Poor Performance on a modern rig - Any fixes?

[MizuDG]

Yes, I saw there was recently a thread like this. No, I'm not going to keep adding oil to that pan. It's turned into a flame war by now.

- I have a GB RTX2060S,
- Ryzen 2600,
- 16GB DDR4 @3000MHz Ram
- Game is installed on a 960 EVO SSD.

I, for the love of God, can't get more than 60-70 fps while in town, and it drops to about 20-30 while in-combat. Yes, I read the engine is single-threaded and I tried a bunch of fixes like disabling Core 0 from the Affinity window, running it fullscreen with Vsync on, disabling and tweaking graphics doesn't do anything either. Please, guys, this is unreal. I don't think I've ever played this game normally and I've always wanted to play it normally. I've got a 144Hz monitor too, so that's an even bigger shame.

[Dranolth]

Huh. Weird.

Have you verified game file integrity to check everything is okay there?

Maybe, disable your AV and see what happens...

Also, - and, please, take this with a pinch of salt because I honestly have no idea if this has any impact in the performance - maybe the game is not optimized for your monitor's refresh rate and that could be causing some problems.

I'm seriously puzzled since T2 has always run smoothly on my notebook that is way lower end than your PC.

[HiFive]

Are you saying that you are getting lags, or glitches in the video stream? I've played this game on 4 different computers (2 low-end desktops, one low-end laptop, and one mid-range desktop) over the past 7 years and have not had any problems. 60 fps is actually fine for this game. Here is what I found from an internet search on fps for games in 2019:

https://gadgetsenthusiast.com/what-is-the-best-fps-for-gaming/

"30 FPS For Gaming
This bracket is best for games that are more about creating the cinematic experience. For instance, games like God of War as well as Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice play and feel best in 30 frames per second.

60 FPS For Gaming
The most common FPS bracket for gaming is 60 frames per second, however, there has been a debate based on this. A lot of people think that 60 frames per second is reserved for multiplayer games, but you need to understand that 60 frames per second are great in FPS games, as well as some of the other games that do not focus on cinematics.

120 FPS For Gaming
This frame bracket is for people who want to have the competitive gaming experience in the market. Sure, you might have a difficulty playing on this resolution in the start, but the good thing is that if you are looking to have a great experience in first person games, and shooting games, then you should definitely look for this frames per second bracket."

The entire article is a good read and explains what the human eye can and cannot notice. It was published in August, 2018.

[HiFive]

This article is also a good read, and points out that enabling Vsync may not be a good solution on some machines:

https://graphicscardhub.com/fps-limiter/

"Another bad thing about V-Sync is that it can lead to 50% reduction in your overall FPS when the graphics card struggles to keep the FPS to the monitor’s refresh rate that is locked by V-Sync. So, V-Sync is not a full proof solution and it is only advantageous when the graphics card is quite powerful and is outputting more frames than the refresh rate. Also, it is better to turn VSync off in high paced fast action games like CS:GO, Unreal Tournament etc. because of the input lag that it induces, and it makes the gaming experience so much worse, because players won’t be able to accurately target their enemies, as the accuracy gets compromised because of input delay or lag. So, to conclude here, V-Sync works well when frame rate is higher than monitor’s refresh rate but it degrades performance to much greater extent when the game frame rate falls below the monitor’s refresh rate, even slightly."

and further down in the article:

"How much FPS Limit should you Set?
It is better to limit your FPS a little below monitor’s maximum refresh rate, because sometimes FPS limiter can overshoot the FPS a little bit (due to error margin) above the target FPS that you have set, and this can result in screen tearing to happen. For example, if your monitor has maximum refresh rate of 75Hz and your graphics card is generating in excess of 100FPS then it would be better to cap the frame rate 2-3 FPS below monitor’s refresh rate, which in this case would be 72 – 73 FPS, to remain on the safer side and avoiding any kind of unaccounted marginal error that can happen with FPS limiters. You may set this number to even 70 FPS also, if you are still getting screen tearing with 73 FPS with FreeSync or G-Sync enabled."

[HiFive]

And.... one more good article to read, from HowToGeek.com:

https://www.howtogeek.com/353730/how-to-view-and-improve-your-games-frame-per-second-fps/

[HiFive]

I forgot to ask if you are using any mods. For instance, the Necromancer in Synergies tends to give people problems because of all the summoned assistants.

Also, I usually keep my graphics settings at medium because my computer overheats easily, but I turned them up all the way just now to see if the framerate would drop, and it didn't, even with a lot of monsters and summons on the screen. So, at least on my computer, the Steam monitor says my fps is pretty stable on this game.

