[Goodbye A19: Show your last base build!]

10 hours ago, Laz Man said:

 

Nice base and nice landing at the end...😅

 

I would imagine the zombies take one look at it on horde night and just turn around....nope nope nope lol.

Pretty much, they're so scared they don't even spawn😂 there isn't any blocks they can spawn on within the loaded chunks while you're there. So I go to my dart trap base nearby to have fun with the horde😛

[Goodbye A19: Show your last base build!]

I like your glass garage at the top very cool op❤️ I made a ww2 anti air tower as my main base. Saw it on the practical engineering channel and thought that would make a great place to live in the zombie apocalypse 😂 I used a separate dart trap base for hordes. I added a hangar bay to it with automated hangar bay door for the gyro. I love that hangar bay but you need so much room to accommodate everything, so i'll have to come up with something else for a20 😛


I have some video of it, i kept it unlisted (youtube wasn't happy with Spotify playing in the background xd)

Spoiler

 

[A20 Developer Diary Discussions]

11 hours ago, littlegreen said:

I normally get "Access Denied" when trying to set process affinity in windows task manager... even though I am the PC admin... any work around that?

 

EDIT: Nevermind, I've got it.

 

For the other people that are having this issue:

 

1. Right click on Taskbar.

2. Click on Task Manager.

3. Search for the process 7dtd.exe

4. Right click on it and click on Properties.

5. Click on Security tab and click on Edit.

6. Then give full permission to the Administrator. (Or your current user account)

Doing it through task manager while the game is running won't work if you're running Eac. You can set up a desktop shortcut which launches the game with the specified affinity that will work with eac. I cover the details on that in the conclusion of the affinity benchmarks I did here

[A20 Developer Diary Discussions]

2 hours ago, Fanatical_Meat said:

Would forcing the game to run on physical cores or select cores inprove

performance as opposed to letting it run on any of the 16 cores when unity only needs a few cores to run.

Yes limiting the game to 4 physical cores does help. 

2 hours ago, Fanatical_Meat said:

 

 

[Alpha 20 Dev Diary]

11 hours ago, littlegreen said:

 

I'm not quite sure that's the case at 3440x1440 ... besides, my CPU activity usually resides in the 70% usage area with browsers, Discord and a few other apps open in the background (streaming in Discord as well)... while playing the game.

 

The thing is, I get more than decent FPS during normal gameplay, but during horde nights with all the models and textures around the bases we build - especially during night, when light reflections factor in etc, frames very often dip down to below 60 which on a 144hz screen does not feel nice...

You'd still be cpu bound at 3840x2160 with a 3080 running a default config at ultra settings. 

6 hours ago, jeromeN7 said:

Super sampling is the highest quality anti-aliasing.

Dlss doesn't super sample. Dlss runs a game at a lower resolution and ai upscales the image to a higher resolution. 

 

Super sampling doesn't need any dev support and can be enabled in the driver now if you want. Super sampling runs the game at a higher resolution than your display can display, then down scales the image to your displays resolution. 

[Alpha 20 Dev Diary]

13 hours ago, littlegreen said:

@Roland @faatal

 

Guys, are there any future plans to enable super sampling for the game? Either DLSS or FFX-SR (preferably DLSS lol)

I know it is best to optimize as best as you can so that stuff like that is not needed at all, but I am struggling to display Ultra settings on anything above 1080p in high frame rate, and I happen to be running a 3080, so... super sampling maybe makes sense? 😇

 

EDIT:

OK, just to be clear - I'm not bragging about having a nice GPU, I'm asking a genuine question. Screen resolutions are ever increasing and DLSS is a very nice way to get around that, whilst at the same time keeping system requirements low - thus targeting a wider audience

With a 3080 you're cpu bound, any kind of upscaling would just make the image slightly worse at the same performance you're currently getting. 

[A20 Developer Diary Discussions]

8 minutes ago, KhaineGB said:

Sounds about right. I did my testing on my 10850K before I started messing with overclocking properly (5.2ghz single, 5.1ghz dual, 5ghz quad, 4.8ghz all-core, tweaked numbers to 5.2ghz single/dual, 5.1ghz quad for the test. Now running 5.2ghz single -> quad, 5ghz all core)

I tried to keep the traditional overclock methods alive for my 5950x, but the best i could do was worse than stock😄. So i had to adapt to the more modern tuning the frequency curve of the boost algorithm route. Got much better results 5-15% more performance. I mean it's nice modern hardware is already tuned near it's maximum potential out of the box, but i'll miss the satisfaction of making it run better and knowing i'm getting everything it's got out of it😂

[Alpha 20 Dev Diary]

31 minutes ago, Kinyajuu said:

Yes. 150x150. Yes.

