How I optimized DayZ to get a constant 30 FPS while preserving game graphics quality

[demine0 43]

The last few days I've found that I've been having issues keeping my game playing above 10 FPS. I'll get random drops in busy area's where my CPU will strain to keep up with the game while my GPU stands by doing jack shit. A good example of a busy area is the Apartments west of Cherno. With these new settings my game runs at an average of about 30 FPS. It falls to about 20 FPS in busy areas. That's an average boost of about 20-25 FPS from what I used to get.

 

As many of you guys know, DayZ is built off of the Arma II TOH engine. The way this engine handles certain graphic operations is a bit flawed. This is no surprise as the game is still in the alpha stages and has had no optimizations put into place. I've done a bit of research and found out a few things about the engine. This is all to the best of my knowledge, so PLEASE if any of this is wrong, let me know so I can correct it.

 

First the game assumes that your graphic card won't be able to handle the full load of the game and automatically offloads certain graphic card operations off to the CPU. This is why your game often appears to be CPU bound. Secondly; Poorly implemented occlusion culling causes the game to render objects when they are out of line of sight causing FPS drops to occur. To demonstrate this; Stand inside a building in a large town on the coast; Look towards the ocean and you'll notice you get high FPS. Looking towards the city you'll get considerably lower FPS. Even while staring at a wall inside the building you'll notice the same issue.

 

This has been a flaw since the early Arma II days. Instead of fixing the issue at the core of the engine they decided to rely on costly level of detail transitions. Accounting for level of detail involves decreasing the complexity of a 3D object representation as it moves away from the player.

 

The settings I'm going to explain below will help your system deal with these bottle necks caused by the engine inefficiency's by forcing certain rendering controlled by the game to be rendered directly by the graphics card, and by reducing the distance at which certain objects are rendered in the game.

 

First you should adjust the game settings the way you want them. I turned pretty much everything off except for AA. I left AA on so that DayZ would allow me to use the Alpha Coverage to make trees, plants, and grass look nice. Just copy my settings if you're unsure of what to set.

My Game Settings (And Screen Shots from in the game):

http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197965238711/screenshots/ 

 

After you save your settings, exit the game. It's time to edit some configuration files.

 

First open:

C:\Users\<USERNAME>\Documents\DayZ\DayZ.cfg

You want to find and change/set the following config values:

FSAA=1;

postFX=0;

GPU_MaxFramesAhead=1;

GPU_DetectedFramesAhead=1;

HDRPrecision=8;

vsync=0;

AToC=7;

SWLayersCount=0;

PipQuality=3;

PPAA=0;

 

These settings cause the CPU and GPU to pre-render more content than they normally would. afaik GPU_DetectedFramesAhead is set on the server end in the DayZ client, so I don't know if this change is actually doing anything. The other values turn things like post processing and vsync off.

 

Don't change or add any other config values. Save the file once your done, then make it read only. You do this by right clicking the file, going to properties and clicking the "Read Only" check box. This prevents the game from reverting certain settings on reload.

 

Now open:

C:\Users\<USERNAME>\Documents\DayZ Other Profiles\<STEAMPROFILENAME>\<STEAMPROFILENAME>.DayZProfile

You want to find and change/set the following config values towards the bottom of the file:

sceneComplexity=50000;

shadowZDistance=100;

viewDistance=2200;

preferredObjectViewDistance=1800;

 

Save that file and make it read only. Those settings tell the game not to render things that are super far from you. This is probably the second largest FPS saver. The lower you make shadowZDistance, viewDistance, and preferredObjectViewDistance; the better your performance will be at the cost of view distance. sceneComplexity is the in-game "Objects Detail" Setting. Putting this to values below 200,000 lets you get way more fps at the cost of some graphics detail. You can set this to 50000 for a good compromise between performance and quality. Much lower values can also work. With the above config I can still see far enough to snipe with a long range scope, but I don't get such a hard FPS hit in more busy area's.

 

Next you need to offload some of the things you turned off or down onto the graphics card. These are the settings I am using for my nvidia card. If you have ATI or another brand you're on your own as I don't have the software to compare settings. If you post screen shots of your control panel like I did with mine below, I can give you some suggestions on what to set. Every PC setup is different though. Try different settings and see what get you the best FPS boost.

http://img.sykotix.com/2014-01-01_12-01-23.png 

http://img.sykotix.com/2014-01-01_12-01-40.png 

http://img.sykotix.com/2014-01-01_12-01-55.png 

 

A few notes on my above settings:

- If I could turn Ambient Occlusion off or down, I would as it's the largest FPS hog. This appears to be locked by the game itself.

