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

+
The NPC pop in has been in the game since day 1 in my experience. None of the patches so far did anything to improve things significantly.
The specs, no matter if high performance-enthusiast or mainstream level are of no real significance either. I'm running TW3 with tweaked beyond-Ultra settings on an i7 5960X, 32 GB RAM and 980 Ti SLI setup from a ridiculously fast SSD and still see NPCs popping up all over the place.
 
@vesemas228,

I hear you, but that's what optimization entails. A game engine is just that: an engine. You can't simply make everything run faster. In order to get more power in one area, you have to take it away from another. There is no perfect answer -- it's a great balancing act. And the more complex the engine, the more moving parts. The more moving parts, the more chances for something to go wrong.

I'll say that in 1.04-, pop-in was still there, but much less frequent. The game also used to crash, hang, and stutter like crazy for a lot of users. My guess is that the pop-in developed from an effort to stabilize the procedural generation of new areas/objects/NPCs. Now, they probably can't fix it without re-introducing the instability.

I've never experienced any problems with the in-game graphics options. They have all worked for me since release. To this day, I must run Fullscreen, in-game Vsync ON, Frame Limit at 60, or I receive terrible stuttering.

Many changes were made to mip-mapping, AA, and ambient occlusion since release. Most of them improvements, as far as I can see on my screen. Although, that's always subjective. I noticed great improvement in performance with Nvidia HBAO+ over time. AA became much sharper. And I used to run with anisotropic filtering at 16x in Nvidia control panel. The distant textures used to be so muddy. Now, they look plenty good enough for me using default, in-game mipmaps. Got a few more FPS there, to boot.

For you last paragraph, do try the TextureMemoryBudget tweak. Works great here. When, not if, the pop-in starts going haywire despite the tweak, it will get worse and worse as you move about. I just quicksave and reload, and that always seems to clear it up for me.
 
@vesemas228Now, they probably can't fix it without re-introducing the instability.

I've never experienced any problems with the in-game graphics options. They have all worked for me since release. To this day, I must run Fullscreen, in-game Vsync ON, Frame Limit at 60, or I receive terrible stuttering.

Many changes were made to mip-mapping, AA, and ambient occlusion since release. Most of them improvements, as far as I can see on my screen. Although, that's always subjective. I noticed great improvement in performance with Nvidia HBAO+ over time. AA became much sharper. And I used to run with anisotropic filtering at 16x in Nvidia control panel.

For you last paragraph, do try the TextureMemoryBudget tweak. Works great here. When, not if, the pop-in starts going haywire despite the tweak, it will get worse and worse as you move about. I just quicksave and reload, and that always seems to clear it up for me.

Well, instability is a separate issue to performance. There's no exclusive rule that things that perform well must crash, instability is usually closer to code defects/unstable overclocks. Id completely agree about the trade off's between popin and performance though. My current assessment is its a worthy tradeoff, but leaving it as a fixed setting is certainly sad, i'd like to play around with it if i can.

Set your frame limiting to unlimited, just for giggles. Though you're running a 980ti and getting above 60? Perhaps its different for that environment. I'm constantly under 60fps, and both 30 and 60 fps limited still drops frames even though i'm not hitting 60 or above. Which makes the image look much worse. For my case this must be unlimited. Though im not sure what gains limiting the frames does.. vsync does the same thing effectively.

Ahha!! You got better performance with HBAO+!!! Its confirmed!! They did nerf it. Since 1.07 i've been able to force quality from the nvidia control panel due to the rest of the optimizations and still get a happy framerate, perhaps give it a go, its gorgeous at high quality. Yeah they buffed sharpening significantly in 1.04 i think. Its the sharpening setting.. previously it wasn't doing much, now its got kick. Disable it to see it back to normal. I personally turn off ingame and use one of the lumasharpen modes in sweetfx.. it seems finer than the ingame one.. but its a subtle difference only.

Alright, i'll give the memory budget setting a go next play. I've got 3 gigs on my card so should have some room to increase it.

Forced HQ Ambient occlusion example:
 
Last edited:
Well, instability is a separate issue to performance. There's no exclusive rule that things that perform well must crash, instability is usually closer to code defects/unstable overclocks. Id completely agree about the trade off's between popin and performance though. My current assessment is its a worthy tradeoff, but leaving it as a fixed setting is certainly sad, i'd like to play around with it if i can.

