Solution : Low FPS on legacy hardware / laptops

[Alva]

I put this together as a reference for people who are having low frames (10-30 fps) or stuttering issues while playing Payday 2. This is a fairly extreme solution which will make the frame rates increase dramatically, but the image quality will suffer. If you are simply looking for a playable game and don't particularly care how pretty it looks, here is my advice. I originally figured all of this out when using an older pc with integrated graphics. The game was unplayable until i took these steps to modify the game rendering.

For AMD Users

Download RadeonPro. I don't know how to post links, but a simple google will bring up the website. Once installed, open RadeonPro, add a new profile for Payday 2. You will have to find the executable which is located in:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\SteamApps\common\PAYDAY 2

Under the Overdrive tab, select enable Overdrive, and "Always use high performance clocks".
Next, go to your advanced tab, and select Flip Queue size of 1. Some people prefer size of 2, depending on the mouse lag. 1 or 2 will fix your mouse lag issues.

If you have a quad core processor i recommend going to the OSD tab, selecting "GPU core utilization" and running the game to see which core the game defaults to. Now disable your OSD, and under the tweaks tab set your cpu core affinity to the core the game defaults to. This may or may not help your performance, depending on the system. Also you can force high priority here, which may or may not help depending on your hardware. Go through your settings and make sure tesselation and anti-alias is at minimum or disabled, as well as vsync.

For Intel Graphics Users

You will need to download a direct3d dll file and drop it in your game directory. refer to this steam thread:
http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=3159522

Modifying Your Render Settings

These tips apply to both Amd and Intel.

Go to your game directory:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\SteamApps\common\PAYDAY 2

Open up the file context.xml in notepad/wordpad. Make sure to disable your windows key first, unless you want to minimize the game accidentally while playing it.
<keys disable_windows_key="true"/>

On your physics settings, you want multithreaded=false:
<physics settings="settings/physics_settings" fps="60" physx_effects="hardware" multithreaded="false"/>

Next, go to your render settings file.
C:\Users\[yourusername]\AppData\Local\PAYDAY 2

Open render_settings.xml with notepad/wordpad. Under <d3d device verify the game is detecting your video card correctly. If not, if on AMD you can spoof your videocard info in radeonPro under the tweaks tab, delete render_settings.xml, and re-run the game. This should force the game to detect your card correctly and repopulate a new render_settings.xml file.

You will see all of your valid resolutions and refresh rates. Look at the refresh rate value and make sure it is not set incorrectly. You should select a compatible refresh rate for your display, preferrably 60 or above.

Next, set your resolution to the lowest setting here, i.e. resolution = "800 600". We will start at the bare minimum and you can scale up your visuals later.

Now, under the <render_settings> tag, copy and paste the following tags, pasting between the <render_settings> and </render_settings>

<variable name="max_anisotropy" value="1"/>
<variable name="texture_quality_default" value="very low"/>
<variable name="shadow_quality" value="disabled"/>
<variable name="dynamic_lights" value="true"/>
<variable name="effect_quality" value="disabled"/>
<variable name="post_effect_quality" value="disabled"/>
<variable name="texture_managed_backdrop" value="true"/>
<variable name="environment_detail" value="0"/>

Save your render_settings.xml file, then launch the game. If you are an amd user, you will know that radeonPro is working if you see an FPS indicator on your screen. If you do not see it, radeonPro is not launching with the game.

At this point, the game will not look very pretty at all. Play a few minutes with crimenet offline and see how responsive and smooth the gameplay is. At this point, you will want to scale up your display settings slowly, via the render_settings.xml file. Start by boosting your resolution step by step, as well as the tag:

<variable name="texture_quality_default" value="very low"/>

move up the scale from very low, low, medium, high.

Continue to restart the game and play in single player mode to watch responsiveness/frames per second. When you notice a slow down, scale back to your last settings. If you need to start over, just delete the render_settings.xml file and restart the game. The render_settings file will be automatically regenerated.

WARNING

If you change any video settings from the in-game menu, it will completely overwrite your render_settings.xml file. I recommend if you need to make adjustments in-game, that you copy your render_settings.xml file so you have something to refer to.

Good luck, happy heisting!

[Undercover Defective]

This should be pinned :)

[Courier Six]

Agreed, this helped my fps immensely.

