Poor performance, is it normal?

[Ofniir]

Ultra and even high settings run really badly on my GTX 860M and i7-4710HQ.

Ultra settings I average ~25 fps.
High settings I average 25-30 fps.

I have to go to medium-ish settings with Sky Lighting and Shadows turned off and set lowest, respectively, to get playable (30+ fps) performance.

What's really odd is that changing the resolution seemingly does nothing. There's a mere 2-3 fps change from 720p to 1080p, and normally in a GPU bottleneck dropping to 720p can add 20-30 fps to the framerate. That made me think my CPU could be throttling, but the temperatures are normal (~60c under load).

The difference from ultra to min settings is only about 15 fps, which is also odd. Even if my video card is simply too weak for high settings, I'd still expect more than a 15 fps change from ultra to minimum settings. It makes me think something is wrong.

Other games are performing normally. My video card drivers are up to date, and I performed a clean install.

Any ideas?

Does anyone else have a GTX 860m, and how does it perform in The Forest?
(Or an equivalent card, like a GTX 650 Ti, GTX 750, or R7 260X)

[☢ Fox-1 ☢]

it's not normal, so you should have something who's using lot of memory....could be many things like : temperature, space on the HD, num of process, more than 1 antivirus....;)

Start the comp in "sans échec" and run a antivirus !

[2High2tell]

Yeah what fox said, and when you say other games run well do you mean full releases or EA titles. The game is far from complete and far from optimized. Your system is probably better then mine least your vid card is and I am running around 60 with dips in the 40s. There may be a prob. at your end.

[Ofniir]

Already released games are running normally. Warframe is ultra at 50-60 fps and Dark Souls is ultra with the framerate locked at 30 fps (straight PS3 port, so the framerate is capped, or it would be above 30). I haven't tried others, as I just got this laptop and I'm trying to keep it relatively clean of stuff I don't use or play very often.

The HDD is 1TB, and about 800GB of it is open. Can't really be an issue with space, though it may be an issue with HDD speed if The Forest does a lot of background loading or procedural voxel stuff.

If you don't mind me asking, what's your video card, and what settings and resolution are you running The Forest on that you're getting 40-60 fps?

[BRT Cobra]

there is no ultra settings,but anyway that gpu isnt the greatest and the forest is demanding so turn down grass to very low or somthing.

[Ofniir]

BRT Cobra, changing the grass setting literally does not affect the framerate. Whether the range is shortest with the lowest density, or very high with "extreme" density, the framerate literally does not change even 1 fps. That was the first thing I tried before I even asked this question.

[BRT Cobra]

prob not enough ghz on cpu games like this needs lots in alpha stage (not optimised yet)

Originally posted by Tanner Fredrickson:

BRT Cobra, changing the grass setting literally does not affect the framerate. Whether the range is shortest with the lowest density, or very high with "extreme" density, the framerate literally does not change even 1 fps. That was the first thing I tried before I even asked this question.

[Ofniir]

An i7-4710HQ outperforms the FX-8350 easily. No core ever gets above 30% use. If my CPU isn't enough, then no AMD owners can even play the game. Please don't guess randomly. I can do it too, and I can do it better.

[BRT Cobra]

yes but a laptop has low ghz cpu its no guess and will struggle because of it when the game is optimised this wont matter so much

Originally posted by Tanner Fredrickson:

An i7-4710HQ outperforms the FX-8350 easily. No core ever gets above 30% use. If my CPU isn't enough, then no AMD owners can even play the game. Please don't guess randomly. I can do it too, and I can do it better.

[Ofniir]

You don't even know how CPU frequency works, or optimization, do you? Ghz literally does not matter on it's own. It's a measure of of cycles per second; that's all. Multiple actions can be carried out each cycle, and that's what matters, because i7s and other Haswell CPUs carry out the most instructions per cycle. Additionally, the majority of the CPU's resources have not been changed from the desktop version; just a minor cut to L3 cache.

An i7 can be downclocked to 1.5Ghz before it starts to bottleneck games, and even then it will be able to maintain around 60 fps.

Additionally, as The Forest is in Unity 4, most of the optimization the developers can do is simple sampling changes to the lightng, mesh redesign, shader redesign, and so forth. Script changes typically only result in a 5-10% performance gain, and very little can really affect the CPU without access to the engine source code. "Optimization" will be affecting GPU-bound effects almost entirely; the CPU is still only being pushed as far as Unity 4 can push it, which is easy to run.

You're guessing, you're poorly informed, and you're risking derailing the topic.

[BRT Cobra]

lol

Originally posted by Tanner Fredrickson:

You don't even know how CPU frequency works, or optimization, do you? Ghz literally does not matter on it's own. It's a measure of of cycles per second; that's all. Multiple actions can be carried out each cycle, and that's what matters, because i7s and other Haswell CPUs carry out the most instructions per cycle. Additionally, the majority of the CPU's resources have not been changed from the desktop version; just a minor cut to L3 cache.

An i7 can be downclocked to 1.5Ghz before it starts to bottleneck games, and even then it will be able to maintain around 60 fps.

Additionally, as The Forest is in Unity 4, most of the optimization the developers can do is simple sampling changes to the lightng, mesh redesign, shader redesign, and so forth. Script changes typically only result in a 5-10% performance gain, and very little can really affect the CPU without access to the engine source code. "Optimization" will be affecting GPU-bound effects almost entirely; the CPU is still only being pushed as far as Unity 4 can push it, which is easy to run.

You're guessing, you're poorly informed, and you're risking derailing the topic.

[Ofniir]

What's the matter? Can't think of any other nonsense to make up?

[BRT Cobra]

ghz means everything in a cpu intensive game the fact you dont know that ends the conversation

Originally posted by Tanner Fredrickson:

What's the matter? Can't think of any other nonsense to make up?

[Ofniir]

Betraying your ignorance again. Shocking.

[^èa†èr^]

was going to install game again til community lmao....

[Ofniir]

I'm not really part of the community... Don't let me dissuade you. I only bought the game three days ago and I've only posted on the Steam forums three times.

I tend to pick fights wherever people start talking about CPUs, because it annoys me more than it should when I see all the myths people propagate about them. That comes from having a terrible CPU for three years and getting told by people like the guy above, over and over again, that Ghz is all that matters (back when I had a desktop). When I finally started ignoring them and switched to a better CPU (albeit at a lower clock rate), my framerates improved dramatically. Now I have a personal grudge against the "Ghz is all that matters" crowd and get into arguments about it.

My vendetta probably shouldn't paint the whole community in a negative light, or at least not the game itself.

For what it's worth, I think the issue with performance practically not changing, is my HDD. It climbs to 100% disk usage relatively often in The Forest, which is not very surprising considering it's the worst 5400rpm HDD imaginable. I suspect that's when the framerate drops to 20 fps and when grass or normal geometry stops affecting the framerate. When my framerate is lowest, ferns and such also take a while to load and pop-in during gameplay. Normally HDD speed is irrelevant to framerates, but in these open-world games with geometry that can be modified in real-time, it can be an issue. I'll be switching to an SSD any week now...

The rest I suspect is simply the GPU, as I wouldn't expect more than 35 fps out of this game maxed on a GTX 860m, based on videos.