I have been using FPS configs for a shit ton of time now but recently I wanted to see HQ DB, my FPS instantly dropped from 300 in lobbies and 120 ingame to 120 in lobbies and 60 in game, which got me thinking “Are my specs are bad and I need to upgrade or could it be optimization” then I remembered a lot of people complaining about this sort of stuff of their FPS dropping after each update or they have really good specs and a beast CPU but DB is just pretty hard to run. I then went to free cam in maps and saw really useless stuff in maps that server no purpose at all for example: A plane in underground in the air moving where NO ONE CAN SEE IT (same thing with chapel but this one you can see but honestly no one looks at the sky). These sort of things need to removed to balance framerate for people cause these extra things to render are dumb AF. Now there could be an argument of “But it adds to immersion fuck you” then what I have to say to that is: why in the world would there be an airplane flying above contaminated London? To film the beautiful scenery of dead people and gas? I would be really happy if not only there was fine tuning and content update but also an update that is tailored specifically for optimization.
Optimization
If it’s out of line of site the GPU isn’t drawing it so it essentially doesn’t exist outside of it’s wireframe. And most likely it’s low poly/low texture even if you could get close to it. And if it’s moving on a fixed path then it is using scripting and not actual physics that demands constant CPU calculations so there isn’t any extra burden there. Basically, the FPS issue doesn’t have a lot to do with these particular things.
UE3 is just a beast on CPU’s and apparently a lot of it’s lighting, physics and other features are heavily CPU reliant. If you have lower end CPU’s or have some kind of issue this game is going to have issues.
Most of the issues I’ve seen with people and incredibly low FPS revolves around lower end intel hardware like i3 desktops, the newer lower than i3 procs that I can’t remember the name of, laptop hardware which always sounds powerful but is usually half the power of it’s desktop predecessor and AMD hardware in general which tend to not do well with single/dual core applications. AMD went all in hoping game companies would support 4-8 cores fully and it’s just not happened overall. Base UE3 pretty much uses two cores but can use a couple more for extra work if the game is setup that way (no clue if DB is but I’d wager it is not). So a lot of people with issues are using processors that simply aren’t that powerful or aren’t designed for low core count use to get max performance. Also, some people just have crappy hardware/drivers that they don’t know how to keep up with (drivers, bios updates, firmware, using full anti-virus suites that destroy system performance).
When you work the CPU as hard as UE3 does you also get more heat as well. Which can cause systems/fps to become unstable. You could get everything from game crashes to system reboots to the processor clocking itself down when it gets to hot causing jarring FPS change or even slowly clocking itself down causing FPS degradation over time.
I think the best SD can do is try to look into optimizing events like server joins (which cause a dip in FPS that I’ve recorded), look into seeing if they can get DB/UE3 to use more cores to offload work and see if they can offload more work to GPU’s which are barely being used. There is also a lot of issue with Coherent UI that is used for the hud which I believe has been looked at a lot. Those are my armchair suggestions anyway.
They should also update the required specs for DB on the Steam page to what they really should be rather than using Epic’s outdated EU3 specs. I know they want the specs to look low so more people will want to install the game (it’s a f2p title afterall) but they don’t represent current UE3 and Dirty Bomb’s requirements.
Yeah it’s shit, they put so much useless trash in the background. Like half the city is blocked out and textured, with blinking lights, the occasional models and some even animated. At least they allow us to turn off the particle effects like smoke and flames in the background. So why not allow us to just turn of the rest as well?
I’m rocking a 980 and a 6700K, I play on low graphics and I still can’t turn on Thread Sync without dips below 120 FPS, that is some pretty terrible performance.
It’s just too bad it wasn’t a simple endeavor to convert UE3 games to UE4. UE4 scaling and performance is pretty incredible by comparison. UE3 was developed in a time of “more power” CPU’s and GPUs and fairly high-powered consoles (at the time). Everyone thought that you could design something and not care about how efficient it was because you could just throw more power at it. UE4 has been developed with the current ideology of maximum scaling and efficiency across a broad range of hardware platforms.
So DB’s FPS issues might never be fully fixed. Only bandaged a bit…but it might be enough for most of us.
I am not sure what I am looking at beyond what I mentioned in regards to FPS dips with server joins and other events that aren’t handled properly with DB. I have something similar recorded where I drop from 300+fps down to the 40’s IIRC when people joined a server I was on.
I don’t remember if there is a join notification or not but I believe there is but this time there wasn’t. Honestly I expected some UE3 expert to just come and completely destroy my claims.
Has anyone tried the -USEALLAVAILABLECORES launch option? Curious to know if this provides any noticeable gains.
At stock speeds my 5820K didn’t perform much better than my previous system with 3570K. Overclocking did improve performance and stability quite a bit but CPU is still under utilized in DB.
I noticed that argument when I was looking at UE3 documentation and meant to test it out (with and without it set) to see if anything changed. I need to remember to do that this weekend and see. I have a feeling it’s not going to help much if the game isn’t specifically programmed to take advantage of more worker cores. I think that only turns on the option for it to use more if it’s asked to. But I could be wrong…I am not an UE3 engine expert.
I feel like this would be a drastic oversight if the solution to this problem was so simple.
That being said, I’d be interested to know peoples findings after having tested it.
Well I can’t add a whole lot more than what @Amerika has already said, but I work with both UE3 and UE4 on a pretty regular basis, so allow me to fill you in…
Firstly, the nonsense about things outside the map eating up your frame-rate is completely wrong. Unreal Engine has a feature that allows the developers to set render boundries, meaning if they player is within X region, draw X objects - anything outside of this will not be rendered, and thus has 0 impact on the system.
On the flip-side, this can actually sometimes cause lag. If these render fields are not set up properly, they can cause a lot of pop-in for the player, and subsequently - lag. If lots of objects pop in at once, on lower end systems this can cause them to slow down in order to process everything… which is the sort of lag you see in the video, that you linked.
Of course, the final point is that UE3 was built when GPU’s weren’t exactly great… and a lot of the graphics processing power came from the CPU itself, so the engine is VERY CPU intensive - which means if you CPU is sub-par, you could be running into a lot of problems because of it. Can I ask, what CPU do you actually have? Or better still, what is your system spec?
I have an AMD cpu.
There is my first and only problem.
Come cry with me my fellow brethren who fell into the same trap.
[quote=“CCP115;146111”]I have an AMD cpu.
There is my first and only problem.
Come cry with me my fellow brethren who fell into the same trap.[/quote]
nothing wrong with amd, unless you bought an apu.
@CCP115 AMD isn’t awful… I just hope you aren’t using an Athlon or below :s Otherwise… yeah, gg.
They don’t care about AMD, IE Nvida is paying them, I asked them in a stream and they were so shocked.
I am going to have to assume this is a joke/sarcasm. Game companies don’t take minor bribes from graphic card makers to sabotage their game for a good percentage of the gamer populace that owns AMD hardware. Not to mention Dirty Bomb doesn’t really care a ton about your graphics card and instead cares about your CPU. And last I knew Nvidia didn’t make CPU’s for desktops but Intel does.
@Amerika Splash Damage is partnered with NVidia though, and thus the optimisation is in fact tailored more towards NVidia drivers. Optimisation is of course done for all kinds of systems, but the NVidia partnership has been in long standing, and the UE3 engine itself was actually built with NVidia cards in mind.
An Nvidia or AMD partnership does not require you to sabotage the competition. What it means is that you work with the company to ensure that your game is running the best it can on that platform and are also integrated into software like Geforce Experience. Which Dirty Bomb is…even if the optimization by Geforce Experience recommends that you turn Thread Sync to off. Not a great partnership IMO 