Torchlight's horrible performance on a high end PC

[Blue]

I love the game but the fps drops are really terrible. Here are my PC specs:

Operating System
Windows 10 Pro 64-bit
CPU
Intel Core i7 2600 @ 3.40GHz 46 °C
Sandy Bridge 32nm Technology
RAM
12,0GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 668MHz (9-9-9-24)
Motherboard
ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC. SABERTOOTH Z77 (LGA1155) 36 °C
Graphics
ASUS ML239 (1920x1080@60Hz)
2047MB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB (EVGA) 55 °C
Storage
931GB Western Digital WDC WD10EZEX-00UD2A0 (SATA ) 28 °C
238GB Micron_1100_MTFD SCSI Disk Device (SATA (SSD)) 34 °C
Optical Drives
TSSTcorp CDDVDW SH-222AB
Audio
Realtek High Definition Audio

[potterman28wxcv]

It's a 2012 game that uses a single CPU core and isn't very well optimized.

It has been known to have framerate issues since release. Especially if you play with mods that adds a lot of enemies like Synergies.

You shouldn't get horrible performance though. You should be able to get a steady 40-50 FPS. Which is playable :)

[Blue]

Originally posted by potterman28wxcv:

It's a 2012 game that uses a single CPU core and isn't very well optimized.

It has been known to have framerate issues since release. Especially if you play with mods that adds a lot of enemies like Synergies.

You shouldn't get horrible performance though. You should be able to get a steady 40-50 FPS. Which is playable :)

The game often drops very much below 40 fps.

[steffire3]

Documents > My Games > Runic Games > Torchlight 2 > Settings.txt files will be found here and within the Save Folder.

Changing Corpses to "0" and Particles to a lower number has been mentioned in the past in an attempt to raise the Frame Rate.

= = =

Lowering the Visual Effects and testing the other Settings in-game may help.

[Blue]

I've also heard a lot about a possible CPU bottleneck. Do You perhaps know what it is and could You please explain if/how it may affect the game?

[potterman28wxcv]

Originally posted by Bluejazz:

I've also heard a lot about a possible CPU bottleneck. Do You perhaps know what it is and could You please explain if/how it may affect the game?

Modern CPUs feature multiple processors. For an i7 you have 4 cores.

Recent video games use multi threading to take advantage of that. So you might have one thread loading the graphics (issuing commands to your Graphic Processing Unit (GPU ; in your case it's your NVIDIA card)) while the other thread is looking for keyboard/mouse inputs and the other is updating the states of the game (physics state or just the game state in general like how many monsters there are, what change do they do, etc..).

Torchlight 2 has been written in an era where multicore technologies like we have now were just releasing but it wasn't yet mainstream. So Torchlight 2 code is mono threaded.

This means that all the monster counting effort, tracking out the effect of each projectile, remembering that something is actually falling down and computing that fall, everything, is done by one single unit of your CPU instead of several. This everything also includes telling the GPU what to do - the GPU computes the shaders and all the fancy things, which alleviate a lot of work from the CPU - but in the end of the day it still needs to be told what to do. The GPU does not run any game code (with the exception of some features of certain engines like PhysX from UE4, but that's recent stuff - I doubt TL2 engine has much game logic code running in the GPU. GPUs are bad at handling logic anyway)

This results in a bottleneck where the GPU spends its time idle, your SSD has finished his loading/writing long before, your RAM is quite empty, but your CPU is struggling to orchestrate everything because there's just one thread dedicated to it.

There are several kinds of possible bottlenecks in computer science - CPU bottleneck, RAM space bottleneck (you run out of RAM -> the computer starts writing to the disk which is significantly slower than writing in the RAM), RAM read/write bottleneck, GPU RAM read/write bottleneck (the data does not arrive fast enough in the GPU for the GPU to perform at 100% capacity), HDD bottleneck (your hard drive disk spend too much time reading things), GPU bottleneck (your GPU has all the data it needs but it's too slow to compute the effects)...

Here it's a CPU bottleneck. So there is nothing you can do aside of desactivating certain entities in the game that are known to cause that bottleneck, such as some particles like steffire said. In theory, you could also increase the frequency of your CPU but that won't change much because of physics limits (heat too hard to evacuate on a physics level)

[Blue]

Originally posted by potterman28wxcv:

Originally posted by Bluejazz:

I've also heard a lot about a possible CPU bottleneck. Do You perhaps know what it is and could You please explain if/how it may affect the game?