Is it possible to create tiles that have some kind of meta data that when generated in rwg always spawn a group of specific tiles, that always line up together in a specific way? Say to split a larger prefab than 150 into separate prefabs and have each section of the prefab in it's own tile always spawned together lined up.

3 minutes ago, KhaineGB said:

Older hardware still had turbo boost for single core vs all core.

It just wasn't as granular as the newer hardware that has like single, dual, quad and all core turbo.

true the 6700k has a boost of 4.2 and there is an all core optimisation option in the bios that runs all cores at that boost, but for that test it was running a manual 4.5 all core oc, so the clock speeds were capped at a maximum clock of 4.5, single dual or all core loads would never exceed that clock speed.

[A20 Developer Diary Discussions]

32 minutes ago, KhaineGB said:

I can tell you exactly why No 1 happens.

Valheim and 7DTD like CPU speed more than CPU cores. Therefore, limiting to 4 cores allows the CPU to turbo higher as they all have "per core" turbo that depends on how much is being used.

If you turned on "Multi-core enhancement" in your BIOS (I believe this is available for both AMD and Intel) you'd see the exact same behaviour happen as your system auto-overclocks ALL cores to the "single core turbo" speed. However, be aware this uses more voltage and more heat.

Tested it myself by limiting 7DTD to 4 cores at 5.1ghz vs 8 cores at 4.8ghz.

That may be a factor with newer hardware, however the 6700k is a 4 core 8 thread cpu, so not utilising the 4 virtual cores has a minimal impact on how much power the chip draws. It's also an older cpu that doesn't have todays boost technology's and it was running a static all core 4.5Ghz overclock so any boost behaviour wouldn't apply there. The 5950x system however does indeed boost significantly higher with only a few cores under any kind of load, however i've benchmarked stock cpu performance against a static per ccx overclock on a 3950x and the gains of a few hundred Mhz higher boost don't come anywhere near the performance gain from assigning 4 true cores. So if the cores are running at a fixed frequency and assigning affinity still yields a significant boost, it must be another reason. I'd wondered if it was just unity being optimised for systems with 4 threads, there was a very long period where 4 core i5's where the go to choice for gaming systems.

[Alpha 20 Dev Diary]

@faatal If you have a sec could you look at these performance tweaks and share your thoughts? if they check out with you, they could give a substantial boost to performance in a20 and they're small changes. I can measure that things are better with them, but i still don't understand the "how" they work as well as they do and i don't know if there are any potential issues running the game with them.

1 is locking the game to 4 physical cores, helps more the more cores/threads you have. I saw a 20-25% improvement in Valheim with the same tweak so maybe it's a unity thing?

2 is editing a file called boot.config , this has a similar boost to the 4 core affinity tweak, however it's not compatible with eac, so currently it can only be used in sp. Using both of these tweaks substantially boost performance. I don't know how useful or practical to implement the 4 core affinity tweak could be, however the boot.config tweak is a very simple change and as long as there are no side effects it might be worth changing it in vanilla. It would also be nice to know what exactly the changes are and what they do 😛

I'll leave benchmark numbers on 2 systems and details on the changes to the boot.config in the spoiler bellow (so i don't clutter up the thread :P)

 

Spoiler

All setting set to ultra except motion blurs disabled. The boot config tweak was brought up in this thread by DonDregon. The file in question is located here:
7 Days To Die\7DaysToDie_Data\boot.config

Current boot.config	Tweaked boot config
gfx-enable-native-gfx-jobs= wait-for-native-de@%$#=0 scripting-runtime-version=latest vr-enabled=0 hdr-display-enabled=0 gc-max-time-slice=3	gfx-enable-gfx-jobs=1 gfx-enable-native-gfx-jobs=1 wait-for-native-de@%$#=0 scripting-runtime-version=latest vr-enabled=0 hdr-display-enabled=0 gc-max-time-slice=3

system 1
CPU: i7 6700K | GPU: 1080ti | Ram: 32GB DDR4 3000Mhz


system 2
CPU: R9 5950x | GPU: 3090 | Ram: 64GB DDR4 3600Mhz

 

[Low FPS on a high end PC -> shadow issues]

Just wanted to follow up with some more info on the bootconfig tweak. Seems it isn't compatible with EAC, so unfortunately players can't use it if they play on a EAC enabled server. It would have to be part of vanilla which is a shame since it's a really simple change and on initial tests provides a great deal more performance.

