Standalone performance issues

[MrKrabs (DayZ) 0]

evening lads,

 

I couldn't figure a right section in forums for discussing performance issues so I thought I'd rather post in the general section, see if I can get some help or someone with a similar issues might find the information here of any use.

 

I have not played any of the recent FPS shooter based games and struggle to realize  what are the average requirements for a satisfactory experience ( in terms of gaming gear).

 

What I have is a two and a half years old laptop with specs as: 

 

Proc: Intel i7 2630 QM Cpu @ 2GHz

Graphics : Nvidia GeForce 525m (1gb)

8gb ddr3 ram

 

I am no  rig spec so I can't say much, but what I think is that my graphics  card is  the issue . I have all the video settings minimised and it's still  a hell of a pain when entering bigger cities. Wandering in the woods is okish, but I feel like I am missing  a lot of the action sitting in the bushes.

I have the steam settings edited as well as  dayz's .cfg's .

 

WHAT THE HELL DO YOU WANT FROM US ?  - wondering if  my rig is real badly out of date and if there is anything else I could do ?

[ponymony 9]

Well I'm running a $2000 gaming rig with 2 670's and when I enter cities it drops to <30, so I can imagine what it's like for you. outside of the main cherno/elektro etc areas its 60> though. it purely comes down to your rig, the the games optimization, but I don't think it'll get that much better. I've just gotten so used to it from arma2.

[djporternz 644]

TBH, if you are able to get anywhere close to 25~30 FPS in town, then you're doing it right. The RV engine isn't known for delivering massive frame rates.

 

Also, if you're thinking DayZ is going to be a FPS shooter, you WILL be disappointed. That style of game/engine is done far better elsewhere.

[MrKrabs (DayZ) 0]

TBH, if you are able to get anywhere close to 25~30 FPS in town, then you're doing it right. The RV engine isn't known for delivering massive frame rates.

 

Also, if you're thinking DayZ is going to be a FPS shooter, you WILL be disappointed. That style of game/engine is done far better elsewhere.

 

im not looking for a fps shooter, I am happy with the game idea as it is . It's just the frame rates that buggin me. In cities i doubt i get anything more than 10 frames, so running into some bambit is a certain death to me as i don't have time to react.

[Window Licker 504]

I used this to get some better performance, unfortunately client optimization usually occurs close to beta stage of testing once everything it in, sort of a clean up the code thing.

 

http://dayzintel.com/dayz-standalone/dayz-standalone-performance-guide

[TheCalyx 78]

Well I'm running a $2000 gaming rig with 2 670's and when I enter cities it drops to <30, so I can imagine what it's like for you. outside of the main cherno/elektro etc areas its 60> though. it purely comes down to your rig, the the games optimization, but I don't think it'll get that much better. I've just gotten so used to it from arma2.

The RV engine is Processor heavy at the moment no graphically heavy, all you need is a decent high end graphics card to handle the graphics, the processor makes the fps difference

[instynct 99]

I have a $4000 rig with an i7 4770k and 2x GTX 780 Ti and I get down to 30s in cities...

 

Don't expect the game to get anymore optimized either, it's the engine and not much can be done, look at arma 3 for example. Everyone thought it'd be better in beta, but NOPE

Edited January 19, 2014 by Andromeda

[NicoBaloira1357 24]

Well with that gpu you sure are getting low fps, it's not powerful at all, if you want to get good performance I would suggest you look into upgrading that

[djporternz 644]

im not looking for a fps shooter, I am happy with the game idea as it is . It's just the frame rates that buggin me. In cities i doubt i get anything more than 10 frames, so running into some bambit is a certain death to me as i don't have time to react.

Fair enough. Then I'd look at the fact you're running on a laptop with a mobile processor and a mobile graphics GPU. The 2 GHz CPU is going to be a major bottleneck with DayZ performance and the 525m GPU spends most of its time trading down performance for lower power consumption.

 

If there is a low to mid-range desktop in your future, you'll be a lot happier in DayZ. A nice cheap 4 GHz CPU and a 5 or 6 series nVidia GPU will at least get you in the game with around the same FPS as most people here.

[deebz1234 243]

you have a shite laptop with a shite video card.

 

you are trying to run a game which has a 200ish km open world (which no other game has) on a server...

 

you barely meet the posted minimum req's..maybe not even.

 

Arma 2, 3, SA are very CPU dependant.

 

your CPU is very slow, min 3ghz for decent SA performance.

 

the gtx 525 is a very low end card, laptop version even more so. The later 2 numbers in a card for nvidia explains how good that version of that generation is.

ex gtx 525 is not as good as a gtx 460.

(25 being low end, 60 being a higher spec card (even from a prev gen))

 

my 500$ asus ROG laptop plays SA fine. But that was 500$ used.

[gerbilschooler 229]

If you want to get a decent experience playing DayZ, you're gonna have to drop at least 500 bucks on a desktop there partner. I'd either recommend a build based around a 5670K from Intel with a high end Nvidia card like a GTX 660Ti or better (I would not go AMD for a high end card right now as the prices are high because of Litecoin mining; example, I got my HD7950 about six months ago for about 215 bucks and they are now going for around 300 to 450 used on Ebay) or for a budget build maybe try an AMD A8-5600K in dual graphics with an R7 260X or R7 240. Just some suggestions. But, you'll either need to drop about 500 for a desktop that can play it or roughly double that or more for a decent enough laptop.

[gerbilschooler 229]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814150695

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819113281

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148500

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817151076

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813130746

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811119256

 

^Here's a build for 500 bucks that I think could play DayZ at pretty decent frames at medium settings.

