Obsidian - blame youself

[fenrir]

You wrote that "It is a known issue that higher end Nvidia graphics are having many problems with the game", but actually your game has many problems, not cards, and it doesn't matter what card/drivers we have. You can't fix that black screen for so long already, I haven't change my video card and haven't changed drivers - but the game was crushed and doesn't work anymore.
We all remember numerous patches for POE 1, tons of bugs...if new patch fixed something it was bringing new bugs and now that story again...
And you blame someone for your faults... fair!?

[Kaldaien]

It's so much worse than you even know.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1436974507

I hate everything about the Unity engine, but this by far the worst performing Unity game I have ever had the displeasure of playing.

[tanman500]

Yeah I was surprised at how bad the performance is in Pillars of Eternity 2. It's much worse than Pillars of Eternity, that game I can run on my 2012 laptop (has a gt 630m) at a smooth 40 fps. My high end gaming pc, with a gtx 1070 and an i5 4670k @ 4.2ghz has a hard time keeping 60 fps in the more demanding scenes. Neketaka runs at an inconsistent 40-50 fps on my machine. Using afterburner, it appears that the game is using around 65-70% of my cpu and 40-45% of my gpu. The game isn't even using up all my cpu resources, which is very strange.

Although I do not think unity game engine is the problem. You have to remember than at least 30 percent of all mobile games were made with unity, even dating back to 2009 (those developers really had to optimize their games). I have a good amount of unity games sitting in my steam catalogue, the forest is a great example of an open world unity game that has great graphics, and runs like butter on my gaming pc. Not to mention, just look at some of the unreal engine 4 games on steam, you'll find a handful that don't run too well either.

One thing I'll add too is that unity and unreal engine 4 aren't built for isometric style games, those with 2d background all the while simulating 3d lighting and shadows. The framework that allows Pillars of Eternity to look the way it does probably takes a large performance hit, due to the sheer complexity and uniqueness of this game's visuals. I'm sure the UI is also eating up a ton of performance, but it sure does look better than the first game at least . It's really up to the developers at this point to optimize their code so that future titles won't run at 20 fps when there's more than 4 enemies on screen at the same time.

[Kaldaien]

Actually, the Unity engine is responsible for some of this. Since the 2015 release of Pillars of Eternity 1, the Unity engine has switched to sRGB colorspace for its framebuffer. sRGB carries with it a major performance penalty in windowed mode because Windows has to take the final rendered image and then convert it back to normal RGB.

I would suggest NOT running any new Unity engine game in windowed mode, except wouldn't you know it, the damn engine defaults to windowed mode and many games (this one included) don't support fullscreen exclusive mode without injecting software such as mine to override a bunch of things :(

I more than doubled my framerate by turning off sRGB, but the game still stutters more than is acceptable.

[tanman500]

Kaldaien の投稿を引用：

Actually, the Unity engine is responsible for some of this. Since the 2015 release of Pillars of Eternity 1, the Unity engine has switched to sRGB colorspace for its framebuffer. sRGB carries with it a major performance penalty in windowed mode because Windows has to take the final rendered image and then convert it back to normal RGB.

I would suggest NOT running any new Unity engine game in windowed mode, except wouldn't you know it, the damn engine defaults to windowed mode and many games (this one included) don't support fullscreen exclusive mode without injecting software such as mine to override a bunch of things :(

I more than doubled my framerate by turning off sRGB, but the game still stutters more than is acceptable.

I actually tried your Special K mod to see if this would actually increase my framerate. I installed the global injector, and it started just fine. I couldn't figure out how to turn off the sRGB setting or go full exclusive fullscrene. But the water graphics were completely glitched unfortunately, it looked like pixels moving in a curve. I should have taken a screenshot, it looked terrible .

[tanman500]

I just set launch options to "-window-mode exclusive", and this did help increase load times and improved the framerate slightly. Although it does seem like this introduced some more input lag, mouse clicks don't always register either, which is really annoying.

[tanman500]

The Special K mod works now with no water graphics glitches! I figured out that I needed to go into the SpecialK config file for the POE2 Profile (I found this in my documents/mymods/specialk/profiles/game dir). Inside the config, I changed "ForceFullscreen" to true, and then for Textures.D3D11 I changed the cache and inject values to false. The framerate seems to be a stable 50 fps now, although I still have the occasional framerate drop when entering a new area. I still couldn't figure out how to change the sRGB value, I believe it's part of the framebuffer resolution category, which I can't find at all in the config file.

[Kaldaien]

Pfft, you answered your own question while I was typing this :P I'll just include what I had prepared here anyway, maybe something will prove helpful.

--------------

Ah, yes... about that :)

The problem you're describing is caused by my texture cache and the game informing the graphics driver of the wrong usage pattern for the memory. Technically what the engine does has undefined results, but Obsidian seems to have gotten lucky because AMD and NV drivers both behave the same way.

