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

Hardware & System
#1

Hello guys. First of all thank you very much for releasing this much anticipated update. I really appreciate your hard work. The game already feels 10 times better. I love the fluidity of the horse riding and I like the new areas, however I have noticed some serious performance issues that did not exist prior to 0.4.

I am monitoring everything with MSI Afterburner and I have noticed that GPU usage is between 54%-79% with all settings set at maximum. Before 0.4 I was at a constant 99% usage and the gameplay was smooth.
This has introduced very noticeable stutter that hits every few seconds.

CPU wise, the load seems to be spread evenly on all 8 cores. My VRAM usage is now hitting very close to 3GB, sometimes more than 3GB and System RAM is very close to to 8GB.

Now my GPU has 3GB VRAM and I have 8GB system RAM total. But the stuttering happens even when my VRAM usage is nowhere near 3GB. Bear in mind that I did not have any issues prior to 0.4 using the same PC.

I have also had 2 crashes in less than 30 minutes.

Here are some screenshots with Afterburner overlay:

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pcHuCCM.png1920Ă—1080

My specs are:

i7 3770k @ 4.5GHZ with Hyperthreading enabled
EVGA GTX 780 Ti Classified KINGPIN 3GB (Latest Geforce Driver)
Asus Sabertooth Z77 (Latest Bios)
G SKILL Ripjaws X 8GB RAM
Windows 8.1 Pro 64 Bit
Game installed on SSD.

EDIT: I have now upgraded to a 980 Ti and performance is WORSE! GPU usage is stuck at 45% MAX and FPS is in the 40s

Can you please look into this?

Thank you.

1 Like
GTX 980 bad performance (30-40 fps)
Crashes and such
Alpha 0.4 crashes
#2

I think Dan did mention in the 0.4 update video that they are aware of performance issues and they are working on optimization.

1 Like
#3

Yup the perfromance is really an ass. I can run witcher on medium details fluidly. But this runs constantly on 30 fps, 15-20 fps in combat camp on low detail. And this is just a “starting” zone, mostly without NPC’s or more advanced AI. They really need to work on optimization

#4

I did an extensive play yesterday covering the whole map and there are some serious memory leaks and stuttering all over the place. Lowering the LOD, Vegetation and object sliders only improve things slightly. Very High has annoying stuttering happening every 3-5 seconds which was not present in 0.3. High preset is slightly better but the stuttering can still be felt. Medium and Low are playable but look like console versions.

I am dropping to 28 fps in some places such as the camp and inside villages at night when I have a torch. For a GTX 780 Ti 3GB and an i7 3770k @ 4.5Ghz at 1080p resolution, this performance is too low, even with everything at max.

And yes the camp is a massive fps hog. I was getting my ass kicked when I chose the highest fencing difficulty due to low fps. That opponent was RUTHLESS HAHA :smiley: I LOVE it though, finally a game that rewards skill. Please DO NOT nerf the difficulty, it’s perfect. Just make it playable :smiley:

Oh yes a lot of optimisation needs to be done, the work starts now. I just hope that you do not have to sacrifice visual quality. The game looks gorgeous and the controls are fluid, minus the performance issues.

#5

Good evening. :slight_smile: I totally agree! Im playing it for the last two hours and had more than 14 crashes. (Cant even visit the Cumans before the game shut down). As you already mentioned frame drops are a big problem. I tried to play it with a changed setting (tried everything from low to high), always the same problem, much more then in version 0.3 … Of course its quite early version bit I have to admit that this is a bit frustrating :smiley: hope they`ll fix it soon.

#6

I play on 1440p rresolution with Sli x2 gtx 980 o/c and unable ton maintain at least 30 fps. Hardly unplayable, i know this is an alpha but it needs a serious optimization.

The most curious thing, is that between Very high and Low setting, i got hardly 3~4 fps difference.

For now, i worry about a huge downgrade in upcoming months.

#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)
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