 

- FXAA: Although the game has it, this is one of the things that it offloads to the CPU(I think?). Turn this ALL the way down in game, and set your graphic card to override the game setting (this is so the graphic card handles the AA, but still allows the game to use Alpha coverage for tree's and grass.

 

- Certain nvidia GPU's have the option to force applications to multithread graphic processes. I'm testing to see if this has any effect on DayZ. I think it does.

 

Settings and Game Play Screenshots: http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197965238711/screenshots/ 

[larrylongbottom 106]

beans for your work

[ValterZz 8]

I was playing with graphic settings few days ago...and im pretty happy with it turning everything on high and max (except clouds, on low...idk why but having clouds on max eats 15 FPS and they look the same shit on high as they do on low) but 1 annoying thing that i found is this  ""Alpha Coverage"".... i have it turned on because grass and shIt looks more real but some crazy ass dot-lines grid idk wtf appears on grass and it looks so fake.

 

Anddd apparenty on 1080p resolution those dots are the most visible.....BUT! if i set res to 120% (i dont even know what is this shit) but setting resolution in game settings to even more than 1080p even tho my monitor supports only 1080....removes those crazy dots, at the cost of 5 FPS.

 

So im running now on average on about 35 FPS.

 

i5 2500k, 8gb ram and HD 7850

[humberto 5]

noobs....these tweaks wont help much if your PC cant handle it

 

the real bottle neck is the limit of your cpu / gpu

Edited January 1, 2014 by humberto

[The_Man 393]

This actually helped my game run a lot smoother. Better than the tweaks I saw stickied. 

[deevote 21]

noobs....these tweaks wont help much if your PC cant handle it

 

the real bottle neck is the limit of your cpu / gpu

 

 

Wrong.

[humberto 5]

Wrong.

ok, so I guess this is the holy grail where , you wont need to EVER upgrade more ram or cpu or gpu, just change some settings and you will get 30 fps on your old pc, even if its a pentium 2

Edited January 1, 2014 by humberto

[admiral12 7]

My PC is medicore and managed to addapt the settings for 40-50 fps in the wilderness and 20-30fps for the big towns. Do you get 30fps outside of towns, OP?

[imperian_man 31]

ok, so I guess this is the holy grail where , you wont need to EVER upgrade more ram or cpu or gpu, just change some settings and you will get 30 fps on your old pc, even if its a pentium 2

You realize people on i7 4th generation processors get around 30 FPS?

That isnt even NEAR to acceptable for an i7 processor!

[imperian_man 31]

My PC is medicore and managed to addapt the settings for 40-50 fps in the wilderness and 20-30fps for the big towns. Do you get 30fps outside of towns, OP?

What are your system specs?

[linfosoma 38]

noobs....these tweaks wont help much if your PC cant handle it

 

the real bottle neck is the limit of your cpu / gpu

 

Wow mister leet man, that was really helpful advice! Thankfully we have a master hackor like you to provide us with useful advice!

[Frell 80]

No one should ever praise a game for finally running at 30 fps most of the time on a top of the line rig

 

 

Shows how skewed peoples heads are because the engine is THAT bad

Edited January 1, 2014 by Frell

[deevote 21]

ok, so I guess this is the holy grail where , you wont need to EVER upgrade more ram or cpu or gpu, just change some settings and you will get 30 fps on your old pc, even if its a pentium 2

 

Quit embarrassing yourself man. Calling people "noobs" as if this is COD. The game is poorly optimized at this stage and people have to change various settings that can only be changed in cfg files to achieve the best quality and performance for their top tier graphics card and processor. Do you realize that people with outrageous PCs can only run this about an average of 30 FPS, mostly lower in Cherno? That isn't because they have crappy hardware.. Its because the rendering distances and crap like that have to be tweaked. Guides like this help the people with it. So quit being a "noob" and go read up.

[donakowski1@gmail.com 41]

My computer is not a gaming computer by any means, hell, it's not really fit to run DayZ. I suppose it doesn't help that I don't know much about computers. But these settings helped me get from 10 to 16fps on the SA, which is huge for me. I'm running everything on low, and have a bunch of other settings turned off, but I just enjoy playing the game no matter how it really looks. (I'm actually surprised at how well it looks for me)

Although, I wasn't able to access the settings panel associated with my graphics card. I don't even know if my computer allows you to alter those. (HP Touchsmart 520, told you....not meant for gaming)

Thank you!

