Quality settings Medium vs High. 3070 TI hitting 100% usage on high

[b-dub94]

So I can play the game with no hiccups or issues on medium settings. Running a 3070TI + 10600K

its a 1920x1080 monitor capped @ 60 FPS in NVIDIA control panel.

On medium my GPU usage is about 40-50% or lower

Just bumping the settings up to high, not even ultra, my GPU usage will spike up and stay at 100% and my FPS drops to like 24-40 fps

What is the huge difference between medium and high? Why such a drastic increase in resource usage for one bump up? CPU usage is low ~ 30% at a glance but I didnt look at it really. Issue was with the GPU.

Not a single issue with my GPU in any other game out there. Stuck on medium settings until I can learn what setting or settings are the most busted for this.

Thanks

[FT]

I think the ShadowDistance changing from LOW to HIGH is making the biggest hit, though ObjectQuality going from MEDIUM to HIGH also hits a little...moreso in the cities.


I think you'll likely see the same performance simply cranking the preset up to UltraPreset, then lowering
ShadowDistance LOW
ViewDistance MEDIUM or NEAR
ObjectQuality MEDIUM
and MotionBlur SIMPLE or OFF

[Mardoin69]

FT touched the main culprits. Also could take a look through this;

https://steamcommunity.com/app/251570/discussions/1/3190241086281294394/

[pApA^LeGBa]

I would invest a bit on your system tbh.

I can play this on the high preset with a GTX1070, AMD R5 3600, 16GB RAM on 1920x1080 at 60FPS. GPU usage is at around 60%. CPU is 10-20%. I do have motion blur off, because who the F wants that and occlusion off due to some flickering bugs when it´s on.

Unless you speak about horde night with more than 16 zombies. That does causes lags, but that is a CPU Problem not a GPU one.

Nearly all games heavily use one CPU core mostly and don´t use the rest fully usually. You might even have 2 cores nearly idling. 30% basically means that one core is under full load.

If you don´t wanna check your system, try turning terrain quality down, it doesn´t really look much different.

Edit: Just tested the Ultra preset including motion blur and occlusion. GPU was at 85% max. You should really check out the link that Mardoin69 posted.

Also maybe try turning on Vsync in the game to get the 60FPS cap instead of doing it in the control center. Not sure if that matters, but that´s how i did it.

[b-dub94]

Shadow distance was 100% the problem. thank you!

I put it on ultra and turned down the settings FT recommended. Instantly went down to 50-60% GPU usage.

Tested and moved each setting back up to ultra and none of them even budged the usage except for shadow distance. On ultra or high GPU usage was still 100%

Knocked it on down to medium and the usage went down to 75%. Seems that was the main culprit

[FT]

I think the new A20.4exp update might let you safely crank the ShadowDistance up to HIGH after updating.

The update seems to have improved performance in some situations for me; most noticeably the night/morning Shadow+Trees performance hit in some areas.
I think some of the zombie performance hit was optimized too (fewer AI path-change/decision calls, particularly at long distances) though I haven't been able to compare that.