Stable 120 FPS with a GTX 745

(Zenity) #1

I don’t know if performance really has improved a lot with the recent update, or if I just have found the ideal settings for my system now. But right now the game is running at rock solid 120 max FPS for me, and since I am using a 60hz monitor, that’s pretty much my ideal. This is on standard low detail (high character detail), with no lego config shenanigans, and a respectable resolution (more on this later).

This is remarkable if you ask me, because the GTX 745 is an OEM-only card which is about half as fast as the 750 ti, which is probably the cheapest reasonable option for gamers right now (and which I incidentally just ordered). My CPU is a decent i7 though, so that may make a bit of difference (as you can probably tell I didn’t buy this PC for gaming).

To get there, I only had to do three things:

  1. Enable the one frame delay. I am rather sensitive to input lag but don’t notice any issue with it, so I don’t think it’s a big deal at all. I’d still disable it out of principle if I had the choice, but I see no reason to feel bad for turning it on if it helps.

  2. Disable texture streaming based on this tutorial: http://www.randomguy7.com/blog/how-to-remove-all-texture-streaming-in-unreal-engine-games

This actually makes things look better (without it, the game would stream the weapon textures in for me whenever I switch weapons, which looked rather ugly) and also increases performance, so it’s a win/win. It uses more memory of course, but if you have enough then that’s just not an issue.

I don’t really understand the details of this yet, but considering how useful this seems to be, I am wondering if this could not be offered by default at least as an option.

  1. Change my resolution to 1280x960 (4:3). This is a big one of course. With 1080p I still get over 80 FPS which is decent, but ultimately I prefer this resolution. It’s the highest 4:3 resolution and thanks to the vertical resolution being pretty close to 1080p, it looks far less messy/blurry than other low resolutions. I still get a VERY sizeable performance boost out of this and it looks far better on my screen than 720p (YMMW).

The 4:3 aspect ratio is interesting in itself. A lot of Counter Strike players use this resolution on widescreen monitors because it stretches the view vertically (effectively creating a smaller FOV) which makes targets appear bigger. Of course in Dirty Bomb you can offset this effect by adjusting your FOV, though you still get a more zoomed view horizontally than vertically and a slightly different feel to the mouse movement. You may like or hate this, but I would suggest anybody to give it a try at least once. For some reason I do extremely well with this resolution and I just find it fun to play with it.

Oddly this resolution also shows six columns in the loadout UI, while 1080p shows only five.

So that’s it. Here are two screenshots to prove that it really is running well above 120 FPS (before I capped it) and resized to 1080p to show more or less what it looks like on screen:

And finally my system specs:

If the 745 can do this, then any halfway decent GPU should be able to do this really, unless there is a specific issue with the game or hardware. With just a little bit more juice, achieving 150 FPS and more should be no problem at all (I’m looking forward to seeing what difference the 750 ti will make).

Of course every system is different and this may not work for you at all, but hopefully some will find this useful enough to give it a try before falling back to one of the super low graphic configs. Nothing wrong with lego graphics, but at least having the option to play the game as it is intended to is really nice IMO.

(evuze) #2

I have a feeling processor matters a lot in this game. I went from a 7700 to an r9 280x and the FPS increase wasn’t much, although the upgrade was pretty big.

However, I also recently went from an i3 @ 2.7 to and i5 @ 3.2 and the FPS just exploded. Before the CPU upgrade I couldn’t cap at 60 fps with the 290x with a low quality config, now it manages it easily on high quality.

Question though, why cap at 120 fps on a 60hz monitor, I thought 60 fps was the ideal?

And I wondered why I keep seeing people with high specs run at low resolutions, rocking 300 fps at 1024x768, I don’t get it…

(Zenity) #3

[quote=“evu;13581”]I have a feeling processor matters a lot in this game. I went from a 7700 to an r9 280x and the FPS increase wasn’t much, although the upgrade was pretty big.

However, I also recently went from an i3 @ 2.7 to and i5 @ 3.2 and the FPS just exploded. Before the CPU upgrade I couldn’t cap at 60 fps with the 290x with a low quality config, now it manages it easily on high quality.[/quote]

That’s very interesting, and also promising because optimising CPU usage is often much easier than optimising GPU usage. Hopefully it will run a lot better on slower CPUs by the end of the beta.

Question though, why cap at 120 fps on a 60hz monitor, I thought 60 fps was the ideal?

