7 Days To Die optimization

[RudyPolak]

So, its not some sort of bug report etc but i just want to know your (community's) opinion about 7D2D optimalization. Mainly because i am able to run 7D2D, but at decent framerate and horrible looking (PS2 go brrrr). Its actually kinda sad, that my pc can run lots of games with a very good framerate, but games like 7D2D run horribly bad compared to his opponent like Dying Light (runs more than well). My pc specs are:

- Ryzen 5 3500u

- Vega 8 2gb VRAM

- RAM 1 x 8gb 2400mhz

- SSD 256gb + HDD 500gb (running game on HDD)

- Windows 10 21H1

Also what things may include my framerate in your opinion, without degrading visuals that much, because it looks horrible already (nothing with textures, but some sort of animation maybe?). Thanks for reading & help

[outhous]

I'm not really knowledgeable enough to give you the answers you need. But one thing I would mention is that your video card could be a bit beefer & 8gb of memory is on the lower end as well. That being said, I have read here on the forums that turning off shadows gives a decent boost. Hopefully someone with much better knowledge will drop you a better answer. Good Luck!

 

[meganoth]

Dying Light may have some of the same players being interested in it, but tech-wise they are a completely different shoe. 7days is some sort of Minecraft with graphics miles ahead. Voxels and a completely destructible world need a lot of additional processing power.

 

I agree with outhous that your system is quite on the low side. I would as well turn down or disable shadows and reflections, and at the moment you should turn off the new dynamic meshes as well (rightmost tab in the graphics options).

 

 

[BarryTGash]

7D2D is a game that taxes cpu, gpu and memory, as well as drive speed (near constant saving game state and loading resource).

 

Unfortunately the cpu and gpu will seriously hold you back. About the only thing I can think of is to jam in another stick of identical ram to gain memory bandwidth from running in dual channel mode - assuming there is an expansion slot. Also, move the game to the SSD and ensure your saves are on the SSD also.

 

As for settings, I'd start at with the lowest preset and increase one setting at a time to see impact on performance. Regardless, with that vram limitation I think you'll need to stick with quarter or half size textures at most. But, as a rough estimate:

 

1. Antialiasing - off

2. Texture quality - 1/4 or 1/2

3. Texture filtering - low

4. Don't think UMA does anything any more

5. Reflections - definitely off

6. Shadow distance - off or low

7. Water quality - try it out; medium?

8. Particles/View Distance/LOD - try them out starting from low, raise each individually

9. Terrain/Grass/Object quality - Low/Medium/Low?

10. Occlusion - on will tax the cpu, off will tax the gpu but may stutter less (higher frame times but less stutter may be preferable).

11. All the other bells and whistles - mainly off. Motion blur may provide some disguise to a lower frame rate/higher frame times. 

12. Misc - try with vsync off - you may get frame tearing but less input lag? I've never tried dynamic resolution but I imagine on your system it will be constantly adjusting which might be too jarring. Could try lowering the FOV so less is on screen at once?

 

Ultimately, you'll have to experiment. The video options ui provides some indication of performance impact of each option.

 

[Star69]

I will toss an additional suggestion…..move the game off the HDD and on to the SSD if possible to improve the read/write of the game which is extensive. Your gpu is way below minimum specs. I believe you need 4 preferably 8gigs vram at a minimum. Also 16 gigs of ram at a minimum. It stinks that newer gpus are expensive and difficult to find right now but you should be able to bump up you ram relatively cheaply.

[RudyPolak]

1 hour ago, Star69 said:

I will toss an additional suggestion…..move the game off the HDD and on to the SSD if possible to improve the read/write of the game which is extensive. Your gpu is way below minimum specs. I believe you need 4 preferably 8gigs vram at a minimum. Also 16 gigs of ram at a minimum. It stinks that newer gpus are expensive and difficult to find right now but you should be able to bump up you ram relatively cheaply

Minimal specs of 7D2D are:

OS: Windows 7 or higher (64-bit)

Processor: 2.4 Ghz Dual Core CPU.

