Troubleshooting: Slow FPS? Won't start? Look here, first

[Chimeric]

Solutions to common issues:

"The game doesn't launch at all!"

Try these:
▫️ Reinstall Nova Drift & Restart Steam.
▫️ A driver that comes with Elgato products such as Wave XLR or Stream Deck, called "Wave Link" is incompatible with Gamemaker games. Once the game starts crashing for this reason, apparently you can circumvent the problem by moving the game folder so it can't be found by the software. Alternatively, the software can be uninstalled. I have no ability to fix this.
▫️ Disable 3rd party programs or recording software, especially things that affect display or vSync. In particular, RivaTuner, which comes with MSI Afterburner, is known to cause launch problems exclusively on Steam with Nova Drift.
▫️ Make sure your antivirus software has white-listed Nova Drift, could be a false positive
▫️ You can use Windows "Startup Apps" or a program like "CCleaner" to prevent any applications you might not know about from launching on your computer.
▫️ If you have an "N" edition of Windows, Nova Drift requires the installation of Microsoft's Media Feature Pack to run. I don't know why!
▫️ If you really can't launch and none of the above helps, contact me directly.

"I'm experiencing mouse drift while doing nothing"

▫️ Not sure why, but disabling windowed mode seems to fix this. Investigating.
▫️ Often controls problems with Nova Drift are caused by devices being detected as gamepads that aren't really. Steering Wheels, pedals, joysticks have been known to throw bad inputs, sometimes all the time. You might try disconnecting everything from bluetooth, usb, or any virtual devices until you identify the culprit.

"I'm using a gamepad and I can't fire / thrust all the time / controls are scrambled"

▫️ Certain bluetooth Xbox gamepads, while used wirelessly, don't work properly with the game. After researching I found its out of my hands to fix this. But I can provide two work arounds:
1) Steam settings > Controller > Enable Steam Input For Controllers fixes the issue. You can also do this per game by right clicking it and going to properties. This lets you play wirelessly.
2) Plug in your controller. It'll start working.

"My computer is pretty strong, but I drop frames with Nova Drift"

Possibly your GPU isn't being utilized. Here is how you can make sure it is:
https://imgur.com/a/KxQJYqH

I'm experiencing intermittent slowdown, regardless of what's going on in Nova Drift"

Try these:
▫️In the game's settings, experiment with toggling vSync, Windowed Mode, and Borderless Fullscreen Mode. Any of them might affect performance for you.
▫️ Launch Nova Drift without an external monitor, see if that makes a difference. Specifically, older HDMI monitors seem to be causing problems.
▫️ There's a weird bug with windows and some monitor combinations / strange start up conditions where Nova Drift will run slowly, but not always. If this happens try minimizing all programs with "Window key + D" and then going back into Nova Drift. In the cases where I have been able to reproduce this problem, this fixed it. Borderless Fullscreen Mode likely also removes this problem.
▫️ For OSX problems in specific, please try switching to the "Legacy OSX" branch on Steam to see if it improves performance.

Please don't hesitate to contact me directly. I will work with you to find a solution:
email: [e-mail]
discord: https://discord.gg/Zp2MkPJ

Thank you.

[iman]

THANK YOU SO MUCH

[S☯wn-Lﺤuꁅhtǝr]

a lot of the cause for FPS issues is DWM Desktop Window Manager. setting the priority to Normal helps in many cases.

[Chimeric]

Originally posted by Sown-Laughter:

a lot of the cause for FPS issues is DWM Desktop Window Manager. setting the priority to Normal helps in many cases.

This is news to me! Would you mind telling us how to do that? This isn't present in Windows 10, right?

[S☯wn-Lﺤuꁅhtǝr]

Originally posted by Chimeric:

Originally posted by Sown-Laughter:

a lot of the cause for FPS issues is DWM Desktop Window Manager. setting the priority to Normal helps in many cases.

This is news to me! Would you mind telling us how to do that? This isn't present in Windows 10, right?

Use the Ctrl + Shift + Esc keyboard shortcut

https://www.digitalcitizen.life/7-ways-launch-task-manager-windows-8

open the taskmanager and find "Desktop Window Manager".