And I wondered why I keep seeing people with high specs run at low resolutions, rocking 300 fps at 1024x768, I don’t get it…

It’s about responsiveness. If you play with VSync then 60 FPS is ideal, but that creates horrible input lag so no competitive player does that. Without VSync, higher FPS mean that what you see on screen is closer to the live action. You also get less screen tearing because the difference between two frames becomes much more subtle. It just feels a lot smoother with higher FPS.

This is something that’s much easier to feel than see, and 120 FPS is about the region at which I can’t tell a difference anymore to higher FPS.

Then you have the really competitive players playing with 144hz screens, so they’ll want to target at least 144 FPS or up to about 300. I’ve never played on a 144hz screen, so I have no idea if I would still be able to tell the difference between 144 and double the amount. All I know is that CS:GO pros generally consider around 300 FPS ideal, but we are talking about incredibly subtle differences here of course.

(evuze) #4

Ah right, I’ve recently turned vsync on so it caps at 60 but didn’t know it affected input, been wondering why I’m not hitting as much! I’ll try capping it at 120 then and see how it goes.

Cheers dude.

(adeto) #5

Pretty sure for DB it’s really about CPU usage. Went from a Ati 5870 to an R9 290X this week and my fps hasn’t improved greatly. It’s known that UE3 prefers Nvidia hardware but not being able to hold a 120FPS stabile with a high grade card feels silly even if its AMD. I’m running a i7 920 @ 2.67. Friends who have newer gen i7 cores and lower end graphics cards get higher FPS than me :confused:

(Dwu) #6

I have i7 3930k + GTX 970 and im barely getting 80±20 fps on ultralow cfg, dont really mind the lego graphics I actually prefer them, but I’d love to have >150 fps. Neither GPU or CPU ever reaches >40% usage so somehow my hardware isn’t being utilized to the fullest. Funny, since I had constant 200+ fps on initial steam beta in december with the same hardware.

(finespunUvula) #7

[quote=“Zenity;2252”]I don’t know if performance really has improved a lot with the recent update, or if I just have found the ideal settings for my system now. But right now the game is running at rock solid 120 max FPS for me, and since I am using a 60hz monitor, that’s pretty much my ideal. This is on standard low detail (high character detail), with no lego config shenanigans, and a respectable resolution (more on this later).

This is remarkable if you ask me, because the GTX 745 is an OEM-only card which is about half as fast as the 750 ti, which is probably the cheapest reasonable option for gamers right now (and which I incidentally just ordered). My CPU is a decent i7 though, so that may make a bit of difference (as you can probably tell I didn’t buy this PC for gaming).

To get there, I only had to do three things:

  1. Enable the one frame delay. I am rather sensitive to input lag but don’t notice any issue with it, so I don’t think it’s a big deal at all. I’d still disable it out of principle if I had the choice, but I see no reason to feel bad for turning it on if it helps.

  2. Disable texture streaming based on this tutorial: http://www.randomguy7.com/blog/how-to-remove-all-texture-streaming-in-unreal-engine-games

This actually makes things look better (without it, the game would stream the weapon textures in for me whenever I switch weapons, which looked rather ugly) and also increases performance, so it’s a win/win. It uses more memory of course, but if you have enough then that’s just not an issue.

I don’t really understand the details of this yet, but considering how useful this seems to be, I am wondering if this could not be offered by default at least as an option.

  1. Change my resolution to 1280x960 (4:3). This is a big one of course. With 1080p I still get over 80 FPS which is decent, but ultimately I prefer this resolution. It’s the highest 4:3 resolution and thanks to the vertical resolution being pretty close to 1080p, it looks far less messy/blurry than other low resolutions. I still get a VERY sizeable performance boost out of this and it looks far better on my screen than 720p (YMMW).

The 4:3 aspect ratio is interesting in itself. A lot of Counter Strike players use this resolution on widescreen monitors because it stretches the view vertically (effectively creating a smaller FOV) which makes targets appear bigger. Of course in Dirty Bomb you can offset this effect by adjusting your FOV, though you still get a more zoomed view horizontally than vertically and a slightly different feel to the mouse movement. You may like or hate this, but I would suggest anybody to give it a try at least once. For some reason I do extremely well with this resolution and I just find it fun to play with it.