Modern CPUs feature multiple processors. For an i7 you have 4 cores.

Recent video games use multi threading to take advantage of that. So you might have one thread loading the graphics (issuing commands to your Graphic Processing Unit (GPU ; in your case it's your NVIDIA card)) while the other thread is looking for keyboard/mouse inputs and the other is updating the states of the game (physics state or just the game state in general like how many monsters there are, what change do they do, etc..).

Torchlight 2 has been written in an era where multicore technologies like we have now were just releasing but it wasn't yet mainstream. So Torchlight 2 code is mono threaded.

This means that all the monster counting effort, tracking out the effect of each projectile, remembering that something is actually falling down and computing that fall, everything, is done by one single unit of your CPU instead of several. This everything also includes telling the GPU what to do - the GPU computes the shaders and all the fancy things, which alleviate a lot of work from the CPU - but in the end of the day it still needs to be told what to do. The GPU does not run any game code (with the exception of some features of certain engines like PhysX from UE4, but that's recent stuff - I doubt TL2 engine has much game logic code running in the GPU. GPUs are bad at handling logic anyway)

This results in a bottleneck where the GPU spends its time idle, your SSD has finished his loading/writing long before, your RAM is quite empty, but your CPU is struggling to orchestrate everything because there's just one thread dedicated to it.

There are several kinds of possible bottlenecks in computer science - CPU bottleneck, RAM space bottleneck (you run out of RAM -> the computer starts writing to the disk which is significantly slower than writing in the RAM), RAM read/write bottleneck, GPU RAM read/write bottleneck (the data does not arrive fast enough in the GPU for the GPU to perform at 100% capacity), HDD bottleneck (your hard drive disk spend too much time reading things), GPU bottleneck (your GPU has all the data it needs but it's too slow to compute the effects)...

Here it's a CPU bottleneck. So there is nothing you can do aside of desactivating certain entities in the game that are known to cause that bottleneck, such as some particles like steffire said. In theory, you could also increase the frequency of your CPU but that won't change much because of physics limits (heat too hard to evacuate on a physics level)

Thanks man, You've been very helpful to me :-)

[potterman28wxcv]

You're welcome :)

[lo0mid>]

333 fps ingame

[Shrapnel]

i7 and 1060 is high end pc guys...

[potterman28wxcv]

Originally posted by Shrapnel:

i7 and 1060 is high end pc guys...

We never said the contrary.

[Shrapnel]

Originally posted by potterman28wxcv:

Originally posted by Shrapnel:

i7 and 1060 is high end pc guys...

We never said the contrary.

yeah except its not

[potterman28wxcv]

You missed a "not" in your original post then, i think?
Or there is something that i'm not understanding.
What does your "its" refer to?

[Blue]

Originally posted by Shrapnel:

Originally posted by potterman28wxcv:

We never said the contrary.

yeah except its not

Ok, you've peeked my interest. Explain, please.

[Shrapnel]

Originally posted by Bluejazz:

Originally posted by Shrapnel:

yeah except its not

Ok, you've peeked my interest. Explain, please.

More specifically, it may be above the recommended requirements for *this* game...
but that doesn't necessarily make it a high end pc if that makes sense
Now an i9 109000K, 3080ti, 32gb ram watercooled and overclocked to 4.5 GHz
I would say, objectively, that is a high end PC.
Mind you, I have no dog in this race, I was just passing by.
Good day.

[Blue]

Originally posted by Shrapnel:

Originally posted by Bluejazz:

Ok, you've peeked my interest. Explain, please.

More specifically, it may be above the recommended requirements for *this* game...
but that doesn't necessarily make it a high end pc if that makes sense
Now an i9 109000K, 3080ti, 32gb ram watercooled and overclocked to 4.5 GHz
I would say, objectively, that is a high end PC.
Mind you, I have no dog in this race, I was just passing by.
Good day.

Got it. Well yeah, objectively, nowadays my pc would probably fall into the category of a middle end pc but as you have mentioned to this game it still is a high end one.