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Basically in the main menu i'm locked to either 24 or 42fps, and mouse movement is choppy. Oddly, the same thing happens with veins of evil open in game, it locks the frame rate to either 24 or 42fps and then it goes back up when I close them.
Yeah it's a peculiar one. Very frustrating as anything with the UI is handled by a piece of middleware that is a little bit of a black box. I'm definitely of the belief that this is something affecting AMD exclusively or at least is greatly more pronounced on AMD GPUs.
My guess is currently that some way in which UI elements are being drawn by Coherent in a way that is really hammering AMD Drivers and this problem only gets worse the larger a UI object becomes. There might be something we can do there in how we're handling complex menus and sending that off to Coherent.
Unfortunately since early 2020 we've actually got rid of our office in which we had our test machines and I'm not sure if anyone still has an AMD based rig, so it might be some time before we can investigate further and test ourselves.
I'm going to stick a ticket in however to investigate this as part of our maintenance passes on WFTO if we can. It would be good if we could resolve this issue for AMD users.
Although i'm willing to cut the engine some slack for that one as it's clearly trying to calculate and path so many different creatures that it's just struggling.
You get very similar behaviour with the original Dungeon Keeper, it's sequel, and the fan remake KeeperFX. In fact, it's possible in KeeperFX to just crash it completely by overloading it with pathing calculations. And that's a 20+ year old engine.
I don't know if people with more cores and/or faster CPUs get the same issues but sometimes I wonder if the editor should have some kind of limit to stop this happening. I mean I never get any slowdown on the "official" maps, even the big ones like the final couple of MPD.
Woulnd't it be prudent to bring Linux up to par too? Don't be like ChinaChink Ark Survival Evolved who pretend they give a ♥♥♥♥ on Linux but do the bare minimum for the game to run with 1 fps at all times.
Anything UI related just butchers the FPS, both in main menu and in game.
I tried native 1440p, 1080p, 720p, PS1 demake, no vsync, no texture filtering, no AA, whenever an UI element appears anywhere, the game chugs at 15 fps, no matter what other settings i choose.
In game it can get 30ish FPS, but it dips hard when i go to the unit UI (and this was reported ages ago as well).
I mean, this game is done, i know, i won't expect you guys to code a new UI, but what the hell did you use to code this one?
This has got to be the worst optimised game i have ever seen.
I mean, i love it, and thank you for making it, it's one of my all time favorites, but the fact that i can't get a stable 60 fps with PS1 demake graphics on 720p is just absurd.
And this is in a game that expects you to micromanage and click like crazy...
How am i supposed to play it when even my mouse lags?
Too bad, this game used to be good, now it's unplayable. :(
So sad... One of my favorite games.
I'm afraid not but it is on my priority list for things that need a look at as soon as I can get some code support on the project. It's a real kicker though as none of us see the same issue at all.
If anyone is affected it's really important that I get DXDiag or other system spec outputs and logs from people. I want to know what connects everyone who is affected by the issue (other than it's obviously coming from the UI middleware.)
Yeah that seems to be the case for a lot of people here, but that's some of the worst performance I've heard. It's a real frustrating issue because I know it is awful for those experiencing it, all I can do is impress on my fellows how bad this is for some people and encourage that we look for a solution as soon as we can.
As I say it's probably the highest priority issue out there, sharing that accolade with the crash some users experience on 2.0.8 (the new unity version release) for no immediately obvious reason.
The problem with both of these is I can't rightly say how many users are affected. With the handful of reports of this issue I can only conclude it affects a small portion of AMD users. But why?
It's a real slap in the ♥♥♥♥ when the game starts running dramatically worse for a seemingly small subset of users with no obvious cause and only a tenuous link that they're all seemingly using one family of GPUs. These issues might have aligned with the 2.0 release in 2018 and took some time to become obvious, or it might have been a change on the graphics vendor's side that suddenly made it become a problem.
To answer the question the UI is done in a third party solution called CoherentGT which essentially uses HTML and CSS, it's a pretty good and flexible solution but obviously (as we can see) has its drawbacks.