And there's probably a source code-level reason why that sort of option is not included. I'm sure they're continuing to work on it. While performance and stability are not mutually exclusive in most cases, it seems like they are here. It's a significant build over prior REDengines. I'm still convinced that it's a data threading issue -- timing and sync are off somehow. But who knows, really (...except for the CDPR programmers that are probably pouring over a million lines of code right now and trying not to pull their hair out)?

Set your frame limiting to unlimited, just for giggles. Though you're running a 980ti and getting above 60? Perhaps its different for that environment. I'm constantly under 60fps, and both 30 and 60 fps limited still drops frames even though i'm not hitting 60 or above. Which makes the image look much worse. For my case this must be unlimited. Though im not sure what gains limiting the frames does.. vsync does the same thing effectively.

I do this every time a patch is released. I'm a tweaking junkie. (I have a problem. I admit it.:smoke:) FPS has never been my problem, I get around 75-80 in Novigraad with everything at Ultra (Except: Hairworks OFF -- I can turn it on and it only costs me ~10 fps, but I just don't like it at all.) The problem is not FPS. It's stutter. Unless I have frames locked, the game constantly micro-stutters everywhere while I'm moving. It's migraine-inducing. Frames locked at 60 -- butter smooth.

Ahha!! You got better performance with HBAO+!!! Its confirmed!! They did nerf it. Since 1.07 i've been able to force quality from the nvidia control panel due to the rest of the optimizations and still get a happy framerate, perhaps give it a go, its gorgeous at high quality. Yeah they buffed sharpening significantly in 1.04 i think. Its the sharpening setting.. previously it wasn't doing much, now its got kick. Disable it to see it back to normal. I personally turn off ingame and use one of the lumasharpen modes in sweetfx.. it seems finer than the ingame one.. but its a subtle difference only.

It's possible, but on the whole, I think it looks much better than before. When the game was released, the contrast caused by AO really made colors appear almost neon in places. It feels like they've toned down all of the visuals for much more natural lighting. I'm a huge less-is-more fan with stuff like that. I'm very happy with it as it is now.

Let me know how the tweak works! You should be able to jack it all the way up to 1600. Also, it will cause the game settings to show that your textures have been set to "Low". Don't worry about that. Same issue with shadows if you tweak them.
 
@vesemas228,

I hear you, but that's what optimization entails. A game engine is just that: an engine. You can't simply make everything run faster. In order to get more power in one area, you have to take it away from another. There is no perfect answer -- it's a great balancing act. And the more complex the engine, the more moving parts. The more moving parts, the more chances for something to go wrong.

I'll say that in 1.04-, pop-in was still there, but much less frequent. The game also used to crash, hang, and stutter like crazy for a lot of users. My guess is that the pop-in developed from an effort to stabilize the procedural generation of new areas/objects/NPCs. Now, they probably can't fix it without re-introducing the instability.

I've never experienced any problems with the in-game graphics options. They have all worked for me since release. To this day, I must run Fullscreen, in-game Vsync ON, Frame Limit at 60, or I receive terrible stuttering.

Many changes were made to mip-mapping, AA, and ambient occlusion since release. Most of them improvements, as far as I can see on my screen. Although, that's always subjective. I noticed great improvement in performance with Nvidia HBAO+ over time. AA became much sharper. And I used to run with anisotropic filtering at 16x in Nvidia control panel. The distant textures used to be so muddy. Now, they look plenty good enough for me using default, in-game mipmaps. Got a few more FPS there, to boot.

For you last paragraph, do try the TextureMemoryBudget tweak. Works great here. When, not if, the pop-in starts going haywire despite the tweak, it will get worse and worse as you move about. I just quicksave and reload, and that always seems to clear it up for me.

you do optimize and have to make proper choices for where and what to put on resources in a closed environment with set hardware/computing power, but not for PC, where the power headroom is so big compared to console ( and its gonna be even more ridiculous with next generation of Nvidia for example ), you literally have no justification beside devs costs to not use it

but what make CDPR and W3 situation worse is that they showed us in the 35mn demo the game running totally fine with wayyyy higher settings than the version that we have now
 
you do optimize and have to make proper choices for where and what to put on resources in a closed environment with set hardware/computing power, but not for PC, where the power headroom is so big compared to console ( and its gonna be even more ridiculous with next generation of Nvidia for example ), you literally have no justification beside devs costs to not use it

But a game's engine is "software" and has nothing to do (directly) with "hardware". Any engine is based on various bits of code that must all work together to create a foundation that a game can then be built on top of. The engine is not the game itself.

