Sudden huge performance loss.

[zkratt]

EDITED for clarification:

Between the dates of 10/26/2021 and 10/27/2021 I lost roughly half the frame rate on multiple machines without explanation. One machine running an AMD GPU, the other, a GeForce GPU, and I have done extensive testing so I am sure it's not a graphics driver issue.

In fact, the framerate relevant to this particular issue was measured in a cleared Troll Cave instance, without any constructions, drops in the world, or other major graphical factors in play. I.E. The game was tested with as little as possible but the actual game code and basic rendering ticking.
I don't think graphics is of any real factor in this particular case.

Tests had been made with old and new worlds, old and new characters, both running offline locally, as a server, and as a client connected to a dedicated server, and like I said, on different PC's with different hardware components and configurations.
Also, only just Steam and Valheim was running with nothing out of the ordinary in the background.
Numbers noted on my gaming machine: I had roughly 160fps and suddenly went down to about 80fps.

Whether Steam, Irongate, or Windows updates is the reason behind it is irrelevant at this point. It could be anything. Your guess is as good as mine. The point is that it happened.

Now, to whom this may concern; The problem has now (3 mere days later, perhaps even earlier) vanished for me. It is gone. At this point in time I haven't tested it on various systems, because I didn't feel the need to. The problem simply just came and went without any explanation. While that brings no clarity to what could be causing this problem, it does in fact tell you that whatever it is, it could also very well just cease by it self within short. That is somewhat good news, and not necessarily something to worry too much about.

What I'm wondering is: Has this sudden performance drop happened to anyone else here? Has anyone figured it out, or solved it? Is there any way we can prevent it?

[zkratt]

Okay, just to be clear here:
*My thread again, TLDR: Sudden problem with Valheim's framerate. Most likely Not hardware related. Either: Be wary, or, if you have previously experienced this AND if you can; share with us how it can be solved/prevented.
*Why I said it doesn't matter to ME, who caused the problem, is because I didn't want to get into further trouble with the moderators (again) for ALLEGEDLY pointing fingers here, and also: because I really don't know.
*I'm not a Trek-fan. I've been meaning to give the show a good shot for quite some time. I just haven't gotten around to do that as of yet, but anyway, isn't Spock supposed to be super-smart or something?

Originally posted by Noodly Catastrophe:

Originally posted by zkratt:

Whether Steam or Irongate updates is the reason behind it is irrelevant to me as a consumer. It could be anything.

It's relevant, because if it's a Windows issue, you will need to go to Windows support/forums. If it's Steam, you need to go to Steam support/forums. If it's Valheim, then this is the right place to complain.

As a consumer, you don't go to McDonald's to complain about a bad burger you ate at Wendy's.

I covered this already, but... At the time of writing I'm having an actual problem with THIS product (Valheim), for reasons I don't know. I am making people aware here (in the steam community - Valheim technical issues forums), as well as I'm asking if anybody here is ahead of me when it comes to solving or preventing the issue.
I.E. not complaining - that's a completely different thing -- and I'm not going to the wrong place - these are either all people who play Valheim, or people who develop Valheim. The issue I had with Valheim is in fact only of direct relevance to these people. I assure you, this is definitely the right place to bring an issue like this up.

It is in fact nothing like complaining over at McDonald's about a Wendy's burger. That's neither funny nor on point. It's just silly arguing without context.
If you still disagree, then play with that thought a bit, will you?
What do you think would happen if I instead went to the Microsoft forums and said I had problems with Valheim? Do you really think that would be more appropriate?
And if so, and if Spock is supposed to be a smart dude, then you, walking around unqualifiedly quoting him like this is rather amusing to me.

Originally posted by Noodly Catastrophe:

Originally posted by zkratt:

so it's not a graphics driver issue

How do you know for sure?

Spock once said, "If you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."

Not saying your GPU's are the issue, but you might as well do some basic tech on your side just to be sure, just as I suggest in your original thread, include testing your hard drive, CPU temp, etc.

Once you have done basic tech on your end, if this is still a problem, then people here can probably further help you. At the very least, filter out the possibilities down.

Let's just beam ourselves back down to earth: It IS possible, yes, I could be jumping the gun by saying it's software related, but if it isn't then I guess we also need a blue blood-moon. Now, you're actually suggesting the possibility that both of my tested PC's could have gotten the exact same issue, even if their respective hardware is completely different - AND they got that exact same issue at the very same point in time? That's also a bit silly. Be it storage drives, graphics cards, whatever - I mean what are the actual odds of that? You do the math.