Memory: 8 GB RAM.

Graphics: 2 GB Dedicated Memory.

DirectX: Version 11.

Network: Broadband Internet connection.

Storage: 12 GB available space

Also i have it on SSD, and i am planning to add 4gb of RAM, or even 8gb to make it dual channel, because it improve speed of RAM, So it Will also improve my GPU i think. But most sąd thing is that i bought it without knowing that specs are that high (i bought it like almost 2 yrs ago), but i dont regret it that much because game is good looking, but it doesnt look and i dont have good FPS on my pc. 

[bdubyah]

They realllly need to bump up the minimum specs at this point. 

[Star69]

15 minutes ago, bdubyah said:

They realllly need to bump up the minimum specs at this point. 

Yes, I remember reading somewhere starting around A19 that 8gig vram was minimum. If you try to generate a rwg map, the game utilizes 16-23 gigs of ram and due to an unresolved issue, you have to exit the game after generating the map so that the ram used is released.

[Rotor]

Well, I get some FFrames, usually means a Z is spawning or something big is about to draw

 

Win10 Pro 64

16gig Ram

AMD Opteron2.4ghz 8 core.

RX570 12gig 400mhz

 

Those are not the latest and greattest hardwares, but surely above min specs, right?

 

The only other game, which is also an Alpha, and is not optimized so it runs like molasses, at times, is StarCitizen.

 

Although I havent tried to run Cyberpunk just yet.

[BarryTGash]

15 hours ago, RudyPolak said:

i am planning to add 4gb of RAM

 

Please note that to get full benefit out of a ram upgrade you must use an identical stick to the one you already have - same manufacturer/size/speed - everything.  

[RudyPolak]

1 hour ago, BarryTGash said:

 

Please note that to get full benefit out of a ram upgrade you must use an identical stick to the one you already have - same manufacturer/size/speed - everything.  

I will get it used from CeX, but with the same clock speed, So obviously 2400mhz to get the dual channel, but i heard that most ram can work with each together good if they are the same clock speed and sizes like that (atleast on Dell site it said that it should work as 1 x 8gb 2400mhz + 1 x 4gb 2400mhz)

[Pernicious]

6 hours ago, RudyPolak said:

I will get it used from CeX, but with the same clock speed, So obviously 2400mhz to get the dual channel, but i heard that most ram can work with each together good if they are the same clock speed and sizes like that (atleast on Dell site it said that it should work as 1 x 8gb 2400mhz + 1 x 4gb 2400mhz)

 

An 8 + 4Gb set won't be dual channel. It'll just be 12Gb of single channel.

 

Also, one 2400Mhz isn't necessarily the same speed as another 2400Mhz. The latency could differ, in which case, both sticks are slowed to the slower one. It's a bit of deceptive marketing.

[Jason Tamosiunis]

On 2/21/2022 at 10:52 AM, outhous said:

I'm not really knowledgeable enough to give you the answers you need. But one thing I would mention is that your video card could be a bit beefer & 8gb of memory is on the lower end as well. That being said, I have read here on the forums that turning off shadows gives a decent boost. Hopefully someone with much better knowledge will drop you a better answer. Good Luck!

 

im running 7dtd on a worse PC than he has but yes he is right optimization for 7dtd is lacking to say the least and yes i know the game is still in alpha btu so are plenty of other games than play wayyy better

[outhous]

On 2/22/2022 at 8:46 PM, Jason Tamosiunis said:

im running 7dtd on a worse PC than he has but yes he is right optimization for 7dtd is lacking to say the least and yes i know the game is still in alpha btu so are plenty of other games than play wayyy better