Each engine has limitations -- what it can and can't do. Perfect example is Starcraft vs Total War. Spawn 3000 characters in Starcraft, and the game will become a slide-show and likely crash. The engine just can't handle it. The engine used in the Total War series can handle 15,000 characters on-screen without any FPS loss. Same exact hardware for both games -- two completely different engines.

The REDengine 3 was built to create massive open worlds with dynamically generated/drawn folliage, weather effects, lighting, and certain NPCs/mobs. Regardless of whether I'm running it on a GTX 670m or a Titan Z with 12GB VRAM, the engine is not able to keep up with the calls for certain NPC/object textures to load in real-time. It fails to schedule the textures to draw at the correct distance (obviously, because something else in the engine is delaying those calls), then it seems to get very, very confused by constantly culling/dumping textures for almost all near NPCs and objects around you. It's like the engine begins to think that by drawing/unloading the textures 2 feet in front of / behind you -- it's doing it correctly.

I think it's a data threading issue because this only seems to occur to specific assets in the game, not all assets universally. So the code governing the timing and synchronization of those assets is getting knocked out of alignment by something and not re-syncing properly. If those calls are mutually exclusive with other calls, because that's how it's written in the source code, then there may be no way to completely rectify it -- bad code. That means it will have to be re-written, and re-writing that section could create issues for other sections that all rely on the existing code...

...nightmare fuel...

It could take months of steady work to figure it all out and then iron it all out.

but what make CDPR and W3 situation worse is that they showed us in the 35mn demo the game running totally fine with wayyyy higher settings than the version that we have now

I adore this argument.

Firstly, the game was not even fully playable then. It was a demo -- a trailer. Adorned with bells and whistles and specifically staged to look as amazing as possible. That's what advertising is.

Secondly, it was running on their custom hardware...which is well beyond anything you or I have sitting beside our desks! Plus it was hardware that the engine and game were specifically built around. Of course it will be almost flawless! It's like slipping on a custom-tailored Armani sport-coat.

Thirdly, many changes will crop up over the development of a title (the introduction of new resource-hungry gameplay elements, issues that require elements to be added/removed/altered during QA testing, scaling of features to remain functional across multiple platforms, etc.). I challenge you to show me a single game in which everything remained unchanged over its production cycle. Sometimes things can be improved, other times things need to be cut.
 
I adore this argument. Firstly, the game was not even fully playable then. It was a demo -- a trailer. Adorned with bells and whistles and specifically staged to look as amazing as possible. That's what advertising is. Secondly, it was running on their custom hardware...which is well beyond anything you or I have sitting beside our desks! Plus it was hardware that the engine and game were specifically built around. Of course it will be almost flawless! It's like slipping on a custom-tailored Armani sport-coat. Thirdly, many changes will crop up over the development of a title (the introduction of new resource-hungry gameplay elements, issues that require elements to be added/removed/altered during QA testing, scaling of features to remain functional across multiple platforms, etc.). I challenge you to show me a single game in which everything remained unchanged over its production cycle. Sometimes things can be improved, other times things need to be cut.

Yes, yes, yes. Of course. Let us not forget however, that we were told the game would look as good as that, right up to release.
 
Yes, yes, yes. Of course. Let us not forget however, that we were told the game would look as good as that, right up to release.

And I fully expect all of the lettuce and tomato slices to be arranged neatly on my Big Mac, just like it is on the pictures behind the counter. (*Sarcasm alarm*)

Besides, where did CDPR ever claim that the final product would look exactly like it did in the E3 demo? Fans asked that. CDPR said that the trailer was made using the in-game engine (which was true) and was representative of what the final game would look like (which is true). What were they supposed to say? The game wasn't even playable yet. That was all they had at the time.

