Low Fps on high end pc

[Surreall]

On 12/20/2021 at 5:50 PM, Pernicious said:

The below should instruct it to use cores 5, 7, 9, 11. Won't work on anything with less than 6 real cores.

 

C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe /c start "7D2D" /affinity AA "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\7 Days To Die\7DaysToDie_EAC.exe"

 

(Edit, actually off by one, because Core 0, still needs a flag to be set, so it actually sets it on core 4, 6, 8, 10 - I.e. the physical cores, not the logical ones).

Having trouble getting this to work... keeps saying steam isn't available when I launch the link.  Initially it starts to load fine, but then instead of the 7dtd menu coming up to join/create a game, the steam error shows.

 

What am I doing wrong?

[meganoth]

There should be a script in the game directory that is usually started and does some preliminary work (at least I assume it is, as I have something similar on my operating system). Instead of starting the exe maybe start that script.

 

 

[Pernicious]

On 1/16/2022 at 5:46 AM, Surreall said:

Having trouble getting this to work... keeps saying steam isn't available when I launch the link.  Initially it starts to load fine, but then instead of the 7dtd menu coming up to join/create a game, the steam error shows.

 

What am I doing wrong?

 

Steam also has to be running. It uses Steam APIs locally to get your steam ID so you can  log into any game and track your character profiles  - including local ones. 

[Surreall]

1 hour ago, Pernicious said:

 

Steam also has to be running. It uses Steam APIs locally to get your steam ID so you can  log into any game and track your character profiles  - including local ones. 

Yeah it's running but it just can't see it apparently.  Probably because I'm trying to launch it directly from a shortcut to the game exe with the config listed above.  IDK what else to do though, can't find a script that looks like it has anything to do with launching the game... found one for a dedicated server, but I'm not running a server on this PC.

[BFT2020]

2 hours ago, Surreall said:

Yeah it's running but it just can't see it apparently.  Probably because I'm trying to launch it directly from a shortcut to the game exe with the config listed above.  IDK what else to do though, can't find a script that looks like it has anything to do with launching the game... found one for a dedicated server, but I'm not running a server on this PC.

Not sure if you tried these steps yet:

 

1) Open up Steam and click on the link at the upper right (labeled Steam).  Select Check for Steam Client upgrades and see if it needs to download an update

2) Shutdown steam and relaunch it.  And by shutdown, I mean shut the program down.  Don't minimize it, select Exit.  Open up Program Manager and make sure all instances of Steam have closed.

[Surreall]

1 hour ago, BFT2020 said:

Not sure if you tried these steps yet:

 

1) Open up Steam and click on the link at the upper right (labeled Steam).  Select Check for Steam Client upgrades and see if it needs to download an update

2) Shutdown steam and relaunch it.  And by shutdown, I mean shut the program down.  Don't minimize it, select Exit.  Open up Program Manager and make sure all instances of Steam have closed.

Yep it's updated

[stueck0514]

The best I can tell you is the game itself sucks for GPU usage. I have a 2080ti and I seem to hover between 40-65% usage. If you go into the 7 days to die folder, then into 7daystodie_data folder, there is a file called boot (a config file). If you open it up in wordpad, put these two lines at the top:

 

gfx-enable-gfx-jobs=1
gfx-enable-native-gfx-jobs=1

 

In total you will have:

 

gfx-enable-gfx-jobs=1
gfx-enable-native-gfx-jobs=1
wait-for-native-de@%$#=0
hdr-display-enabled=0
gc-max-time-slice=3

 

 

The good news is this runs my graphics card fully like any other game, the bad news is when I first boot into the server it is only the background image that shows up, but if I leave and go back in, everything is perfect.  I went from slugging away at 30-60 fps to the full 120 I need without changing any game graphics settings. Hope this helps, and you can always delete the code if you don't like it.

