Wildly inconsistent performance and framerate issues

[Riebart]

So, myself and two friends have been playing this game for most of 2021, and our experience with performance has been abysmal, and after what's probably tens of hours testing, I'm no closer to a solution. So here I am hoping the wisdom of the hive mind can help.

The systems in question:

(A) i7-6820HK + RTX 2080Ti (or GTX 1070), 32GB RAM, NVMe SSD
(B) i7-7700HQ + GTX 1060 6GB, 32Gb RAM, NVMe SSD
(C) i7-10750H + RTX 2070, 16GB RAM, NVMe SSD

All are laptops (the first one has a 2080Ti in an eGPU, but a 1070 internal, performance is the same either way), and everyone is running medium-ish settings, but it turns out that it doesn't really matter.

Now the issues:

- Performance is all over the map. Sometimes we all are ticking along fine around 60, but we ALL often end up in the single digits, or low tens. The (C)i s better, because of the stronger CPU, but not by much. If (A) and (B) are getting 15-20, (C) is getting 20-25.

- Lowering resolution from 4k to 640x480 has zero measurable impact on performance, so clearly it's a CPU bottle neck, right? Well every thread is 50% or lower in utilization. None are pinned.

- Going from Lowest to Ultra presets impacts performance minimally, GPU utilization is always 50% or less.

- Disabling AI, as a test, can get me from 8 to 16 FPS in some of the particularly nasty community POIs, but low-20s is where I play 90% of the time, and it's so friggin irritating.

It's clearly a CPU bottleneck, but it's impossible to identify what's causing it, because even disabling AI, and going to the Lowest preset, there's no pinned CPU cores, and GPU utilization is 50% or lower. It's the difference between 30fps with AI off, 30+ zombies visible, lowest, and 720p, and 15fps with AI on, 30+ zombies chasing me, and Ultra at 1440p.

Any suggestions?

[JimmyIowa]

On laptops sometimes the cause of mysterious inconsistent CPU performance is windows power management settings. Windows can throttle the CPU at odd times. Go into advanced tab and put ALL power management settings on high performance. Also known as, "stop trying to help me" mode.

[Mardoin69]

On top of what JimmyIowa said.....I suggest opening the Nvidia Control panel and be sure (in manage 3d settings) that power settings are set for 'prefer maximum performance.'

On a side note; if you've been updating the gpu driver's by simply using the express update method, I strongly suggest you uninstall and do a clean install of the latest driver. The other method can (and does) lead to driver corruption--which also happens due to Windows updates sometimes. When you run the install for the latest driver, select 'Advanced' and check the box for 'Perform a clean installation.' You'll want to go into control panel and do that 'manage 3d settings' adjustment again afterwards.

As for game setttings, you should be fine with the medium preset (maybe even high preset--not ULTRA) but, you need to turn down shadows and water reflections to low or off.....they can kill fps on some systems--even beefy game rigs will see a noticeable improvement doing this.

[Capt. W. Schwartz]

What do your temps look like?