GTX 980 Ti, i7 3770K, 16GB RAM. Massive performance drop & stuttering since 0.4. GPU usage does not exceed 45%

Hardware & System
#7

Yes I can confirm this as well. Lowering the settings from Very High to High, Medium or even Low does not offer a significant FPS boost like it should. All it does for me is decrease visual quality and lessen the stuttering. I just checked a few minutes ago and I got only 4 FPS boost from Very high to Medium. Though the stuttering was greatly reduced.

I watched the livestream where Dan mentioned that they would probably have to sacrifice visual quality in order to get the game to run faster and considering the fact that it is also being developed for consoles, I think some sacrifices will be made for those platforms even after the game is optimised properly. I doubt that the consoles will be able to run the game at anything higher than Medium-High but I really hope that for the PC version, we get an optimised version PLUS the option to enable the FPS killing options, should we desire to when we get better hardware, just like Crytek let us do with the original Crysis.

#8

I have a GTX 970 no SLI and I can run this game on very high settings with silky smooth FPS. I wonder if its your CPU or RAM bottle-necking it. I have an i7 and 16GB of RAM.

1 Like
#9

the lack of difference between high and low would suggest that graphics are not the source of the issue. i think it’s likely the ai is the source of the performance issue, and the fact that the camp is the source of lagging would seem to corroborate this. most of the major npcs are gathering there, the ai is performing combat routines, minor npc pass through there on various routines. and the game is looking same as before, just more assets at better quality only. so lets not go crazy with downgrade hysteria.

i think once they are able to make npc operate more efficiently in the background while maintaining persistence in the whole world, things will become better.

4 Likes
#10

A WH staff member actually posted this in the 0.4 bug list thread. They said the AI in this game are CRAZY performance hogs and they are working on optimizing. I pray they keep the graphics the same in final version.

#11

I think Sli isn’t yet supported atm, i’ll try desactiving it.

Cpu bottle necking ? don’t think so, have an i7 3930k o/c 4,7 ghz, hyperthreading disable has well. clairely not a cpu issue. And Motherboard is flashed with the last bios.

I can run Witcher 3 in Ultra with Hairwork and HBAO+ maxed out with 60 fps + on 1440p

the only issue is that the game is cleary not optimized.

And Warhorse studio, please, don’t make the mistake to make huge downgrade on PC for console

1 Like
#12

Just for referencing.

2 Likes
#13

i’ve read some things about optimizing ports for consoles and it seems mainly a lot dealing with lower texture resolution, this can be achieved relatively easy i think. just use lower texture lods for certain repeating objects, like trees, rocks, etc. then things which are just settings based like object lod switching and rendering distance.

i think they did pretty good job on balancing this game from the very beginning to be visually realistic and intricately detailed while having lower res objects for some things like mud patches, debris, etc. some games just use 4k textures on things that don’t matter in the grand scheme of visual quality, so i think they had this planned well and don’t expect to see any serious graphical downgrade. especially for things like texture which are already made, and can be in the hundreds and thousands range, much easier to adjust settings like mip level than to actually make them smaller.

i believe in the e3 video with rocketbeans, they say biggest bottleneck isn’t graphics, but the persistent npcs.

1 Like
#14

It will be interesting to see how this game will run on the current gen consoles. The main problem with the PS4 and X1 is their fairly weak CPU’s. If this game remains heavily CPU dependant, with its costly AI, it may be a challenge for WH to scale it for those platforms. I hope the PC will be considered a separate entity and KCD will not suffer in making it cross platform. Having said that I will need to upgrade to take full advantage of this games full potential.

#15

Hmm interesting. I have only 8GB of system RAM and the game is in fact hitting 6 to 7GB RAM easily but I don’t think that should be an issue. I have seen such high usage in other games and had no problems at all.
I also have an i7 3770k running at 4.5GHZ. Hyperthreading is enabled and it seems that the game is making good use of all 8 cores. All other games play flawlessly. In fact before 0.4, I never had stuttering and the game was playable.

The GTX 970 is 4GB(well 3.5GB) compared to the GTX 780 Ti’s 3GB and VRAM usage is pretty much 2.8 to 3GB nearly all the time. Still the stutter happens when VRAM usage is nowhere near 3GB.

Will need to dig into this further. When you mean silky smooth FPS, how many FPS is that? You get absolutely no stuttering at all when everything is set to Very High with all the distance sliders maxed out?

