Uniquely Bad DayZ framerate performance?

[dave_e_crockett 0]

Hi all,

 

I'm a longtime lurker of this forum and, similarly, a longtime player of DayZ SA (as much as that's possible, at least).

 

While I really love DayZ (my Steam hours will confirm this handidly), I have been getting increasingly paranoid that I am experiencing terrible FPS performance uniquely to my machine. While this is obviously not the most rational of fears, it's been excacerbated of late by the many threads here extolling tweak guides that allow people to get "60 in the fields, and 30 in the cities".

I only get high 40s in the field, and (in the largest cities) teens in the cities @1080p. :(

 

My specs:

AMD FX-8350 Octo-core @ 4.33 GHz

AMD/ATI Radeon R9 290X 4GB

8 GB DDR3 1600 MHz

1 TB HDD (no SSD)

 

I've tried all the various tweak guides, launch-line options, .cfg editing, but I just cannot get this game to run well (or even playable in the larger cities) it seems. Presently, I play on all very low quality settings and stick to the fields, mainly.

 

Am I doing something wrong? I realize the game is in alpha, and optimization is yet to come, but watching all these streamers and YT videos and reading how other players boosted their FPS 50% by using this one neat trick is making me suspicous. Especially for a game that at many times looks, feels, and plays exactly like another game which was a large part of my childhood: Operation Flashpoint. Seriously, Bohemia, I'd recognize those guard tower models/textures and vehicle control schemes anywhere!

 

As BI did indeed make that game I played to death in my adolescense, I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt now. I'm sure FPS optimization will come. But in the meantime, any help would be much appreciated! It's just so jarring to go from playing a game like Shadow of Mordor or Far Cry 4 on Ultra @ 1080P with 100 FPS to DayZ: Powerpoint Crisis.

 

Thanks in advance!

 

 

[tobias winfro 305]

I am running a similar setup but my old rig was so craptastic that when I updated it was a major improvement. That said I am pulling about 40-50 in the wilderness/open fields and 20-25 in the big cities. Most of my settings are on high, minimal on shadows and motion blur is turned off. Without being in front of my PC I can't give you the exact specifics of my settings.

I am hoping when we get the new engine and Dayz is optimized it gets better but like I said earlier, this is a vast improvement over my old rig. For me asking for more seems to just be getting greedy

[mithrawndo 166]

Two things drastically increased my performance.

 

• Deleting the dayz.cfg
• Defrag your disk

I too tried many settings to boost my framerate, and for a time these helped. With 0.53 I saw yet more loss of frames and had the same problem. Deleted my config, now I'm hitting over 80 in the fields and 20-40 in the towns. My dayz files were also horribly fragmented at one point, causing texture load to cripple my gameplay. Grab a copy of something like defraggler if you haven't already and tidy up the files.

 

Disabling shadows and clouds will also help. Good luck!

 

I7 950 @ 4.2Ghz

6Gb DDR3 @ 1.6Ghz

500GB 7200rpm 32MB HDD

GTX470

Edited February 12, 2015 by Mithrawndo

[creature 1189]

Turn your textures and stuff to the highest setting. It will take some strain off the cpu.

Most everyone with a decent machine follows those guides and end up worse off. Make it pretty and deal with the frame drops.

[_robhimself 0]

Game is terribly optimized. Terrible enough to warrant people quitting the game entirely. Nothing you can really do to make it opperate at a level it should be operating at with decent PC gear.

 

I hop on DayZ: Low settings = 20-30fps

 

I hop on H1Z1: Ultra settings = 60+fps at all times, everywhere, even in fights.

[soulfirez 901]

Game is terribly optimized. Terrible enough to warrant people quitting the game entirely. Nothing you can really do to make it opperate at a level it should be operating at with decent PC gear.

 

I hop on DayZ: Low settings = 20-30fps

 

I hop on H1Z1: Ultra settings = 60+fps at all times, everywhere, even in fights.

excellent maybe many of the complainers will take your first post advert here and follow you over to h1z1 where the player render is less than 500m. where the hackers have found a happy home ( i was silly enough to buy the early release to try it out , oh my god). Where you can just pay to have supplies to drop down to you ( a perfectly rational mechanic in a survival game??)

Edited February 16, 2015 by SoulFirez

[The Riddler (DayZ) 410]

Two things drastically increased my performance.

