Linux, poor performance

[Jer]

Running 2 different machines:

SteamOS
FX-9590 4.7 GHz 8-core
24GB DDR3
EVGA GeForce 970GTX, 4GB
SSD

Ubuntu 17.04
i7 7700K 4.2GHz 4-core
32GB DDR4
EVGA 780 Titan
SSD

Running both these at 1080P. In order to get anything north of 30 FPS, I have to run it on Low settings. Turning any settings up to tolerable quality, and the framerate plummets. Any thoughts?

[Myamo]

Hey SuperJer, we are aware of the poor Linux performance, but we have not yet found the bottleneck. Have you tried turning just the SSAO and the Shadow quality down a little? The Ambient occlusion effect we are using have caused some trouble on some systems.

[entroPete]

I have a GTX 970, and for me, the shadow quality "medium" has a big influence,
the other settings are on or high/ultra, and then i have >30fps at 1080.

Update: it is not really consistent, sometimes switching to windowed and
back to fullscreen helps, now without vsync...

[Jer]

Adjusting the SSAO and shadows down had an effect, but something real interesting happened this time I ran it. I had left fullscreen unchecked since the last time I tried, so the game started up windowed, and ran real well. I kicked the preset up to Ultra, and it was still pulling 45 frames per second. Once I put it back in fullscreen, the game started chugging again. Setting it back to windowed brought the framerate up a little, but not near where it was when I first launched it in windowed and set it to ultra. This was all with the game resolution at 1920x1080, while my actual screen is a 4K, if that makes any difference.

[Myamo]

Wow, that is a really-really nice find! Thank you, putting this info right in our FAQ/Known issues thread!

[Jer]

Originally posted by t3opc:

Are you really going to play it at 1080p window or fullscreen on a 4k screen? =)

Don't worry, I have a magnifying glass.

[Cap]

When starting the game and after loading is done, the performance is incredibly bad at first. Talking about 0.5 to 1 fps here! It is even hard to operate the menus, as the cursor needs several seconds until it moves. Clicking the Vsync checkbox seems to resolve this issue, the game runs ok ish afterwards (~30 fps). It doesn't matter if Vsync is left on or off, performance stays about the same. I just need to click the checkbox once after the game is started.

Could live with that, sadly the performance drops again after some minutes of gameplay to ~10 fps.

[entroPete]

very strange observation (gtx 970, i5):
i had 18 fps, then ran the nvidia-full-compo-command

nvidia-settings --assign CurrentMetaMode="nvidia-auto-select @1920x1080 +0+0 {ForceCompositionPipeline=On, ForceFullCompositionPipeline=On}"

which kind of broke my window manager (xfce4) at first, but then:

suddenly i have 60-70 fps in some places...normally it is well above 30 now.

there seems to be some funny order of initialization bug going on somewhere

with all settings to on / ultra, but no vsync


UPDATE 2: "good news":

+ it seems that this helps a lot:
+ just switching to text mode (ctrl-alt-f1)
+ and back to X11 (ctrl-alt-f7, if your distribution opens the X11 there)
+ this already increases my frame rate from around 15 to around 40 in the central first plaza


OLD UPDATE 1: "nvidia fullcompo":

after
+ killing all my user's processes (id 1001) (e.g. as user 1001 with "kill -9 -1")
+ cleaning/deleting all files in /run/user/1001/* (or xfce4 complains when starting)
+ starting a new X11 session with xfce4
+ starting the game
+ getting around 10 fps
+ running the above nvidia command on another workspace
+ which visually crashes the driver (pink screen)
+ switching to text mode (ctrl-alt-f1)
+ switching back to X11 (ctrl-alt-f7)
+ the game runs with 47 fps
+ and stays that way

[Probable Cauze]

I was having extremely poor performance on my Windows 10 system with 16GB RAM, i7-6700, AMD R9 390 (so considerably better than the recommended system). Changing to windowed mode appears to have fixed the issue for me, so it's not just Linux.

[Probable Cauze]

False alarm. Performance improvement was only temporary. I will start a new thread.