[A20 Developer Diary Discussions]

11 hours ago, Dares said:

I have an opposite problem. I have massive fps drops in my base at around 23 o clock. It drops from 50fps to 20. After midnight it goes back to normal. Playing on random map and even changed the time with settime (it worked), but almost every day is the same problem. Anyone had the same ?

Do you have a bunch of electrical timer relays set up for that time? 

[Unable to Start Client Outside Steam]

Thought i'd throw some ideas in the pot 😜 
- see if it works if you install the client on another drive, could be some funky drive error causing issues
The eac support page has some ideas, but most of it you've already tried.

The "Untrusted System FileUntrusted System File" says it a system level corruption, but you said you've reinstalled multiple times with different os's, so maybe your C:\ drive is having issues or maybe it's ram related.

My guesses, probably not useful but i tried XD

[Low FPS on a high end PC -> shadow issues]

Benchmarks from my other system

Specs
cpu: AMD 5950x 16 Core 32 Threads
Ram: 64gb 3600mhz
GPU: RTX 3090

All setting's set to ultra, except motion blur which is disabled.

 

This time the affinity tweak came out on top, but combining the tweaks still wins the day. Like i've said many times 7DTD doesn't like having tons of threads available to it, the more threads it has the worse the performance is. This is why the affinity tweak won this round because the game had access to 32 threads it couldn't use efficiently.

If you want to run a similar benchmark, choose a new game on nav's map. Since i use the "settime day" command to reset the time of day after every run, i wouldn't recommend doing this on a world you intend to play on, since settime is notorious for breaking things. i also use GPUZ and it's sensors tab to log the avg gpu load and clock speed, just reset the log just before you start a new run and remember to screen cap the app after every run to somewhat accurately record the averages and add them to the benchmark txt data.

I'd also recommend you follow my benchmark run around Diresvile if you want it to be comparable, i'll leave the exact path i follow below (note the image is from a14 and the working stiffs before the bridge is now on the other side of the street)
 

Spoiler

 

I used to use food and coffee to continually sprint, but it's no longer necessary. You can how enable debug mode in the console (dm) and hit Q the H. Q is god mode and H is fly mode, first go into god mode for unlimited stamina and then disable fly mode so you can run like normal.

[Low FPS on a high end PC -> shadow issues]

2 hours ago, DonDregon said:

can't say much because setting affinity for 4 real cores (8 virtual cores) does not add any improvement on performance nor stability to me as far as I've tried.

This is because you assigned the game 8 threads, just assign the 4 physical cores not the virtual threads. Physical cores start at core 0, then core 1 is core 0's virtual thread, then core 2 is a physical core, core 3 is core 2's virtual threads etc so forth. So you just want core 0,2,4,6

[Low FPS on a high end PC -> shadow issues]

10 hours ago, DonDregon said:

 

That's great so it means many users could get a boost performance combining those tweaks!

 

I've no tool to bench this and 7d2d has no built-in bench, I'm just trying to help with what I could found and what I've tried so far walking around the same like 200x200 with this tweaks enabled/disabled/combined looking at the fps count and I'm telling you the result. Btw how does it come that you get better result limiting the game to 4 cores on a 4 core CPU? Doesn't limit the cores to 4 means "use all cores" anyway?

 

Also I would like to know which tool do you use to bench this images out so I can use it as well to post the results 

Yeah no worries I use msi afterburner and rivatuner server statistics. The reason it helps for a 4 core cpu is because it has hyperthreading, so on top of it's 4 physical cores it has 4 virtual cores. So windows and applications see it as an 8 thread cpu. I haven't tried the tweak on a 4 core 4 thread cpu, but I think it's safe to say it wouldn't do anything. 

