Game is dropping frames despite not maxing out any of my hardware

[Chet_Awesomelad]

Hey all, as the title suggests I'm playing with the hardware monitoring options turned on so I can see my CPU usage, GPU usage, VRAM usage and FPS counter. Usually I'm sitting at 70-80% CPU usage, 50-60% GPU usage, around 75% VRAM usage, and while my FPS counter CLAIMS the game is running at 58-60 fps it feels super jittery not smooth at all when I turn the camera which makes it hard to aim and also just ruins the immersion.

Any tips? I know the game is poorly optimised and there are lots of issues but there might be something obvious that I'm missing? Thanks for any help you can offer!

My hardware: i7 9700KF, RTX 4080 w/16 GB VRAM, 32 GB of RAM, playing on an SSD

[CJM]

Publicado originalmente por C1REX-PL:

The CPU can often become a bottleneck even when its utilization is way below 100%. This is typically caused by a bottleneck in a single core, scheduler, or cache. AMD's 3D chips are good examples of this phenomenon, as even when they have slower clocks, they perform much better than non-3D versions, highlighting how the lack of cache memory can often cause bottlenecks in games.

Could that be it? This game is some kind of stress test on every possible "weak point".

OP's i7 9700KF has 12MB of cache, my Ryzen 7 5800H has 16MB of cache.

A 5800X3D has a whopping 96MB of L3 cache.

[kgkong]

Publicado originalmente por MishaTX:

Blah, blah, bleh. Having a 3070 drop to frames in the 40s while staring at a wall on medium settings is in no way justifiable, please quit trying to come up with excuses for this pathetic dumpster fire of a lazy port, because you're not fooling anybody.

Greed, laziness, incompetence, pick your poison. There is no excuse for this arsetastic pile of piss poor coding, and this is coming from somebody who absolutely LOVES every single other aspect of this game, and I do.

I've waited for 10 years for this, so to see the port made by a bunch of drooling, knuckle-dragging monkeys who couldn't find their own nethers equipped with a magnifying glass, a compass, a flashlight and both hands is, to put it mildly, pathetic.

Now go flex your 4090 again and explain to me, like I'm five, how it's perfectly acceptable that a game that lists, as its RECOMMENDED specs, 8 gigs of VRAM and an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER (8 GB) runs like molasses uphill in December.

Please. Do. Waste as much time as possible doing so, because I am not listening, and it brings me quite a bit of joy knowing that you're shouting into the wind pointlessly.

There's the whole limited vRAM of the 3070 card and there's also the whole 531.41 nVidia driver bug that's impacting users and also seems to be impacting how the 8GB vRAM GPUs are managing memory spillover (rather poorly).

Publicado originalmente por CJM:

Publicado originalmente por KingGorillaKong:

Drop animations down, turn down some other CPU bound settings, turn down draw distance, and tweak the lighting resolution settings.

Done that. I'm on what is supposed to be a 1080p High rig, and I'm at the lowest possible setting.

FSR High Performance at a 360p Render target, everything on Low. CPU is around 70 FPS, GPU is around 30-40 FPS.

Ryzen 7 5800H - 4MB L2, 16MB L3 Cache
RX 6600M 8GB
32GB DDR4-3200
1TB NVMe SSD

In this case, the assets and file sizes of what needs to be rendered and loaded in for the game tends to be larger than what most games normally use, meaning you will need more system RAM and video memory to mitigate. I will say though, the devs can do more to optimize the asset sizes. This isn't something that's necessarily an issue on the PS5 due to the low hardware latency and faster GDDR6 memory it uses. But this is a dominant issue with users with GDDR5 video memory, limited video memory, and lower system RAM capacities because the game engine isn't designed for this type of PC hardware.

[CJM]

Publicado originalmente por KingGorillaKong:

Publicado originalmente por CJM:

Done that. I'm on what is supposed to be a 1080p High rig, and I'm at the lowest possible setting.

FSR High Performance at a 360p Render target, everything on Low. CPU is around 70 FPS, GPU is around 30-40 FPS.

