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The Bizarre World of Observing Framerates in PoE

King Crispy

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This has almost turned into an obsession of mine, observing and trying to make sense of the performance of PoE. I'm not talking about slight slowdowns, I'm talking about outright nearly halving the framerate, on an excellent system, with no rhyme or reason to explain it.

When the beta was first released, it seemed like the game didn't suffer near the framerate issues it has, but that's mainly because the areas we were restricted to weren't the problematic ones. Almost every open wilderness area still runs very smoothly and for some reason Dyrford, despite having plenty of NPC's standing around (a leading theory in PoE's curious frame chugging being the presence of them) never showed the problem. No one suspected how bad it would get in some areas in the retail release.

So once it came out, the infamous trouble areas made many an eye roll: Copperlane in Defiance Bay and in general most areas of that city, Twin Elms (every district), and a few miscellaneous indoors areas like the marketplace in Twin Elms and certain dungeons, etc. No amount of tweaking, reinstalling, or patching the game seemed to have any effect. You just dealt with it and tried to ignore the problem. Some may ask why it even matters since this is primarily a 2D game -- and a rather boring one at that -- to which I reply that the least I should be able to expect is a 2D game running flawlessly at all times so I can properly observe all its other faults at sixty fucking instances per second.

Anyway, now patch 3.0 and the second expansion comes out. Guess what? It fixed it! Well, kind of. Now, when you load up a savegame in Twin Elms, lo and behold the framerate sticks at 60, at least for me. Walk around a little, still there. Unbelievable. Did Obsidian actually do something right for a change?

But not so fast. Enter the marketplace there, and the problem comes right back. Bam, down to 30fps. WTF? Quit and reload, same issue. Quit and reload back in Twin Elms, back to 60. Weird.

So it's still clearly a Unity issue, at least with Obsidian's implementation of Unity. And they've fixed something but I suspect there's still some bug in there having to do with lighting that continues to plague certain areas. Doubt it'll ever be truly fixed but at least it's more of an isolated problem AFAICT. And I haven't made it back to Defiance Bay yet since patch 3.0 so maybe I'm wrong.

Why do I care about this so much? Uh, should I care about the game itself that much? At least trying to figure this out gives me something interesting to do in it.
 

Fairfax

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It's so poorly optimized that the GPU usage is low even in these low framerate areas. Not to mention major frame drops when some animations are triggered, mainly chanter summons. Obsidian's own promotional videos have these drops, it's embarrassing.
I was surprised to see that TTON has much better GPU usage, although it has some inexplicable drops and high temperatures sometimes.
 

Perkel

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What slowdowns ? Even in 1.0 there was no slowdowns for me.

Also if you run game Vsynced without D3DOverider triplebuffering then Even if game will slowdown 2fps it will straight cut framerate to 30fps instead of 58 fps.

So it means that either CPU or GPU is shit and your framerate goes below 60fps where game cuts then to 30fps due to Vsync without triple buff.

Game isn't that different from full 3D game (considering it uses expensive shaders everywhere) and it runs on Unity4 which is known for bottlenecking CPUs.
 

King Crispy

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What slowdowns ? Even in 1.0 there was no slowdowns for me.

I knew someone would show up claiming this. I'd ask you to post a clip of your party standing in the market in Twin Elms with a framerate monitor running but I seriously doubt you'd do it.

And I don't think my 2600K running at 4.4GHz and my two 970's running in SLI (althought I run PoE in single GPU mode) is exactly "shit". What's shit is the game engine and probably Obsidian's pushing it too far or plain ineptitude in tinkering with it.

Also if you run game Vsynced without D3DOverider triplebuffering then Even if game will slowdown 2fps it will straight cut framerate to 30fps instead of 58 fps.

Nvidia Control Panel's Triple Buffering should be enough to handle this but it is a good suggestion to try something like D3DOverrider so I might do that.
 

Perkel

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What slowdowns ? Even in 1.0 there was no slowdowns for me.

I knew someone would show up claiming this. I'd ask you to post a clip of your party standing in the market in Twin Elms with a framerate monitor running but I seriously doubt you'd do it.

And I don't think my 2600K running at 4.4GHz and my two 970's running in SLI (althought I run PoE in single GPU mode) is exactly "shit". What's shit is the game engine and probably Obsidian's pushing it too far or plain ineptitude in tinkering with it.

Also if you run game Vsynced without D3DOverider triplebuffering then Even if game will slowdown 2fps it will straight cut framerate to 30fps instead of 58 fps.

Nvidia Control Panel's Triple Buffering should be enough to handle this but it is a good suggestion to try something like D3DOverrider so I might do that.

I have i5-3470 (3.4ghz without k) + HD7970 and literally i had no slowdowns for whole game back when i played release version.

So it means that:
- nvidia gpu has problems with game (driver issue)
- game itself doesn't like your pc for some reason
- your windows install is shit. (stuff is broken somewhere and shit happens)

I am betting for your windows craping out problems (which is how usually thing work). Because both nvidia drivers for your gpu and unity support is at this point mature.