[Low FPS on a high end PC -> shadow issues]

7 hours ago, DonDregon said:

because in order to make a strict core association to a given software to work well you'll need to edit the core usage for ALL running apps including system processes which is a titanic task and suitable for drawbacks, otherwise you can get better fps but some other app can malfunction such discord, chrome and whatever. I've 3 monitors and I use all of them with different things so It's a bad option to me, this is of course a TWEAK that can or cannot be achieved using 3rd party software but it will definitely affect the entire computer performance at least during game sessions on 7d2d.

Thank you for returning with something more constructive. First up is this statement. You do not have to edit any other process affinity because you altered another's. I've never had any problems setting affinity on multiple apps and using 4 monitors, not sure why you think this is the case. It most definitely does NOT affect the entire computers performance while 7dtd is running. 
 

 

7 hours ago, DonDregon said:

Then I've found a thread about Unity games, that seems to work for both 7d2d and Escape from Tarkov

Now this tweak you linked actually holds some water. I've ran some benchmarks to test both the affinity tweak, boot config tweak and running both tweaks.



These test were run on my other machine with a 6700k (4 cores 8 threads) & 1080ti at 1440p. You can see regardless to what we do we're still firmly CPU Bound even with a older 1080ti. However both tweaks improve this

 

7 hours ago, DonDregon said:

- Editing the boot.config seems to not combine with core affinity tweak so I'll say that editing the boot.config is the way to go as it has less drawbacks than core affinity has.

As we can see from these results this part obviously isn't true, running both tweaks here yielded greater performance than just either 1 and again there are no drawbacks from assign 7dtd 4 core affinity, not that I've ever experienced in thousands of hours anyway.
 

7 hours ago, DonDregon said:

Other options:

I saw there's a -threads launch command that can be set in steam launch options which I guess can deal to the same result than using the affinity thing.

I mean if you set up the game to run on cores 0, 1, 2, 3 it will use (if muli-threading enabled) the threads:
0/1, 0/2, 1/1, 1/2, 2/1, 2/2, 3/1, 3/2

So if you set the launch command to use those threads, the result should be the same than saying "use this specific cores".

* Note that this is my guess, I said I'm a software engineer and it's true but I work on a different field so I may be wrong if any of those options have underlying effects that I know nothing about.

 

There is also another option like -high which makes it a high priority process but well, check the details here

 

I've tried:

-threads 4 -high

-threads 8 -high

-threads 4

-threads 8

 

 

Result: -threads 4 deals a performance loss, -threads 8 does not make any difference and -high does not make any difference as well.

This was an interesting read, however he's talking about csgo, you're comparing apples to a bacon sandwich, so doesn't really apply to a fully destructible voxel game on an entirely different engine. Also when i refer to affinity i mean launching the game with a cmd affinity start-up shortcut or task manager, i haven't tested the -threads launch option in steam so i can't say if this will still apply using that method.

However his closing statement has some relevance here.
My recommendation would be to not set the launch option, unless you can objectively measure different values are beneficial to your performance. I cannot stress this enough, don't do anything unless you can objective measure the effects. These kinds of tweaks are dependent on all kinds of things, such as your hardware, in game settings, stuff running on your machine and god knows what. Any 'guide' you find online that will tell you to set this to a specific value (be it 4/8, or the number of logical/physical processors) is likely full of snake oil.

I've published tons of data here to support my claims of the benefits of 4 core affinity, i'm not pulling recommendations out of thin air. Try things and benchmark them yourself to validate it.
I also agree with the statement that More people should test things and properly, and i don't mean taking a screenshot of the framerate. Run a proper comparative controlled benchmark. A "Spot Check" can give you a quick indication however you're comparing 2 frames to each other, you don't know what was running in that split second it took to take the screen shot, maybe a horde was spawning, maybe the slightly different camera angle changed the load on the system because it has more shadows or reflections, maybe the state of the particle effect on the weapon affected the result. Even taking the screenshot can affect the result if for some reason it was saving to a hdd that had to spin up freezing the game for a split second. A proper benchmark run can account for these things and give a more realistic result.

I'll do some more benchmarks on my 5950x and 3090 system to see how the boot config tweak works on a different system, but first results are really good even better running them both.

