Poor performance on good PC (Heskey)

[jrhesketh@gmail.com 1]

Hi all,

 

Disclaimer: I know there are other threads like this, but each rig is unique (like a snowflake) and I'm simply hoping to get some pointers specific to my setup, or hear the experience of other people with the same/similar rig. I also understand that this is Early Access, that optimisation is nowhere near done, and I could simply just be out of favour with the DayZ Performance God unlike people of similar, or even worse rigs.

 

Disclaimers out of the way - The nuts and bolts are that I get about 40-60 FPS in the wilderness, which is playable, but 15-30 FPS in cities and it's unplayable. I'm hoping to improve that.

 

My rig is:

 

CPU: i5-3570k @ 3.4GHz (not overclocked)

RAM: 8GB DDR3 Corsair Vengeance (2x 4GB)

GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 4GB (Gigabyte Windforce 3, Gaming G1 model) (not overclocked)

 

I have dual-screen 1920x1080 (x2); one plays the game, the other has a website-based map open. I've noticed no improvement in performance by disabling the second monitor.

 

I use Nvidia's "GeForce Experience" program which optimises the graphic settings of games so that they perform at their best based on my drivers (latest) and PC specs. I've noticed no noticeable increase in frame rate when playing 'all low' to the Nvidia 'optimised' settings. I've also heard that any settings 'Normal' and below then fall onto the CPU causing additional strain. The settings played at are:

 

Resolution: 1920x1080

 

Texture Detail: Very High

Texture Filtering: Very High

 

Object Quality: High

Terrain Quality: Very High

Clouds: Normal

Shadows Quality: Low

 

Antialiasing: Disabled

Alpha To Coverage: Disabled

Edge Smoothing: FXX Very High

HDR Quality: Low

Post-process Quality: Disabled

Bloom: 0

 

I have also followed all the advice given on the various reddit threads about gaining FPS. This particular article brings together every suggestion I've seen to date. I have not done Core Unparking, RAMdisk, Priority or Overclocking as I value my system stability over getting an unoptimised game to run better.

 

So, my DayZ.profile is:

 

sceneComplexity=750000; (auto-set by one of the graphic options)
shadowZDistance=50;
viewDistance=1800;
preferredObjectViewDistance=1800;

 

And my Launch Properties string is: -nosplash -noPause -noborder -cpuCount=4 -exThreads=4 -maxMex=8192 -maxvram=4096

 

I have every other program closed when playing except for Fraps which I use purely for screenshots and checking my FPS - I don't record videos or stream.

 

I'm not sure what else I can do. Am I just unlucky? I see people with worse rigs having recorded YouTube videos at great FPS, or streaming on Twitch. My rig isn't poor - I got the GTX 970 before buying Shadows of Mordor, which I play on Ultra settings WITH the HD Texture Pack enabled at a smooth 60-70+ FPS and it murders the game. I don't notice any increase in FPS from the game using this card over the one it replaced, which was an ATI Radeon HD 5850 (Sapphire brand, 2GB).

 

Can anyone offer any tried and tested solutions over what I've done to try and get more FPS out of my DayZ? I love the game and I'd love the play it more than I currently have, but the fact of the matter is it currently runs very poorly on my PC, and doesn't look good in the process either.

 

Any and all help would be very much appreciated - I'll keep an eye on this thread.

 

Thank you!

[DeatHTaX 1217]

Poor performance with a rockin PC is not your PC specifically. A couple friends I play with have PCs 20x better than mine, and still suffer like 18 - 30 FPS in some cities, especially zelagogorsk

Edited December 28, 2014 by DeatHTaX

[blitzz92 7]

Devs mentioned something about no optimization at all abd without new renderer there will not be any optimizations. You know...

[fluxley 2228]

You'll get a decent improvement in cities by changing Object Quality to Very low, the main drawback being that you wont be able to see into windows from just a short distance and the buildings will look pretty shitty, i try to keep mine on normal but sometimes have to drop it right down in the bigger cities.

[kitlope04@yahoo.com 3]

You're just gonna have to live with the lag in cities. I have a decent pc (Intel 6 core Gulftown 980 @ 3.72 Ghz, 12 Gb DDR3 ram, 2 780 GTX SLI, 250 Gb Samsung EVO 840) and have tried a few tweaks to up the frames in the cities but to no avail. It's an optimization thing and we're all just gonna have to wait.

[jrhesketh@gmail.com 1]

Thanks for the replies so far guys - Fluxley I'll try your suggestion and beans you if it helps.

 

It seems strange to me that popular YouTubers/Twitchers all have systems that allow them to play when everyone else is in the mire. When Rome 2 Total War was released, a chap called LionHeart had been doing videos about its development and when it released, he was streaming and YouTubing the game perfectly whilst everyone else was running it like dogpoo.

 

I've yet to come across someone who's been passionate about DayZ Standalone, saying how they're going to stream videos, and then found they couldn't because it wouldn't work for them. Just very lucky, I guess?

 

EDIT: Fluxley, I've tried your suggestion and here are my findings.

 

I was using Xsplit Gamecaster rather than FRAPS to measure my FPS.

 

Day time, on a server with 2/40 people, I went to the main strip of Cherno and ran run and down a length of the road, looking left and right, and ran back to my starting point. Then I repeated this with a different Object quality setting.