[Robeloto]

27 minutes ago, stueck0514 said:

The best I can tell you is the game itself sucks for GPU usage. I have a 2080ti and I seem to hover between 40-65% usage. If you go into the 7 days to die folder, then into 7daystodie_data folder, there is a file called boot (a config file). If you open it up in wordpad, put these two lines at the top:

 

gfx-enable-gfx-jobs=1
gfx-enable-native-gfx-jobs=1

 

In total you will have:

 

gfx-enable-gfx-jobs=1
gfx-enable-native-gfx-jobs=1
wait-for-native-de@%$#=0
hdr-display-enabled=0
gc-max-time-slice=3

 

 

The good news is this runs my graphics card fully like any other game, the bad news is when I first boot into the server it is only the background image that shows up, but if I leave and go back in, everything is perfect.  I went from slugging away at 30-60 fps to the full 120 I need without changing any game graphics settings. Hope this helps, and you can always delete the code if you don't like it.

Damn, when I check my gpu usage it is at 90% sometimes. Same GPU. Gets laggy everytime zombies are spawning. Never had this trouble in A19. Maybe my GPU is dying lol.

Edited January 17, 2022 by Robeloto (see edit history)

[Naz]

On 1/15/2022 at 6:46 PM, Surreall said:

Having trouble getting this to work... keeps saying steam isn't available when I launch the link.  Initially it starts to load fine, but then instead of the 7dtd menu coming up to join/create a game, the steam error shows.

 

What am I doing wrong?

You need to make sure steam is running before launching the game with the shortcut. I'd also change the start parameter from "7DTD" to "7DaysToDie" after that you can add /high if you want to give the process high priority, i haven't noticed any meaningful change in doing so but doesn't hurt so why not xd. Also make sure in the shortcuts properties you fill in the "starts in" field with your install path. for mines it's "V:\Games\Steam\steamapps\common\7 Days To Die" Also make sure that field and the target field actually point to where your install is, if it isn't installed on your c or v drive at that location it won't work.

9 hours ago, stueck0514 said:

The best I can tell you is the game itself sucks for GPU usage. I have a 2080ti and I seem to hover between 40-65% usage. If you go into the 7 days to die folder, then into 7daystodie_data folder, there is a file called boot (a config file). If you open it up in wordpad, put these two lines at the top:

 

gfx-enable-gfx-jobs=1
gfx-enable-native-gfx-jobs=1

 

In total you will have:

 

gfx-enable-gfx-jobs=1
gfx-enable-native-gfx-jobs=1
wait-for-native-de@%$#=0
hdr-display-enabled=0
gc-max-time-slice=3

 

 

The good news is this runs my graphics card fully like any other game, the bad news is when I first boot into the server it is only the background image that shows up, but if I leave and go back in, everything is perfect.  I went from slugging away at 30-60 fps to the full 120 I need without changing any game graphics settings. Hope this helps, and you can always delete the code if you don't like it.

This is a great tip, however keep in mind it isn't eac compatible. If you play on a eac protected server you can't use this. Additionally it will revert to stock after an update. Fatal mentioned enabled gpu jobs will be in a20.1 i believe in the dev diary. So hopefully everyone can enjoy it's benefits in the future.

[Naz]

Another couple tips for the affinity trick. If you have a modern cpu released in the last 3-5 years your cpu may have what's called "best cores" these cores give you your single threaded max boost clocks. They run at higher clocks speeds than the others so it's worth targeting those cores to lock the game too. If you have a ryzen cpu you can use ryzen master to see exactly which cores those are (won't always be the same cores for every cpu) also with ryzen don't split your affinity across multiple ccd's and ccx's if possible.

 

CCD's are the physical "chiplets" on your cpu if your process is split between them it has a latency penalty having to communicate back and forth with a completely different chip. So try to find the block diagram for your exact model to find out how it's arranged (the 5800x for example only has 1 CCD) CCX's are the groups of cores within a CCD, the performance penilty is minimal here but it's you have a ccx with 4 cores use them. Some cpu's this might not be possible so just do what you can do and it should be fine.

For intel the intel extreme tuning utility exposes those cores i believe.

 

If you want to take things even further. You can assign any programs you have open normally to cores not assigned to 7dtd. This can be done exactly the same way using shortcuts. You can even copy the shortcuts to:

C:\Users\YOURUSERNAME\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup

 

and they will open on start up automatically with the assigned affinity.