Ryzen 7 5800H - 4MB L2, 16MB L3 Cache
RX 6600M 8GB
32GB DDR4-3200
1TB NVMe SSD

In this case, the assets and file sizes of what needs to be rendered and loaded in for the game tends to be larger than what most games normally use, meaning you will need more system RAM and video memory to mitigate. I will say though, the devs can do more to optimize the asset sizes. This isn't something that's necessarily an issue on the PS5 due to the low hardware latency and faster GDDR6 memory it uses.

But this is a dominant issue with users with GDDR5 video memory, limited video memory, and lower system RAM capacities because the game engine isn't designed for this type of PC hardware.

And Bill's Town and the Bus Depot use what, 16GB of VRAM?

I ordered a PlayStation 5 spec machine for this game and Ghost Recon: Breakpoint. I'm supposed to have GDDR6.
https://store.minisforum.com/products/elitemini-hx90g?variant=43300585832693

It is only 8GB of GDDR6, but I am doing everything in my power to keep it under 8GB.

[benjaminfirst84]

the game is dropping frames because of the LGBT friendly textures can't you see ?

[kgkong]

Publicado originalmente por CJM:

Publicado originalmente por KingGorillaKong:

In this case, the assets and file sizes of what needs to be rendered and loaded in for the game tends to be larger than what most games normally use, meaning you will need more system RAM and video memory to mitigate. I will say though, the devs can do more to optimize the asset sizes. This isn't something that's necessarily an issue on the PS5 due to the low hardware latency and faster GDDR6 memory it uses.

But this is a dominant issue with users with GDDR5 video memory, limited video memory, and lower system RAM capacities because the game engine isn't designed for this type of PC hardware.

And Bill's Town and the Bus Depot use what, 16GB of VRAM?

I ordered a PlayStation 5 spec machine for this game and Ghost Recon: Breakpoint. I'm supposed to have GDDR6.
https://store.minisforum.com/products/elitemini-hx90g?variant=43300585832693

It is only 8GB of GDDR6, but I am doing everything in my power to keep it under 8GB.

That's one, laptop form factor hardware. It's not as equivalent to the actual PC hardware versions.
For two, that's still not GDDR6 memory. It has GDDR6 8GB of video memory on the mobile GPU that is using.
For three, even though this is probably closer to the actual PS5 hardware than the Digital Foundry rig they used for comparison, this rig still has ample hardware latency that without direct SSD to GPU performance and full shared GDDR6 system and video memory, you won't still get par performance to the PS5 on the same exact settings.

[MishaTX]

Publicado originalmente por KingGorillaKong:

There's the whole limited vRAM of the 3070 card and there's also the whole 531.41 nVidia driver bug that's impacting users and also seems to be impacting how the 8GB vRAM GPUs are managing memory spillover (rather poorly).

This card that handles every. single. other game in my library perfectly fine without these problems??? But this game is SPECIAL and we now all have to replace our GPUs for three times what buying a PS5 and the game would cost?

Now, with this very game, anything at 8GB or below of VRAM is hopelessly last century??? Even though said cards have absolutely no issues dealing with other games of the same or better visual quality?

Try to sell it to somebody who cares. I mean, I'm done.

I'll spot you the driver issue, though, particularly since nVidia have admitted it themselves. They need to get their stuff together too, so that's definitely fair.

[CJM]

Publicado originalmente por KingGorillaKong:

That's one, laptop form factor hardware. It's not as equivalent to the actual PC hardware versions.

It should be closer to the "PC Hardware" at medium spec, than being below minimum requirements.

Outside of Bill's Town and the Bus Depot, the game is very playable. After Bill's Town I have to drop down to Medium to keep VRAM below 8GB, but I can get 50 FPS minimum frame rates through the bulk of the game.

Publicado originalmente por KingGorillaKong:

or two, that's still not GDDR6 memory. It has GDDR6 8GB of video memory on the mobile GPU that is using.

A mobile GPU that benches extremely close to its desktop counterpart.

Publicado originalmente por KingGorillaKong:

For three, even though this is probably closer to the actual PS5 hardware than the Digital Foundry rig they used for comparison, this rig still has ample hardware latency that without direct SSD to GPU performance and full shared GDDR6 system and video memory, you won't still get par performance to the PS5 on the same exact settings.

The discussion is about whether or not that is the problem, or if these sections of the game are harder on the CPU cache. Or if it is DirectX11on12 shader pipeline related...

This last point is why people are demanding refunds.