What is your point of quoting me? Did I say anything about optimization? You quote me as if I was saying it is his fault.... I wasn't, I just mentioned his equipment wasn't really up to the specs recommended & that I heard turning off shadows could give him a boost. I also acknowledged my lack of knowledge on the whole subject.  I was hoping someone with more knowledge would add some helpful comments. Your comment added nothing at all to the discussion, thanks anyway. 🤨

[meganoth]

20 hours ago, Jason Tamosiunis said:

im running 7dtd on a worse PC than he has but yes he is right optimization for 7dtd is lacking to say the least and yes i know the game is still in alpha btu so are plenty of other games than play wayyy better

 

The other games that play wayyy better are not voxel-based and not completely destroyable and buildable from bedrock to sky. This says not much about whether optimizations are good in 7D2D, but it definitely says your comparison is junk.

 

[Roland]

On 2/21/2022 at 2:12 PM, RudyPolak said:

Minimal specs of 7D2D are:

OS: Windows 7 or higher (64-bit)

Processor: 2.4 Ghz Dual Core CPU.

Memory: 8 GB RAM.

Graphics: 2 GB Dedicated Memory.

DirectX: Version 11.

Network: Broadband Internet connection.

Storage: 12 GB available space

Also i have it on SSD, and i am planning to add 4gb of RAM, or even 8gb to make it dual channel, because it improve speed of RAM, So it Will also improve my GPU i think. But most sąd thing is that i bought it without knowing that specs are that high (i bought it like almost 2 yrs ago), but i dont regret it that much because game is good looking, but it doesnt look and i dont have good FPS on my pc. 

 

Minimal specs mean minimal settings for any kind of decent performance. At 8gb of system RAM you should have the default video settings set to lowest and then play around with different resolution settings. The lowest resolution won't necessarily automatically give best performance but there will be a setting that gives you the best you are going to get. If the standard lowest settings don't turn off dynamic mesh then make sure to turn that off as well. 

 

Finally, you should plan to not play longer than an hour or so at a time between logging of the game and exiting steam and then reloading if you want to play longer.

 

Minimal settings are for the minimal experience. You can't watch the game on youtube being played by influencers with god level rigs and expect that your experience will be anything close to that if you are running the minimum specs.

 

I highly recommend you getting 8 gb of RAM rather than 4 gb. Finally, I strongly recommend that you make sure your tower is well ventilated and clear of dust and dander. The game runs hot and even more so if you are pushing it to get all you can out of 7 Days to Die.

[RudyPolak]

On 2/24/2022 at 12:06 AM, Roland said:

 

Minimal specs mean minimal settings for any kind of decent performance. At 8gb of system RAM you should have the default video settings set to lowest and then play around with different resolution settings. The lowest resolution won't necessarily automatically give best performance but there will be a setting that gives you the best you are going to get. If the standard lowest settings don't turn off dynamic mesh then make sure to turn that off as well. 

 

Finally, you should plan to not play longer than an hour or so at a time between logging of the game and exiting steam and then reloading if you want to play longer.

 

Minimal settings are for the minimal experience. You can't watch the game on youtube being played by influencers with god level rigs and expect that your experience will be anything close to that if you are running the minimum specs.

 

I highly recommend you getting 8 gb of RAM rather than 4 gb. Finally, I strongly recommend that you make sure your tower is well ventilated and clear of dust and dander. The game runs hot and even more so if you are pushing it to get all you can out of 7 Days to Die.

Its not a Tower, right now the machine on which i play on is a laptop, thats why processor is with "U" at the end and Integrated Graphics, but i think adding 8gb would be better also as you also said it, tysm all anyway

[pApA^LeGBa]

Tbh the completly destructible world argument isn´t valid anymore. Even good systems do have troubles in downtown areas. Yeah we all know, optimization is not for alpha, but right now it´s really no fun if you don´t have a really strong CPU wich also can´t keep up at times. And turning down settings just for downtown isn´t really a viable solution.

 

Wich is really sad. This means more zombies is propably out of question. Wich is a shame. This could be such a great game if we had more z´s but it looks like we will end up in an empty world with a game that had really great potential.

