PC Performance Thread

Yo! How is everyone doing on the performance with this game? Not doing so hot on my end, started off with a solid 55-60 while indoors for the first 20 minutes of the game, but as soon as you step out into the open world the game is now wavering between 27-33 fps.

I'm running with Ambient Occusion on, HBAO+, shadows medium, textures high, view distance knocked down a few pegs, FoV at 50 (default), AA on, foliage quality medium, depth of field off, Vsync on, running at 1920x1080. Using a i7 920 @ 3.8 Ghz, R9 280x with 8GBs of RAM.

As usual, AMD performance isn't so hot, reports of Nvidia users getting much higher framerates at equivalent hardware. How's everyone else doing?

The game is mostly fine for me, except when the game switches to a cut scene or a zombie grabs me. Then the frame rate drops to zero for a couple of seconds.

I have the settings set to best quality and my PC uses a i5 4670k and a GTX 780 with 8GB ram also running off an SSD.

Not at home right now but I have something like an i5-4670k, 8GB RAM, ATI R9 280X and I'm also getting real spotty performance. Clean 60 in the tutorial and as soon as I stepped out into the open world, the framerate tanked even when I dropped the settings off high. I've been reading that the view distance is what's killing the framerate most, so i'm gonna try droping that a few pegs tonight when I get home. My video card drivers were also wicked outta date so maybe that'll change something.

Sounds like yeah, people on Nvidia cards are getting better performance. If anyone here gets a good setup on their ATI card, I'd love to hear what settings you have on.

I have an i7 2700k, 8GB RAM, 3GB GTX 580 and it seems to be running pretty well to me. Everything mostly set to high.

@doctordonkey:

Neogaf's thread's pretty extensive. http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=980126

"you can double your framerate by reducing draw distance from 100% to 35%. You can disable Nvidia DoF and get additional +30% FPS"

Here's an odd thing:

"If your keyboard is set to any language different from your OS, all the text in the menus disappear. I have my OS set to English but my keyboard to Spanish, so, welp. I could try to fix it, but it would require changing the settings back and forth every time I want to play the game."

Here's Nvidia's Performance Breakdowns:

http://www.geforce.com/whats-new/guides/dying-light-graphics-and-performance-guide

I'm getting 40-60 fps on a 780 Ti and 4690k. I've got FOV turned almost all the way up, View Distance down to about 40%, Motion Blur and DOF off, and everything else on high.

This game needs a patch badly.

This better be like the best looking game ever because holy shit @ those benchmarks...

Seems like waiting for a couple rounds of patches and/or driver/performance updates could be a smart thing to do.

This is gonna be a fun generation, if new games keep maxing out brand new videocards this quickly. Hey developers, If you're trying to go all Crysis on these cards you'd better give us some SERIOUS next level graphics in return.

@zojirushi: I hear that.

I'm looking forward to this year specifically for the performance/visual difference.

GTA V on pc has some really attractive system requirements, and after Unity......

lol techland

@aurahack: Drop your draw distance all the way. You spend the entire game (at least I have so far) either in shantytown areas, indoors, or running through thick brush. The only time you ever see a significant portion of the map is when you climb really tall buildings, in which case the draw distance isn't going to cover the entire map anyway. I've tested it both all the way up and all the way down and the difference is negligible, in terms of how noticeable it is.

I've got an R9 290, an i5 3570 3.4 ghz and 8 gigs of RAM.

Settings are 1920x1080, both Nvidia settings off, high texture and shadow, medium foliage, ambient occlusion off, AA on. My FoV is almost max and my draw distance is all the way down. I get between 30 and 50 FPS, for the most part.

@mb: Fiddle with your FOV if you want better FPS. For some reason the FOV has a major impact on performance

Sadly not on my PC. I've changed it from as narrow as possible to as wide as the setting will allow and there isn't a measurable difference.

No way is the default fov 50? That's so narrow holy shit. At least you can change it, but still, that's crazy.

Default is 52 vertical, 75 horizontal on 16:10. You can only increase it to 72/98. I bet 52 is around where the consoles are.

Sounds like vomit city when coupled with the apparent focus on lots of fast movement, I do wish fov didn't mess with me as much as it does.

Reducing the FOV resulted in an almost stable 60fps outside on my 970 and I didn't seem to noticed to much of a visual drawback.

Reducing it from 52?