[kgkong]

Well... The game engine is designed around multi-threaded processors. A lot of people trying to play TLOU still have single threaded CPUs. That in general will just make the CPU work harder. Whether using Vulkan, DX11, DX11on12 or DX12.
Intel took forever to get into actually making proper multi-threaded CPUs and the first few generations of multi-threading they have (they call it hyperthreading) is rather inefficient at it. These Intel CPUs are gonna struggle much harder than most AMD CPUs since AMD has been multi-threaded for a long time now.

Certain game processes are beginning to capitalize on the features of modern hardware and one of those is the multi-threading capabilities of CPUs and parallel processing. If your CPU is poor at performing these types of functions, then it doesn't matter which graphics API you use, you're gonna see higher CPU usages period because these CPUs are in a constant state of playing catch up with the rest of the game engine.

[CJM]

Publicado originalmente por KingGorillaKong:

Well... The game engine is designed around multi-threaded processors. A lot of people trying to play TLOU still have single threaded CPUs.

I thought you were here for an honest debate. That is trolling.

[kgkong]

Publicado originalmente por CJM:

Publicado originalmente por KingGorillaKong:

Well... The game engine is designed around multi-threaded processors. A lot of people trying to play TLOU still have single threaded CPUs.

I thought you were here for an honest debate. That is trolling.

No I am. Just these are unfortunate challenges of designing a game that is designed around modern hardware in a console that is being ported to be played on inferior hardware on PC by the majority of the demographic.

This is a legitimate challenge for developers to do. How do they optimize a game without either nerfing performance or nerfing the visual fidelity too much either way? One way or another, a lot of hardware is gonna have to sacrifice some performance or visual fidelity to play (either aim for 30fps higher resolutions or 60fps lower resolutions) because of these actual limiting hardware challenges the majority of the PC gamer demographic is still running.

[CJM]

Publicado originalmente por KingGorillaKong:

Publicado originalmente por CJM:

I thought you were here for an honest debate. That is trolling.

No I am.

Back in Bill's Town I tried different graphics settings, and it just kept getting worse. Same thing happened on the Highway Exit of the Bus Depot chapter. Frame rate dropped to 30 FPS, and I lowered my settings until I couldn't get higher than 30 FPS.

An exit and reload of the game on the Bus Depot seems to have resolved the issue.

Might not be flushing VRAM between chapters.

[_APA [~sudo]]

Shame shame shame on Devs

[kgkong]

Publicado originalmente por CJM:

Publicado originalmente por KingGorillaKong:

No I am.

Back in Bill's Town I tried different graphics settings, and it just kept getting worse. Same thing happened on the Highway Exit of the Bus Depot chapter. Frame rate dropped to 30 FPS, and I lowered my settings until I couldn't get higher than 30 FPS.

An exit and reload of the game on the Bus Depot seems to have resolved the issue.

Might not be flushing VRAM between chapters.

There's a memory leak and this will impact performance over time. There's likely a few and they're not all activating equally across all gamers.
And the Hotel and Bill's town are both rather CPU extensive scenes in the game. I wouldn't expect your CPU to get anywhere near the performance of mine (I have the desktop version of your CPU) but I never had these issues. The 1% lows it caused for me was a microstutter. Again, having extra vRAM, system memory and just a more capable CPU goes a long way here. But you may need to ramp up your page file on that system you got to help compensate for these memory leaks and just overall larger file and asset sizes.

[Mexicola9302]

Single cores on the CPU are getting maxed out that ruins the performance. Game is ported very badly. Just standing in an alley, the game is utilizing the CPU to 75% while NOTHING is happening.

[kgkong]

Publicado originalmente por Mexicola9302:

Single cores on the CPU are getting maxed out that ruins the performance. Game is ported very badly. Just standing in an alley, the game is utilizing the CPU to 75% while NOTHING is happening.

Lots is happening in that scene. The draw distance is set too high for the particular single threaded CPUs in questions and some of the lower end multi-threaded CPUs (such as the Ryzen 3600). It's attempting to draw, render and prepare all manners of details that aren't directly visible but are required to be rendered and not culled due to the way that real-time path tracing lighting works. There's improvements the devs can do around this to better optimize it, but there's still a lot going on there with that scene.