[meganoth]

1 hour ago, pApA^LeGBa said:

Tbh the completly destructible world argument isn´t valid anymore.

 

It is valid for arguing that this game can't compete with games of similar or higher graphicvs quality. It is valid if someone simply compares the game to "other games in alpha".

 

 

 

[Jason Tamosiunis]

Watching a grandspartan stream who has a 3080ti graphics card with 64gbs of ram has massive lag i dont want anyone telling me i dont know what im saying the game is not optimized 1 bit and im sick and tired of people telling me otherwise. Dont tell the player base we dont know what we are talking about

[meganoth]

6 hours ago, Jason Tamosiunis said:

Watching a grandspartan stream who has a 3080ti graphics card with 64gbs of ram has massive lag i dont want anyone telling me i dont know what im saying the game is not optimized 1 bit and im sick and tired of people telling me otherwise. Dont tell the player base we dont know what we are talking about

You don*t know what you are talking about. 😁

 

More serious, the game is CPU- and probably cache-or datapath-bound in some situations as well, not GPU bound, and it is dependent on a graphics library that is not optimized for their use case.

 

"A chain is only as strong as its weakest link". You probably know that saying, right? Now in the case of 7d2d (different than most other games) the CPU is the weakest link. grandspartan could have two 3099ti overclocked in his computer (if such beast were available) and the game would not run one FPS faster. Because if the 3080ti was using 20% of its power then the two 3099ti would be running at 10% utilization. But the same 1 (!!) core of the CPU would be running at 100% just like it does now with a 3080ti.

Whatever you do to the GPU, the CPU is the weak link and it is running at full speed already.

 

Now could TFP change that? Not according to its developers, because the graphics engine (Unity) seems to feed the data to the GPU in one single thread running on 1 core of the CPU and that is the core that is already fully occupied with that task.

Since players who have super graphics cards expect to turn all options to ultra, their games often have low FPS and those FPS do NOT depend on their graphics card but on the CPU. Every graphics option they turn on also makes the CPU have to work slightly more in that single thread which is feeding the GPU with data. But that single thread in the CPU is already at its limit and so the game gets slower at ultra settings even though the GPU is bored out of its wits.

 

in the last years GPU performance and CPU performance have been improved as expected. But while the GPU was multi-core from the beginning and could fully employ those improvements, the speed of the CPU (for games at least) was almost equal to its single-core speed and all the improvements by adding more cores are half wasted by many games today. Since i7-4770k  (6 generations ago) the single-core performance improved only by about 30% (at least according to a comparison website). And graphics engines like Unity are only slowly converting to the situation that all tasks have to to be balanced across cores.

 

I don't have experience with Unity myself. I don't know what the current status is. Eventually all graphics engines will have to be fully balanced multi-core or they will be superseded by better engines because at the moment CPU improvements largely only happen by adding more cores.

 

[Jason Tamosiunis]

6 hours ago, meganoth said:

You don*t know what you are talking about. 😁

 

More serious, the game is CPU- and probably cache-or datapath-bound in some situations as well, not GPU bound, and it is dependent on a graphics library that is not optimized for their use case.

 

"A chain is only as strong as its weakest link". You probably know that saying, right? Now in the case of 7d2d (different than most other games) the CPU is the weakest link. grandspartan could have two 3099ti overclocked in his computer (if such beast were available) and the game would not run one FPS faster. Because if the 3080ti was using 20% of its power then the two 3099ti would be running at 10% utilization. But the same 1 (!!) core of the CPU would be running at 100% just like it does now with a 3080ti.

Whatever you do to the GPU, the CPU is the weak link and it is running at full speed already.

 

Now could TFP change that? Not according to its developers, because the graphics engine (Unity) seems to feed the data to the GPU in one single thread running on 1 core of the CPU and that is the core that is already fully occupied with that task.

