FPS Issues

[XPho3nixRisingX]

Lol @erlgrey, probably true. And using sylen's settings actually tanked my fps more than my own. Texture size, texture filter, water quality, and water particles had no noticeable effect on my framerate... Changing ss reflections to off is the only setting that changed my fps more than 2 "5 actually." But I found a bit of a stopgap elsewhere... Opening the console and entering "gfx af 0" seems to improve my framerate ~15ish. I don't know exactly why, someone just said that it was supposed to be a VRAM thing. And I'm still 15 frames from what is reasonable/desirable "60." But at least the game runs a lot more smoothly and I don't notice much if any visual quality differences, even at ridiculous distances. Though I really wish I didn't have to play around with the console to get the game "even close to" playable. And change settings without knowing exactly what they do. So I'll just attach the post that saved me a LOT of trouble here, in the hopes that either A: this information becomes easier to access B: the game sees large optimizations/performance improvements, or C: BOTH.

 

[erlgrey]

yes, AF tanks performance heavily in this game, i can't run more than 4x AF with my vega56 too without dropping in unplayable performance region. (without hitting vram limit btw)

funnily it is not that bad for me in vulkan, in 18.1 i did some comparison and i had pretty much similar performance with very high graphic settings in vulkan (16x af too) compared to medium settings with 2 or 4x af in dx11. sad thing is, it crashes very very fast.

 

i can counter some of the blurriness due to low af setting by using high (radeon) image sharpening setting without loosing any performance, guess you can give it a shot in your nvidia driver settings.

[XPho3nixRisingX]

@erlgrey

 

Interestingly enough I don't seem to get any bluriness from AF 0... And I even left the nvidia settings image sharpening off? Weird, also Vulkan literally halves my already low framerate on my 960 4GB so it's likely Vulkan does better with your gpu/cpu "and I'm guessing it's the gpu." GL Core literally stutters while reporting a "normal" frame rate XD

[Beelzybub]

Though I really wish I didn't have to play around with the console to get the game "even close to" playable

 

You can disable AF (Anisotropic Filtering) in the Nvidia Control Panel. After which, you won't need to do it from the game console.

[XPho3nixRisingX]

As it was already when I checked the nvidia control panel... Only worked after allowing the game to control it and entering the command into the console... And regardless it's still too much to ask for the average person to know how to tweak driver settings for a single game...

[meganoth]

As it was already when I checked the nvidia control panel... Only worked after allowing the game to control it and entering the command into the console... And regardless it's still too much to ask for the average person to know how to tweak driver settings for a single game...

 

Well, alpha and all that. In A17 there was a huge performance drop. As a hot fix they implemented the AF and other commands and told anyone to try the commands when they have fps troubles. Then in a later version added those settings to the config menue and added rules to startup like "AF=0 if your GPU is a potato" (rephrasing because I don't remember the exact rule ).

 

So it seems your PC gets misclassified by the current heuristic, for whatever reason. You might file a bug report.

 

There are also lots of finished games on the market where average persons supposedly don't need to know cryptic commands.

[XPho3nixRisingX]

@meganoth

 

It seems like you have an idea of what is going on here. Could you please elaborate on my PC getting misclassified by the heuristic. I'd love to file a bug report if it would help, and especially if it gets the ball rolling on a fix. But I really don't know if I have enough information about what is happening to provide a report... I've played a great many games where I've hosted servers and needed to know a great deal of commands. But none have ever required driver tweaks to run properly "if I recall correctly." But I do get that the game is still in alpha. It's just been frustrating trying everything I can to get the game running properly, only to find that a command I was told was experimental would've helped all along.

[meganoth]

I've read a lot of changelogs and followed the dev diary. But that doesn't mean I know the code.

 

I can only guess that your machine might be misclassified because when your machine is only able to reach 30 FPS, AF should already be turned off or very low and using the command should not do anything drastic. So you should report speccy output, game logfiles and the info that you could only reach sensible FPS (60 instead of 30) after entering the AF command. And that you would have expected to get sensible FPS without having to manually set AF=0. Use a low resolution and low graphics settings, and no weird memory configuration. Then it is up to the testers and devs.

 

The low graphics setting is important, by the way. It is possible that the heuristic simply uses graphics settings to decide whether to turn off AF.

 

And it might take a while. So better get used to setting AF manually for a while.

[Beelzybub]

If the Nvidia Control Panel has AF disabled, and 7D2D somehow turns it back on, that would be a bug.

Or maybe Nvidia AF is something different than 7D2D AF?

[erlgrey]

there is still a issue that texture filter setting in 7dtd options does only work for current runtime, it saves the value successfully in registry but does not apply it on next game start.

means you have to change the value everytime you start 7dtd to apply it again, af driver setting does usually not change game settings at all, just overrides it.