 

• Deleting the dayz.cfg
• Defrag your disk

  With 0.53 I saw yet more loss of frames and had the same problem. Deleted my config, now I'm hitting over 80 in the fields and 20-40 in the towns. My dayz files were also horribly fragmented at one point, causing texture load to cripple my gameplay. Grab a copy of something like defraggler if you haven't already and tidy up the files.

 

 

 

 

I assume you're running the game from a standard HD and not an SSD? Defragging on a traditional HD is just fine and can certainly improve performance, but I do not recommend anybody defragging their SSD as it doesn't improve performance and can in some cases damage the SSD. Below is a bit more info on this topic: 

 

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2047513/fragging-wonderful-the-truth-about-defragging-your-ssd.html 

 

As mentioned above, delete your DayZ.cfg as that should help and from there you can tweak your settings more. Post up your progress if you make any and we'll try to help some more. 

[a_irish_fella 15]

You have a pretty good rig, your fps seems a lil low like but its common to have bad fps, especially with amd cpus, surely you can get more than 4.3ghz out that cpu (depending on your cooler ofcourse) seeing dayz works on single tread performance my 6300 is actually out performing your 8350 as im currently running at 4.7ghz and all fx cpus have the same single core performance at the same ghz, id bet you could get close to 5ghz on that cpu! Just dooo it!1.55v and go for it!

[a_irish_fella 15]

Also why are so many people recommend ssds? I have a small ssd and a standard 7200rpm hdd, yes it loads faster but both hdds produced same fps, anyone saying ssd can improve fps.. i beg to differ!

[a_irish_fella 15]

Game is terribly optimized. Terrible enough to warrant people quitting the game entirely. Nothing you can really do to make it opperate at a level it should be operating at with decent PC gear.

 

I hop on DayZ: Low settings = 20-30fps

 

I hop on H1Z1: Ultra settings = 60+fps at all times, everywhere, even in fights.

come on man its h1z1.. aint nobody got time for that! 

[SaveMeJebus 164]

Also why are so many people recommend ssds? I have a small ssd and a standard 7200rpm hdd, yes it loads faster but both hdds produced same fps, anyone saying ssd can improve fps.. i beg to differ!

With all the texture loading/popins having an SSD most definitely makes a difference in the smoothness of play (there are much less hitches where it will freeze for a  second or 2) but yes SSD doesn't improve your framerate numbers.

 

 

Hi all,

 

I'm a longtime lurker of this forum and, similarly, a longtime player of DayZ SA (as much as that's possible, at least).

 

While I really love DayZ (my Steam hours will confirm this handidly), I have been getting increasingly paranoid that I am experiencing terrible FPS performance uniquely to my machine. While this is obviously not the most rational of fears, it's been excacerbated of late by the many threads here extolling tweak guides that allow people to get "60 in the fields, and 30 in the cities".

I only get high 40s in the field, and (in the largest cities) teens in the cities @1080p. :(

 

My specs:

AMD FX-8350 Octo-core @ 4.33 GHz

AMD/ATI Radeon R9 290X 4GB

8 GB DDR3 1600 MHz

1 TB HDD (no SSD)

 

I've tried all the various tweak guides, launch-line options, .cfg editing, but I just cannot get this game to run well (or even playable in the larger cities) it seems. Presently, I play on all very low quality settings and stick to the fields, mainly.

 

Am I doing something wrong? I realize the game is in alpha, and optimization is yet to come, but watching all these streamers and YT videos and reading how other players boosted their FPS 50% by using this one neat trick is making me suspicous. Especially for a game that at many times looks, feels, and plays exactly like another game which was a large part of my childhood: Operation Flashpoint. Seriously, Bohemia, I'd recognize those guard tower models/textures and vehicle control schemes anywhere!

 

As BI did indeed make that game I played to death in my adolescense, I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt now. I'm sure FPS optimization will come. But in the meantime, any help would be much appreciated! It's just so jarring to go from playing a game like Shadow of Mordor or Far Cry 4 on Ultra @ 1080P with 100 FPS to DayZ: Powerpoint Crisis.

 

Thanks in advance!

Setting many of the graphic settings to low will only offload them to the CPU which is most often the bottleneck anyways.  If you can't turn the setting off completely than set it to high so it will dump more on the GPU and see what kind of fps it produces.