As with 90% of all games over the last 12 months, SLI/Crossfire support is/was busted. Bad shadow flicker, under-using the 2nd GPU, weird stuttering, and so on. They seemed to have put out a patch to sort of address this, but I haven't had a chance to try it out yet. nVidia rolled out a SLI profile, so that's good, but as usual AMD is dragging their feet.

Sadly, the game isn't coded as well as something like Ground Zeroes, so I can't get my aging 6950s to run the game without Crossfire and still be remotely enjoyable to look at.

Does disabling DoF even help? Nvidia has this to say about it:

Depth of Field is rendered almost exclusively during cut scenes and conversations, with no ability to toggle the setting on the fly. As such, the main menu offers the most accurate 1:1 comparison between the two available settings.

Performance: The extensive use of high quality depth of field blurring during cutscenes and conversations results in a significant performance impact. However, as these are non-interactive, and frame rates are higher than during gameplay, the performance impact of NVDOF is typically negated, and therefore goes unnoticed.

That's really weird, but makes some sense because there you don't have something like GTA's cover mode where it would make sense to enable DoF during gameplay.

Speaking of cutscenes, any time there's a cutscene it seems to lock at 30fps (according to Fraps, vsync enabled). They just said above that "frame rates are higher than during gameplay", so what's the deal? Maybe it's a bug. Lately I feel like developers are having a very hard time with cutscenes, things like facial animation & lip sync seem pretty bad compared to a few years ago. Alien had just awful cutscenes with stutter, bad framerate, and even the character models looked pretty bad.

I get weird about this stuff on PC for some reason, and it bums me out. I don't mind playing GTA at 30fps on my PS4 because it's running as intended, but if I can't get every PC game to 60 it bugs the shit out of me and makes me feel like the loser who got a 770 shortly before the 900s came out (facepalm). Even if settling for 30 might mean I could run at max detail or something. Oddly enough the consoles may have an advantage here (higher detail), they would be wise to avoid too many 60fps games if they want to make those GPUs last 8 years. 60fps in Last of Us, Call of Duty, PvZ and others on PS4 feels amazing, but people are gonna get spoiled. Maybe if they presented it as choosing between graphics quality, or speed/smoothness. Those pages of advanced technical video settings are evil sometimes, becoming a mini-RPG trying to min/max it. Choosing the right Dark Souls armor pieces is a baby game by comparison. :) I force myself to trust the Nvidia GFE presets, give or take an AA setting maybe, otherwise I know I'd end up in that rabbit hole. Then it's time to turn off Fraps and just enjoy the fucking game already!

Does anyone have a background about the impact of the cpu on AAA games?

As of late i'm seeing benchmarks like this one and the impact of the cpu is surprising, yet disappointing.

So... I'm now getting something like 50-60 fps with everything back on high.

Someone on Reddit gave a quick fix for turning off the film grain and it bumped my framerate outdoors way, way, WAY up. Runs real well, now. So... you know, unless you're some real "moody" fella who likes his games grimey as the UK underground club scene, then that's probably your golden ticket until a patch is out.

@mb: Ya. it's set at 4 clicks from the bottom of the FOV scale

@giant_gamer said:

Does anyone have a background about the impact of the cpu on AAA games?

As of late i'm seeing benchmarks like this one and the impact of the cpu is surprising, yet disappointing.

Well that certainly throws Intel's IPC advantage over AMD into stark relief. Game must be pretty damn heavy on a single thread to choke that hard on AMD's gear.

@aurahack: How does it look without the grain? Rorie seemed pretty down om it in the ql.

Well I like the look of the without film grain, but sadly I still am getting drops to 40-50 fps even after reducing the resolution to 1600x900.

This is even worse than I was expecting from Techland, and that's really saying something. Oh well, still a fun game, let's hope for a good patch or 5.

@mb: whats the VRAM on the 780? if its 3GB that may be your problem. most people are saying the game uses 3.5GB

this shit has been so annoying, i have a i7 4790 and a gtx 770 w/4gb onboard and im still nervous about getting the pc version over the console. After far cry 4 im super scared, they still havent fixed that random stutter thing in FC4

@mb: Dang, really? Did you try reducing your draw distance? That's also a huge help.

@sharkethic: I think it looks pretty sharp. It's no Crysis but I dunno. S'alright.

I don't know my FPS is fine and I just run the stock advised settings from nvidia. That said my pc is pretty high spec. Problem I am having is this god awful static interference thing on my audio after I play for about a half hour. It causes tons of glitches in spoken dialog, and this constant non stop distorted sound over everything. Like listening to someone scratch a chalkboard only it never stops. I have to cancel all the way out and reboot to get rid of it. Way worse than any graphical issues so far.