[HiFive]

Don't know if this helps. Found it on Reddit:

"I get 100% CPU usage while playing even older games. My laptop shouldn't have any problem running Torchlight, but I still get 100% CPU usage and the game is freezing all the time for a short time.
​
What I tried:
installed GeForce Experience and then installed the my GPU driver. I made sure to set the "Manage 3D Settings" to "High performing NVIDIA processor".
https://preview.redd.it/epovpcmzgqa31.png?width=666&format=png&auto=webp&s=165289d997b0f12eba70de0f2d25241e8ce34711
https://preview.redd.it/p79vbw1ygqa31.png?width=666&format=png&auto=webp&s=767ade9f94f69b360f3755948b72e1a589838e10
​
https://preview.redd.it/7hv7srbplqa31.png?width=958&format=png&auto=webp&s=7b656f86b6ca0cf32c930e0f1c02719f6d0f15c0
My Specs:
OS: Windows 10
CPU: Intel Core i7-4700MQ
GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 765M"

---------------------------

Expand all the comments on this Reddit thread:

https://www.reddit.com/r/computer/comments/ce3fhc/getting_100_cpu_usage_while_playing_games/

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Also, try expanding all the comments for this Reddit thread, in case there is something there to explain things for you:

https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/40jybj/troubleshooting_4k_monitor_stuttering_in_games/

I found a number of references stating that often the problem is more GPU and monitor related than CPU related.

[MizuDG]

It doesn't matter if it's modded or not. I've had this issue ever since the game came out, as I said. Used to be 40-60fps on a FX6100 and GTX560 was good enough back in the day, but it's really not acceptable nowadays. I tried running it without Synergies and with and there's no difference. I go into any zone and as soon as mobs come out, the fps dips by about 30 and as soon as anything dies or a longer fight ensues, it goes under 30-40 at best. I checked through the links you provided. Very informative, but I'm not getting 100% CPU usage. My PhysX settings have always been set to my GPU and running the game on the 2nd monitor (the one with 60HZ) didn't change anything either.

[Anarch16Sync]

Well, I know this doesn't serve as a consolation... but the game is clearly not optimized for modern CPUs, I don't know what rig the devs used as a base for programming and testing, but just the issue that the game is single threated in a modern CPU ecosystem that keeps pushing for less powerful individual cores but more multi-treading put this at a disadvantage for future enjoyment.

My perfect experience with the game was with a Phenom II X4 960T BE, Constant 60 FPS with Vsync on, everything on max settings. Then I upgraded to a FX 8350, and I started to see dips in FPS (nothing major but dips from 60s to around 45-50 for a couple of seconds) when the game actiong got too intense, and if I take your story into consideration it seems the more you upgrade into the AMD CPUs the worst the game handles...

So this may just be an issue of the game engine not being able to keep up with the new way CPUs handles stuff and just needing a good and old pure brute force single core... If this keeps happening with newer CPUs, this game is gonna be relegated to retro gaming in a couple of years

[HiFive]

Well, there are enough potential fixes listed on some of the threads I gave. If you have tried those, checked that your drivers are all up to date, etc., and still don't have a solution, then you will need to do more of your own research, or accept things as they are. My graphics card is not as good as yours, and my Ram speed is slightly better than yours. My monitor is much older than my computer, but I get a very consistent fps throughout my gameplay. Most people do not experience problems on this game, regardless of the age (new or old) of their rig, so I can't agree with Anarch. I'll wait to see what happens over the coming year or so on the discussions pages of these older games. I can only hope all of these classics remain viable for a very long time, since, for many people, they resonate with some of us more than any of the newer games out there.

[MizuDG]

Is there possibly a mod or some hidden setting that could improve performance? I saw there was a Low Population mod for Synergies but that didn't change anything either. Like I said, it didn't matter if it's modded or not. Perhaps I'm missing something else?

[HiFive]

Originally posted by MizuDG:

Is there possibly a mod or some hidden setting that could improve performance? I saw there was a Low Population mod for Synergies but that didn't change anything either. Like I said, it didn't matter if it's modded or not. Perhaps I'm missing something else?

What some people have done is to lower their in-game graphics settings. Other than the Low Population mod, I don't know of any other mods to help, since this seems to be a new issue that is just recently being reported on here. I am still not entirely convinced that it's the game's fault.

[HiFive]

Originally posted by HiFive:

Originally posted by MizuDG:

Is there possibly a mod or some hidden setting that could improve performance? I saw there was a Low Population mod for Synergies but that didn't change anything either. Like I said, it didn't matter if it's modded or not. Perhaps I'm missing something else?

