Assassin's Creed Odyssey - Heavy Performance Fix

[BlankFX]

I just made an interesting discovery regarding Assassins Creed Odyssey I thought I should share and that might heavily help all those that were in false hope Special K Mod would fix their performance issues.
I did some benchmarks with the games internal benchmark tool for that. To make sure it was fault free, I repeated them all a couple of times.

System Specs I benchmarked with:
i7-4790K
RTX 2080 Ti
32 GiByte of RAM

No Modifications:
FPS min: 25
FPS avg 42
FPS max: 60
CPU min: 17 ms
CPU avg: 24 ms
CPU max: 39 ms
GPU min: 13 ms
GPU avg: 20 ms
GPU max: 33 ms

Special K Mod (taken from SK_Odyssey_fast_stream-v0.7z, the most recent Special K makes the game crash at startup)
FPS min: 13
FPS avg 37
FPS max: 54
CPU min: 19 ms
CPU avg: 27 ms
CPU max: 76 ms
GPU min: 13 ms
GPU avg: 21 ms
GPU max: 65 ms

So far this might not be anything new to us as Kaldaien stopped supporting Ubisoft Games for a very decent reason.

Now there is a tool called DXVK, which also uses dxgi.dll-Interception, like Special K, but is actually a wrapper from DirectX to Vulkan. The primary goal of the DXVK-Project is to make games using DirectX run on Linux. It's feature to also work on windows is just a nice side effect of that.
Devs of DXVK stated they couldn't think of a scenario where DXVK could improve performance on Windows over the native implementation of DirectX.
Yet, I was able to absolutely make sure I got heavy performance improvements by using DXVK on Assassin's Creed Odyssey.

DXVK:
FPS min: 32
FPS avg 73
FPS max: 104
CPU min: 10 ms
CPU avg: 14 ms
CPU max: 31 ms
GPU min: 9 ms
GPU avg: 14 ms
GPU max: 32 ms

As stated above I repeated these benchmarks a couple of times in each configuration to verify this effect.
I assume the improvements might heavily depend on the CPU, which was kind of bottlenecked by my aging i7-4790K and no mod.
Now I'd love to see if some users could verify my discovery by doing some benchmarks too.
If you do so, please pay attention to the fact that DXVK does lag for a very short period of time when it has to render shaders for the first time to create it's "ACOdyssey.dxvk-cache"-File. This initial lag requires you to repeat the benchmark to get valid results.

I hope Kaldaien won't mind me to create this thread in his forum, but yet it's a good chance to put more shame on Ubisoft, which I hope will be fine by him. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[JBeckman]

Haven't tested it myself though other than a quick go with the Discovery Mode for Origins, will be giving it a better test once I get around to replaying the game but there's Assassin's Creed Syndicate first.

At least it has the most British villain in the series and doesn't try to take itself too seriously for what's going on during the game. (Whether that's intentional or not.) but I'll get around to it eventually.

[Andi3d]

At my Sys (8700k / 1080Ti / Win10) DXVK don´t work....ACO don´t start, for short time i see the start pic of ACO, then it closes and ACO ends.
(some other games work with DXVK)

Tested different NVidia drivers, different DXVK Vers., don´t know why, but ACO don´t start!
(SpecialK or Reshade are working)

[fray_bentos]

Andi3d の投稿を引用：

At my Sys (8700k / 1080Ti / Win10) DXVK don´t work....ACO don´t start, for short time i see the start pic of ACO, then it closes and ACO ends.
(some other games work with DXVK)

I think this might be due to being set full screen/borderless/windowed etc. Try changing the setting to something different. I normally run fullscreen.

I also have right clicked on ACOdyssey.exe, properties, compatibility, change settings for all users, tick "disable full-screen optimisations".

I also have the Uplay overlay disabled.

Let us know what helps for you!

In the meantime, I have chickened out and decided to get a 10600KF and sell my 4790K whilst it still has some resale value! I'll likely keep using DXVK though if it also benefits 6 core CPUs. Hopefully, I will remember to post back here.

[Andi3d]

I found out, if you use Afterburner+RTSS you should disable the On-Screen Display in RTSS, without the OSD i could use DXVK 0.61 - 0.72, but 0.72 is the only one without errors in graphic.

All other don´t work and performance with 0.72 is worse.

I testet all and now i have no more passion.

...but thanks for you help. ;-)

[fray_bentos]

Andi3d の投稿を引用：

I found out, if you use Afterburner+RTSS you should disable the On-Screen Display in RTSS, without the OSD i could use DXVK 0.61 - 0.72, but 0.72 is the only one without errors in graphic.

All other don´t work and performance with 0.72 is worse.

I testet all and now i have no more passion.

...but thanks for you help. ;-)

A shame, the benefit in my case might be because I only have 4 cores, perhaps paired with something to do with my very low latency RAM (<40 ns), which might work better with VK rather the DX for some reason? I'll try another comparison when my new CPU arrives.

[Andi3d]

I think your benefit is...you use newer DXVK release, there are much optimizations.