[TheStevieJ 4]

AMD FX 8120 @ 3.6

8gb ram

windows 8.1

R9 280x msi twin frozr

750w psu

 

I get like 20fps in towns its damn horrible.

[Punkrawks 136]

I'll test OP's settings.
My setup:

i7 4930k @ 4.3Ghz
16GB 2400 RAM
gtx 780
Win7 pro x64
Nvidia driver version 331.93

50fps in open fields, 30fps in cities/forest

Settings: Objects: Very High

               Terrain: Very High

               Clouds: Very High

               Shadows: Disabled

Vsync: Disabled
Antialiasing: Normal
Alpha to coverage: Disabled
Edge Smoothing: Disabled
HDR Quality: Very Low
Postprocess quality: High
Video Memory: Auto
Texture Detail: Very High
Texture Filtering: Very High

After OP's Settings (followed to the letter):

70-80fps in open areas 50fps in cities... HOWEVER:

The game looks like a plastic fake environment. All the config settings that OP changed are just the menu settings, but in text form. All OP did was turn the settings WAY DOWN in order to boost FPS. Here is a side-by-side of OP's settings vs. my default:

 

I DO NOT RECOMMEND CHANGING SETTINGS THROUGH CONFIG FILES!!!!! You're better off to use the menu options and sliders. If you change the config files to an unsupported value, you will get unpredictable results - including rolling crashes with the game.

If you like the game looking stale and plastic, trees in the distance look like 2d cutouts, buildings look awful (screenshot really doesn't do it justice, it really affects the mood of the game) Then by all means, use OP settings. You'll get higher fps, but junk graphics. Anything over 24fps is considered "Movie Quality" anyway. This isn't Call of Duty or Battlefield. You don't have the quick spinning ultra-fast gameplay that high FPS requires. This is supposed to be a realistic sandbox survival game. High FPS won't do you any favors here.

Edited January 1, 2014 by Punkrawks

[DevilDog (DayZ) 455]

I actually think I went from 32 down to 25 doing this, standing in the same spot. I will test it out again just to double check. Will take screen shots as well.

[DevilDog (DayZ) 455]

I'll test OP's settings.

 

Your side of that pics looks a lot more blurry than the OP side. I am going to do the same thing as you after I get some food.

[humberto 5]

any claiming to get 40+ fps on their pc, post a youtube video to prove it

 

there are none..

[OrLoK 16182]

Hello there

 

Firstly, these are well known tricks to hopefully eak out a few extra frames and for many they will help, but at a slight cost of quality.

 

Secondly, @humberto  Noobs?

 

Dont be so bloody rude. Readjust your attitude please.

 

Rgds

 

LoK

[demine0 43]

 @humberto; You're right; which is why my guide helps by taking some of the strain off the CPU.

 

@Punkrawks: I agree with you. Quality does take a hit, but even you saw a 20+fps increase. While people with awesome rigs might not find these optimizations helpful, I'm sure people running with less specs will find some use from it.

[Gerandar 212]

noobs....these tweaks wont help much if your PC cant handle it

 

the real bottle neck is the limit of your cpu / gpu

 

Wrong, this game as its in alpha is not optimized for most if any systems, I for one have no issues on max settings but for those that are having issues this post might/should help them at least a bit

[AndehX 7]

Not sure what people are doing/aren't doing to their systems, but I get up to 90fps no problem in most areas of the game.  I only drop to 40-50fps in big cities like Cherno.  Im using a 3770k overclock to 4.5ghz and a GTX770

[terminal_boy 860]

any claiming to get 40+ fps on their pc, post a youtube video to prove it

there are none..

Would screenshots with Afterburner showing the GPU stats suffice? Edited January 1, 2014 by Terminal Boy

[ValterZz 8]

As one mentioned earlier in the post, this isnt BF or CS....where u need 35+ fps to not feel the lags when doing 360s. I was actually playing dayZ sd for quite some time on 20-25 fps with everything turned on ultra max and if anyone asked me what fps im running on i would easy say 30+ untill i opened fraps and saw those poor 20.

 

My advice to u is to pump up and up those graphic settings as long as ur around 25-35 fps. Game is pretty blurry so its hard to notice fps lag. Playing CS GO for example, on 20  fps if freaking impossible but u barely notice that its lagging in Dayz.

 

Its a waste to cut out this beautiful graphic game just to get a bunch of fps which will do u nothing.