The only thing I am saying is; I at least know ONE place where the problem is NOT. So, how do I know it's not a new-graphics-driver issue for sure?
-You can't just take my word for it? Do I really need to spell that our for you?
Well, extreme unlikelness aside, for instance: my driver version is from 11/13/2020 on my AMD card here. That means the issue suddenly appeared overnight about a year too late. Valheim wasn't even out when the drivers released, so they've been present throughout the entire public existence of Valheim (the game) on the Steam platform.
I'm also monitoring my temperatures here. Obviously. When someone who has multiple systems with different GPUs says he has a problem, and he's tested the issue on two entirely different PC's before he states it's at least not a graphics driver issue, I think it's fair to assume that he most likely is tech-savy on a reasonably competent level. I.E. he has the drivers and temperature-parts sorted out already. I can't believe you actually wanted me to declare this. I liken that with asking me if I've tried rebooting the systems. Also, if I remember, I'll try and explain how I made these tests, so you'll have a better understanding of where I'm coming from.

Now, what I'm saying is what I'm saying. That is actual, and that's all that any reader really has to go by. Adding fluff in the form of unfounded and objectively incorrect assumptions is pointless.
With that part of your post behind us, let me also do one of them very fitting Science Fiction quotes about truth:
“You know, the very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common: they don’t alter their views to fit the facts; they alter the facts to fit their views.” -Dr.Who

I really don't like this thread to be about McDonald's, Spock, moderators, you or me, or anything else completely irrelevant to the subject matter in the future. Let's not keep fueling an irrelevant fire that'll achieve no more than feeding trolls. I have nothing at all against you, I just didn't agree with the insincere tone and general unseriousness of your reply. So, let's just drop this here, okay?

Originally posted by Noodly Catastrophe:

Pre and post-H&H, the game ran similarly for me. The main thing that changed was I turned off SSAO and my GPU temp went from 76 Celsius constant to 62 low and 72 high, averaging around 67. FPS stayed relatively the same with as low as about 21 FPS to as high as about 62 FPS.

My specs:

AMD Ryzen 5 2600
40GB DDR RAM
MSI Radeon Armor 8GB RX 570

This is good. It has actual substance and is relevant given how I expressed myself earlier.
I'm sorry I was in a bad mood when I wrote the initial post, but I had tried everything I could do by myself at that point. I had to ask around. And I was perhaps too brief about describing the issue.

Let me add, if you have that sort of framerate with those specs, you either also have serious issues, or (and most likely) you're doing your tests differently. I.E. you're doing your tests in your base or somewhere crowded out in the world.
The framerate relevant to this particular issue was measured in a cleared Troll Cave instance, without any constructions, drops in the world, or other major graphical factors in play. I.E. The game was tested with as little as possible but the actual game code and basic rendering ticking.
Suddenly, something had changed. I know this because I took my comparative measurements to help a friend out with his low framerate just some couple of days earlier, otherwise I would probably not have had any numbers to go by. So I went back to the Troll Cave to test. I had roughly 160fps and went down to about 80fps.

Again, I don't think graphics is of any real factor in this particular case.
Tests had been made with old and new worlds, old and new characters, both running offline locally, as a server, and as a client connected to a dedicated server. Also, only just Steam and Valheim was running with nothing out of the ordinary in the background.


Now, to whom this may concern; The problem has now (3 mere days later, perhaps even earlier) vanished for me. It is gone. At this point in time I haven't tested it on various systems, because I didn't feel the need to. The problem simply just came and went without any explanation. While that brings no clarity to what could be causing this problem, it does in fact tell you that whatever it is, it could also very well just cease by it self within short. That is somewhat good news.

If anyone has anything new and meaningful to add to the topic at hand, please make a civilized and educated comment below, otherwise, please don't bother.

Cheers, and have a great day!

[zkratt]

Originally posted by Noodly Catastrophe:

Originally posted by zkratt:

SNIP.

You might not realize this Zkratt, but I am the only one responding and I initially actually wanted to help. I responded in kind, because your attitude stinks. I am not being paid by IronGate, and I actually followed Arachnova and Munin's advice on treating other players in the forum with slightly more patience, due to their frustrations with the game not being optimised. Alas, I'm quite done here.