I believe you can fix that under the D3D11 / Texture Management settings by turning off caching of textures with no mipmaps.


As for disabling sRGB, there are two ways to do this:

1. Enable Flip Model Presentation under D3D11 / SwapChain Settings
   
2. Manually enable fullscreen exclusive mode
   
   • Edit Documents\My Mods\SpecialK\Profiles\Pillars of Eternity II Deadfire\SpecialK.ini and set:
     • ForceFullscreen=true
     • SafeFullscreenMode=true
     • RefreshRate=<insert your native refresh rate here>

Option 2 is a little bit more involved and it is critical that you set your refresh rate since the game never does and D3D11 can't go into fullscreen mode without one. But, the performance benefits from fullscreen instead of windowed are quite large in this game.


Option 1 (Flip Model) disables sRGB mode, Option 2 (fullscreen exclusive mode) does not (since it's not a performance bottleneck in fullscreen).

[Lock]

It's an Obsidian game. They've had this nonsense in every single one of their releases since the dawn of time, except for The Stick of Truth. If they were a bigger company, or of this wasn't a niche crpg game, they'd be crucified. Many people don't seem to remember what happened with Fallout: New Vegas, but for the first few months after release, that game was hated by everyone who went near it, because it had hundreds of bugs, and dozens of gamebreaking ones. Same thing happened with Alpha Protocol. Lets not even mention the unfinished Kotor 2. Every time this happened, their excuse was "the publisher made us rush it". What's the excuse this time? Did a dog eat their coders? Did their cat scratch the entire Q&A team?

[Adventuring Through Games]

Does Special K do anything to help with the issue of a black screen after the loading screen?

[Kaldaien]

Broken Fantasy の投稿を引用：

Does Special K do anything to help with the issue of a black screen after the loading screen?

I sincerely doubt it.

It does, however, generate a log file that traces any D3D errors. Generally these solid color problems in D3D11 games are because the driver detected the game doing something invalid and signals to the game that the graphics engine needs to be reset.

[Adventuring Through Games]

Okay. Thanks for the reply.

[tanman500]

Kaldaien の投稿を引用：

Pfft, you answered your own question while I was typing this :P I'll just include what I had prepared here anyway, maybe something will prove helpful.

--------------

Ah, yes... about that :)

The problem you're describing is caused by my texture cache and the game informing the graphics driver of the wrong usage pattern for the memory. Technically what the engine does has undefined results, but Obsidian seems to have gotten lucky because AMD and NV drivers both behave the same way.

I believe you can fix that under the D3D11 / Texture Management settings by turning off caching of textures with no mipmaps.


As for disabling sRGB, there are two ways to do this:

1. Enable Flip Model Presentation under D3D11 / SwapChain Settings
   
2. Manually enable fullscreen exclusive mode
   
   • Edit Documents\My Mods\SpecialK\Profiles\Pillars of Eternity II Deadfire\SpecialK.ini and set:
     • ForceFullscreen=true
     • SafeFullscreenMode=true
     • RefreshRate=<insert your native refresh rate here>

Option 2 is a little bit more involved and it is critical that you set your refresh rate since the game never does and D3D11 can't go into fullscreen mode without one. But, the performance benefits from fullscreen instead of windowed are quite large in this game.


Option 1 (Flip Model) disables sRGB mode, Option 2 (fullscreen exclusive mode) does not (since it's not a performance bottleneck in fullscreen).

Thanks for clarifying. I didn't quite get twice the framerate like you were saying, but the game does seem to run smoother now. It's strange that with the cpu and gpu monitoring, I found out that my cpu cores rarely reach 70 percent usage, even when the framerate is in the low 40s. My gpu sits at around 40 percent usage. What is causing my game to lag so much? Usually with monitoring tools like Afterburner, it's very easy to tell what's bottlenecking my system. It's almost as if the game is telling my cpu that it can't run at full speed for whatever reason. I did turn off high end shadows and turned msaa samples to 1. This game definitely needs to be optimized.

[Briggs]

What type of garbage computer do you guys have? Mine is 5 years old and the game runs fine. Worse, I'm running on Linux. Don't tell me that PoE2 is optimized for Linux!

[ltron]

Krovoc の投稿を引用：

What type of garbage computer do you guys have? Mine is 5 years old and the game runs fine. Worse, I'm running on Linux. Don't tell me that PoE2 is optimized for Linux!

I think it might be, Windows users are definitely reporting more issues anyway.

[Kaldaien]

Krovoc の投稿を引用：

What type of garbage computer do you guys have? Mine is 5 years old and the game runs fine. Worse, I'm running on Linux. Don't tell me that PoE2 is optimized for Linux!

Ryzen 7 2700x, GTX 1080 Ti, 32 GiB RAM, 2x 512 GiB NVMe SSDs in RAID1. It's something I sourced from my local thrift store obviously.