drop isnt because its going over 8gigs. the game never goes over 7.2 outside of dogtown it sits in the 6.5-6.8 range
1440p, all ultra, max textures.

[PanPan]

Agree, they still don't have time to optimize.
I have a 7900XT and it's really a shame that i have to use FSR for 4K 60fps without RT...
Reminds me TLOU that can't run in native 4K even in medium...

[Coulston]

no, it ABSOLUTELY is not.

[⎝⧹Za Furan⧸⎠]

Yes, specially in some spots. The market in which there is the tree covered with photos is the area with worse performance for me in the entire game if I'm in one of the upper floors (in the balcony of Alex's bar for example) the fps drops to 63-65 if I look around towards the tree zone also the area surroinding the Black Saphire. Dogtown is also the only zone in which I have some fps drops while driving around.

This area need more work definitely, specially if you consider that the area doesn't show any graphical improvements respect to the rest of Night City which justify that performance losses, even crowded areas of Night City like Jig Jig street and the market of the surroundings have better performance than Dogtown.

[Vault Traveler]

for me its exactly like the rest of the game.

[Majestic]

Originally posted by Zoid13:

i have an 8gig card (3070 TUF) and played PL for over 100 hours everything maxed out including textures never closed the game during the day it just sat there running (10+ hours at a time) while i was making lunch and whatever else. never crashed once and its been a solid 60 fps (locked to 60) the entire time including dogtown.(RT off)

but
with RT and dlss on the base game runs at 60 no probs. dogtown however ranges from 60-20 fps when using RT.

and no the performance drop isnt because its going over 8gigs. the game never goes over 7.2 outside of dogtown it sits in the 6.5-6.8 range
1440p, all ultra, max textures.

See, I just looked in my own game. 1440p UW, also ultra settings with max RT, and it uses up to 11.5GB. Sure, that does not imply anything under 12GB instantly turns into a slideshow, but that's that's how much it needs to store all it's assets, when it has the available room. So when it doesn't have this amount, it needs to cycle more into slower memory. The first of which being L3 cache, then system memory, then SSD, etc.

It wholly depends how much L3 you have, how much system memory you have (and the bandwidth of that memory), and how fast your SSD is, for this to either just enough for the asset/texture streaming of the game to cope with, or it becomes a problem. Especially once it has to dip into the SSD territory and its a SATA SSD, or heaven forbid... a HDD. You can, for example, compensate sometimes for a 8GB GPU if you have 32GB of fast system memory. Not always though, like with TLOU.

But Windows memory heuristics always chooses the fastest and closest memory to store it in. And 11.5GB is what it requires. So it will always cause a performance drop if you dont have that amount, because it has to spend CPU cycles moving memory, and it will cause adititional wait time. But how much that impacts the overall performance differs wildly on the rest of the system. How much capacity you have on the CPU to cope with the extra copy cycles, how much system memory you have, etc.

You can't just say "I have a 8GB, and have no issues, therefor you're wrong". It's not that simple. What is simple however, is having 12GB of VRAM would improve performance and the rest of your system would not have to be specced out or particularly fast to compensate.

Besides, with a 3070 at ultra 1440, you have to be running DLSS to reach your claimed fps numbers, probably on balanced, meaning you lower the internal render resolution significantly and thus drop VRAM requirements.

[Spooky]

[Zoid13]

Originally posted by Majestic:

See, I just looked in my own game. 1440p UW, also ultra settings with max RT, and it uses up to 11.5GB. Sure, that does not imply anything under 12GB instantly turns into a slideshow, but that's that's how much it needs to store all it's assets, when it has the available room. So when it doesn't have this amount, it needs to cycle more into slower memory. The first of which being L3 cache, then system memory, then SSD, etc.

It wholly depends how much L3 you have, how much system memory you have (and the bandwidth of that memory), and how fast your SSD is, for this to either just enough for the asset/texture streaming of the game to cope with, or it becomes a problem. Especially once it has to dip into the SSD territory and its a SATA SSD, or heaven forbid... a HDD. You can, for example, compensate sometimes for a 8GB GPU if you have 32GB of fast system memory. Not always though, like with TLOU.

But Windows memory heuristics always chooses the fastest and closest memory to store it in. And 11.5GB is what it requires. So it will always cause a performance drop if you dont have that amount, because it has to spend CPU cycles moving memory, and it will cause adititional wait time. But how much that impacts the overall performance differs wildly on the rest of the system. How much capacity you have on the CPU to cope with the extra copy cycles, how much system memory you have, etc.

You can't just say "I have a 8GB, and have no issues, therefor you're wrong". It's not that simple. What is simple however, is having 12GB of VRAM would improve performance and the rest of your system would not have to be specced out or particularly fast to compensate.

Besides, with a 3070 at ultra 1440, you have to be running DLSS to reach your claimed fps numbers, probably on balanced, meaning you lower the internal render resolution significantly and thus drop VRAM requirements.

im aware that PC gaming can have 1000's of variables that makes one persons game run like crap while anothers runs fine :)

just saying the game only uses 7.2 max on an 8gig card with everything maxed.
on a gpu with more ram it will keep more things cashed to smooth out performance more because it can with the exact same settings.

with RT off at 1440p and everything maxed my game runs between 70-90fps (i lock it to 60 cos i don't like fluctuating) and it stays at 60 everywhere even in dogtown no issues at all. 100% smooth, no stuttering 0 crashes in 150 hours.
with dlss on quality yes cos 2.0 got more demanding. back at launch i was running it maxed at the same fps without dlss.
i have a 12 core 24 thread amd cpu and 64gigs of ram too (this is technically my home 'workstation' for 3d modelling i built in 2020.

with RT on it runs like poop in areas of dogtown. 20-45 is the average. it drops to 13 in mr.hands office. i guess whatever shader those giant cats are using doesn't like being rendered nicely through the raytraced glass window lol
but its still not a Vram issue.

[kripcision]

yeah the area around the roundabout is the worst spot