Thing is when you're using this kind of middleware it becomes a bit of nightmare to fix. The solution MIGHT be in an updated version but there's no guarantee of that, it's possible it's caused by some dodgy HTML or CSS on our side but then why would it only affect one GPU vendor's devices and possibly a subset of them at that?
All the more is that we've never seen this in person, never been able to test it and debug it on our devices and at the time when we DID have AMD machines for testing purposes they all ran silky smooth.
Without being able to put the Unity Editor on an affected rig it's a real hard slog to work out the problem. I'd love to know what everyone who is affected has in common (so please send me your specs!) but it's sometimes difficult to get that information from users beyond "It just doesn't work"
All we know is nothing changed in our code between then and now when it comes to the UI. So what changed which broke it for you? I honestly have no idea right now but I think it deserves investigation.
In any case our support contract with Coherent has long since expired. If we wanted an update (beyond our last possible which we actually included in 2.0.8) we'd need to renew that and that's if there are new versions that support our version of Unity. I just need more to go off before I recommend that to the powers that be...
CPU: 4790K (4.4 Ghz)
GPU: Radeon 5700XT
RAM: 32GB
I'm getting low FPS in main menu. My CPU is barely used and my GPU hits 80% usage max. I noticed that the FPS dips to <30 the second I set it to 1920 x 1200. The input lag also drastically increases. These problems worsen when increasing resolution to <20 FPS in 4K. This is for both windowed and full screen mode.
The problem does not exist at 1920 x 1080. It runs at 60 FPS with no dips. If it's mainly Radeons, might be OpenGL.
Where do I send DxDiag?
In any case, thank you for replying, nice to see the game's not dead yet! :)
Well, i can give you a few ideas why, but idk if any of that will help.
I'm currently running the game in 1080p and at the start of say, My Pet Dungeon missions it starts at 60+FPS. Running medium textures, no filtering, no aa, no oclusion although, switching those on and off does nothing to the FPS, but they're off cause i don't need them.
Switching resolutions makes a huge impact on FPS, seems like the UI likes 1080p best, like Shifty Mario said as well.
My specs:
AMD Phenom II x6 1090t 3.2GHz
8 GB DDR 3
AMD R7 260x 1GB
the game is installed on an SSD, no other disks connected.
I used to run this game at minimum 30 fps high textures in the past. it was stable at around 35-45 FPS. It's not the most demanding game out there (when it works). The only time in the past FPS dipped to 30 and below was when i was running ridicuolous amounts of stuff with god mode, or when i had some problems that - upon submiting a ticket - you guys fixed, was some paging file issue, as soon as i moved it to the partition the game was on, it was fine again.
Furthermore - late last year, AMD discontinued support for my GPU. No new drivers will be coming. So, if this is a driver issue, well, i'll just have to wait when i don't have to sell a kidney to buy a decent system.
I tried window mode, and despite FPS counter saying 15, the gameplay felt smoother, not sure what that was... Maybe the FPS counted wrong or i was imagining, but something to consider.
Lastly, it seems to like one resolution best for some reason?
Maybe something breaks when changing resolutions, idk... Just a thought.
Well i'd donate you my computer for testing lol, if you can make it run smoothly here at medium, it'll run on every configuration.
It kinda is in the middle of your system spec recommendations. I mean, your recommended spec 3D mark is 3000, my GFX card lists as 3139. It's in the ballpark.
But then i'd be out of a computer. :P
But if this affects only a small amount of systems, and aging ones like mine, i'm not sure if it's worth digging too deep.
If you do consider this a problem that needs fixing, i'll be glad. :)
I just doubt it'll be convincing enough to make you renew your middleware support, idk...
That's up to you and the other devs to decide. :)
By default on windows the game should try to run in D3D11. I speculate that OpenGL could be at fault on Linux but that doesn't make sense for Windows, left me wide open again on what it could be.
You can confirm this on your output_log.txt file that is generated in WFTOGame_Data folder of the game's directory. It'll be right at the top.
You can try commandline arguments -force-d3d9 or -force-opengl.
I don't think OpenGL even works on the windows version though... for some reason >_>
You can either submit a public or private ticket at our support site[support.brightrockgames.com] or email us at support@brightrockgames.com it'll end up in the same ticketing system regardless. Please include your logs and a description of your problem as well.