If your idea of kindness and helping people is about saying things out of context to force others to defend what they are talking about and explain why, less they want to look stupid - then you've got that completely wrong.

And do not speak to me about patience with other people. It took quite some patience to even write all that in detail so you could not possibly pull out another silly "misunderstanding" out of the hat and make more fun of me. You dragged all of that out of me, and now that the topic is crystal clear, and your jokes have been nulled out, I'm the bad guy?

I'm sorry, my attitude may stink to you, cause I do not approve of, nor wish to endure your crude ways around discussions. Period.

I also asked you (and others) not to take the discussion further down this path, yet here we are. This here is the definitive end of the line though.

---------------------------------------------------------*

I ended on a good note with considerably good news: The problem went away on it's own. So it's hopefully nothing serious to worry about.

[chrisflynn888]

I have seen the same issue but I think a week prior. The difference is that the problem still exists. I play on private servers and local games. Same problem.

Playing in Vulkan local does NOT replicate this issue and frame rates are great

Running the following specs
AMD Ryzen 5-3600
Gigabyte B550 Aorus Pro-P
16 GB Ram
EVGA 3060Ti

Was getting min 80 FPS on high settings no OC

Now getting 5-8 FPS. Completely unplayable.

I have updated Windows to latest update available, I don't recall an update around that time
Updated to latest driver for GPU hoewever it still remain same problem.

Have updated bios on Mobo haven;t checked yet to see if anything available.

[DJ Shadowmind]

Originally posted by Noodly Catastrophe:

As a consumer, you don't go to McDonald's to complain about a bad burger you ate at Wendy's.

He ate a bad burger, but doesn't know if it was McD, Wensdays, or Ironic...

So he goes to each of them, investigates, and complains.

I see no injustice here. I do see a snarky Karen responding at him being miffed about the situation.

I also ate a bad burger as of last night, but I know it was Unity and Valheim that served it...

[DJ Shadowmind]

Originally posted by zkratt:

What I'm wondering is: Has this sudden performance drop happened to anyone else here? Has anyone figured it out, or solved it? Is there any way we can prevent it?

Do you have any error reports in Windows WER related to UnityPlayer.Dll or Valheim.Exe? My problems began when I crashed from a memory access violation. I've reinstalled Valheim, started new worlds, started new charaters, etc to no avail. It is still a problem.

I've set up AMD Radeon to monitor Valheim and the GPU is barely being touched, and then maxed out suddenly. It reports a 6 fps average, and extremely high clock speeds of 1800 ms.

I can run Rust (another fps sucker poorly made in Unity) at 60 fps. So it isn't Windows, or the GPU. Something happened when UnityPlayer.dll tried to access a memory location and was caught by an error crash.

What did you do to resolve yours? I assume you've fixed it? I love Valheim, but if it remains like RUST where fps issues become make a break in a dire situation, then it won't be a long lasting relationship.

Shame developers like to program in Unity... It is the worst for fps problems in large cached games TBH. It doesn't take a lot of effort to learn Unreal. I am both an Unreal and Unity developer FWIW. Unity is great for phone app games, but not so much for PC games.

[jonnin]

go thru your computer logs to see what changed that day. auto updates for graphics card, windows, or sound drivers can all break a game in short order. you can also run a malware check. Did you install anything on those days, esp something with a TSR / background process that auto starts? If you have it down to 1 day when it went wrong, dig deep on that day...

[zkratt]

Hmmm... :\ The fact that nobody else have reported having the same issue leads me to believe that the fault could possibly be my Internet Security Suite. It's a custom one I got from my ISP. That's about the only proprietary thing to my systems. Everything else is the usual bog standard stuff.

[GinsengSamurai]

Originally posted by zkratt:

I'm sorry, my attitude may stink to you, cause I do not approve of, nor wish to endure your crude ways around discussions. Period.
I also asked you (and others) not to take the discussion further down this path, yet here we are. This here is the definitive end of the line though.

Alright, I will accept that.

And here is my sincere apology Zkratt. I apologize if I had taken things a bit far with you.

On the internet, I often times forget about 'tone of text'. You were frustrated and needed a point of reference in which to express your complaints. In the future, I shall make a more mindful approach.

I hope you have a great week Zkratt. ♥