On Win 7 its Dwm; & on win 10 its Desktop Window Manager under processes.

Just know Desktop Window Manager defaults to normal when restarted, its default is high.

Mostly windows uses DWM . Direct x . and when too many uses of Direct x are all at once it can cause DWM to bug and mess up.
Tekken 7
Soulcalibur 6.

Many blame denuvo for this issue, but there are a few games where alt tab will cause frame skips stuttering and other issues.

Hope this helps

This is something i figured out when i was running 4k on my FX 8150 pc.

[Azza35]

doesent do anythign and windows 10 defaults to normal priority anyway its firewall and graphics card shame i cant play the game many missed sales

[Chimeric]

Originally posted by Azza35:

doesent do anythign and windows 10 defaults to normal priority anyway its firewall and graphics card shame i cant play the game many missed sales

Hi! I'd like to help you troubleshoot. If you've already ensured that your antivirus is not blocking Nova Drift from launching, and tried the other steps listed here, please email me at [e-mail]

[d o c o]

I am experiencing very strange FPS drops.

Every time I start the game it lets me play through an entire round with no fps drop, as soon as I die and start the next match it INSTANTLY drags to 20% of the fps speed.

I am running Macos Catalina.

Just letting you guys know whats going on, and look forward to future updates! Love this game!

[Eggpie]

Originally posted by d o c o:

I am experiencing very strange FPS drops.

Every time I start the game it lets me play through an entire round with no fps drop, as soon as I die and start the next match it INSTANTLY drags to 20% of the fps speed.

I am running Macos Catalina.

Just letting you guys know whats going on, and look forward to future updates! Love this game!

I'm having this problem too now, I think. I'm running windows 10 though, so i doubt its the OS that's the problem.

[baczek]

Came here to confirm RivaTunerStatisticsServer causes white screen on startup 100% of the time for me. Highly recommeded to display a warning on startup if you find it running.

[Walden]

Can also confirm - Rivatuner is stopping any startup until closed prior to launch, works once game is running (steady 60fps @ 16.6ms)

[pixeljammiles]

Originally posted by James Walden:

Can also confirm - Rivatuner is stopping any startup until closed prior to launch, works once game is running (steady 60fps @ 16.6ms)

Can you try the solution in this link, but with Nova Drift instead, and tell me if it works? : https://steamcommunity.com/app/751780/discussions/0/2951502108446940263/

[Limygeorge]

Personally I've had good frame rates all the time.

My set up is very simple, but might, just might help someone.

I did three things, all easy.

In windows 10 I set to game mode, then in full screen it works. (Idle is 99% at desk top, so although a lot of people are not impressed with "game mode," it may help?

Anti virus exemption, I do this with all games as quite a few get flagged, so I haven't played it without that exemption. Thats another possible fix?

In NV control panel setting are pretty standard. For now I max frame setting to 60 although I have a 144Hz monitor. Refresh rate (different to frame rate but often thought of as the same, every game is set to "Highest available." I use clamp as it's good with ansi filter. Not sure if this game has that, but no down side. Only down side to clamp is for photos and not really noticable anyhow.

Latency in NV CP (I forgot the name, but it's fairly new, I set to ultra.)
Finally I use a fair bit of the new sharpen feature (80) and ignore the film grain (default 17)

Just to repeat, win 10 game mode works best in fullscreen. I always use that as even without gamemode windows optimizes for only FULLscreen, no windowed. Basically only a total of 1% CPU with this for everything else except the game which has 99% of the CPUs attention.
This is the same for all games. Fullscreen=background processes reduced, including DWM.

Windowed or windowed full screen by default windows ten doesn't optimize background processes for games.

So, that's it. For years I keep startup progs to just two, one is my AV, and at the desktop in task manager ALWAYS at 99% idle. I do tweak windows to ensure that nothing not needed is off when gaming.

These steps are probably familiar to most of you, but it may help a few folks?

If the above apply on any PC with a dedicated GPU, then there is some other problem which I have not yet encountered.

Edit: Forgot to say, I never use Rivatuner or anything 3rd party this or any twin stick shooter. It possibly causes problems.

