HELP: Assassin's Creed Unity runs great on PC, but extremely sluggish on Link

[Lorthirk]

Hello everyone.

I bought Assassin's Creed Unity on Steam some weeks ago, and yesterday I started it, since I'm going through all the saga and I just finished Rogue. So, since I had no problems with other ACs, I was a bit surprised by the performance. After the De Molay intro, with the Steam Link, as soon as I went in the Paris game sequences, I noticed that the frame rate started dropping to 5 fps or so, and the latency graphs spiking higher than I ever saw. "Fine, probably my PC isn't up to the challenge" I thought; just to do some double checking I went in front of the PC, I was amazed by having a solid almost-60 FPS nearly everywhere, in High graphic settings. So, I started tinkering around; and I noticed that even lowering the resolution to 1280x720 and putting graphic details to Low doesn't help a bit. Moreover, I noticed that as soon as the slugginess starts, the stats overlay promptly warns "Slow network, encode, convert" (I may have changed the order of the three, but all of them are present).

My host specs are:

ASRock Z77 Pro4
Intel CPU Intel Core i5-3450 3,1GHz
nVidia GeForce GTX 680 4GB
RAM 8GB

And the client is a Steam Link, as I said.

Here's the streaming_log.txt: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1R9KUd-GPfymcGhgs4vkn8Lu8lN2QHNR7QxHoFo5GgCM/edit?usp=sharing

Thanks for any help!

[Tucu]

What is your network setup?

[Lorthirk]

Sorry, forgot. Cabled connection, capped to 100Mbps by the Steam Link. Everything else is Gigabit.

[Tucu]

Are you using the latest Steam Link beta firmware and the latest Steam Client beta?
Your streaming logs shows a lot of dropped frames (k_EStreamFrameResultDroppedReset) and a very low encoding rate

[Lorthirk]

Yes, beta on both (firmware v400 on Link)

[Tucu]

What results do you get with the Intel encoder and the software encoder. Might be a bug in the Nvidia encoding code.

[Lorthirk]

I only tried the Intel, and the result was the same

[Tucu]

Originally posted by Lorthirk:

I only tried the Intel, and the result was the same

Try changing the title of the discussion to include the phrase "multiple EStreamFrameResultDroppedReset". It might help grab the attention of one of the developers.

[henryg]

Thanks for posting your log. We are seeing this kind of issue with DirectX 11 open-world games that do a lot of texture streaming - that is, uploading new textures to the GPU in the background while you run around. We have some changes coming soon that should help get the framerates back up on the Link.

[Lorthirk]

Originally posted by henryg:

Thanks for posting your log. We are seeing this kind of issue with DirectX 11 open-world games that do a lot of texture streaming - that is, uploading new textures to the GPU in the background while you run around. We have some changes coming soon that should help get the framerates back up on the Link.

Thanks to you and all the team for taking the time in reviewing my issue. However I decided to put aside the Steam Link for a while, having found a new location for my main PC in my living room: albeit a great idea, IMHO the Link still has some quirks that prevents me to enjoy my games fully. I really hope to get back sometime in the future.

[endtropy]

Originally posted by henryg:

Thanks for posting your log. We are seeing this kind of issue with DirectX 11 open-world games that do a lot of texture streaming - that is, uploading new textures to the GPU in the background while you run around. We have some changes coming soon that should help get the framerates back up on the Link.

Henry I rolled the beta last night and this seems to have helped in a few games, I know this thread was started about the Steam Link but am I safe to assume this issue impacted all clients and not just the link?

[henryg]

Yes. It turned out to be a capture-side issue, not a client issue. The change last night should have helped the framerate for streaming for all users, not just the Link. So far we think that it significantly improved Fallout 4, The Witcher 3, Just Cause 3, and Assassin's Creed: Syndicate. I haven't personally tested AC: Unity but I suspect it is improved as well.

[virtualcld]

I'm experiencing the a similar problem to the OP. I had no problem playing AC: Rogue, but when I play AC: Unity or AC: Syndicate past the introductory missions, the stream starts dropping frames like they're hot (according to he overlay). The problem is particularly noticeable in large crowds of people.

The client is the Steam Link on a wired network (gigabit backbone).
The host machine is running Windows 7 (64-bit) Intel i5-4670K 3.4GHz, 8GB RAM, nVidia Geforce GTX 970 4GB

I have tried both beta and stable builds of Steam Client and Steam Link firmware. It seems that when the hardware encoding struggles too much during AC:U and AC:S, it switches over to software which only makes matters worse.

I'm not sure what debug information would be useful as the latest log file I have is huge and I can't figure out which part is which.

Other games don't seem to present the same kinds of problems, but I don't own Fallout 4 and I haven't tried other recent open-world games. I do own the older Fallouts and Elder Scrolls series if that would help with testing.

I would be interested in finding out what other test I could perform to see what is the culprit.

[Adrian]

I'm also getting the same issues with AC: Syndicate, streaming from Windows 10 desktop to Windows 7 HTPC over ethernet. Any sign of a solution to this?

[Adrian]

Was getting a lot of "slow encode" issues.

Managed to get better streaming performance from AC: Syndicate by upping the resolution in the in-game video settings, which lowers the framerate. Lower framerate = less frames to encode.

This is a stopgap, but it works okay if you can deal with the lower framerate.