[imadous]

i myself use Shadow map mod V3 and it works great for me, but cool guide for those with lower hardware

[Alva]

I'm glad this post was helpful :)

[Vector88]

just tried it out. Works great, especially with my laptop with integrated graphics

[CoryStar]

Shadow Map Mod V3 link: http://steamcommunity.com/app/218620/discussions/15/558754900072879608/

[Alva]

shadow map mod is great, but for some hardware my solution is the best way. ;)
the map mod reduces the shadow map to 1024 vs 4096. this is still a performance killer for many machines.

i have an even more extreme solution im considering adding to the thread. for low power laptops/desktops on windows 7/8 you can also disable desktop window manager while gaming. i use rocketdock and a batch script to accomplish this. it adds another 5-7 fps in my experience because dwm is polling constantly. if there is a need ill post it up.

[CoryStar]

GEM - PAYDAY 2: http://gem.codeusa.net/ install it and make sure you run the chromaticpatch.exe in the "Remove Chromatic Abberation" folder inside the "Mod Tools - Optional" folder. Once in-game press the "Pause/Break" key to activate it.

It gives me a boost of 10 fps usually.

[Alva]

CoryStarkiller eredeti hozzászólása:

GEM - PAYDAY 2: http://gem.codeusa.net/ install it and make sure you run the chromaticpatch.exe in the "Remove Chromatic Abberation" folder inside the "Mod Tools - Optional" folder. Once in-game press the "Pause/Break" key to activate it.

It gives me a boost of 10 fps usually.

does this need to be redone every time the game is updated? also, will it interfere with hoxhud

EDIT:

i just tried this and it actually looks worse and messes with the way the menus are rendered. this likely wont help with my suggested modifications. i saw no framerate increase, also a degradation in image quality in the menus. if you want to try this solution, be prepared to delete the files then right click on your game in steam, hit the local tab and verify game cache. that will reverse the patch if it doesnt work well for you.

[CoryStar]

Alva eredeti hozzászólása:

CoryStarkiller eredeti hozzászólása:

GEM - PAYDAY 2: http://gem.codeusa.net/ install it and make sure you run the chromaticpatch.exe in the "Remove Chromatic Abberation" folder inside the "Mod Tools - Optional" folder. Once in-game press the "Pause/Break" key to activate it.

It gives me a boost of 10 fps usually.

does this need to be redone every time the game is updated? also, will it interfere with hoxhud

EDIT:

i just tried this and it actually looks worse and messes with the way the menus are rendered. this likely wont help with my suggested modifications. i saw no framerate increase, also a degradation in image quality in the menus. if you want to try this solution, be prepared to delete the files then right click on your game in steam, hit the local tab and verify game cache. that will reverse the patch if it doesnt work well for you.

I don't know if it needs to reinstalled, because I reinstall everything when a new update happens. It does lower the quality, but it gives me a 10 fps boost, over and above everything else.

I find that removing shadows is the thing that makes the game look bad though.

[Alva]

CoryStarkiller eredeti hozzászólása:

Alva eredeti hozzászólása:

does this need to be redone every time the game is updated? also, will it interfere with hoxhud

EDIT:

i just tried this and it actually looks worse and messes with the way the menus are rendered. this likely wont help with my suggested modifications. i saw no framerate increase, also a degradation in image quality in the menus. if you want to try this solution, be prepared to delete the files then right click on your game in steam, hit the local tab and verify game cache. that will reverse the patch if it doesnt work well for you.

I don't know if it needs to reinstalled, because I reinstall everything when a new update happens. It does lower the quality, but it gives me a 10 fps boost, over and above everything else.

I find that removing shadows is the thing that makes the game look bad though.

yes. without dedicated hardware, running the shadow maps kills performance. im not sure of the limitations of the shadow map mod. there are likely no map sizes below 1024? Obviously having a shadow map of 256 would look crap, but it would also remove the blinking you get when you remove them entirely.

[CoryStar]

He said you can make it smaller but there isn't much of a performance increase after 1024. I still dropped shadows completely, so I can get 60 fps as often as possible.

[NXR]

if i activate morphological filtering my menu starts flashing black and the "actual" menu...

[Dhoomdealer]

Holy ♥♥♥♥, talk about a necro

[NXR]

Parkour Pyro eredeti hozzászólása:

Any one bothering to help?
I've tried this and it helped my Frame rate a lot,
But the 2nd time I launched the game it replaced the renderer_settings.xml (the one with the changes above), with the default one.
Now, lately when I try to launch it with the edited renderer_settings.xml, it won't launch. For around 20 seconds Steam will say I'am playing PD 2, but then Steam says I'm Online again.

You need to remove "READ ONLY"
for me it was the fix... and i have low fps now.