It's in long-term maintenance, meaning we're not actively working on it but we're still looking for issues to fix in occasional bug fix releases (like we released 2.0.8 to fix the intel crash). There's plenty going around but this is one I would consider somewhat serious given its unknown range of impact.
I'd say at this point it's firmly in the ballpark of the UI middleware see it has a canvas which obviously increases in size as you scale your resolution. Given the issue is present
I would say that these specs are a little dated but as you seem to have realistic expectations that's fair. I'd be pretty worried about hitting either the system memory or texture memory ceilings.
You'll see from other specs posted here though that other users are having pretty significantly degraded performance on much, much beefier rigs. So I think we're safe to say it's not any issue with normal rendering performance and the specs don't matter too much.
It's good to know that if we needed to get an AMD there might be a wide range we can try for.
Honestly you may find an older driver would actually perform better here. I don't have a clear cut date when this became an obvious problem however so I don't know exactly whether it's Coherent or AMD. All I know is it only seems to affect AMD users.
You'd have expected something breaking would break for users on nVidia as well. My GPU minces WFTO however and retains a solid performance throughout. What's shocking is the tales of how high GPU utilisation gets from just the UI on AMD.
I don't see an uptick at all when moving through the menus while profiling the game in Unity. It doesn't register on the GPU.
Were it only low end AMDs I'd be inclined to chalk it up to things that are most likely to be replaced but for example the post above yours getting low FPS in the main menu. Similar descriptions of performance hit when heavy UI elements are open in game as well such as the Veins of Evil.
It's all together far outside what I would expect, at first I wondered whether for some reason this was a case that the UI wasn't getting hardware acceleration but the reports of obscenely high GPU usage seem to discredit that. It's just whatever is being thrown to render is blasting Radeons and not Nvidias...
Nice to learn the game is still supported. :)
Good call honestly, there's nothing new needed, and just maintaining it is pretty great for longetivity while you work on a sequel or whatever you're working on. :)
And if this problem is severe enough to warrant a deeper look, well, only you can determine that. Hopefully it does get looked at, i mean, of course an RTX 3090 or anything newer is going to crush this game at 100000 FPS, but it would be nice if the specs you listed as recommended could play it at least at medium 1080p at 60 FPS without dips.
And it does dip HARD...
I did some testing, i ran an hour session yesterday at 720p, medium textures, nothing else enabled.
The main menu starts at 75fps (my monitor refresh rate), then, as soon as the UI shows up, it first halts for a second, all black, just boxes, dips to 50 FPS, and then UI elements appear.
After that, each UI transition halts for a second, and every transition i lost about 5 fps until it settled at 30FPS. Tried this a few times, each time the same. Starts great, then starts losing FPS.
Same happens when i enter a map.
Starts at max FPS, smooth, and each UI thing slows it down. It's like a memory leak, each time getting worse.
Also, not only UI seems to slow the game down over time, the more stuff you have in the dungeon, the less FPS, which, ok, understandable, but i fail to see why it wouldn't be able to be stable at such extremely low settings. I'm playing Darkness 2 at 1440p 75FPS max settings and while yes, it came out 3 years before WFTO, that's still 75FPS at max settings at 1440p! Meaning tons of pixels to render and it's doing it without chugging along.
WFTO can't do more than 15 at 1080p, i mean, there has to be something wrong with this, and it's not JUST the UI. I mean, i don't have an unrealistic expectations, i know the limits of my system, but 1080p at medium should run at 60FPS, that's not too much to ask, no?
The UI elements though are the worst offenders. You mentioned veins of evil. I tried it and yes, it did lag. Not always, but at times it did, it was noticable, although, only when i was looking for it knowitn it will lag, otherwise i never noticed it before.
The bottom UI though... The units tab is atuomatic FPS loss as you open it, variable, sometimes minor, sometimes major, but always introduces input lag.
The best "strategy" i found is to keep it on something that has small number of UI elements like constructs, and that has the least impact.
Either this game is in dire need of heavy optimisation, or, if you intend to keep it like this, you need to seriously change your system requirements on the store page because the ones above the recommended can't handle this game right now at any resolution or texture size. At least not the AMD side of things, especially if way beefier systems can't handle it.