[Low FPS on a high end PC -> shadow issues]

Welcome, Yeah the hex value can be a pain to work out, but it's not too bad once you get your head around it. I just use notepad and type out the thread numbers, then under than I put the binary with the cores I want and then convert it to hex. Glad you figured it out 👍

[Low FPS on a high end PC -> shadow issues]

2 hours ago, DonDregon said:

tbh I'm not gonna install any software to play with the cores to play a game

i'd also set
- SS reflections -> Disabled

Also where does it say you have to install any 3rd party software? If you read my the post with the 2 links in that thread, 1 is a link to 2 windows shortcuts that apply the affinity when you use them to launch then game. The 2nd is just a guide on creating the windows shortcuts yourself. No 3rd party software was recommended anywhere in that thread.

1 hour ago, DonDregon said:

The current balance is that I can play at this fps because I consider it enough entertaining to me

Then why are you here complaining of performance problems then? If it's fine to you great, just enjoy the game. You asked for ideas and that's exactly what you got. If you don't want to put in even the minimalist amount of effort, that's fine too, nothing is forcing you to do anything. The suggestions offered to you require nothing more than 30 seconds of time. If you can't be bothered with the solutions just say so instead of buck the issue up the chain and give every excuse not to dirty your hands with any kind of effort. The game is in alpha development it takes time as you should know. You want better performance today, now, tweaking is required. If not, no problem play at 20fps in your base or wait until the game is finished.

[Low FPS on a high end PC -> shadow issues]

14 hours ago, Jugginator said:

You may get a decent boost by playing in 1080 resolution, or use the scale setting in dynamic resolution set to about 92% or so; resolution is also highly CPU-bound. But, I'd start with limited the game to 4 cores.

Sometimes that can work, however in this case with a 3080 at 1440p is cpu bound and it wouldn't perform any different. If you look at my a19.5 ultra settings benchmark results here you can see going from 1440p (OC) 58.6fps avg to 1080p (OC) 58.7fps avg

[Low FPS on a high end PC -> shadow issues]

19 hours ago, DonDregon said:

Thanks I'll try turning off reflected shadows/SSAO to see how it works after the current hore (that I need to face in some real life minutes xD) and I'll provide feedback to let you know how it worked.

 

By the way, how limiting it to use 4 cores can help in this issue? 

There's a few things you can try that should help. If you check out the link jug left, it has some performance tweaks that could help. 

 

I'd also check to make sure you're not doing too much with electricity, it's never really been optomized and is a performance killer. Somthing to keep an eye out for also is if you're playing with ultra reflections, make sure you're not overusing highly reflective paints on your base. Also as jug suggested disable screen space reflections and reflective shadows. 

 

The 4 core tweak is an odd one, it sounds counterintuitive to limit how many cores the game can use, but from my testing it helps with cpus with more than 4 threads. 

 

I'm by no means qualified to tell you why exactly it works. However it has to do with a couple of factors. 

1. Ryzen cpus use a cpu design that uses mutiple chips and each chip separates groups of cores into ccx's. For the best single core performance you want to keep all the processing on a single die or ideally a single ccx. The core layouts for Ryzen 3000 cpus are explained in more detail in this article. 

 

2. For some reason the unity engine often works more effectively locked to 4 cores. There is an article with some possible explanation on this here. I've also benchmarked this tweak extensively and you can see in the results it can help a ton the more cores you have over 4.

[A20 Developer Diary Discussions]

38 minutes ago, Matt115 said:

Well i'm think graphic is more important that frames and i hate when streamers play on warzone etc and have 100 fps but graphic looks terrible. why ? because people watch them so devs will be more focused about  at least 60 fps that good graphic. well i played a lot in mw 2 , dod and it was good. now playing in modern pvp is nightmare

Depends on the game, high fps also has a competitive advantage since your eye balls see more recent frames. So in a situation where 2 players come to a corner and both come into view of each other at the same time, the player with the higher framerate will see a couple of frames showing the other player first. It's not always a situation like that tho it was just an example, even in that situation a couple frames is literally the blink of an eye. So if your reaction time is slow if doesn't really do anything for you. But that is why games like warzone see players running higher frame rates, pretty much all competitive games are designed to be easy to run at high frame rates.

for singleplayer or coop games most people usually just turn up the eye candy in favour of visuals over frame rate. It just depends what type of game it is that decides what the devs choose to make a priority. I think that absolute bare minimum in general needs to be 24-30 fps. 24fps has been a standard in the tv and movie industry for donkeys. It works fine there because it's a static view, you don't control the camera so the motion is perceived as smooth to the eyes. For games 24 is pretty rough, you could technically get away with it, but it would really suck. Under that it impacts you're ability to control the game and it becomes unplayable.