If you want to know "what CDPR said", here:

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

People often confuse hype, what they've seen, and what they believe with what actually happened. (And the media doesn't help this one bit.) The team knows it doesn't look "the same". They changed the entire rendering system after E3. They needed to cancel billowing smoke because DirectX 12 just wasn't ready yet.

In the end, the game looks absolutely amazing. Complaining that "it's not good enough -- it should look like that instead"...is just spoiled whining.
 
Besides, where did CDPR ever claim that the final product would look exactly like it did in the E3 demo? Fans asked that. CDPR said that the trailer was made using the in-game engine (which was true) and was representative of what the final game would look like (which is true). What were they supposed to say? The game wasn't even playable yet. That was all they had at the time.

Good god, not the e3 video again. We're talking about a 35-min gameplay demo that came out during Gamescom 2014. Also,


There are more examples elsewhere but I must get to bed now.
 

Attachments

  • sR4ob8S.jpg
    sR4ob8S.jpg
    80 KB · Views: 57
For you last paragraph, do try the TextureMemoryBudget tweak. Works great here. When, not if, the pop-in starts going haywire despite the tweak, it will get worse and worse as you move about. I just quicksave and reload, and that always seems to clear it up for me.

Done and loving it, thanks. It doesn't actually solve the 3m popin issue, but i can see the vram usage go up in certain scenes and it feels more wholesome.
 
ah yeah ... imagine when Geralt have to asking someone and then Roach butt appeard...nightmare ! nightmare !
 
Here's something to get you guys thinking..

I've just been working on the grass settings.. and something that has my stomach sinking with console destruction at the moment.

- I noticed with the patches we have a very tangible fps boost on pc.
- This i suspected was just because of nerfing the grass.
- I changed the grass settings to remove the grass ring, at least to 1.03/4 levels.

And this is the really spooky part.. once you fix the grass.. the framerate improvements... from this new fancy streaming machine that causes this really bad poppin, even with the frikkin herbs... has a next to nothing fps increase on pc. If theres any value in this.. its console only.

Restore the grass ring yourself and decide whether hardcore popin was worth basically nothing... I think we just got consoled here. Don't take my word for it.. prove it yourself.

FINAL CONCLUSION: I just observed every 0.1 increase in grass draw distance costs 2fps. I think its pretty certain they've been going hard at downgrading the grass every 1000 support tickets from ps4 and 750ti users.

Its not that straight forward though.. see.. at one point the amount of draw distance fell in being comfortable for my card.. and the fps jumped significantly. For my setup, 780ti at 2560 heavily customized, i think i'm going to choose 1.8.

If anything is certain from these recent graphical tweaking adventures.. first check that the vram allocated for the grass is enough for whatever value you're going to set this to.. and 1.5 is very heavy handed low. My 780ti could take more easily, and people running 980ti's should be able to remove the grass ring completely. Good fun.

- 1.9, possibly 1.8 seems to be the minimum where you wont notice the ring during gameplay.
- I still needed at least 70 megs even at 1.8, the fps was worse lower. Why this is set to 16 megs default beats me.

Last edit: Frikk it, just set the GrassRingSize to GrassRingSize=100777216

Grass ring size seems to be vram usage for the grass.. the grassiest place i could think of was the beehives outside the honeyworks mead factory, and there was a 5 fps difference between 60megs and 70megs, on my machine. Not wanting to do an exhaustive test of how much memory is needed to support the most grassiest area in the game, i'm just setting this to 100megs and being done with it. Please let me know if you find anything to the contrary.

Now i'm really really mad.

Everyone with a decent system, if you've noticed the grass ring at all while playing, even if it hasn't bothered you, to change your user.settings to the following.

[Rendering/SpeedTree]
GrassDistanceScale=2.8
FoliageDistanceScale=1.8
GrassRingSize=100777216

There is a performance cost for doing this, and in some scenes its quite hard (crows perch as an example). Its actually quite dramatic.. on my setup.. the difference between 2.8 and 1.5 is like 10fps.. and im only getting 40fps at 1.5. I think its pretty certain cdpr have been just nerfing the grass now to get these "optimizations". So.. i'm personally going to run with 1.9, maybe 2.0, but if you have greater than my 780ti, or even that running at 1080p then you definitely want to start around 2.6-2.8.. its stunning. You can try distance scale at 3.0 for kicks, but the gains over 2.8 aren't significant.

