The Cause of the Performance Dips When Opening and Closing Menus

[Alcatraz6029]

I know there’s been a massive issue of performance nosediving when entering and exiting menus like the map and the inventory, and I know a lot of various fixes have been proposed like changing cascaded shadow resolution and range, but that’s not the issues.

The issue is DLSS and FSR2.

In patch 1.5, they changed upscaling methods so that they aren’t on when you’re in menus like the map and inventory, they run native to your set resolution. The intent was to give a clearer picture.

This introduced the issue. When you first enter and exit menus there’s a massive performance dip because the game operates as if it’s rendering the actual gameplay, meaning your map or inventory are running at the same frame rate as if you’re trying to run around the game world at native resolution without any upscaling method.

Obviously if you’re playing at 4K with ray tracing on a 30XX series card, this is going to cause some major problems.

So there you have it, the upscaling changes made for 1.5 are the reason you can barely play the game anymore without turning ray tracing off or running the game at a lower than native resolution.

Don’t believe me? Go play the game with upscaling on and your graphics maxed, enter and exit the menu a few times to see the lag, then turn off upscaling and ray tracing features so the game is running smoothly at native resolution, then open and close the menus. You’ll see that the performance dips are completely gone, even in more intensive locations like Lizzie’s and the market by Misty’s.

If CDPR would just add an option to toggle upscaling methods in menus, like it was prior to 1.5, this issue would no longer exist.

 

[Bartinga2077]

"THE CAUSE OF THE PERFORMANCE DIPS WHEN OPENING AND CLOSING MENUS"​

Am not a specialist but can say that this particular issue is a thing of the past for me personally.

That said, on a high end rig, when max FPS is set at 60, during gameplay it's always at a steady 120 FPS, and anytime when going to inventory, menu screen, map or stash, it drops to 60 FPS, and shoots back up to 120 the moment when coming out of any of those.

As this behavior is always the same, that is to say, 100% consistent, have concluded it's intended to work this way.
Can imagine that on a lower spec rig, the drop in FPS when going to inventory or map, is experienced as a drop in performance.

That equally having said, I lean strongly towards the fact that this particular dev team, and actually all game dev-teams, executes all tests exclusively on the most strongest system available concerning PC, effectively overpowering any and all technical obstacle that would chock most if not all less beefed specs rigs.

Therefor it's vital to always waylay your system specs in the finest detail when filing in a bug-report. Else, there simply is no way for any dev to know how to replicate.

 

[Alcatraz6029]

Therefor it's vital to always waylay your system specs in the finest detail when filing in a bug-report. Else, there simply is no way for any dev to know how to replicate.

I just filed a support ticket with a DxDiag file attached.

So when it comes to playing this game I give myself two options; I either play it 4K with ray tracing and cap the framerate at 40 FPS if I'm wanting eye candy, or if I just want to play the game with performance in mind I play at 4K without ray tracing and put DLSS on performance.

Both methods result in the issue, obviously it's worse with ray tracing enabled, but the only way I've been able to play this without the problem being noticeable is at 1440p without ray tracing, which is not ideal. Like you, I can still see the framerate drop with my FPS counter in the corner when entering and exiting menus, but because of the higher framerate it isn't as noticeable.

I suppose this is further evidence of my initial claim.