Whatever you decide, good luck, i'll be checking in from time to time to test stuff out.
Honestly, if you fix whatever is happening with the UI, i think that will solve most of the issues. Then if you can fix the game's memory leaks or whatever's happening that's causing slowing down over time, the game would be solid!
By my expectations generally a rig at the recommended specs should hit 60FPS at 1080p. Dips can't be guaranteed with the nature of garbage collection in the unity version we use, stutter is unfortunately quite common with games like ours on older version of unity (like we are).
For context the specs were based off our old test rigs and they performed well in the game at the time the recommendations were written. This isn't a matter of optimisation, it's a matter of something breaking.
I appreciate getting some details on this, I wasn't aware that there was a cumulative impact with each change of the UI. That's really, really interesting and really drives home that there's something going pretty wrong. There's no incremental degradation in performance on any of my rigs when the UI updates, FPS remains stable with each menu triggered indicating a pretty big jump behaviourally between your rig and mine.
The halting could be a result of having the game installed on a HDD and there being a load delay in assets, but I wouldn't expect a sustained drop in FPS.
In any case details like this will help us generate a test case in the future. My hope is to get my hands on an AMD GPU (what a time for it eh?) and put it through the loop in the editor and the build to see if I get similar results to what people are reporting here.
Different games entirely. Generally performance between titles isn't very comparable. Different engines, different code, different requirements for the genre. WFTO is generally a CPU punishing game, most middling GPUs can run it pretty well at its highest settings at 1440p as well and the numbers you report for 1080p are well below my expectations unless you're playing a really, really heavy map.
When the game gets busy it's not render time that holds you back its script time because there's so much going on :)
If you find that changing your graphics settings doesn't really have an impact on WFTOs FPS then that indicates the problem is somewhere else.
Yeah I've heard the creatures tab can be a problem, especially when you have lots of unit types and are in one of the detail modes. Again it's not something I've seen but another good one to look at.
If I had to guess there's one of two possibilities each UI elements you get rendered generates an error this stacks and doesn't go away so each time you refresh elements you encounter degrading performance or on AMD drivers the UI is being redrawn an exceptionally large number of times, hitting performance real hard. Where either the GPU's hardware acceleration for web stuff can't keep up or the CPU can't.
I'm hoping not to leave it as it is now, but I can't make promises until we can see clearly the issue for ourselves. There's clearly something wrong for AMD users, if it wasn't something wrong then you'd see it affect users with nVidia cards as well and you wouldn't see such a wide range of GPUs affected (Some as recent as 2020 make!)
We're definitely going to look into it. I don't think it's an optimisation problem, I actually think what's happening is some error that only happens on AMD drivers, as the error stacks up the performance drops until it's untenable.
It'd be really good to see more logs from people though, consistently I get people talking about it in here but I still don't get dxdiags, outputlogs or player.logs from anyone affected.
As far as we know there's no memory leaks in the game though that doesn't mean there aren't any. Just as matches go on for longer the more units there are, the more pathfinding, the more scripts, the more CPU load. WFTO is only single threaded so there's really not much headroom and eventually it will have to slow down.
Not uncommon with RTS games. I'm sure there's optimisations we could do. I posted about this somewhere recently but I can't remember where. But I essentially explained at length why optimising WFTO's performance further is a pretty difficult task.
Honestly I'd expect if we can identify and fix whatever error is affecting you and others on AMD cards then most of your issues would clear up.
What I don't understand right now is how few reports of this there are. If it was as widespread to affect all AMD users (15% of Steam's userbase) then surely we'd expect to see more reports. What's the common thread I wonder.
While performance is degraded in the main menu as described above, can you try the following.
1. Open the debug menu with Scroll lock
2. Type "GreatStuff" into the debug console and hit enter to unlock it
3. type "togglego "UI Camera" false" and hit enter. Please note that UI Camera must be within quotation marks.
If done right this should disable the camera that renders the UI. (Your UI will disappear) It might not alleviate the problem but it'd be interested to know if it impacts your FPS at all.
Well, something did break apparently. Maybe it's not affected on faster systems, or it's AMD specific, can't tell, but i know i ran this game better than i do now. And i know my specs are within the recommended mark. But yeah, it definitely looks like something's very wrong.