Normally VK runs better at my sys(most games), but in ACO, i can´t use DXVK....maybe, when i spend years in testing, i maybe found the reason, why newer DXVK don´t run with this game on my sys.

...but it´s ok, i only want to test it, because, ....better use DX with reshade, than vulkan without it.
FPS are good with DX, ever over 60fps. ;-) (with reshade)

p.s. DayZ(e.g.) i use with newest DXVK, no problem and fps/frametimes are much better, than DX. ;-)

[fray_bentos]

Just as a means of an update as promised earlier in this thread, I can confirm that with 10600K (which is slightly faster than an 8700K), the framerate boost on using DXVK remains!

In my first edit I thought there was no benefit, but I discovered that UPlay had redownloaded and was playing from my C: rather than my D: where I was making the edits.

I just reproducibility tried this and go from being CPU limited (66-80% GPU usage) to GPU limited when using DXVK, I even see the difference in the benchmark. I ran native/DXVK/native/DXVK and results flipped back and forth each time.

Native (scores from 2 runs):
Ave FPS: 69/70
Min FPS: 44/45
Max FPS 95/95
CPU framtime ave: 15/15 ms
CPU framtime max: 22/23 ms
CPU frametime min: 10/10 ms

DXVK (scores from 2 runs):
Ave FPS: 86/87
Min FPS: 50/45
Max FPS135/127
CPU framtime ave: 12/12 ms
CPU framtime max: 20/22 ms
CPU frametime min: 7/8 ms

i5-10600K 4.9GHz all core, HT enabled, 16GB 4000 MHz 14-15-15-35.

I set clutter and environment details to their highest settings, which makes the CPU/memory-bound situation even more pronounced.

Graphics settings for all 4 runs (checked and changed each time- enabling/removing DXVK resets the graphics settings each time):

Adaptive quality: off
AA: High
Shadows: very high
Environment details: ultra high
Terrain: high
Clutter: very high
Fog: medium
Water: high
Screen space reflections: high
Volumetric clouds: low
Texture detail: high
Character: high
Ambient occulusion: medium
Depth of field: low

Ubisoft take note!

[fray_bentos]

New post just to bring to the attention of those following this thread (edited post above). TLDR: DXVK does make a massive difference on a 10th Gen Intel PC (see above).

[FlyingZerbra]

I can't get this work. what I did

1. I downloaded DXVK 1.72 from doitsujin/dxvk/releases at Github.
2. I moved d3d11.dll and dxgi.dll files from x64 folder to my installation folder (where ACOdyssey.exe is).
3. I get crash when I try to launch ACOdyssey.exe.
But If I use d3d11.dll and dxgi.dll files from x32 it works.
Can someone help me?

[fray_bentos]

@FlyingZebra did you read the post above (11 Jun @ 9:55am)? I'm also using version 1.7, not 1.72,

[FlyingZerbra]

fray_bentos の投稿を引用：

@FlyingZebra did you read the post above (11 Jun @ 9:55am)? I'm also using version 1.7, not 1.72,

Yes, I read the post above. But, its ok. I think I found the solution. Idk why but, in my case, I turned on Uplay In-game overlay and it worked. Usually, I play with offline mode (without In-game overlay). Sadly, I didn't get any performance increase. I think dxvk patch makes the game a little bit more smoother but overall I lost 10~15fps.

[fray_bentos]

@FlyingZebra, glad you got it to work and thanks for reporting what worked for you. It would also be helpful for others if you could state what GPU / RAM / CPU you are running so folk can see whether to bother themselves.

[FlyingZerbra]

@fray_bentos, I am currently using GTX 1080, 32GB, i7-7820hk with window 10 2004. I will post the benchmark results later.

[jason]

Holy shit. I've been trying to play Origins for 2 years, but gave up on it every time after a few hours/days of testing because it just kills my Ryzen 2600. Every time I look for new mehods/tools to improve performance, but nothing helped so far. This weekend I was in the mood again, but still nothing.

I was about to give up again when I found this thread and tried DXVK. And this is it! It still not perfect, but it seems like I can get a solid framerate around 60fps an the rest does freesync. This is a solid 10fps more then before I would say. The benchmark, which in the heavy middle scene always dropped to 40s now stays almost completely above 60.

As I said, it still not perfect it seems, but I have to experiment a bit more. I'm getting strange framedrops every few seconds that are visible as single spikes in the framerate graph, but even if, I think it's in a state where I'm finally satisfied enough to play it. So thanks a lot!

My system
Ryzen 2600
Radeon 5700
Windows 10 x64
DXVK 1.7 (1.72 somehow gave me those framedrops even more frequently)

[M4rhun]

fray_bentos の投稿を引用：

@FlyingZebra did you read the post above (11 Jun @ 9:55am)? I'm also using version 1.7, not 1.72,

Did you try the 1.72 version? I didnt really get any improvements, perhaphs the minimum fps went up a little but, but that's it and i have a I7 7700K at 4.8Ghz with an RTX 2060. Is there a place where i can properly test this? Athens is not really that consistent.