Have DX11 performance issues? Try this

[TSP]

Hello,

With 2.8 not having been released yet, you are likely not looking for a solution to a problem you can't have yet. However, there's nothing like being informed ahead of time.

There are a decent amount of games (still today) that have added DX11 support to an engine that initially didn't have it, where the performance could be awful depending on your setup and hardware. A DX9 game running on a computer that would cost $2000 today may run at 60 FPS while trying the same game on DX11 on that computer would cut it in half. For some of these games there was a very simple solution to this problem.

If you start encountering the same issue as described above by next week using the -dx11 launch command, try the following:

1. Start the game (main menu)
2. Put the game on full screen
3. Put the game on borderless full screen
4. Put the game on full screen

If this solution works for you, you will still have to repeat these steps every time you launch the game and sadly, borderless mode will likely not work for you until the devs would fix it. If you use a third party tool for your borderless mode, these steps may not work. Conversely, using a third party tool for your borderless mode might also fix the issue.


Notable games in which these steps worked for me specifically:
Rocket League (Issue still persists)
Batman: Arkham City (Worked fine after patch)
Bioshock Infinite (unknown if still persists)
Cuphead (worked fine after patch)
Dead Cells (Issue still persists)

Edit: I'll bump this thread back up when the patch releases so anyone looking can find it easily.

[Prydzen ᛋᛟ]

i tried uninstalling the game instead, very sucesfully.

[tempest.of.emptiness]

If your performance is better with DX9 than with DX11, then you could also just go back to using DX9.

[Cosmic Cat]

What's the point of using DX11 in this game? I mean Stellaris isn't an "eye candy" game like some others? What am I missing?

[kaneeden]

Originally posted by Starlet:

What's the point of using DX11 in this game? I mean Stellaris isn't an "eye candy" game like some others? What am I missing?

Dev Diary 181
...To achieve the best speedup, you will need to use the new beta DirectX11 rendering engine. Yes, you read correctly: the next patch will also offer an open beta which replaces the old DX9 renderer by a more recent DX11 version that was initially made by our friends at Tantalus for the console edition of Stellaris. While visually identical, using DX11 to render graphics enables a whole range of multi-threading optimizations that are hard or impossible to achieve with DX9. Playing with the old renderer will still net you some nice speedup on startup, the splash screen step should still be much faster, but you’re unlikely to see the progress bar “jump” as it does with DX11 when the game loads the models and textures...

[Cosmic Cat]

Originally posted by kaneeden:

Originally posted by Starlet:

What's the point of using DX11 in this game? I mean Stellaris isn't an "eye candy" game like some others? What am I missing?

Dev Diary 181
...To achieve the best speedup, you will need to use the new beta DirectX11 rendering engine. Yes, you read correctly: the next patch will also offer an open beta which replaces the old DX9 renderer by a more recent DX11 version that was initially made by our friends at Tantalus for the console edition of Stellaris. While visually identical, using DX11 to render graphics enables a whole range of multi-threading optimizations that are hard or impossible to achieve with DX9. Playing with the old renderer will still net you some nice speedup on startup, the splash screen step should still be much faster, but you’re unlikely to see the progress bar “jump” as it does with DX11 when the game loads the models and textures...

Thanks, so this renders stuff faster then? Or does it affect the CPU too? (sorry, I'm a computer newbie)
I thought that it would only affect graphics and not the cpu load on stuff like mid/late-game job-scripts that have to calculate what 50 000 pops will have for job (which seems to be one of the worst culprits according to others).

[TSP]

Originally posted by Starlet:

Originally posted by kaneeden:

Dev Diary 181
...To achieve the best speedup, you will need to use the new beta DirectX11 rendering engine. Yes, you read correctly: the next patch will also offer an open beta which replaces the old DX9 renderer by a more recent DX11 version that was initially made by our friends at Tantalus for the console edition of Stellaris. While visually identical, using DX11 to render graphics enables a whole range of multi-threading optimizations that are hard or impossible to achieve with DX9. Playing with the old renderer will still net you some nice speedup on startup, the splash screen step should still be much faster, but you’re unlikely to see the progress bar “jump” as it does with DX11 when the game loads the models and textures...

Thanks, so this renders stuff faster then? Or does it affect the CPU too? (sorry, I'm a computer newbie)
I thought that it would only affect graphics and not the cpu load on stuff like mid/late-game job-scripts that have to calculate what 50 000 pops will have for job (which seems to be one of the worst culprits according to others).

It definitely affects the CPU too. Some youtubers have their hands on a pre-release version of 2.8, Stefan Anon did some research with very promising results (an average of 2x increase in the late game):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hp0jTYh7U2k

[TSP]

Bumping this thread as 2.8.0 is now live. I haven't encountered the same issue as I had in some of the other games myself so I'm cautiously optimistic that it'll be smooth for everyone else as well.