A20.5 Benchmarks

[Naz]

I haven't been keeping up on the last several updates since there was nothing in the patch notes to indicate anything would be significantly different performance wise. There was a couple items that may make a difference so i've ran some benchmarks to determine where performance is currently with A20.5. Noticed a20.6 came out in experimental yesterday, figures an update would come while i was almost finished xd however it's mostly all bug fixes so probably won't have any significant difference.

 

My Other 7DTD Benchmarks

 

Spoiler

Alpha 20
A20.5 benchmarks

A20.1 Trident benchmarks

A20.0 2 systems benchmarks
Alpha 19

Spoiler

A19 Various Performance Tweaks Benchmarked

A19.3>A19.4>A19.5 Hotbox Benchmarks

Resizable Bar Trident Benchmarks

A19 RTX 3090 Trident Benchmarks

A19.2 B3 Hotbox Benchmarks

A19.0 Benchmarks 2 Systems Intel,AMD,SLI,Core Count And SMT Tested

A15 Trident Benchmarks 

 

 

Benchmark Notes & Disclaimers

 

 

Spoiler

1. These figures should be taken as ball park figures and not absolute values.
7DTD is a very difficult game to benchmark accurately. It's in alpha and sometimes does weird things. Also some things are difficult to account for such as the AI, they will behave differently and spawn differently every run, which leads to #2.

2. What's controlled for and what's not
I haven't controlled for driver versions & windows versions. My goal was just to get "close enough" results instead of 100% accurate as possible. That said i have controlled for memory leaks, restarting the game after every run. Time of day is reset from the console after every run. When changing resolution i changed ingame before shutting down then validated with the unity screen selector on next launch. No zombies/animals where killed so areas weren't "cleared" until x amount of days, to insure that on following runs they would respawn (Although i can't do much if zombies kill animals or vise versa etc). I only did 1 pass on each test, however any result that didn't look right or didn't make sense was discarded and retested.

 

3. 1 system isn't enough to draw definitive conclusions for every configuration. The conclusions found here may or may not apply to your own systems, these results are only really comparable if you have similar hardware. But they will however give an idea of where the current performance is at with the hardware that was tested.

 

4. It's Alpha

Any update could change any conclusions drawn from these tests. Also as a work in progress things are always improving and getting worse, by the time 7DTD goes gold these results with be obsolete and invalid. Things are always changing in alpha.

5. Tests on different resolutions were done on monitors native aspect ratio
16:9 Resolutions were tested on an Asus PB287Q 4K 3840x2160 60HZ Monitor
21:9 Resolution was tested on an LG 38GL950G 3840x1600 175Hz Monitor

 

6. The benchmark Run
I've been using the same run since A14 for all tests, you can find more details on the exact run in my a15 benchmarks i did ages ago Here

7. These results are without applies affinity and increased view distance.

 

 

Original benchmark excel and results files

 

System Tested

 

Trident

CPU	AMD R9 5950x
Motherboard	Gigabyte X570 Aorus Xtreme
Ram	G.SKILL Trident Z Neo 64GB (4 x 16GB) DDR4 3600Mhz CL16-19-19-39
Storage 1 Save Data	1TB Sabrent Rocket NVMe PCIe 4 M.2 SSD
Storage 2 Game Data	2TB Sabrent Rocket NVMe PCIe 4 M.2 SSD
GPU	MSI Suprim X RTX 3090 24GB

 

System Overclock Notes

 

CPU: PBO2 OC
EDC:230 TDC:130 PPT:1300
Curve voltage offset
Best Cores: -15 (4 cores) Other 12 cores -30

Boost Override: +125Mhz

Ram: Stock: Default JEDEC(2133Mhz) , Overclock: XMP Enabled (3600Mhz)    
GPU Core:+160 Mem:+550      
GPU Bios Flashed with a 500 Watt Power Target   

 

Tested With 2 Video Settings

*Settings 1 & 2 were both the same for Ultra and Lower Settings

"Ultra Settings"

"Settings 1"

"Settings 2"

"Lower Settings"

 

Trident Benchmarks

I've retested a20.0 without applied affinity and increased view distance to get more "real world" results.

 

Spoiler

A20.5 VS A20.0 Ultra Settings

 

A20.5 VS A20.0 Lower Settings

 

 

 

Conclusions

Pretty much no meaningfully difference in performance, it may be slightly worse if anything. That's unfortunate however i totally understand why that is the case, a20 has probably been shoved onto the stage before it was truly ready and tfp have been trying to fix the issues after the fact. This unfortunately would ,mean they probably haven't had time to work on any meaningful optimisations as presumably all their time has been spend bug fixing. This is of course speculation based on my observations so take it for what you will.

Hopefully we can see some more substantial gains being made in a21 (assuming another steam sale event doesn't catch tfp's eye before it's ready😄 )

[meganoth]

I would suspect that all meaningful optimizations at this stage are too complex to be ported back to A20. (AFAIK no development at all happens in A20, anything that gets added to it is a backport from A21).

 

One optimiziation we already know of is about POI windows and yes, that is not getting ported back to A20.

 

And I would guess that the relatively new dynamic meshes will get optimizations but I'm not sure these will show up on your benchmarks.

 

[Naz]

Yeah I've heard of the windows optimiziation, that should be in a good place to help the cities situation. Also some time ago I think I heard they've hired some help to do tree's more efficiently, not sure how that's coming along lately tho. I think for a20 they said something about working directly with unity but don't think that materialised for this alpha, no idea for a21 obviously. 

 

Yeah dynamic meshes would be tricky to compare apples to apples. Why I always benchmark in nav since it's usually "mostly the same" in terms of the map. I would test cites but there would be no way of running the tests on the same map since it would have to be a new seed for a new alpha and that would affect the comparison too much.