Since players who have super graphics cards expect to turn all options to ultra, their games often have low FPS and those FPS do NOT depend on their graphics card but on the CPU. Every graphics option they turn on also makes the CPU have to work slightly more in that single thread which is feeding the GPU with data. But that single thread in the CPU is already at its limit and so the game gets slower at ultra settings even though the GPU is bored out of its wits.

 

in the last years GPU performance and CPU performance have been improved as expected. But while the GPU was multi-core from the beginning and could fully employ those improvements, the speed of the CPU (for games at least) was almost equal to its single-core speed and all the improvements by adding more cores are half wasted by many games today. Since i7-4770k  (6 generations ago) the single-core performance improved only by about 30% (at least according to a comparison website). And graphics engines like Unity are only slowly converting to the situation that all tasks have to to be balanced across cores.

 

I don't have experience with Unity myself. I don't know what the current status is. Eventually all graphics engines will have to be fully balanced multi-core or they will be superseded by better engines because at the moment CPU improvements largely only happen by adding more cores.

 

i looked back at the comments on his video and i may be wrong as he is playing a heavily custom map with only 2 biomes

[theFlu]

1 hour ago, Jason Tamosiunis said:

i looked back at the comments on his video and i may be wrong

Should we potentially take that as "I didn't know what I was talking about" ..?

[RudyPolak]

9 hours ago, meganoth said:

You don*t know what you are talking about. 😁

 

More serious, the game is CPU- and probably cache-or datapath-bound in some situations as well, not GPU bound, and it is dependent on a graphics library that is not optimized for their use case.

 

"A chain is only as strong as its weakest link". You probably know that saying, right? Now in the case of 7d2d (different than most other games) the CPU is the weakest link. grandspartan could have two 3099ti overclocked in his computer (if such beast were available) and the game would not run one FPS faster. Because if the 3080ti was using 20% of its power then the two 3099ti would be running at 10% utilization. But the same 1 (!!) core of the CPU would be running at 100% just like it does now with a 3080ti.

Whatever you do to the GPU, the CPU is the weak link and it is running at full speed already.

 

Now could TFP change that? Not according to its developers, because the graphics engine (Unity) seems to feed the data to the GPU in one single thread running on 1 core of the CPU and that is the core that is already fully occupied with that task.

Since players who have super graphics cards expect to turn all options to ultra, their games often have low FPS and those FPS do NOT depend on their graphics card but on the CPU. Every graphics option they turn on also makes the CPU have to work slightly more in that single thread which is feeding the GPU with data. But that single thread in the CPU is already at its limit and so the game gets slower at ultra settings even though the GPU is bored out of its wits.

 

in the last years GPU performance and CPU performance have been improved as expected. But while the GPU was multi-core from the beginning and could fully employ those improvements, the speed of the CPU (for games at least) was almost equal to its single-core speed and all the improvements by adding more cores are half wasted by many games today. Since i7-4770k  (6 generations ago) the single-core performance improved only by about 30% (at least according to a comparison website). And graphics engines like Unity are only slowly converting to the situation that all tasks have to to be balanced across cores.

 

I don't have experience with Unity myself. I don't know what the current status is. Eventually all graphics engines will have to be fully balanced multi-core or they will be superseded by better engines because at the moment CPU improvements largely only happen by adding more cores.

 

Well you are right - the game is CPU based. However, i dont have that bad CPU - i should be able to play it if it would be CPU based only. But it might be also my GPU just being very bad for now. 

[Star69]

I’m running arguably the best ‘stock’ rig available at the moment….5950x cpu, a 3090 gtx factory overclocked videocard and 32 gigs of 3800mhz ram. I play at 4k but cannot turn every setting to ultra, it just isn’t possible. I have many but not all settings ultra and keep my fps at 120 even horde nights and downtown. If I max every setting, my fps drops below 50 and becomes very jittery. The key is adjusting your settings based on your cpu and pretty much ignoring your videocard.