Forcing Vulkan over DirectX makes this game run flawlessly for me from unplayable mess

[Krelm]

Fresh install of FF13-2 (cloud saves disabled), apply FF13Fix and 4gb patch and then consult the FF13Fix readme for how to use DXVK.DLL alongside FF13Fix. DXVK.DLL simply forces the game to use Vulkan instead of DirectX. This *MIGHT* work for you this is in no way a guaranteed fix.

That's all i did and my framerate went from 20-60fps unplayable to a solid 60 with an occasional 1 or 2 frame drops. It does stutter for a few seconds when loading in new areas but its been perfect besides that. This also works for FF13-1 as well but i have always had a much worse time with 13-2.

I am running a ryzen 7 2700x, 32gb ram, 2070 super at 1440p resolution and 2048 shadow resolution.

I havent seen many posts about using Vulkan to run the game so i thought i would post this. Hopefully it helps at least some people.

i made a quick video of the bahamut fight at the start. as you can see it does stutter when i skip the video but i dont think i lost more than 3 frames after that and i was recording as well. i dont know why it was windowed like that it was fullscreen for me.

https://youtu.be/Ann-BvENBfA

[Noob Herder]

That clip is terrible imo, so many microstutters. I'm guessing you're running some linux distro? Well, if you're happy, then great - I'm on W10 and I have few frame drops, but the FMV clips are smoother than in that clip. Overall, the port is subpar and even with powerful hardware you're bound to have performance issues.

[Krelm]

Just trying to help dude. I never said it was perfect and its better than running it on directx9 (for me anyway) Here, i recorded the same clip for comparison. Exactly the same settings/fixes (removed vulkan dll ofc) except its now running on directx9. And no linux i am using windows 11.

the fps counter doesnt show in this clip for some reason but its pretty clear how much worse it is. capturing in directx9 captured it in fullscreen but with vulkan it was in a window even though when i captured it the game was fullscreen. possibly why there is some microstutters? i dont know

personally i'll take some microstutters over random 30+ fps drops

https://youtu.be/z6QEmOgBgbQ

[Noob Herder]

My mistake, confused proton sw with vulkan - still, that just doesn't make sense, with the patch you should be able to run it practically flawlessly. Maybe it's an issue stemming from the GPU/CPU or bc of the resolution? I'm on W10 with a 4700X and an RTX570 with 0 issues at FHD res

[Krelm]

No problem. I probably should have mentioned i was running it on Windows as i only just found out that it could even run on Linux and that it used Vulkan so it's natural to assume i was using Linux, so my mistake.

Indeed it is very strange. Iv'e tried playing this game on like 4 different PC's that iv'e owned over the years from a potato PC 10 years ago to my current one, and they all suffered from major frame drops no matter what fixes ive tried and iv'e tried them all. Vulkan is the only solution that actually makes the game playable. Certainly not perfect of course but directx9 is just unplayable for me.

For anyone who has a really erratic framerate, using Vulkan in Windows may possibly help. Or just use Linux? I can't say that i would know how to use Linux personally.

[Number Eight]

The video showcasing the dx9 game-play had only one moment that could be described as "unplayable" due to low framerate and that was those few seconds after you hit Esc, to display the prompt for closing the game, besides that it was "uncomfortable" at best, noticeable only during some particle effect animations like inferno attack explosions.

Can't tell how does rest of your game-play feels like but real question is whether you did test other graphical settings configuration, or you are one of those who must have 1440p no matter how poorly optimized the game is, because HW should be good enough to handle it.

I have "only" Core i5-3570K, 12GB RAM with GTX 1060, and I wrote "only" with quotes because while it's dated and insufficient for most recent games, it's more than enough to run FFXIII-2 in 1440p DSR (1080p native display resolution) at ~54 FPS (stable 60 FPS at 1080p), yet I'm probably the only one who play FFXIII on such HW in 720p capped to 30 FPS for the "as close to the console experience as possible" authentic feel of the game.

[Krelm]

I hit ESC by accident and yes that was a moment of truly unplayable framerate. But as i said before dx9 is still much worse than Vulkan, at least for me it is. This game is screwed up and different things work for different hardware. I am just trying to provide a potential fix for some people.

[Number Eight]

I'm glad that it works for you to improve the frame-rates. It just seem quite funny, because FFXIII never had native Vulkan support, since it was non-existent back then, thus one would assume that adjusting graphical settings on native rendering API would provide better result than using wrapper.

It just proves how much compatibility issues does modern hardware and drivers have with old video-games like FFXIII, when wrapper that have to translate each instruction to Vulkan API before rendering, actually make the game perform better.

[Serafie1999AD]

Interesting, thanks for the report!

I tried the Frame Generation feature of Lossless Scaling in both FFXIII-2 and LR, and it seemed to make the frame rates pretty smooth on both games. You may want to try locking the games to 30 FPS to prevent some bugs (especially during FFXIII-2's Chocob races, and LR when picking up Fireworks and planting seeds), and then setting Lossless Scaling to aim for 60 FPS.