What some people have done is to lower their in-game graphics settings. Other than the Low Population mod, I don't know of any other mods to help, since this seems to be a new issue that is just recently being reported on here. I am still not entirely convinced that it's the game's fault.

Oops! Sorry. I just did a search on "low fps" and found that others have had this issue in past years. I will keep investigating.

[HiFive]

Here are some comments from a fairly recent thread about poor fps:

Originally posted by potterman28wxcv:

Originally posted by steffire3:

I agree with the other answers.

TL2 (developed around 2010 to 2012 using a modified version of the Ogre Engine at that time) is limited to relying on the Cpu only.
Considering how Cpus today are being spread across multiple cores it's not surprising that this game suffers when a mod like Synergies introduces too many mobs on the screen at once.

I myself had to use the LOWPOP Addon just to avoid the lag spikes.

= = =

So in some ways other games made today have the option of running better than games in the past that did not have the option of using the Gpu.

If the game was only using the CPU, believe me you would get a framerate way worst than this. Actually you can test it yourself by desactivating your GPU and try to run the game without. It will run, only at approx 10-20 fps.

The game does use GPU it has to, for all the graphical computations.

However maybe it's not multi threaded - meaning it uses only one CPU instead of all the available CPU on your machine. I would doubt it though, multi threading was already there and wide spread in 2010-2012, at least there started to be dual cores machines

I believe the game just was not developed to have a lot of enemies on screen. In games like Diablo 2 you have synergies amount of foes on the screen and it does not lag because there is no special effect like static electricity or "burning" status effects. Instead they just become a different color to show the effect.

Torchlight 2 decided to put more elaborate effects when you have elemental status but something in there must be expensive to run which really shows when you have huge amount of mobs and you change the status of all of them

Originally posted by steffire3:

Originally posted by potterman28wxcv:

Torchlight 2 decided to put more elaborate effects when you have elemental status but something in there must be expensive to run which really shows when you have huge amount of mobs and you change the status of all of them

Thanks for pointing me in the correct direction. It reminds me that some mods were made to reduce particle effects in order to help the Frame Rates.

[HiFive]

This looks like a really good Steam thread on the subject:

https://steamcommunity.com/app/200710/discussions/0/41973820912769090/

One person disabled the damage displays on the in-game settings and got a bit of improvement. Others are saying they fiddled with drivers on their GPU settup.

A few comments from that thread:

Originally posted by oweb26:

Here are something I read on the synergies forum (all credit to Potterman) about what you can do in the tweak in the local_settings.txt file

"You can change the number of MAX_PARTICLES ; setting it to 2000 should be ok to not load too much particles, but still be able to see abilities.
You can change NETBOOK MODE :0 to 1. That will greatly increase your FPS ; but you will have a shorter field of view.
Finally, you can set DESTROY DEAD CORPSE to 1, so you don't have corpses slowing down your FPS."


I just run the reduced particles mod and that has helped alot.

Overall yes its the synergies mod that is making your FPS drop.

Originally posted by tizeY:

Originally posted by Ziboon:

So I realise this thread is quite old, and my problem isn't exactly the same, but i really just didnt know where else to go haha. Anyways ; I recently started playing torchlight 2 again since last time was a couple of years ago. And the first thing I notice is my CONSTANT low fps. I'd say its around 20-25 at all times (might lower 2-4 fps during MAJOR fights, nothing significant anyways) and I really have no Idea why. I'm running an EVGA GTX 970, 16gb RAM, Amd phenom II X4 965 3.4 GHz on a Sabtertooth 990fx motherboard. Most other games such as crysis 2 and 3, and far cry 3 and 4 at mostly max settings at 55+ fps ... Tried going back on gpu drivers, updated framework and dx just to be sure and nothing seems to help.

AMD cpu in an cpu bound d3d9 title is what the bottleneck here is.

The Games you mentioned use multiple cores while running on d3d11 , while the bottleneck on d3d9 is higher and those games atleast for the most part are running on 1 core only while the rest sit idle. and AMD as sad as is hasn't really delivered SingleCore powerhouses.

[HiFive]

By any chance are you running MSI Afterburner. I just reinstalled it to see if it would run better this time and give me more accurate readings, since it was quite glitchy the first time I installed it. I thought perhaps it was just normal glitches that I often get on free apps. However, this time it doesn't seem to be having any problems yet. Nevertheless, I now notice that my fps is dropping more frequently, so I did an internet search and found this:

https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/in-some-games-msi-afterburner-overlay-can-negatively-impact-fps-by-9-16.2457508/

I really don't need Afterburner anymore, so I'll be uninstalling it again, but it occurred to me that even something that should be improving things, or something that seems quite innocuous, can still affect game performance.