For three years now after building this PC, when at desktop with no other program running except AV monitoring realtime, with or without game mode, it has always, literally, left CPU 99%. I am a bit OCD when it comes to that, but it's worth doing good OS maintenance. So many PCs CPU is always working due to background or forgotten or unknown programs running when they don't need to.
No exaggeration: when at desktop with no prog open, the cpu is only using 1% or less. Leaving 99% available for any game or program whatever.

Actually in Perfmon-Data collector sets-system-system diagnotics which runs a one minute check up for any issues, the cpu usage is usually 0.3%.

Literally any process at all, including bacground ones, if running the CPU will NOT be at 99% idle. My AV Emsisoft uses barely any cpu when just realtime protection.

Yes I am OCD about this, I run that one min diagnotic pretty much everyday lol. Pretty crazy, but it makes for a real snappy PC with no unnecessary apps, or background apps running. For me it's worth it.

[Kinam]

Just to let you get some info from myself about my setup and what I'm experiencing:

Running with a Radeon RX 5700 XT video card, and an AMD Ryzen 5 360x Processor, 32 gigs of system memory, I'm running a three monitor setup. When starting the game and everything, it all looks to be fairly smooth, except a little "slow" framerate wise (don't have the overlay showing FPS to tell you exact amount) it seems. Starting up an actual run however, shows much slower than expected.

If I alt-tab out of the game, and tab back into the game, the framerate is up to the smooth rate I'd expect with such a card and system. I'm not having the Radeon "tuner" app set to gaming as apparently that has had issues for many people when running multiple monitors and doing "normal" things on separate monitors simultaneously while gaming. Thusly it's not default set up to be messing with anything or trying to tune the video to anything crazy. The game is not set to be doing windowed mode also. I have not attempted to set the game to windowed mode to see if this issue disappears or not yet. I was planning on streaming the game possibly, so I'm unsure what will happen when trying to capture it and all the other windows I'll have open at the same time for streaming.

While gaming normally, I have on one monitor, chrome running with Twitch playing some stream on it. The other monitor, usually has Discord to the front.

I'm unsure as to why alt-tabbing and back into the game fixes the framerate issues. But after a death, and starting a new run, it seems the framerate issues come right back until I tab out and back to the game.

[Chimeric]

Originally posted by Kinam:

Just to let you get some info from myself about my setup and what I'm experiencing:

Running with a Radeon RX 5700 XT video card, and an AMD Ryzen 5 360x Processor, 32 gigs of system memory, I'm running a three monitor setup. When starting the game and everything, it all looks to be fairly smooth, except a little "slow" framerate wise (don't have the overlay showing FPS to tell you exact amount) it seems. Starting up an actual run however, shows much slower than expected.

If I alt-tab out of the game, and tab back into the game, the framerate is up to the smooth rate I'd expect with such a card and system. I'm not having the Radeon "tuner" app set to gaming as apparently that has had issues for many people when running multiple monitors and doing "normal" things on separate monitors simultaneously while gaming. Thusly it's not default set up to be messing with anything or trying to tune the video to anything crazy. The game is not set to be doing windowed mode also. I have not attempted to set the game to windowed mode to see if this issue disappears or not yet. I was planning on streaming the game possibly, so I'm unsure what will happen when trying to capture it and all the other windows I'll have open at the same time for streaming.

While gaming normally, I have on one monitor, chrome running with Twitch playing some stream on it. The other monitor, usually has Discord to the front.

I'm unsure as to why alt-tabbing and back into the game fixes the framerate issues. But after a death, and starting a new run, it seems the framerate issues come right back until I tab out and back to the game.

Thanks for the data! Sounds about right. It's still a mystery to me why this occurs.

[randosity]

Having periodic slowdowns that make this game very frustrating to play.

GTX 970
i7-7700 @ 3.6ghz
Windows 10

Most of the time it's a rock solid 60, but for some reason about 25% of the time I go to play the game is just extremely slow and low frame rate even at the very beginning, and multiple restarts don't seem to help. Also the game itself just runs really slow even though the windows game bar reports the fps is only dropping to like ~40fps most of the time.

Is the game speed locked to the framerate?