Also your triple buffering doesn't work if you get locked to 30fps. Whole point of triple buffering is to have variable framerate with lack of horizontal lines problem at price of singular lost framers here and there.

So get D3D and enjoy not being locked to 30fps when games decides to lower fps to 55fps.
 

King Crispy

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Again, I might try that. Thank you. And yes, this could be something isolated to just Nvidia, but there are way too many reports of the exact same behavior, in the exact same areas, from ATI users.

As far as my o/s "craping" (sic) out -- lolno. It's the exact same behavior when I try PoE on my Windows 8.1 drive. Both it and my Windows 7 are meticulously maintained.

So... no clip?
 
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Perkel

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Both it and my Windows 7 are meticulously maintained.

I don't believe you unless you reinstall like me windows every half a year.

Since i got SSD i wrote autoinstaller for most of my stuff i want and now i reinstall windows in less than 40 minutes with complete software package and dependencies i usually need.

edit: still fucking remember half a day spent on installing 98 and software for it.
 

King Crispy

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My Windows 7 installation is long in the tooth but my Windows 8.1 installation barely ever gets used. It's only to test things out with. You don't have to believe me if you don't want to, but the problem persists not only across both of my o/s hard drives but also in the form of thousands of identical complaints all over the internet about the same thing.

You're the one who claims you have "no slowdowns". I don't believe you. Either prove it with a small video of your party standing inside the marketplace in Twin Elms showing your framerate or get out of here and go reinstall Windows again.
 

King Crispy

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Perkel

D3DOverrider didn't work. Downloaded and installed v2.0.1, had it detect the PoE .exe, loaded up the game with Fraps running, I hear the three beeps indicating the program is overriding Vsync and Triple Buffering, load up my savegame in the Hearthsong market, walk to the center of the room (near the fire) then the framerate tanks, dropping to 30fps.

I'm not interested in arguing with you about this; I'm just genuinely keen on "solving" it, or at least just studying it further and comparing with other people to see if it happens to them or not. Please, try the game in that location as well and see if it does it to you. I'd be genuinely curious on someone's system who's never had a problem with the game's performance if you see the same thing I am in that location. That is, if my above post didn't offend you too much.
 

Gregz

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D3DOverrider didn't work. Downloaded and installed v2.0.1, had it detect the PoE .exe, loaded up the game with Fraps running, I hear the three beeps indicating the program is overriding Vsync and Triple Buffering, load up my savegame in the Hearthsong market, walk to the center of the room (near the fire) then the framerate tanks, dropping to 30fps.

Strange, hopping between 30 fps to 60 fps is almost always a vsync issue.
 

Perkel

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It means D3D doesn't work for you which is again strange since it works with almost any game.

Try to reinstall different version of GPU drivers. Nvidia for last 2 years have usually shit drivers. So try to go back to few previous versions to see if something is up.

D3DOverrider didn't work. Downloaded and installed v2.0.1, had it detect the PoE .exe, loaded up the game with Fraps running, I hear the three beeps indicating the program is overriding Vsync and Triple Buffering, load up my savegame in the Hearthsong market, walk to the center of the room (near the fire) then the framerate tanks, dropping to 30fps.

Strange, hopping between 30 fps to 60 fps is almost always a vsync issue.

It is not "almost always" hopping between 30fps and 60fps is always VSync issue when your PC can't be above 60 fps and goes to for example 55 fps.
 

King Crispy

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Again, I don't mean to argue with you, but this is literally the only game I have on my computer that acts even remotely like this. Fallout 4, another shitty game, suffers from similar inexplicable framerate loss in certain areas but it never jumps down to 30fps, presumably because Triple Buffering (which is a setting I have always had on for any 3D game for years) works properly in it.

And it's not my Nvidia drivers. PoE's done this since launch, and there have been at least two revisions of the drivers since then.

Why won't you try what I asked?
 

Heinous Hat

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What happens if you turn vsync off? PoE isn't a dedicated fullscreen application, so you should benefit from the desktop sync. At least, I see no tearing with it off and framerate is subsequently free from the refresh limitation.

I've been downsampling here from 3840x2400 to 1920x1200. Even with that overhead, I still see up to 70fps in some less taxing areas (I have an old i5 and a GTX 760, for reference). Haven't gotten to any problem spots yet on this play-through, but I'll keep an eye out. Only problem I run into is that animation occasionally get choppy... consistent framerate but uneven delivery. It doesn't happen too often and a quick alt-tab to desktop and back fixes it.
 
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King Crispy

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Turning VSync off yields framerates in the 80's to 90's, predictably. Except in that marketplace. No matter what I do, every time I enter there then specifically walk towards the central fire pit, the frames tank to the 40's then clamp down to 30 exactly. Leave the area, back to 60.

I just did the battle of Caed Nua sequence (added with WM 2) with dozens of spells going off, scores of characters on the screen, and the framerate never dropped below about 50, which is rather impressive for Unity. Patch 3.0 definitely helped a lot (no more real chugging in Copperlane) but that one specific area always seems to do that.

Weird.
 

Severian Silk

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I don't believe *you* Crispy. And I'm not checking my framerate until you fix your comp issues.
 

King Crispy

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Bitch, please.

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