Heavy Popping of objects/npc/shadows/meshs/textures

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Heavy Popping of objects/npc/shadows/meshs/textures

Hello

this issue has been around since the release of the game, and we have yet to hear anything about a probable fix and it has gotten even worse since patch 1.0.7 and patch 1.0.8 have no mention of some fix for it

the popping in cutscene is ridiculous to say the least, you can notice geralt/npc beard/hair/objects/textures popping right in your face, and once you notice it, its the end, i will not go into the very low LOD in place like novigrad or any random villages that has meshs pop 3 meters away from geralt

CDPR told us 3 months ago that they are going to unlock the PC settings, and yet we cant do anything about it, everything is either crypted or simply hardlocked :

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2...he-witcher-3-graphics-downgrade-issue-head-on

and yet no fix, not a single word about it, you dont want to fix it ? you guys dont have the time ? fine, at the very least let us do it , just unock the hardcoded settings, there are many capable peoples on the forum who can handle this

i cant see myself replay with NG+ ( wich i really want to do ) with this popping problem, its a crime to let this going for such a beautifully crafted game
 
Well, it's a Problem for Console-Users, too. They have to do something about this themselves as it is a self-induced Problem.
I've been okay until Patch 1.04, but it's a mess ever since.
It's the only real Problem I'm facing as it's taking away much (if not all) of the atmosphere.

Greetings.
 
sadly I don't think this is anywhere high on their priorities list. Whenever Marcin Momot jumps into a thread to post and I ask him why this issue is still present, he completely ignores the question. For a developer who loves to claim that they always listen and read the forums, this is really a shame. I mean, they play the same freaking game, so how is it that an issue like this doesn't bother them ?
 
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Having the same problem here, horrible popping everywhere...
I also had to decrease the textures from high to medium to even make the game playable and the whole game just looks blurred out like that... What went wrong there CDPR :(
I really enjoyed how beautiful the game looked before 1.07 and had so much fun with it, but the performance now is totally killing it...

Playing with a i5-3570K CPU 3.4GHz, GTX 770, 16GB Ram
 
Yeah, its interesting it could have gotten worse.. or the first time i noticed popin with alchemy herbs was in 1.08. Could have been in 1.07 also..

Somethings interesting.. it seems to vary by location and place.. i noticed that in novigrad with hundreds of npc's basically no popin (more than usual). Yet go to a field, possibly one you haven't been to, and yeah it feels like its not even trying to load the npc's unless you're at maximum 3 meters away.

I suspect the giant cache file (about 4 gigs on my machine) that popped up recently is around this.. i haven't tested going to these areas again to see if its any better. Lol. Maybe the encryption is expensive, if its encrypted... really they need a disk cache separate to the resources themselves? Maybe there's a setting somewhere to make this better.
 
Unfortunately I have to agree, Its a real shame to see this crap in such a beautiful game. At this point I suspect the issue will be resolved on PC by the community, tough luck for consoles. Of course CDPR could still prove me wrong .
 
ther's currently no way to fix this ( and will never be unless someone revers engeneer the exe wich would take a ridiculous amount of effort ), even with redkit , if they dont unlock LOD settings we're stuck with consoles level of popping
 
I've been very disheartened by all the decisions CDPR had to make in order to accommodate certain, no-to-be named platforms. That's all well and good but there is no reason (other than time and $$ but this is CDPR, the PC guys, right?) why the PC version has to suffer.
 
In 1.07 they said the made some new streaming system to make performance better.

While i personally enjoy blaming consoles for the downfall of civilization.. i don't think that's the whole story.. there are probably pc users with 750ti's writing support tickets wanting help in running the game... this is making them not hold back in making the pc version like consoles. Which means we have to suffer the down fall of humanity also.

I haven't poked around to see if there's a way to disable that cache... also... did they lower the lod distance again? I noticed grass popping in on the horizon for the first time in a very long time.

I guess i'm getting a very smooth framerate now thanks to 107/108 so happy with my results... Its smooth at 2560x1600 on a 780ti all ultra no hairworks sweetfx cutscene mod forced quality ambient occlusion. course every oc and performance tweak possible applied.
 
this is a truly severe and rather serious technical problem with TW3 that is still not solved, and i don't know if it'll ever get fixed.
no only most of these threads got ignored by CDPR, but these problems kept on increasing. and let us not talk about the hard coded limitations on the engine, which seem to be the same for all platforms, considering that there's a unified build to be used.