[Grimdian]

I've been having issues with A20 as well (playing on 1440p). 7dtd never ran particularly well, but frame rates were more stable in previous releases (at least for me). The FPS drops from ~120 to 70 and sometimes even goes down to 30. I've noticed that the FPS drops are related to bigger zombie groups (horde night being the worst offender). I can usually tell when the game spawns in a walking horde during the day because the lag starts. Maybe something got changed for the worse with zombie pathing? 🤷‍♂️

 

edit: There's also ridiculous lag while opening the inventory sometimes which I believe is linked to the game saving stuff. At least the console messages indicated it.

edit2: I can provide logs but I can't seem to upload them here (yet?)

 

I doubt it's my system, but here it is for context:

Core i7-8700K  @4.2

RTX 2080Ti

32GB RAM

Win10

everything on SSDs...

Edited January 18, 2022 by Grimdian (see edit history)

[Guest]

Me, in 4K with 3090 and r9 5900x 64G 3200 ddr4, I am getting 70+ fps with a dip to below 60 fps now and again. I have turned down some settings from ultra to high, turned AO or as low as it can go.

 

On SSD

Edited January 19, 2022 by Phil (see edit history)

[Naz]

Good options that add little visually but suck fps are

 

Sreen space reflections (I completely disable them) 

Object quality (I'd go go higher than high) 

Reflection quality (low to ultra+ makes little difference to my eye so I leave it at low) 

Reflective shadows (disabled) 

Shadows (low to medium) 

[The_Great_Sephiroth]

I don't buy into the "force the game to use X cores" stuff. Playted it previously on an i7-6950X with a 2080 Ti and if I played at 144Hz, I stayed between 120 and 144fps with max settings in 1440p. Never had to tweak a thing. This core-stuff must be for AMD users or something, because when I tried it with my old rig, removing one core at a time until I lost FPS, it did nothing to help.

 

I am on an i9-11900k with a 3080 Ti now and just tried A20 for the first time. Still in 1440p, and I had no issues. Everything is stock here, no overclocking or anything. That means I peg the CPU at 5.3GHz, but it idles around 800MHz when not gaming. RAM is 64GB DDR4-3200. Storage is a 2TB PCIE4.0 NVME (2280) in a PCIE4 M.2 slot with heatsink. The game currently has access to all cores and threads.

[SylenThunder]

1 hour ago, The_Great_Sephiroth said:

I don't buy into the "force the game to use X cores" stuff.

As you surmised, It's been shown to greatly improve performance on AMD chipsets prior to the 3rd gen Ryzen. This is largely due to them having pretty pathetic multithreading support.  Intel hasn't had an issue like that for a couple of decades.

[The_Great_Sephiroth]

Oh, so that explains it. I kept cutting cores on the 6950X once, doing what was suggested here a year ago, and it only dropped my framerate. Now I know why, thanks. Hope the AMD guys can get a fix. The game looks phenomenal in 1440p with everything maxed out. I just sent Jugginator some screenshots. I am VERY pleased with the work The Pimps and company have been doing. Now give me some zombies doing Thriller and I'll be one happy dude.

[stueck0514]

On 1/18/2022 at 8:15 AM, Grimdian said:

I've been having issues with A20 as well (playing on 1440p). 7dtd never ran particularly well, but frame rates were more stable in previous releases (at least for me). The FPS drops from ~120 to 70 and sometimes even goes down to 30. I've noticed that the FPS drops are related to bigger zombie groups (horde night being the worst offender). I can usually tell when the game spawns in a walking horde during the day because the lag starts. Maybe something got changed for the worse with zombie pathing? 🤷‍♂️

 

edit: There's also ridiculous lag while opening the inventory sometimes which I believe is linked to the game saving stuff. At least the console messages indicated it.

edit2: I can provide logs but I can't seem to upload them here (yet?)

 

I doubt it's my system, but here it is for context:

Core i7-8700K  @4.2

RTX 2080Ti

32GB RAM

Win10

everything on SSDs...

Don't feel bad, I am running your same exact setup. My 8700k is pushed to 5ghz all core and the 2080ti is +125 clock and +800 mem. It is stable and can play anything on the highest settings in 1440, but I have the same lag spikes you have. I can press tab sometimes and it will hiccup for half a second and even the music skips in that time. I have to turn off the lights in the killbox on hoard night just to get to 60ish FPS. I am not knocking the game or developers at all, but I figured a game this "old" and a setup this "new" I could consistently keep 60fps on ultra. World of Tanks on ultra is pushing over 200fps minimum, but that is all I can really compare it to somewhat apples to apples.