Cheers

#16

I’ll get more official numbers sometime in the next few days. I’m at the in-laws this weekend :frowning: bleh

#17

So I put on the fps counter and I never drop below 30. It’s always 35-40fps no matter where I go or what I do.

#18

Shouldn’t the AI be performed on the CPU? In that case reducing the graphics wouldn’t solve any performance issue anyway.

#19

I really think this is the issue, as there are more AI’s around the CPU takes a bigger hit. I get about 2-4 frames from changing graphics. To me it’s a CPU bottleneck, I need to learn how to increase CPU output.

#20

Ok, I did some extensive testing again yesterday by setting everything to Low then increasing each setting incrementally. I have found that “Object Detail” and “LOD Detail” are the most FPS killing and stuttering causing settings in the game. I started increasing the sliders everytime and as soon as they were close to or past half, stuttering started happening. Those 2 settings need optimising. Very High Textures also cause a noticeable performance drop compared to High Textures and bumps up VRAM usage to 3GB+ on many occasions, but that is to be expected. Maybe textures need to be optimised as well.

At Very High, with Vegetation Slider maxed, LOD and Object Detail sliders at Half, FPS ranges from 30 to 45 FPS, average being 34FPS. The absolute lowest drop was 29.9 FPS.

The 2 most taxing areas in the game are Merjohed and the Fencing training camp.

Also, I upgraded to 16GB of RAM and I can safely say that it made a very noticeable difference in how smooth the game felt compared to 8GB RAM. Stuttering would still happen once the Object Detail and LOD slider exceeded half. But more than 8GB RAM DEFINITELY HELPS. I was getting close to 9GB RAM usage.

My system:
i7 3770K @ 4.5GHZ
GTX 780 Ti 3GB
16 GB RAM
Windows 8.1 Pro 64 Bit
Game installed on SSD.

GTX 980 bad performance (30-40 fps)
#21

I haven’t noticed any issues. 0.4 actually feels smoother than 0.3 for me. I use the preset Very High setting for sliders, since I did not notice any visual quality difference when setting it higher, just some slight performance drop.

The game uses max 50% of CPU, but 80%-100% GPU.

I played maybe 10 hours, got only 1 crash.

1920x1080 running 35-50 fps, probably the camp is lowest.

i7 4770K@3.5
780 Ti 3GB
16 GB RAM

#23

Hmm, our systems are identical and I do drop to 30 when near or inside towns. Can you please screenshot your graphic settings and also screenshot when you are in Fencing Camp and Merjohed with Afterburner/Precision overlay?

Want to see what your usage and framerate is like.

#24

I haven’t really figured out to get fps in the afterburner overlay. So look at the right bottom corner for ShadowPlay counter. Graphics setting is just the vanilla Very High preset (with object motion blur). I haven’t adjusted any sliders.

ScreenShot0105.jpg1920×1080 469 KB

I found basically two spots where the fps drops down to 30, always looking at the center of the camp. GPU usage is 99%.

ScreenShot0102.jpg1920×1080 720 KB

ScreenShot0103.jpg1920×1080 807 KB

I incidentally found two pieces of cloth with buggy materials (or maybe the invisibility cloaks).

ScreenShot0104.jpg1920×1080 803 KB

There’s no problem in Merhojed, arriving in the village is slower since the area is loading, but still 35 fps at least. Just running around there gives me above 40.

Another sticky spot I can think of is the pub in Samopesh at night, the light is causing drops to 30 fps as well.

Hope that helps.

1 Like
#25

One of the most fascinating things about Alpha 0.4 is that the performance at 640x480, at 1024x768 and at 1920x1080 is exactly the same, about 40 fps on Very High. Low preset just increases it to 50 fps. So I am guessing that the cause is Draw Calls (maybe competing with AI, or possibly geometry) since the GPU utilization drops from 99% (1920x1080) only to 50% (640x480).

GTX 780 Ti
i7 4470K

#26

It’s very common for unoptimized games that graphic settings have very little effect on performance, it’s nothing strange.

#27

Ok I just got a MSI GTX 980 Ti Gaming 6G and I DID NOT EXPECT what I saw.

Performance with the 780 TI was WAY better.

With the 980 TI, GPU usage is stuck at 45% MAXIMUM. Low-Very High makes no difference. The game is stuck at the same low FPS in the 40s. The GTX 780 Ti at loeast had 75% usage.

A lot of optimisation has to be done and I don’t even think the alpha even supports 980 Ti yet.

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