Oddly this resolution also shows six columns in the loadout UI, while 1080p shows only five.

So that’s it. Here are two screenshots to prove that it really is running well above 120 FPS (before I capped it) and resized to 1080p to show more or less what it looks like on screen:

And finally my system specs:

If the 745 can do this, then any halfway decent GPU should be able to do this really, unless there is a specific issue with the game or hardware. With just a little bit more juice, achieving 150 FPS and more should be no problem at all (I’m looking forward to seeing what difference the 750 ti will make).

Of course every system is different and this may not work for you at all, but hopefully some will find this useful enough to give it a try before falling back to one of the super low graphic configs. Nothing wrong with lego graphics, but at least having the option to play the game as it is intended to is really nice IMO.[/quote]

So since this fix is supposed to load the whole lvl to your RAM im curious how much RAM usage you have when playing fix this fix applied ?

Mine is about 3.6GB which seems to me a little tbh.

(finespunUvula) #8

Sorry for my spelling up there. (Is there no way to edit a post ?!)

Anyway. what i was trying to say was. That with this fix applied, my ram usage is around 3.6 GB which seems a little low to be honest.

How much ram is used when you play ?

(Humbug) #9

[quote=“finespunUvula;13853”]Sorry for my spelling up there. (Is there no way to edit a post ?!)

Anyway. what i was trying to say was. That with this fix applied, my ram usage is around 3.6 GB which seems a little low to be honest.

How much ram is used when you play ?[/quote]

you can edit your post with the cogwheel in the upper right of it.

The engine is really old, so texture streaming is only useful if you have low ram.
the game is really CPU demanding at the moment (not optimised), so if you have at least 8gb of total ram, disabling the texture streaming is a good idea.
3.6gb sounds rather high than low imo. (edit: the game is using 3.6gb or all together?)

(finespunUvula) #10

[quote=“Humbug;13855”][quote=“finespunUvula;13853”]Sorry for my spelling up there. (Is there no way to edit a post ?!)

Anyway. what i was trying to say was. That with this fix applied, my ram usage is around 3.6 GB which seems a little low to be honest.

How much ram is used when you play ?[/quote]

you can edit your post with the cogwheel in the upper right of it.

The engine is really old, so texture streaming is only useful if you have low ram.
the game is really CPU demanding at the moment (not optimised), so if you have at least 8gb of total ram, disabling the texture streaming is a good idea.
3.6gb sounds rather high than low imo. (edit: the game is using 3.6gb or all together?)[/quote]

Ah thanks didnt see that black icon in the upper right :slight_smile:

Well yes all together 3.6GB usage not just the game. (Got 8GB)

Isnt that fix doing exactlly that, disabling texturestreaming ?

(Zenity) #11

I haven’t bothered checking my RAM usage yet to be honest, mainly because I’m not really clear about whether this is supposed to increase system or video RAM. I just know it works so that’s good enough for me. It would be good if somebody with some knowledge could figure out the exact number(s) though (I would imagine that it depends on texture quality as well). If it’s not a gigantic amount, then I really don’t understand why it couldn’t be a default feature to disable texture streaming.

(Zenity) #12

The GTX 750 ti has arrived. I was expecting a noticeable improvement, but the framerates are actually through the roof. This is pretty awesome and means that the current entry level GPU for modern gaming (around 100 pounds) is more than enough to run the game with solid framerates. So on the GPU side of things, I really don’t think the game is terribly badly optimised.

I noticed some interesting things though: When I turn off OFTL, my FPS will always drop down to about 100 in certain situations (e.g. the beginning of the tutorial). This doesn’t change if I change resolution, so the CPU is the bottleneck. This seems to indicate that turning OFTL off will create a much bigger dependence on the CPU.

With OFTL, my framerates are much less consistent now, but generally stay between 150 and 300 in most resolutions, including 1080p.

(evuze) #13

OFTL?

(Zenity) #14

One Frame Thread Lag, aka One Frame Delay or whatever it was called in the settings menu.

I made a typo though, in the last sentence I meant “with”, not “without” of course.

(NuclearSharkhead) #15

Good observations. Did you OC your 750ti ?

(Zenity) #16

It’s the EVGA SC version, so it’s a bit factory overclocked (not as much as the FTW version, which requires an additional power connection). I haven’t tried overclocking it more yet.

(uberlag) #17

Thanks for posting but can u share the finished config file please?