 

High Object Quality (Nvidia Optimised): 16-24 FPS (impossible to play in a firefight)

Low Object Quality (Fluxley Suggestion): 22-30 FPS (playable at points)

 

I have however noticed that Object quality relates to the distance at which open doors on buildings replace the closed door texture - compared to 'High', 'Very Low' seriously reduces the range at which these textures are drawn, meaning that someone could be stood in the hallway of an open building with a clear shot at me, and I wouldn't be able to see them simply because having 'low' Object quality means they appear to be behind a closed door, to me.

 

That said, I'll use low object quality for now given the slight bump in FPS, and just exercise caution with distant doors - I'd rather be able to play better 50% of the time with a slightly increased chance of death, than have it play poorly all the time; in which case I'm likely to die anyway.

 

Thanks. Have my beans.

Edited December 29, 2014 by Heskey

[fluxley 2228]

Glad it helped at least a bit mate,but yeah, it really does mess up the rendering on the lowest settings.

 

Just noticed you're using -exThreads=4 in your startup, for that cpu it should be -exThreads=7, 

 

 

 

-exThreads=<number> Change to a number 0,1,3,5,7. This will override auto detection (which use 3 for dualcore and 7 for quadcore).

 

https://community.bistudio.com/wiki/Arma2:_Startup_Parameters#exThreads

 

Don't know if it will make much difference but can't hurt.

 

edit:

 

Also, try adding these to startup

 

-noLogs -malloc=system

Edited December 29, 2014 by Fluxley

[jrhesketh@gmail.com 1]

Hi Fluxley,

 

I was using -exthreads=7 for the majority of the year until I found out my i5 actually only has 4 threads (http://ark.intel.com/products/65520) - also confirmed just now by CPU-Z. Not noticed any difference in performance between having set it as 7 or 4.

 

What does -noLogs and -malloc=system do? I've not seen that in any of the guides.

[ChainReactor 922]

Not noticed any difference in performance between having set it as 7 or 4.

 

 

Because the game does not use mutithreading yet. Theres no need to tell the game how many threads to use. It's as useless as setting a -maxMem parameter higher than 4GB since DayZ is a 32 bit application.

 

Most launch parameters only cause trouble on startup.

[fluxley 2228]

You wont notice much difference between 7 and 4 because 4 isnt actually a valid parameter so it will most likely just go to the default for your cpu which is 7.

 

The exThreads setting isnt actually how many extra threads your cpu has, its more to do with offloading processing from the main core to other cores.

 

Check the chart here https://community.bistudio.com/wiki/Arma2:_Startup_Parameters#exThreads

 

Setting it to 7 means that all 3 options, Geometry loading, Texture loading and File operations will be pushed onto other cores leaving the main thread free to process the rest of the game.

 

In reality you only need to use -cpuCount and -exThreads if you want to limit what the system uses, for example on my 6 core AMD cpu i have it set to -cpuCount=3, reason for this is that none of my cores were even close to being fully used, and spreading the work over more cores than needed just meant more work managing the different threads. 

 

-noLogs just means nothing will be recorded to the rpt log, so should mean less writing to the hard drive and so might help with texture loading.

 

-malloc=system tells the game to use the default windows memory allocator, which simply put is how free memory is used, calling on free memory actually has its own overhead so the memory allocator used can make a bit of difference.

 

On their own these things dont make much difference but all together i'd say i gained about 5-6 fps, which is quite noticeable when searching for that magical 30fps in the city.

Edited December 29, 2014 by Fluxley

[jrhesketh@gmail.com 1]

Thanks Fluxley,

 

Back at work tomorrow so may be a couple of days before I can test out these little changes but will report back with my findings when I have. Then there may be beanz.

[FirstAidPoetry 0]

You can also try opening the Dayz.cfg and changing these values to 1:

 

GPU_MaxFramesAhead=1;
GPU_DetectedFramesAhead=1;

 

Mine were set to 1000, which seems just insane. Changing it removed some of the sluggishness when turning around.

[jrhesketh@gmail.com 1]

I have also followed all the advice given on the various reddit threads about gaining FPS. This particular article brings together every suggestion I've seen to date.

 

 

Done that already :)

Edited December 30, 2014 by Heskey

[darin113 0]

I was experiencing very poor performance,  randomly  dropping to low fps and poor texture rendering, I updated my Geforce drivers and turned off UAC in windows. I'm not sure which one fixed because I'm not brave enough to turn UAC back on to see if the problem returns.

[eddownz 0]

I have the exact same specs as you, same cpu, same gpu (even windforce) and the same RAM. One step thing I realised that you should check is that gpu and cpu usage is down,  3 of my 4 cores max out at 75% (the other at 100%) but gpu usage never goes above 50%. Throttling is NOT the problem, my temperature tested on multiple programs maxes as 35C for gpu and around 40C for my cpu. I have tried editing 3D manager settings and setting dayz to high performance but that didn't work, I still need to try putting it into high performance in battery settings in control panel.

 

Overall the problem could be drivers but it is not the game settings themselves, the game SHOULD run better but I get similar frames to you.

Edited January 1, 2015 by eddownz