[A20 Developer Diary Discussions]

29 minutes ago, Gamida said:

Speaking of FPS what is the difference. I have heard that 60fps is the sweet spot. I usually have that. I think I locked it somehow so my fps doesn't really go above that and I only notice something when sometimes for some reason it may drop suddenly to 10 or so for a split second then back again. At what point does a higher fps not matter.

I have watched some YTers, (LTT and Jayztwocents mostly) that show them getting really high fps on some games. I mean like couple hundred or more. Does that make a difference? I am not sure but they may have mentioned it mattered to players who play professionally in tournaments but what about to the casual player like me and most of you. Do you need a higher framerate to keep it smoother when you use a higher resolution to keep it smooth?

Just curious. What do you think is a good frame rate, at least for this game so it plays smooth enough.

generally speaking it depends. fps is frames per second or how many "images" the game renders per second. The higher the fps the smoother and more responsive the game feels. However not all games need a high fps to be considered "smooth" rts game could be run comfortably at 30 fps for example. It also depends on what monitor you have and if you're running at it's higher refresh rates. You can still notice greater response times at framerates above your monitors refresh rate, you won't be seeing the extra frames but the frames that are displayed will have a lower latency because of the higher fps.

That will cause screen tearing however that is another topic, so it's generally best to not run games at a framerate your monitor can't display (except for benchmarking purposes). As a rule of thumb 60fps is a good starting point for the majority of games, over 60 will have a greater importance in games that are fast paced. 7DTD kind of sits in the middle, it has a mix of slow paced gameplay and fast paced gameplay. If you have a monitor that can display more than 60 go for it, it will feel much more responsive especially if you're sensitive to that kind of thing and if you already have a monitor that can do so you may as well make use of it, since presumably you paid a premium for a higher refresh rate display. If you have a 60hz panel that's perfectly fine too, you won't be missing all that much (in 7DTD at least)

The last thing with higher fps gameplay is that you will need not only a more powerful GPU but CPU too, especially for 7DTD since the pc will have to work harder to render the extra frames. With higher settings (but not completely maxed) 100fps should be achievable for most people. If you have a decent setup 150fps should be possible. However when talking about frame rate, context is important, the estimates above are based on the assumption you're using a higher resolution panel than 1440p. If you're running at 1080p you can get away with a much less powerful GPU. The FPS numbers also assume you're using highish settings. You can of course sett everything to the lowest it can go and stare at the sky with 500 fps, but i'm assuming people that want to go higher than 60 want to do so without making the game look like a$$ and the ability to look at the ground occasionally😜

[A20 Developer Diary Discussions]

2 hours ago, Darklegend222 said:

Specs: i9-10850k, 32gb DDR4-3200, Radeon RX 6700xt, 2tb Samsung SSD (moved from an inland professional)

I've got it running at 1440p, with occlusion on, motion blur and depth of field are disabled. Radeon Image Sharpening is enabled at 100%, Radeon Enhanced Sync is enabled, and i'm use Radeon Anti-Lag. Average framerate is 72. It goes to 90-110 in fields, it can drop to 60 in towns, which i've only tested in Diersville as of now.

 

The CPU didn't exceed 45% which is still about 4-5 cores but thats not bad in the slightest. I've tested it in the hospital (i'm uploading a video but it might take a day or 2 due to Youtubes insane upload limit.) and it ran at 40fps with Occlusion OFF, so i enabled it and went through the hospital off camera, and it ran at 55-60fps which is excellent.

 

Its not perfect, but it works perfectly. The GPU has reached 100% multiple times which is expected at 1440p, so I'd say its excellent and does the job proper.

Good to hear, ye cities like diersvile are good places to go to stress the cpu. Glad to hear you're able to get full usage tho nice one. 👍

[What you prefer to eat or drink while playing game?]

Don't google spunky drink😂