Most demanding graphical options?

[twantenho]

X-COM 2 performance was terrible for me. So I decided to do some tweaking in Nvidia configuration for X-COM 2. I finally managed to increase the GPU utilization, so that the fps is way higher, which is also the case in demanding scenes. To maximize the fps, I decided to do some testing, to locate the most demanding graphical options. I came to the following conclusions:
AA off (max. to min. , gives you around 50 fps difference)
Ambiant Occlusion (highest to lowest, gives you a difference of around 10 to 5 fps)
Shadows (not quality) (gives you around 20/30 fps from highest to lowest, but makes your soldiers have no shadow, which is not the case on the highest setting)

I chose to turn AA en AO to the min. Shadows were to much of a hassle in correlation with quality, so I decided to turn that on to the max.

My question to you: Do you know any graphical options that I might have overlooked, that can increase fps significantly?

[Mhblis]

Turn off fire effects. All those little animations happening off screen is murder on both CPU and GPU.

I'm not home to check the actual setting but it's there somewhere.

[Supa]

These are my settings
https://i.imgur.com/N6HBDPy.jpg

And I get around 80 fps ingame
https://i.imgur.com/EFjXjyI.jpg

With these specs
https://i.imgur.com/8iZIaUS.png

To me the game looked really bad without AO so I rather dropped the moving shadows. And you should check if it is your CPU or GPU bottlenecking... If your profile is right its probably the CPU. AMD generally does worse when it comes to CPUs because many devs do not see it worth to take their time and optimize their games for more than 4 cores at best.

Originally posted by Mhblis:

Turn off fire effects. All those little animations happening off screen is murder on both CPU and GPU.

What setting is that?

[SeriousCCIE]

It also helps if you set the video card power use to maximum performance (or adaptive); also change the system/PC power to high performance.

For the video card, the power settings may be specific to your card manufacturer or vendor, but the option exists somewhere in the card settings outside of the game, usually in the driver toolset that gets installed or via a seperate vendor specific program (gigabyte has their OC Guru, EVGA has their Precision tool, etc).

It also can be that power can be set in both tools to achieve different things, like maximum power in the Nvidia control panel and then specific power settings for overclocking in the vendor tools.

In my case the system uses about 300-500 watts more power when I set things to high performance, and it makes a difference in nearly all games.

[Mr. Nice]

If you have a Nvidia card, driver based AO via Nvidia Inspector (compatability bits 0x00130000 ) with ingame AO disabled looks as good or better with less FPS hit.

@Supa Anisotropic filtering is as good as free (has been for pratically a decade) so there's little reason not to have it at x16. I have no idea why games still bother to change it between preset graphical levels as if it has any performance impact...

[Supa]

^ I know its almost free but at the same time I honestly cannot tell the difference between x8 and x16 in most of the games so I will just try to get that 1% more fps instead then. (but I agree that its rly strange that low and medium presets turning it off or very low is dumb)

[twantenho]

Hello everyone. Thanks for your replies. Low GPU utilization is only the case in this game, if I play other games like RS6 or the Witcher 3, I get around 95% utilization. As I said in the original post, I already have tried changing certain settings (from which PC power was already set to high performance). I am currently running everything that is fps demanding to the lowest, including AA en AO and types of shadows (everything else is to the max, which doesn't impact fps in the slightest). When being deployed on a mission without any combat going on, I get around 120 fps (gtx 1080 on 1080p). When engaged in combat, my fps decreases to 80 - 100 fps due to decreased GPU utilization. Sometimes it even goes to 40, my GPU utilization then reaches around 20%. So generally speaking, it is not that bad, but I should get way more performance in comparison with other games. They aren't going to do anything, so best thing to do is to just accept it

[Supa]

and your CPU?

[twantenho]

Ryzen 1700x, top notch

[Supa]

I mean the usage.

[twantenho]

Ohh, I have actually no idea, but I do know that the usage was far away from the 100% procent. As I said previously said, the GPU utilization cannot be caused by bottlenecking, because the GPU utilization problem is isolated to this game

[Supa]

In 99% of the cases where your GPU fails to reach 100% it is because there is something else bottlenecking your system. Theres literally no point in lowering GPU intensive options in this case. Shadows is CPU btw.

[twantenho]

Well lowering shadows helps to increase GPU utilization, which could be the reason why my CPU is indeed bottlenecking, but that's really weird, because it only occurs in this particular game. Must be something related to the optimization for 8 headed cores. I have read complaints that ryzen CPU's do not do well in this game, so that would probably be it. Do you have any solution to this maybe?

[Supa]

Solution is to stick to intel unless you actually do something that benefits 8 cores like movie rendering or heavy multitasking. I have i5-4690k and GTX970 and I am getting like double what you are which is just ridiculous when you think about it. And they dare to call Ryzen gaming gear. HAH.

I've been to numerous game subs and every time its been about people having bad performance on high end GPUs its been because of them having AMD CPU.