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Thanks for your reply. At one point, Tiny Glade did switch to my integrated Intel GPU, but a notice came up pointing out that the game may crash (which it did when I tried to run it). In fact, my Surface Book could not find my NVIDIA GPU at all, but it reappeared after I rebooted the machine.
I’ve checked the video settings, and Tiny Glade says it is using my NVIDIA card.
At one point, I had a notice appear in Tiny Glade saying my Vulkan settings were missing or broken, but this message also disappeared after a restart. I reinstalled the NVIDIA driver to be safe and the GPU seems to be running fine, but Tiny Glade still barely works. I tried dropping the resolution setting to 0.7, but this made no difference.
In my first day with the game, I played for about seven hours off and on (such a terrific game, btw) and TG worked incredibly smoothly the whole time, so I can’t figure out why it is struggling so much now.
Any thoughts? I wondered if my NVIDIA GPU is cooked, but I’ve checked it in Task Manager and Game Bar and it seems to be working OK (it shoots up to 100% usage as soon as TG launches, but only gets up to about 45°C and is only using about half of its RAM).
I would really appreciate any ideas you have about what I could try. I am loving Tiny Glade, but it is almost unusable atm.
There's a "beta" in Steam, called ` 1_10_3-benchmark` (Right click Tiny Glade in your Steam Library → Properties → Betas → Beta Participation). If you use that version, and then while the game is running at a snail's pace, you can use the in-game feedback tool (F6). You should see an option called "Attach benchmark" - if you flip its value to "Yes" and send us the data, I will be able to check what the CPU & GPU are doing, and if there's anything that stands out.
I have opted in to the 1_10_3-benchmark beta as you suggested. I tried to send through a benchmark but my machine froze while the screen said it was sending. Let me know if anything came through. I will try again later.
So what I'm seeing here is that the issue is on the GPU side. Even though the GeForce is indeed being used, all rendering operations are running slower than they should - no single thing stands out, it's just the entire frame is slower than it should be.
It's almost as if the GPU is running in low power mode, which I think would correlate with the low temperature you're seeing on it. Task Manager's 100% display is likely inaccurate, as I've seen cases where it shows 0% while the game is running, and I'm not even sure what they base the numbers on.
What I'd try is going to the NVIDIA Control Panel and changing the power management mode, as in here: https://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/3130/~/setting-power-management-mode-from-normal-to-maximum-performance
It might also be a Windows power management thing, so check the battery gizmo in the taskbar; maybe you have it set to maximum battery / low power even if hooked up to a power source?
Thanks very much for reviewing the benchmark and for your advice on settings. I have switched the battery and GPU to maximise performance. I have noticed a slight improvement, but tool selection, panning around and positioning elements is still very laggy. I’ve sent you another benchmark to compare with the last one. Can you see any changes?
Perhaps this is as good as it gets with my old machine – but it seemed to be working so much better during my first session!
I gotta think about this some more; GPU clock speed could be one thing, but performance might also be this bad if resources are placed in system memory instead of GPU memory. I'll need to add some diagnostics for that.
It's also possible to check GPU information like the internal frequency etc using a tool called "nvidia-smi", but I'll have to find the exact command for ya, and right now I gotta run do some chores ^^;
I've also finally properly integrated the code into our main development line, so once the next patch lands, switching between Steam betas/branches won't be necessary... but until then, there's a new beta, called ` 1_10_3-benchmark2`. When you have a moment, I'd appreciate if you could send that in-game feedback including the benchmark data.
I’ve installed benchmark 2 and I’ve sent you two benchmarks, both of the same file, one running on my new SteamDeck (yay!), and one from my old Surface Book. Such a stark difference between the two!
I will be interested to hear what you learn from the two benchmarks.
Aaron
Okays, starting with the Steam Deck - not much to say there, performs as expected :) I'd suggest maybe reducing the resolution scale to around 0.7-0.8, as that will get you quite a decent FPS boost. Then when using the Deck on the go, I like to set a TDP limit to something like 10W.
Now, for the main course, the GTX 965M...
This is the data that our benchmark has gathered about the GPU's utilization:
This evidence supports my earlier theory that the GPU itself is running slowly. P-state (or power state) being P8 is a clear indication of that. NVIDIA GPUs have multiple power states, with the high performance one being P0, which one would expect in games. Further to this, the "Clocks" are low too. The 965M is supposed to have a base clock of 924 MHz, and here the "Graphics" clock of 135 MHz doesn't quite match that. The memory should be 1253 MHz, but it's only 405 MHz here.
Yet if you look at utilization, it says that the graphics subsystem is utilized at 99%. Normally if utilization is high, the driver should bump the power state, thus giving you better performance. Here something is preventing it from doing that. That's gonna boil down to driver or OS settings.
Since you've already tried changing settings in the NVIDIA Control Panel, and that seemed to have no effect, can you check that the power mode in Windows is set to high performance? The battery icon in the tray should pop up a slider with possible values. Failing that, maybe you have some additional software for controlling the GPU (such as Afterburner), that could be messing with us here?
Thanks very much for reviewing the benchmarks and for your suggestions. I’ve double-checked that my battery settings are on “best performance”. One thing regarding the GPU settings – my NVIDIA control panel has no settings options, so I cannot set the performance for the GPU here. I modified this through the NVIDIA app instead. However, I can no longer launch the NVIDIA app, nor can I uninstall it to do a reinstall. Instead, I have just gone mad and deleted every NVIDIA file and application I could find on my machine, then reinstalled the NVIDIA Control Panel and the graphics driver. Reinstalling the NVIDIA Control Panel didn’t give me any more settings, but I went into my Windows Graphics settings and set the Graphics preference to “high performance” for both Steam and Tiny Glade, forcing them to use the NVIDIA GPU rather than the Intel HD Graphics.
One of these changes seems to have shaken something loose and Tiny Glade is running much more smoothly. I’ve sent you another benchmark and will be interested to know if it shows whether I’ve managed to take off the handbrake on my GPU.
Aaron