So dear CDPR, and Mr. Marcin Iwinski, we are still waiting for you to keep on your promesses. So i'll say this: words are CHEAP, time for ACTION.
 
It seems to be related to textures, not meshes. If you run into an NPC that hasn't been drawn in yet, you'll still hear them groan or holler because you ran into them. Other times, you may see a box floating along in mid-air as the NPC carrying it hasn't been drawn. I'm sure everyone has encountered the partially loaded NPCs (hair...but no face) at least once or twice.

This is both good and bad. Good! -- because the assets are being created in-game and are active even if you can't see them. This means that the game won't crash by failing to load key components before Geralt triggers something. Bad! -- because it means that the procedural texture threading for NPCs/objects is not in sync with the rest of the game world. This is most likely a problem at the source code level. (Which is also probably why CDPR isn't openly responding to posts or discussing the issue.) It's probably very similar to the "invisible chunks" in Minecraft -- distant mountains are fully formed, but the forest 2 feet in front of you hasn't been drawn in yet.

One tweak that works wonders is to edit user.settings and double the amount of video RAM allocated to textures by changing:

TextureMemoryBudget=1600

The default Ultra setting is 800, but doubling it helps to load more textures more quickly. The only downside is that you need the spare VRAM to cover it or you will get instability. 3GB should be enough for 1600. I would not go above 1200 for 2GB. I've tried raising it higher than 1600, as I've got 6 GB VRAM (cracks knuckles arrogantly), but noticed no real difference (awkwardly lowers knuckles). Whatever your value is, try to double it, and that should avoid quite a lot of pop-in. I think the values are so low because, well, consoles.
 
You think I should try this with 2GB of VRAM? I am playing with everything on high and vram usage is already pretty high (around 1600-1800 I'd say, sometimes around 1900-2000). I am afraid that raising TextureMemoryBudget will cause some issues.
EDIT: Well I tried and raise TextureMemoryBudget from 500 to 1024. Still seeing objects appearing in like 25-50 meters or so, but at least NPCs arent appearing right in front of me. So it helped a little.
Not sure If I should keep it this way, VRAM usage is around 1984 MB's so it is close to the limit.
EDIT2 : After 20 or so minutes game starts lagging heavily, fps drops to 35-40 everywhere, stuttering etc. Memory use exceeds 2048MB. Whatever, should have bought 4GB 960, I guess.
 
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currently ther's no way to decrease the poping, me and a lots of other peoples tried pretty much every possible setting at our hand, tweaking memory budget has virtually no effect
 
You think I should try this with 2GB of VRAM? I am playing with everything on high and vram usage is already pretty high (around 1600-1800 I'd say, sometimes around 1900-2000). I am afraid that raising TextureMemoryBudget will cause some issues.
EDIT: Well I tried and raise TextureMemoryBudget from 500 to 1024. Still seeing objects appearing in like 25-50 meters or so, but at least NPCs arent appearing right in front of me. So it helped a little.
Not sure If I should keep it this way, VRAM usage is around 1984 MB's so it is close to the limit.
EDIT2 : After 20 or so minutes game starts lagging heavily, fps drops to 35-40 everywhere, stuttering etc. Memory use exceeds 2048MB. Whatever, should have bought 4GB 960, I guess.

It's very hard to use this tweak with only 2GB. Even with 980 ti and 6GB here, the game does tend to stutter at times. Often, just quicksaving/reloading is enough to clear that up. Same thing if the pop-in starts getting wild again, despite the tweak.

It's very much remedying the symptoms, not the cause. In fact, I believe that whatever causes the weird lag-spikes and FPS drops may actually be exacerbated by this tweak. So, now, though you can run around without horrendous pop-in 90% of the time, when the game does hitch up on something...holy fricacta. CDPR will have to sort out the engine issue that's causing it to begin with. I'm sure we'll get there eventually.

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currently ther's no way to decrease the poping, me and a lots of other peoples tried pretty much every possible setting at our hand, tweaking memory budget has virtually no effect

Also try running with your frames capped at 60 or less and try swapping your PhysX to run on CPU or GPU. I'd put money down that it's a threading issue, as I said before, so freeing up more cycles on your processors may help. Your system has some muscle, so it should see some benefit from this.