@karkarov: Man, that is a bummer, the sound design in this game is fantastic.

@aurahack: Yeah I've tried everything. It's just the game. In some sections I have a locked 60 no problem at 1920x1200. In others, I drop down into the low 40's. Sometimes I can have 10 zombies on the screen and fire effects galore and stay at 60, then other times I look at a tiny electrical spark and my frame rate tanks.

It's 3gb, but the recommended GPU for Dying Light is "GeForce GTX 670 / Radeon 7900 Series, >2GB VRAM"...my card beats that in it's sleep.

You had to turn down the default FOV to get a stable 60fps on a 970?!

Oh, Techland...

Does anyone know how the game fares on an 850 4GB? (Or an 860, which is roughly the same)

Or is there any site that does specific GPU performance tests?

Did you mean 950 or 750 or 850m? Or am I getting confused?

I'm on a GTX 680 2gb / i7 3770 and performance has been really dicey. Almost unplayable in some spots... I've literally seen the frame rate drop to 0 a few times. It's a real shame because the game seems great. I might just wait and see if new patch or driver comes out and fixes it. If not, I guess i'll be picking up the PS4 version.

@cirdain: I meant the GTX 850M or 860M. I have the 850M 4GB which is about the same strength as the 860M.

@korwin: Even when you look at intel's benchmarcks alone, they aren't good either .Just look at i3-4330 and how it is competing with i7-4770 and crushing its superiors at the same time .

Only played up to the point where you can play co-op (going to play most of the game with my brothers, like we did with Dead Island) and so far the only real problem I have is the FPS going to shit when cutscenes happen. Sound still plays though, and it tries to catch up. Because of this I did not see how the big mace zombie busted out, and I only caught a glimpse of the green night zombie.
I did turn off film-grain, which seemed to help with some FPS stuttering. It seems to hover around 40-55.

I have no idea what happened. I installed and ran this game maxed out (did preemptively turn the FOV down as people suggested) last night and it was BEAUTIFUL! A steady 60 FPS for a good five to six hour play session. I start it up tonight, just the same and now it's CONSTANTLY dropping into the single digits frame rate wise. I have no idea what is going on and it bums me out. :(

@johncallahan: I've got the exact opposite thing going on...yesterday the game ran like garbage, today I'm at a locked 60 all the time. No changes made since last night.

@mb: I didn't think so, don't remember downloading any patches or anything. No idea why there's the sudden change. Guess I'll just play through Grim Fandango until they finally fix this thing.

TB did a port report on it, he notes that the only setting that matter is view distance. He also points out that a single CPU core is pegged at 99% the whole time, it would seem this game does not support DX11 multi-threaded rendering and as such all the draw calls are being processed by a single core. This would explain why AMD CPU's are being absolutely humiliated in this game.

What's your CPU? The game is getting bottlenecked more than it should by what CPU you have. I have an i7 4770k with a 980 and I'm getting mostly the high 50's with the big slowdowns going down to 45 at times. Only setting I dropped was the draw distance. I haven't had the crazy framedrops to zero yet like some people have mentioned but the cutscenes could seriously be fixed up a good bit. They look like a screen tearing mess

People should save this thread to remind them to not buy AMD. That chart is...shocking

@privodotmenit: Yet the devs are claiming that the performance issues are not related to AMD GPUs...

@a_e_martin: Mainly talking about CPUs in this case

I'll let everyone know once I'm done, but I'm trying to find a way to make this sucker work on a 32-bit OS, particularly Vista. It will only let you download 129MB if you try to download it on a 32-bit OS, so I'm downloading it to a 64-bit Windows 7 right now and I'll try transferring the files to a 32-bit OS and see if I can get it going.

If so, I'll post those results here in case there is anyone who doesn't have a 64-bit OS and wants to play the game. As always, I would only encourage that to anyone who actually purchases the game because fuck pirates.

I have an i7 3.2Ghz and a GTX 970. If I turn view distance all the way down, motion blur off and medium shadows I get an almost solid 60.

Almost everyone I have seen talk about view distance has said there is very little visible difference, but I haven't tested extensively myself. It is the number one quick 'fix' for me, as it literally doubled my outdoor framerate.

This is unfortunately a meaningless piece of information since there have been 9 different kinds of i7 across multiple socket types and architectures since 2008. Intel really needs to differentiate them better in their branding outside of hoping that the user knows what architecture and socket they are running.