I didn't record the main menu stuff but, look at this:
https://youtu.be/wkMI2qlElk0
This is medium textures, 720p, no filtering, aa or anything. The game is installed on an SSD and i have no HDD's plugged in even, i got rid of the only one i have an only use it externally now. So it's definitely not because of the HDD...
Notice the FPS behaviour. At first it's in the 50s, and as soon as i open Veins of evil it drops to 25! Not only that but there's a noticeable input lag immediately. When i close it in the video, FPS goes up again, but then by the end starts dipping.
It's like, the UI really is sucking the FPS out of the game.
I played that session til i got a whole map filled with stupid stuff like giant Vaults, every wall is augrum, etc., and by the end, the game slogged at 15-20 fps. Then, when i opened the units tab, it was set to show levels, the game managed a whopping 3-5 fps with it open!
If you want, i can record the whole session start to finish, so you can observe what FPS does and when.
Yes, i understand that, but just for the argument's sake, i mean to show that the card isn't so horrible that i should expect unplayable FPS. But indeed, it might not even be the card, maybe my CPU is bottlenecking the game. Certainly, if it's UI related, i doubt the GPU is doing such heavy lifting that it can't handle it, it's probably the CPU that can't. Especially if there's something broken, and maybe there's an infinite loop or memory leak somewhere, that would affect the game maybe like it does now? Idk, i'm not a programmer, just brainstorming right now.
I can make you a video of it if you want. By the end, when there's a lot of things on the map, it's pretty noticable. Not so much at the start. Which seems to be the theme - accumulating and worsening performance.
Maybe it's the CPU? idk...
I uploaded mine here:
https://we.tl/t-PHMx4OoQFW
(hopefully steam allows it)
It's wetransfer, it' safe, i've put my dxdiag, launcher log and output log, along with some Justice levels for you to try out if they have anything to do with it. It's in a zip file.
Also, like i said, if you want to see the performance for yourself, i can make a video of one level.
Oh damn, only single threaded? If you could somehow make it use more cores i bet the performance would jump significantly! I mean, beyond just this problem. :) But that probably falls way above "maintenance mode". :P
In any case, yeah, i bet that if you can find out what's particularly wrong with this specific issue, that most problems would go away and i'd have a stable experience.
Good luck in finding out what it is, and if you need me to post something, just say.
AMD specific is what I'm going for. If it affected Nvidia users given there's a ratio of 6:1 nVidia vs AMD ratio on Steam I'd expect to have seen at least one report from an nVidia user by now.
There's plenty of users who report faster AMDs are affected as well, but seemingly less so.
It's also not showing up in any of my profiling attempts. I.e. No matter what I do with the UI whether it's on the main menu or in the game. For example This profiler graph[i.imgur.com] shows the game's frame time (i.e. the number of miliseconds required to render a frame). This is from me opening and closing the veins of evil every couple of seconds at 1080p.
You describe dropping from 50FPS to 25FPS when the veins are open. Which would be the equivalent of going from about 20ms to 40ms. Ignoring the green spikes which shows the wait for monitor refresh my game is averaging somewhere in the region of 8ms.
You'd expect to see some different between me opening and closing the veins of evil but there's not a perceptible difference, the game retains a steady 8ms Frametime or about about 120FPS with the veins open or closed.
Now obviously my rig is much more powerful than yours but you'd expect there to be something, anything to indicate a reason why your frame-time doubled but there's nothing at all.
I can only conclude that's cause of something I can't yet see. This is basically one of the things I want to see from a machine with an AMD card, and why I'll eventually need to see if I can get my hand on an example card to confirm my theories.
Not that's alright but I'd appreciate if you could test the thing I posted above. It's not a solution but I'd be really interested to know if disabling the UI Camera does in fact alleviate the issue while it's ongoing.
No need, I've seen it before :) It's probably the heaviest UI in the game as well so it makes sense.
Yup sadly that's not at all easy. Again this is something I talked about at length in another topic but Unity actually only got integrated support for multithreading in about 2019, way, way, way after the version we use was released.
Essentially it's impossible to implement now because even if we COULD make the leap to such a new unity version, which in itself is a huge amount of work, there's no way we could rework the whole game to be multithreaded.