I read your responses and had another go at the setting this morning to arrive at the above.. my incoherent replies of discovery are in the spoiler.. might be of interest to anyone else who wants to play around.

.... w3 with grass distance up is a thing of beauty..... wow. damn you cdpr.
 
Last edited:
Done and loving it, thanks. It doesn't actually solve the 3m popin issue, but i can see the vram usage go up in certain scenes and it feels more wholesome.

No prob!

---------- Updated at 04:14 AM ----------

Good god, not the e3 video again. We're talking about a 35-min gameplay demo that came out during Gamescom 2014. Also,


There are more examples elsewhere but I must get to bed now.

Well, fair enough. That's a blunder on Mr. Momot's part. Sue him, I guess.

I believe the rendering system had long since been swapped out by then. The answer should have been "No." (But I think he thought he was being honest. People make mistakes sometimes.)

However, I'm not sure if a personal response by a Website Coordinator to a free user on an informal thread in an open community forum...counts as a public statement that overshadows the official answers given by PR reps at events like E3 or through statements released in actual company publications. (This is what I was referring to about people seeing something and then believing what they want.)
 
I adore this argument.

Firstly, the game was not even fully playable then. It was a demo -- a trailer. Adorned with bells and whistles and specifically staged to look as amazing as possible. That's what advertising is.

Secondly, it was running on their custom hardware...which is well beyond anything you or I have sitting beside our desks! Plus it was hardware that the engine and game were specifically built around. Of course it will be almost flawless! It's like slipping on a custom-tailored Armani sport-coat.

Thirdly, many changes will crop up over the development of a title (the introduction of new resource-hungry gameplay elements, issues that require elements to be added/removed/altered during QA testing, scaling of features to remain functional across multiple platforms, etc.). I challenge you to show me a single game in which everything remained unchanged over its production cycle. Sometimes things can be improved, other times things need to be cut.

well seems like you didnt watch that video, am not talking about the shorts demo/trailers, but this :


everything is nearly in place, weather, tod, npcs, quests, combats, some of the AI, novigrad ect ... but still i will give them a break about all of downgrade whining, i dont care about the lighting, the higher quality models/textures ect .. whatever, just give us this level of LOD and view distance, thats it

i dont think thats too much asking to have a game stop poping stuff right in your face, engine limitation or not, its not our problem if its the case ultimately , and since you want to go the corporate discussion kind of way, they either make some effort and code it to work properly or either they dont care and we PC players take note of that, thats it , at the end its a product that isnt working how it IS ( every early demo is still used as advertisement ) and WAS advertised

if you want to see a game that didnt change nearly at all from its reveal to releas ( ground zero ) check MGSV
 
Last edited:
This popin is infuriating.

So i managed to completely fix the environment by going into the all those iopriority xml files and setting everything that looked reasonable to critical.

The environment loads ROCK SOLID from this excellent.

The NPC (are still deliberate malice and sabotage by consoleDPR to their own game) are a special case.. see... its not like npcs arent being drawn. I have a test save in skellege where the npc popin always occurs.. i tried changing a bunch of things.. but its almost like some npc's are flagged as DO NOT DRAW unless they are within 2 meters.. I was looking down.. the do not draw npcs were there only in nametag. Then i realized that there were npcs visible, literally hundreds of meters away.. multiple times further than the blank spaces, all animating and moving away...

hang on hang on.. havent tried turning the npc game setting DOWN yet.. when you cut off your own arm like cdpr do sillier things....

Nope that didn't fix it either.

I think its a fair conclusion that one of our fellow platforms is resource constrained. EVERY SINGLE PLATFORM now has to suffer the capabilities of whichever f*&*^(*g console that was. That's the only possibility here. Why did they do that to the pc version? The release notes for these patches are complete lies, and i can't believe these people can go to sleep at night screwing up their hard work like this. And putting forward a patch like its an improvement for players. That's so twisted.
 
