FYI: water physics

[Prismatic Platypus]

Just started playing and was struggling to get solid 60fps with vsync on (TV).

Finally I found that turning off water physics makes the game smooth as silk, even allowing for turning up other settings.

I don't have a super rig, but It should be up to the task:

I7-7700K @ 5GHZ
32 GB RAM @ 4GHz (XMP)
1080 GTX OC
1080P Ultra textures most else medium. MSAA off ;)

I tried switching phys-ex to CPU in CP and it was much worse.

I'd be interested to know if others see the same result especially with AMD CPU/GPU. The performance difference is quite large, so I wonder if something is up with water physics with the recent patch.

[Erynar]

I'd suggest watching these two videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=385eG1IEZMU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3xQ33Cq4CE

He goes over all of the various settings and how they affect performance. In the case of water physics, they do have a large impact on performance, but some tweaks in the more advanced settings allow you to get some of the visuals back without anywhere as near as high an impact to your performance as you get with just the more basic settings.

[Prismatic Platypus]

Cool thanks for the links I'll check it out.

[TMoney]

You shouldn't be having many problems with your hardware although not sure why you have vsync on so I would turn that off. I do feel this game is designed with future hardware in mind. I wish every dev would do that to push the boundaries and show what's possible.

On my laptop with a 7700k and GTX1070 it runs smooth as silk at 1080P vulkan and for me anywhere above 40-50 fps feels good for this game. Turned some things up to high/ultra from the defaults and it looks amazing and I don't get any frame drops I can feel.

I have noticed if you turn the water slider full right it tanks the framerate. I'm at 1 notch down and it looks good and runs smooth.

[halfmonkey]

Originally posted by TMoney:

You shouldn't be having many problems with your hardware although not sure why you have vsync on so I would turn that off. I do feel this game is designed with future hardware in mind. I wish every dev would do that to push the boundaries and show what's possible.

On my laptop with a 7700k and GTX1070 it runs smooth as silk at 1080P vulkan and for me anywhere above 40-50 fps feels good for this game. Turned some things up to high/ultra from the defaults and it looks amazing and I don't get any frame drops I can feel.

I have noticed if you turn the water slider full right it tanks the framerate. I'm at 1 notch down and it looks good and runs smooth.

Not disagreeing, just wanted to point out for clarification that the game was originally designed to showcase the then available "max" options of the PS3, then "enhanced" for PS4 and pc.

Thanks for the heads up [while I wait for the laboriously slow download to finish...] as to tweaks and optimization!

[TMoney]

Well far as I know the original RD was on PS3 but RD2 just came out last year. I don't think they had any thoughts about PS3 when making the game but maybe you're thinking of GTA5 and well yea, RD2 looks worlds better but that's not a fair comparison since it's about 5 years old.

[Prismatic Platypus]

I agree with the no vsync in general, but when using my Samsung TV it will generally look quite terrible unless I have vsync enabled - I don't know why considering I always run vsync off on a regular monitor and any tearing doesn't bother me at all.

[TMoney]

Might be something to do with the viewing mode. Either see if you have game mode and enable that or maybe try a better HDMI cable. Should feel smooth even under 60fps.

[Prismatic Platypus]

Originally posted by TMoney:

Might be something to do with the viewing mode. Either see if you have game mode and enable that or maybe try a better HDMI cable. Should feel smooth even under 60fps.

I have it on game mode and with a very nice HDMI cable that can push 4K just fine if needed, although I'm too old too benefit from that resolution :)

[Erynar]

Originally posted by TMoney:

Well far as I know the original RD was on PS3 but RD2 just came out last year. I don't think they had any thoughts about PS3 when making the game but maybe you're thinking of GTA5 and well yea, RD2 looks worlds better but that's not a fair comparison since it's about 5 years old.

Given that they apparently lost the source code for RDR1, it's highly unlikely that RDR2 uses any the code from RDR1. In fact, it apparently has some performance bugs in common with GTA V, so they probably use the same engine. Regardless, consoles supposedly use the equivalent of low or worse for most of the settings (the primary exception being textures as I understand it), so even using medium settings for most stuff is going to look better than what consoles can do, and for many of the settings, ultra takes an insane performance hit. In fact, the guy who did the videos I linked to suggested that for many of the settings, they should have called ultra extreme or insane instead, with something like medium being ultra. Water physics are a prime case where maxing them out will tank performance, whereas lower setting still look fantastic. There are some ultra settings that have almost no performance hit though.

[halfmonkey]

For clarification: According to a review video I recently watched, RDR2 and GTAV are on the same Rockstar game engine...which was developed for the then current PS3 hardware. Anything new is a tweak or enhancement to that engine.