Noticed Something Odd Re: Performance

[Trilkin]

tl;dr: Game's still broke. It might not be broke for everyone, but there's a serious issue going on that needs to be addressed.

So while keeping some monitoring software up, I noticed something interesting going on that is related to the frame dips. A few things first so you know what I'm running:

i5 9600KF@4500mhz/core
32gb of Rando Corsair RAM It Works Fine Don't Worry About It This Isn't Related
RTX3070 w/8gb. Core clock at 1800, Mem clock at 8000, overvolted 10%. Driver version 561.09
M.2 SSD with enough space on it and fast enough, the numbers aren't important and I'll expand on why below

Keep in mind this rig runs Cyberpunk 2077 at high settings, DLSS Auto (seems to be in the middle of Quality and Performance) and most of the raytracing options on. 60fps with rare framedrops. That game is far, far more taxing on this hardware than FF16 is. Forspoken is also using more of my machine than FF16 does, but that has its own blurb below.

In-game settings are everything on High, DLSS3 set to Quality, Dynamic Resolution Off (it doesn't make a difference, I tried it with it on too.) I'm on a 3x card, so no framegen. The rest of the settings don't matter since they're just post processing junk which would normally be ~5fps at absolute most.

So, some VERY minor overclocking going on, but temps are controlled so thermal throttling is ruled out. My normal performance is a largely solid 60fps (locked by driver in my case to avoid issues) with the rare frame dip when the lighting system has a conniption with particles in weird places. It's fairly uncommon, but does happen. After enough time playing, the frame rate suddenly drops to ~20fps and doesn't recover until I restart the game. You've heard this story already.

Watching my utilization, I noticed that my GPU and CPU both stopped having load at about this point. VRAM was also below cap. I was seeing maybe 20% cpu utilization and maybe 15% GPU utilization at most. What seems to consistently trigger this is transitioning between different places on the map. Going from one locale to the other that requires a different set of assets is a near-guaranteed frame drop. An example is the transition between the overworld area to the first set of Fallen Ruins and the associated dungeon. This destroyed my FPS until I restarted the game and was back to a clean and solid 60 again. The same happened when I went from the Hideaway to Martha's Rest. Frame destruction until I restarted the game, then smooth sailing. This isn't even a memory leak because memory usage doesn't seem to change. It may be a related issue of not being able to properly flush memory, but I'm not too sure.

Something is going on with the asset streaming in this game for many rigs for some reason or another. Something about unloading assets and loading new ones seems to get the engine stuck in some way that is preventing it from returning to normal utilization. Again, when it hits this point, it pretty altogether stops using my hardware. It isn't a frame limiter either; if you go to a spot next to a wall where the game isn't drawing much, the FPS increases. Utilization, obviously, doesn't.

One of the potential culprits might be a poor implementation of DirectStorage. Forspoken actually taxes my hardware significantly more than FF16 does, fills the ♥♥♥♥ out of my VRAM, and generally actually uses my machine. It also uses DirectStorage and none of the scene transition problems are present. It does, obviously, use a different engine (or at least an older build of the same engine if my conspiracy theory is correct.) FF15, similarly, with everything turned out and resolution set to 150%, does way more to my machine than FF16 does and that game's running at ~100 FPS most of the time. This is me basically saying 'it isn't my machine, it's the game.'

There is an actual issue with this game. It may not be for all rigs, but it's for Enough rigs. The last patch absolutely did fix a lot of the asset streaming and shader compilation issues. I notice pretty much no stutter at all while playing except VERY rarely at the start of cutscene for a brief moment while it's loading assets for the next playfield transition. This was also evident on the PS5 version, so this is just an engine quirk at this point. It didn't fix this weird ass frame drop issue, though. This same thing happened in the demo/prologue when transitioning from adult Clive to the flashback. It seems like the demo patch might've fixed it, but I haven't gone back to check.

This is a complete aside, but may shed some light into how this game was actually built:

My conspiracy theory is that this game is running on a (heavily) modified version of the Luminous Engine rather than an 'all-new engine' as YoshiP said. People who play FF14 know that YoshiP has a way of lying through certain omissions and doing a lot of bait-and-switch marketing speak. He does have a true and earnest interest in his projects, but he's not always 100% truthful about their development until long after the fact. The reason I believe this is that FF14 also runs on another, modified build of the Luminous Engine. It is very likely that the FF16 engine is an iteration on it and many of the lighting improvements on this iteration were backported to FF14 in Dawntrail once they were tested in FF16. FF16 also has a lot of recycled animations that use a lot of same skeleton rigging as FF14 does. There is a TON of FF14's DNA in general in this game, and while it's easy to go 'maybe they just imported those animations into the other engine,' I don't think that's what happened here. Too many quirks of the Luminous Engine (weird asset pop-in, LOD bugs etc. usually too minor to notice in motion unless you're looking for it) are present here too.

[Linus]

FF14 1.0 used Crystal tools, Yoshi-P's FF14 however uses an engine they made themselves. This could still mean a HEAVILY modified version of Crystal tools however.
FF16 is using FF14's engine, but obviously, heavily upgraded to accomodate the higher fidelity.

[iameatingjam]

Originally posted by Linus:

FF14 1.0 used Crystal tools, Yoshi-P's FF14 however uses an engine they made themselves. This could still mean a HEAVILY modified version of Crystal tools however.
FF16 is using FF14's engine, but obviously, heavily upgraded to accomodate the higher fidelity.

It would have been heavily modified indeed, considering ff14 was originally a ps3 game. It would have to have changed so much, it would bear little resemblance to what it once was if that was the case. Then again, I mean, windows still carries a lot of very old bits and pieces along with it, so not impossible I guess, but I doubt it.

[Trilkin]

To reply to both of you simultaneously: I mean FF14 v2 specifically which moved away from Crystal Tools to use a variation of Luminous (or as YoshiP put it: they are heavily related engines)

[Salaru]

After a little while of playing, turning the camera makes it look all choppy. Guess I can return the new graphics card since it didn't fix anything. Wonder if the game's using more power than it should, or causing more strain to the monitor, causing more power drain? Or overcaching could be an issue? And this morning's maintenance patch didn't fix it either.

[Grimm]

I agree with you with the animation part this game has FF14 in it for sure I even noticed some animation that is copy paste from ff14 and trust me I play ff14 alot it medicinally feels like 14 sometimes. to this day I haven't solved my 40 fps issue in this game also the fire and praticle looks so low pixile for some reason with 4070s and 7600x :/ and 1440p