Sometimes, I wish I could have, like, 10 different systems in front of me. Then, I could hop from one to the next and figure out why something works here but not there...
 
this is a truly severe and rather serious technical problem with TW3 that is still not solved, and i don't know if it'll ever get fixed.
no only most of these threads got ignored by CDPR, but these problems kept on increasing. and let us not talk about the hard coded limitations on the engine, which seem to be the same for all platforms, considering that there's a unified build to be used.

So dear CDPR, and Mr. Marcin Iwinski, we are still waiting for you to keep on your promesses. So i'll say this: words are CHEAP, time for ACTION.

Fixed? I think its very certain that the current problems are completely by design. They built this popin problem with a knowing hand. We have gotten a much smoother fps experience in exchange. Though i strongly suspect the primary driver in these changes was consoles (and pc support tickets). Ie, not you me and this thread.

Being older if given a choice i would certainly choose graphics over gameplay... but.. as an exercise in curiosity get back patch 1.03. That had the highest reasonable detail distance, and the least amount of popin that i can remember. There is a massive fps cost, but that... makes sense? If you need the mip bias for whatever config you're running then try 1.04. You do get popin, but the extreme hardcore 2-3 meter npc teleportation popin does definitely not happen with 1.04. You also get axii finishers on bandits... Its like an upgrade.
 
Being older if given a choice i would certainly choose graphics over gameplay... but.. as an exercise in curiosity get back patch 1.03. That had the highest reasonable detail distance, and the least amount of popin that i can remember. There is a massive fps cost, but that... makes sense? If you need the mip bias for whatever config you're running then try 1.04. You do get popin, but the extreme hardcore 2-3 meter npc teleportation popin does definitely not happen with 1.04. You also get axii finishers on bandits... Its like an upgrade.

True to every word, 1.03 great low fog and distance detail, 1.04 introducing mip-maps (which I like), 1.05 trouble with NPC crates and quests,
1.06 awful thick fog in Novigrad-pop up npc ,1.07 missing boat in novigrad harbour and priority meshes streaming seem changed,
1.08 most stable version- but less fps than usual and graphic card memory is only 1.6 gb at max (comparing to 2.6 on 1.07 patch-what when wrong there)

For newcomers -If you don't need all dlc-s , stash box or alternate movement - it's best to stay on 1.03 or 1.04 patch.
 
True to every word, 1.03 great low fog and distance detail, 1.04 introducing mip-maps (which I like), 1.05 trouble with NPC crates and quests,
1.06 awful thick fog in Novigrad-pop up npc ,1.07 missing boat in novigrad harbour and priority meshes streaming seem changed,
1.08 most stable version- but less fps than usual and graphic card memory is only 1.6 gb at max (comparing to 2.6 on 1.07 patch-what when wrong there)

For newcomers -If you don't need all dlc-s , stash box or alternate movement - it's best to stay on 1.03 or 1.04 patch.

Yes, absolutely.. though i'm not sure about 1.08 having worse fps.

What i strongly suspect (since they only give us console detail release notes) is since 1.05, they've started to fix, or change the function of the graphics settings to make a very significant difference in how they function. At some point post 1.04..

- They've fixed the frame limiter setting to actually do something. If you have this set on anything that isn't unlimited, it drops frames and stutters like a sick and tired console.
- In 1.08, they made the vsync setting actually mean something. Previously i had this forced in the nvidia control panel, and the setting in game didn't do anything on or off. in 1.08, it seems that if you don't have it on in the game settings, it definitely does not vsync.. when i first installed 1.08 i thought it was worse too.
- Somewhere between 1.05 and 1.07 they lowered the ambient occlusion settings (well, im convinced at least).

Its a bid sad, because i was upset for a long time, but every patch, there's a strong chance that the settings we take hours perfecting for our machines will get upset by cdpr ninja changing the function of one of the value settings. Its worth playing around with these every patch... i didn't bother with 1.05 and 1.06, but tried again with 1.07 and 1.08 and the fps is amazing now. There is the hardcore popin cost, but i think i'm okay with that.

I haven't tried increasing the memory size to see if it helps with popin.. 1.04 didn't have problem popin.. next chance will give it a go. There's also the issue of the cache file.. if you revisit an area once the popin has broken the experience does it happen again? I haven't tested it but there's a chance that it doesn't.
 
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