FPS issues

[NA1]

FPS issues

Recently just got this game for PC. Never played the original Witcher 2, so I figured Witcher 2 EE would be a good time to get it, as I did with Witcher 1 EE.

I've been using the epilogue scene where you start fighting on the drawbridge as a benchmark area. Lots of NPCs, situations for shadows, etc, makes for good testing.

My framerate in that scene is pretty much always about 32 +- 5.

At best:
I run the game at 1920*1080 with all settings maxed, with uber, motion blur, and SSOA disabled. I get about 30 FPS at this scene.

At worst:
I run the game at 1366*768 with all settings at minimum/disabled, and I get about 35 FPS at this scene.

Something not workin' the way it should here....

Yes, all drivers are up to date.


PC:
GPU: Radeon HD 5850
CPU: Q6600 2.4 Ghz (OC'd to 3.6 Ghz)
RAM: 8g DDR2
OS: W7 64-bit


UPDATE: So I ran the game with EVERYTHING disabled/minimum, and ran the game at 640*480 resolution. On that drawbridge scene, I get about 45 fps.

I should be getting 100+. Seriously CD Projekt, wtf is up with your game?

 

[AsTheDeath]

I'm not the techiest of techies, but if resolution and graphical settings don't really impact performance that normally suggests a CPU bottleneck, and yours isn't fantastic... Can you check (using windows performance monitor/task manager) what your CPU is doing?

 

[GuyNwah]

That CPU shouldn't bottleneck. It's an old horse, but it has a big cache and overclocks like a sprinter on steroids. This game doesn't tend to be CPU-bound anyway. What it does get bound by is the number of pixels you have to compute, and that causes GPUs to show performance that depends on resolution more than settings.

You're probably close to full throughput on that 5850, at 1920x1080 and most-of-Ultra. You can run MSI Afterburner to check. If it shows GPU usage of 99% or close to it, your GPU is already being run pedal to the metal.

With EE, the most important feature to disable is "Cinematic DOF". They did something that makes this feature very expensive in the EE.

 

[NA1]

I've run it with Cinematic DOF disabled when I run the game at minimum specs.

Doesn't seem to help much.

 

[NA1]

Bump.

 

[Highlancer]

That CPU shouldn't bottleneck. It's an old horse, but it has a big cache and overclocks like a sprinter on steroids. This game doesn't tend to be CPU-bound anyway

Not entirely true, there, mate.

Actually CPU IS important for the game almost as much as the GPU. The Witcher 2 is a very demanding game.

Here: http://www.techspot.com/review/405-the-witcher-2-performance/page8.html

 

[GuyNwah]

Not entirely true, there, mate.

Actually CPU IS important for the game almost as much as the GPU. The Witcher 2 is a very demanding game.

Here: http://www.techspot.com/review/405-the-witcher-2-performance/page8.html

That review is irrelevant. Comparing Nehalem and Sandy Bridge quads with Phenom IIs just demonstrates that AMD CPUs are not competitive when the load is not tailored for AMD quad cores. It tells you nothing about how Kentsfield Core 2 Quads perform with this game, because no CPUs of that design were included in the test. The OP has a CPU that I doubt is 50% loaded on the busiest core.

Something else is bottlenecking the OP. But there is no point in condemning the CPU, especially before GPU performance has been measured.

 

[Highlancer]

That review is irrelevant.

You made me smile.

You know, you COULD compare OP's CPU with some of the CPUs used in the benchmark and you'd had a pretty good picture about the situation. But of course, you already know that.

Or it might be... irrelevant... ? Maybe we should add in the equation also 3 generations ago CPUs? So it could make more sense to you?

 

[NA1]

If a Q6600 running at 3.6 Ghz is bottlenecking me at 30-35 FPS, then they'd have had to rip out over 90% of the game's subroutines to make it work on the 360, let alone run at a decent framerate on that console.

 

[WrATH64]

Not entirely true, there, mate.

Actually CPU IS important for the game almost as much as the GPU. The Witcher 2 is a very demanding game.

Here: http://www.techspot.com/review/405-the-witcher-2-performance/page8.html

The CPU is always important because the faster the CPU, the more it can process off the GPU. The CPU is pretty useless at graphics operations because that's what it's not designed to do but that doesn't make it not important for gaming.

Just be aware that it's no secret that crossplatform game engines are more CPU driven because consoles have strong CPUs.

 

[NA1]

More bumps until issue is resolved.

 

[WrATH64]

I think what is consistent on the forums is that AMD cards don't run well with The Witcher 2 and doesn't seem to be very well optimised for such cards.

NVIDIA cards generally run a fair amount better, probably due to CDPR getting help with optimisations from NVIDIA.

 

[Licaon_Kter]

it's something EE specific anyway, hopefully they're fixing things up

le: can any of you AMD guys, that have issues, try the new hotfix: http://en.thewitcher.com/dotnet/ ? ( your old witcher2.exe is backed up )

 

[nstiver]

I don't know bro. Tried TW2 tech support?

 

[WrATH64]

CDPR should never has used .NET for the config UI but I guess it's the best way for them to use the Witcher 2 for the XBox360 and then have to strip out all of the settings from in-game.

We all know all those settings should have been in the game menu, not some .NET broken crap.

 

[mbangali]

Make sure that your system configuration is matching with minmum hard ware requirement. also see that you have installed necessary drivers and latest version of DirectX on your computer. Click here

 

[GuyNwah]

Make sure that your system configuration is matching with minmum hard ware requirement. also see that you have installed necessary drivers and latest version of DirectX on your computer. Click here

The OP already did that; you can read it in his first post. His computer massively exceeds all minimum and recommended hardware requirements. He is already up to date on drivers. He said so, and we should start by taking him at his word.

Back on topic, OP, you still need to measure GPU performance. We can't tell from the numbers you posted whether your GPU is running at full load to make that 30-35 fps, or whether it is underloaded and you have problems elsewhere. MSI Afterburner does a good job of this; you can see frame rate, GPU temperature, GPU compute load, and GPU memory usage all at the same time. Any other program that measures frame rate and GPU burden and can display it in an overlay and on a strip chart would do just as well.

As for the .NET crap, that came about because, well, Microsoft uses .NET to perform many advanced functions, especially communicating objects over the network. They have done so for many years and are not going to change doing things that way. If you use a Microsoft development environment to do those things, you end up with dependencies on .NET. If you use Visual C++ 2010, you end up with dependencies on .NET 4.0 unless you take care to prevent them.

Since features of .NET 4.0 were used to solve the problem of uploading the Arena scores properly, the patch to solve that problem made the game dependent on .NET 4.0. This, in hindsight predictably (this is not just CDPR's problem; many software companies are suffering from it in various ways), caused fatal incompatibilities with many other programs. It also broke Wine compatibility, for a game that had been one of the best ever on Wine.

In the Bad Old Days, we called it DLL Hell. Microsoft told us DLL Hell had been banished. They were wrong again.