Poor performance with high-end system?

[dkanter]

Poor performance with high-end system?

Hi Folks,

I recently bought TW2 and was looking forward to sitting down and playing through the game.

I started the tutorial, and it was terribly slow with very very choppy graphics. The 'look' speed in the game is far too fast, while the mouse speed in manipulating objects (e.g. in the inventory) is too slow (mouse sensitivity is set to 10 in game, to deal with slow mouse speed).

My system specs are:

Sandy Bridge i7 2600K @ 3.4GHz
Win7 x64
8GB of memory
Radeon 6970
2560x1600 primary display, 1680x1050 secondary display
Running in 2560x1600 on primary display

My system is well above the recommended specification. Is there something that I am doing wrong here?

The graphics settings are pretty much the best available, with uber-sampling disabled.

I tried running at 1280x800, and it ran fine, but it looks like crap on my monitor. Do I really need a higher performance GPU for 25x16?


David

 

[Licaon_Kter]

well yeah, also disable Cinematic Depth Of Field, tweaker ? http://witcher.nexusmods.com/mods/181 ( running the Configurator afterwards will mess your config, warned you! )

 

[RSIK_4]

set texture downscaling :high texture memory size :very small shadow quality: medium no. of shadows lights: medium lod distance: minimal blur effects : enabled vignette :enabled vertical sync :enabled decals :medium specification set this tweak in ur config my fps booming over 50-55

 

[GuyNwah]

I think the OP was after tuning hints he can use to get top performance out of a high-end setup, not to get medium performance out of a setup that doesn't meet minimum requirements.

Licaon_Kter gave the answer that is usually right: deep-six "Cinematic DOF" (and "Ubersampling", if you enabled it).

 

[AsTheDeath]

The game is quite demanding, especially at higher resolutions, so yeah, you'll probably have some issues at 2560x1600. Ubersampling is already off, but the Depth of Fields (especially Cinematic DOF) are somewhat performance intensive, as is SSAO.

I should mention that mouse lag in menu screens (and sometimes in game as well, but less noticeable) is a known issue unrelated to your performance, so those are two separate issues.

 

[dkanter]

Does anyone know how much video memory TW2 takes up for different resolutions? I'm wondering if the problem is that my card only has ~1.7GB of video memory.

David

 

[robvdheijden]

it isnt the memory but it definatly is the resolution that aside make sure u dont have graphic card intensive things turned on like ubersampling

2560x1600 are 4million pixels
1920x1080 are 2million pixels

just to give u an idea how much harder ur system has to work on that resolution compared to full hd or lower

i would try running the game on ur secondary monitor and see how it runs then

 

[GuyNwah]

Does anyone know how much video memory TW2 takes up for different resolutions? I'm wondering if the problem is that my card only has ~1.7GB of video memory.

David

Memory is only rarely a problem. The game budgets a large part of graphics memory for textures; if that is too large, you can inadvertently use up all the memory. But the budgets are fairly small; the largest setting in the Options dialog corresponds to 600 MB.

With a 1GB or greater graphics memory, you should never have a problem caused by graphics memory size.

Resolution makes a big difference because the game does a lot of processing in the output stage, where it is working with big blocks of pixels. But it's the output processors and their speed, not the available memory, that is limiting at high resolutions.

 

[dkanter]

The performance necessary scales linearly with pixel count. As you pointed out, I have a 4MP display. Does anyone know how many FLOP/pixel are needed from the shader array?

 

[GuyNwah]

The performance necessary scales linearly with pixel count. As you pointed out, I have a 4MP display. Does anyone know how many FLOP/pixel are needed from the shader array?

Rule number one when analyzing performance of this game: "Necessary" means you have made an assumption that does not hold and you should start by discarding. The faulty assumption here is that shader performance (whether nVidia "unified shaders" or AMD "stream processors") is limiting. It isn't.

It's the output array that is the bottleneck in this game. You can throw 800 instead of 320 shaders at it and it will make little difference. But 8 vs. 16 vs. 32 ROPs is the difference between barely running at all, satisfactory performance on High at high resolution, and Ultra performance (as always, except Ubersampling and Cinematic DOF) on large screens.

If you want a number, I will give you "250 MFLOP per MPixel per frame per second". Or 250 processor-clocks per pixel. That's what my old GTX 285 (32 ROPs at 704 MHz) measures out to. But that is on the ROPs, not on the shader array. This suggests the 6970 could do about 28 frames/second on Ultra at 2560x1600, about twice that on 1920x1080.

So a 6970 (32 ROPs at 880 MHz stock clock) should have no problem with this game on any settings, except for the Ubersampling and Cinematic DOF options. Performance deficits with this powerful a card are more likely due to interference from other programs or poor configuration of the system.

 

[dkanter]

1. What exactly is ubersampling anyway? Is that just brute force 16X AA?
2. What is cinematic DOF? Is that a post-processing step of some sort?
3. Is there a list of programs known to interfere with TW2?
4. What system settings should I be looking at?

DK

 

[GuyNwah]

1. What exactly is ubersampling anyway? Is that just brute force 16X AA?
2. What is cinematic DOF? Is that a post-processing step of some sort?
3. Is there a list of programs known to interfere with TW2?
4. What system settings should I be looking at?

DK

Yeah, ubersampling is a manner of brute-force AA. I don't like it. It fuzzes details on characters' faces and fancy clothes and armor without eliminating jaggies. And it doubles your GPU burden.

Cinematic DOF is the depth of field feature applied to cinematic sections of the game (like the opening with Geralt running through the forest). There has been no official comment, but it appears to have been broken in the EE. I could run the game fine before, but after updating to EE, it ran miserably until I turned this one feature off. No other feature is so damaging to performance.

Steam Overlay seems to be the worst offender. But anything that competes for the pointer is a suspect. Anything that runs in the background, accesses disks, or filters files read from disk (say, real-time AV scanners) is also a suspect. Fancy pointer drivers that come with "gaming mice" and raise the USB sampling rate may also screw up the game's pointer handling.

 

[dkanter]

Hrmmm, I don't have any background tasks at all and I'm using GOG, not steam. The game is installed on a pretty high-end SSD, so I'm quite puzzled.

Although I do have a fair number of other applications open, that shouldn't be an issue, since they are inactive.

DK

 

[dkanter]

Strangely enough, closing down firefox and chrome seems to have significantly improved performance. I'm not sure the graphics are still smooth, but they are no longer stuttering horribly.

So next question: The user interface for TW2 blows, because it seems to be tailored for both consoles and PCs. Are there any mods that make the UI optimal for PCs?

DK

 

[tommy5761]

None that i know of that are tailored exclusively for the UI . There are a couple for the UI but i don`t know if they are what you`re looking for .
http://witcher.nexusmods.com/mods/categories/