My experience with A19 performance

[Madnesis]

I doubt it's going to be of any use here but because I posted this on Steam forums, I thought why not here as well.

 

Here is a summary of my own experience with A19 performance on a beefy computer knowing I had better and more stable frame rate with A18, something seems to be off at the moment with vanilla A19 if you ask me. Mainly tested with experimental build B169 but I noticed no difference with last B173 update from yesterday.

Recap of my rig (details in my Steam profile) :
 

• Intel Core i9-9900K
• NVIDIA RTX 2080 Ti
• 1 TB M.2 NVMe SSD
• 32 GB RAM

Playing with all settings maxed out except "Object Quality", playing in 2K (1440p) resolution.

VRAM (GPU):

A19 does use a HUGE amount of VRAM if you have it available, which is a good and bad thing, good because we want games to use our hardware as much as possible, bad because I doubt it's properly optimized yet as it doesn't look like I'm actually benefiting from it. Because of that, I noticed that if I keep my web browser open for instance with all my tabs and stuff running in background, the in-game performance decreases significantly so better close your open application before running 7D2D. NOTE: I'm not totally sure I had "Texture Streaming" setting ON right from the beginning so that may be the reason why VRAM usage was so huge but many people report the same so it appears to be a thing.

Stuttering

Occurs mainly when approaching POIs, very noticeable in big cities when big/multiple buildings are being loaded. I found two ways to mitigate it to an acceptable level:

1. My Windows Page File (swap) was on my System disk, my non-M.2 SSD when 7D2D is installed on my games disk, which is my M.2 so even though my game would benefit from loading files very quickly, 7D2D is the first game I noticed a small bottleneck so disabling my page file (not recommended for overall system stability) increase performance as my System disk doesn't perform as good as my M.2 and RAM. NOTE: if you don't have a M.2 disk but have a lot of RAM, the setup of a RamDisk and moving 7D2D install in it is a good option.
2. I noticed less stutter after I started using "Zombie Stutter Stop" modlet which forces zombies to preload into RAM, available here: https://community.7daystodie.com/topic/19558-khaines-a19-modlets-bigger-backpacks-backpack-buttons-hp-bars-etc/

Overall framerate

1. Out of all 7D2D settings available from the in-game menu, I found only one to have a huge impact on performance: "Object Quality". I only did try the settings individually, not combinations as it would take me forever to test but when other settings would not provide additional frames per second or only 1 or 2, "Object Quality" literally kills my FPS when next/in a city. By just tweaking this setting, I did gain around 30 FPS if not more, which is insane.
2. Followed the steps documented in following URL, which is about modifying config file, noticed a performance boost but do NOT use it if you play on servers with EAC as it's not compatible apparently: https://www.reddit.com/r/7daystodie/comments/g0n8gm/huge_performance_increase_in_7_days_to_die_unity/

[Ghostlight]

For me it was Terrain Quality. High gave me 20 fps, Medium gave a solid 60 fps.

[Laz Man]

2 hours ago, Ghostlight said:

For me it was Terrain Quality. High gave me 20 fps, Medium gave a solid 60 fps.

Same here. Low didnt look much different for me and gave me huge performance so I kept it at low.

[watzlp]

I have found that running the game on a sata ssd vs a m.2 has no effect on performance even though I wish it would. For the most part, A19 has been running rather well after playing for more than 20 minutes. IT seems when the game first starts up however, it has some major hickups and seems to stutter alot. Im curious if it just takes a while to cache assets or if this game even uses a caching system to begin with. Never looked into it too much.

[Madnesis]

13 hours ago, Ghostlight said:

For me it was Terrain Quality. High gave me 20 fps, Medium gave a solid 60 fps.

 

10 hours ago, Laz Man said:

Same here. Low didnt look much different for me and gave me huge performance so I kept it at low.

I will try playing with Terrain Quality setting again, could be that I did not decrease the quality enough to see the benefit.

 

10 hours ago, watzlp said:

I have found that running the game on a sata ssd vs a m.2 has no effect on performance even though I wish it would. For the most part, A19 has been running rather well after playing for more than 20 minutes. IT seems when the game first starts up however, it has some major hickups and seems to stutter alot. Im curious if it just takes a while to cache assets or if this game even uses a caching system to begin with. Never looked into it too much.

Really interesting, I noticed exactly the same so game performance is better after a while but did not mention it as I wasn't sure, I thought I was simply getting used to the stutter. I would be interested to know why it does improve over time, I'm wondering if it's because by moving around, the game will cache some elements and so the stutter would mainly occur when first loading it in memory or something. Anyway, having to play a game for a while before the performance gets decent isn't something I think

[Galifrey1965]

15 hours ago, Madnesis said:

 

I will try playing with Terrain Quality setting again, could be that I did not decrease the quality enough to see the benefit.

 

Really interesting, I noticed exactly the same so game performance is better after a while but did not mention it as I wasn't sure, I thought I was simply getting used to the stutter. I would be interested to know why it does improve over time, I'm wondering if it's because by moving around, the game will cache some elements and so the stutter would mainly occur when first loading it in memory or something. Anyway, having to play a game for a while before the performance gets decent isn't something I think

The stutter is the prefabs loading, ie the ones that didn't load when the world loaded in. It was a recent change and they are still perfecting it I believe.