[byrgesen 1341]

Not to "piss on your parade" or anything mate, but a 2 GHz processer is not really enough to run this game well.
All games based on the RV engine (Arma, Take on Helicopters and now DayZ) are very CPU dependant, above all else :)

Upgrade the CPU and see how HUGE a difference it makes, and while your at it, throw a SSD in there.
DayZ does alot of reading directly from the HDD, so SSD makes a big difference aswell :)

Im running the game on meduim/high settings with 60+ in forests and 30-40 in cities, look at my specs in the spoiler below, it does not take much, but a decent CPU is really important in this game.

 

 

I have a $4000 rig with an i7 4770k and 2x GTX 780 Ti and I get down to 30s in cities...

 

Don't expect the game to get anymore optimized either, it's the engine and not much can be done, look at arma 3 for example. Everyone thought it'd be better in beta, but NOPE

 

I have to say ARma 3 got improved, it runs a hell of lot better now then in the beginning of Alpha, thats for sure :)
But dont expect a giant difference, thats true.

Edited January 20, 2014 by Byrgesen

[Westerburg 41]

Gonna agree with the rest on this one. You're first issue is game optimization. There are very few people that are able to get above 30fps in a city. Your second issue is that you are on a laptop. Unless you have some high quality gaming laptop that is cramming a full fledged video card into it, don't expect to get good frame rates in 90% of the games out there without a lot of tweaking. I know a few people that perform about as well as me in dayz on their laptops, but they are running decent integrated cards with super fast processors. I've said in several posts that I'm all but 100% that my issues are cpu bottleneck related, since the only changes I see in my fps come when I'm pushing my cpu to the limit.

 

That said, your best bet is going to be a desktop. Don't let people tell you that you need to drop a couple thousand on a new pc though. My pc cost me about $600 to build 2 years ago and the only thing I've upgraded since then are my video cards (I went from a single 5770 to dual 7770's, which will run you about 250ish for the pair, maybe less now. With prices being what they have been lately, you can get a motherboard with triple crossfire (recommended the triple because those will typically run X16/x16/x8 or x16/x16/x4 on your pci-e slots) for about 120-160 bucks and a 6 core processor with decent speeds and maybe even an apu for about the same. You can build a rig that will run the current iteration of standalone as well as most anyone else for about $800.

 

The key though is the processor for dayz. Number of cores don't effect the game too much, so much as the speed of each core (at least in my testing) an am3 Phenom 955 is what I'm using currently and if you have decent ventilation will oc from 3.2ghz per core to between 3.8-4.2ghz with just the stock amd fan. That push by itself was enough to get me from 45fps in the woods and 25 in cities to 60 in the woods, 35-40 in towns and 29-30 in major cities, and that's with 4 cores and 4 threads. I can't do any video recording mind you, and I'm using the general recommended tweaks you'll see all over these forums (all the fancies turned off, .cfg modified, AA and shadows off and everything else set to low or normal), but I get decent framerates, with an average increase of 10fps at night.

 

I plan on doing an incremental upgrade over the next couple of months, which isn't going to cost me more than a couple hundred bucks (am3+ boards are fairly cheap and will take an am3 cpu, and they still make decent am3+ cpu's with twice as many cores and 3 times as many threads, that stock at what I'm pushing my current cpu to, so I can only image what I'll be able to push those to.) so for 6-800 bucks you can build something that's going to run most everything currently out there at high settings, with normal being the average for dayz standalone. If a 3 year old $600 computer can run BF3 on ultra settings at 45-55 fps, than a $600-$800 computer today will be able to run it at 60fps. There was a nice article I used to have saved that showed a $700 computer could perform as well at 90% of todays games as a $2000 monster rig, Most of the stuff in the monsters was only half-utilized even at the highest settings, and any result that the big rigs out performed the budget gaming rigs ended up being due to cpu bottlenecking. Two of the rigs they used had the same mobo/cpu combo with cheaper ram/video card in one and in almost every instance they performed the same, both flourishing on fast cpu's, and both suffering horrendously on lower end processors.

 

edit: I should also add that to run my computer cool at those speeds I keep my case open and well ventilated with a duster blowout every couple of weeks, and the first thing I did was replace all the thermal paste on my cpu and gpu's. One of the cards runs slower despite being the same brand on account of me not buying them both at once and I couldn't oc it to catch up to the other without it going unstable. removing the fan to apply thermal paste to the gpu itself fixed this though, and it will match the speeds of the newer card and run the cooling fan at half the speed it used to and nearly silent, even overclocked and with more power being pushed through it. I also wouldn't recommend pushing a 955 phenom II to 4.2 ghz on a stock fan all the time, as it's probably destroying the poor bastard and is only about 70% stable. 3.6 is enough to get an fps boost out of it, but with the open air it seems to run pretty stable and not obscenely hot at 3.8ghz. I keep it at stock 3.2ghz for most of my daily activities, with profiles set up to push it higher only in games where the extra speed has a noticable difference (arma games, both dayz games and TSW, otherwise I'm fine at 3.2-3.6ghz)

Edited January 20, 2014 by Westerburg

[MrKrabs (DayZ) 0]

Thanks for the responses guys. I believe my processor boosts to 3 Ghz automatically when it needs to.

The laptop was not bought directly for gaming  so overall no complaints or regrets.

 

I am planning to buy a desktop for around 600-800$ USD somewhat in the near future ( since I am using my laptop as a desktop and have a separate screen connected).

I'll see how it goes in the future, when I have some more experience with the actual game, ect. Don't see much of a point to buy a desktop just for day z. Maybe in 3-6 months time.

 

Thanks for responses once again