Last edited:
well seems like you didnt watch that video, am not talking about the shorts demo/trailers, but this :


everything is nearly in place, weather, tod, npcs, quests, combats, some of the AI, novigrad ect ... but still i will give them a break about all of downgrade whining, i dont care about the lighting, the higher quality models/textures ect .. whatever, just give us this level of LOD and view distance, thats it

i dont think thats too much asking to have a game stop poping stuff right in your face, engine limitation or not, its not our problem if its the case ultimately , and since you want to go the corporate discussion kind of way, they either make some effort and code it to work properly or either they dont care and we PC players take note of that, thats it , at the end its a product that isnt working how it IS ( every early demo is still used as advertisement ) and WAS advertised

if you want to see a game that didnt change nearly at all from its reveal to releas ( ground zero ) check MGSV

demo vid.... I guess they ran it on a CRAY, in slow motion....
 
Hello,

I have an question: Is the problem of not responsiveness and glitching like an quantum-leap of particular vendors/merchants similar to the problem, that is discussed in this thread? Or does this problem regard to another domain?
 
@essenthy,

I'm sorry, man, but "everything" is nowhere near "in place". This video was released almost 1 full year before the game was released. Game-time doesn't pass, there are no random encounters, frame-rate is inconsistent, there is no looting system... This is nothing but a tech demo of a single quest (which is likely one of the ONLY major quests they had mostly finished at that point.)

Plus, it's using the old rendering engine. That engine was scrapped because the team couldn't get lighting for both days and nights looking up-to-spec. The engine we have now was selected as the superior option. I'm afraid it's not possible to make it look like that anymore.

As for the pop-in, again, it will be fixed when it's fixed. You can be patient and enjoy the game as is until then, or you can just shelve it and go play something else. Nothing else to be done until it's fixed. CDPR has shown nothing but dedication to improving the game since release. If you are not happy with that effort, you are well within your rights to demand a refund.

Metal Gear Solid V :
2013 vs. 2015

Texture fidelity drastically increased. More accurate lighting engine. Added much more detailed specular maps. Massive depth of field improvements. Much cleaner animations and speech modeling. That's just graphics; can't even imagine how many gameplay changes were made over time.

---------- Updated at 10:55 PM ----------

This popin is infuriating.

So i managed to completely fix the environment by going into the all those iopriority xml files and setting everything that looked reasonable to critical...

Sorry, (seriously not being cheeky!) but can I ask you to summarize this with more attention to grammar? I'm not sure I'm following everything that you said you did or what its actual effect was, but you've got my attention!

---------- Updated at 10:58 PM ----------

Hello,

I have an question: Is the problem of not responsiveness and glitching like an quantum-leap of particular vendors/merchants similar to the problem, that is discussed in this thread? Or does this problem regard to another domain?

Sorry...again...but while I'm on the subject of grammar: I don't understand this one either. :-
 
Sorry, (seriously not being cheeky!) but can I ask you to summarize this with more attention to grammar? I'm not sure I'm following everything that you said you did or what its actual effect was, but you've got my attention!

Sure, it was getting late, and i was slowly getting angered as my usually successful advances at tweaking something out were getting knocked back at every attempt.
In witcher/bin and witcher/bin/config (not sure which one is getting read so i changed both) theres a file called io_priority_table.xml. I replaced most values with critical, and that seems to fix popin sheep and shrubs etc.

After yesterdays few hours of tweaking though, i think the conclusion is 1) cdpr aren't interesting anymore. 2) roll back to 1.07, its just better. the frames are smoother and i think.. you don't have to worry about resource popin.. it feels very solid.. especially using the same config that had the grass ring increase. 1.07 is gold.. its so solid that i'm willing to forgive the npc popin. 1.08 the cracks in the rendering matrix are back... the gains you get to suffer popin aren't there anymore.

Ideally id be back to 1.04, i was completely happy with that patch until i got excited one weekend. But now i have to suffer consoles as a cost of my curiosity. Remeber that when dealing with cdpr kids.

I think whats madding is.. seriously is genuine malice and ill will. Who would put in a configuration.. that literally worsens or downgrades the graphics, knowingly do this, and the put the setting to disable this in an encrypted file? Really... we are going to tangibly fuck up thousands of peoples games.. PREVENT THEM FROM CHANGING IT BACK and NOT TELL WE"RE GOING TO DO THIS. Even the most mean spirited corporate publisher would have the sense to put the config for something like this in a user accessible place so people can make it work if they need to. I'm speechless.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Top Bottom