[mithrawndo 166]

I assume you're running the game from a standard HD and not an SSD? Defragging on a traditional HD is just fine and can certainly improve performance, but I do not recommend anybody defragging their SSD as it doesn't improve performance and can in some cases damage the SSD. Below is a bit more info on this topic: 

 

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2047513/fragging-wonderful-the-truth-about-defragging-your-ssd.html 

 

As mentioned above, delete your DayZ.cfg as that should help and from there you can tweak your settings more. Post up your progress if you make any and we'll try to help some more. 

 

Absolutely right, like the original poster I use an old fashioned spinner.

 

Any file fragmentation really hurts performance for those of us without SSDs; in areas with a lot of objects (and thus high texture load), any fragmentation to the "wad" files (I forget what file format dayz/arma actually uses now) causes the framerate spikes that can happen on busy servers in high population areas to shift from a fraction of a second to 2 or 3 whole seconds - unplayable.

 

Running with low texture settings helps here too, but I believe offloads more of the work to the CPU - not too much of a problem with my i7 950 given how well BI's titles seem to run on Intel kit, but YMMV with AMD gear.

[_robhimself 0]

excellent maybe many of the complainers will take your first post advert here and follow you over to h1z1 where the player render is less than 500m. where the hackers have found a happy home ( i was silly enough to buy the early release to try it out , oh my god). Where you can just pay to have supplies to drop down to you ( a perfectly rational mechanic in a survival game??)

Never had any combat or render problems yet. Servers are also much more populated on h1Z1 so combat is far more frequent. Combat being close range isn't worse, it's just different.

 

Hackers are an abomination, but the number seems about the same as DayZ hackers.

 

Air drops do not give any major advantage since the gear is mostly random crafting junk; rarely bandages and medkits, something not very needed since berries/cloth are easily farmed. The only air drops I've seen used have been heavily contested combat zones, which is their primary use: Getting people to go to a location and battle it out.

 

I love DayZ but the engine is absoultely garbage. I mean, laughably bad, which is sad. Both games are great but I would rather be playing on Ultra settings at 60+ FPS like my computer is supposed to be doing instead of running around with 15fps on a game that feels like it was made in the 90's. Won't even talk about the terrible interface, item bars, inventory and swap features, my god.

Edited February 17, 2015 by _robhimself

[Calvin Candie 189]

@Dave Crockett

I have similiar rig like you, only with r9 280x not 290x. I also have Dayz on the SSD.

Runs like absolute crap. Thought it was my drivers, turns out it is not as all other games fly. And litteraly fly.

[R0B3RTF1SH3R 66]

You have a pretty good rig, your fps seems a lil low like but its common to have bad fps, especially with amd cpus, surely you can get more than 4.3ghz out that cpu (depending on your cooler ofcourse) seeing dayz works on single tread performance my 6300 is actually out performing your 8350 as im currently running at 4.7ghz and all fx cpus have the same single core performance at the same ghz, id bet you could get close to 5ghz on that cpu! Just dooo it!1.55v and go for it!

im using same 6300, i think im sitting on 4ghz or just under on stock cooler. 

[deebz1234 243]

last resort

 

id reinstall windows and dayz as a last result, dont touch any cfg files or do any tweaks

 

then systematically adjust the launch parameters/ingame settings only and test on same server back to back.

 

also having msi and riva tuner open with an OSD helps troubleshoot.

you need to be viewing the real time clock speeds and load %s, etc.

then you can figure out whats up.

 

maybe its a core parking thing, maybe its the gfx card not working hard enough? etc

 

id also try setting your render to 150%, and watch your gpu load.

it should fill up more, taking more of the work and putting it on the gpu.

 

surprisingly you may get better fps with higher settings, as it disperses some of the load on to more cores maybe and also more towards gpu?

 

i have 6/12 core x99 with gtx 970 and only get 30-40 in cities (its gotta be limited to engine/mp performance)

and 100+ fps outside of cities.

but render @ 150+% and every setting on max.

[The Riddler (DayZ) 410]

Just to add more perspective to this discussion, my rig isas follows:

 

i7 860 overclocked to 3.8ghz using a Corsair H100 cooler. 

8 gigs of ram - memory timings were tweaked to handle over clock but can't recall settings off the top of my head

Nvidia GTX 680 also on a liquid cooler (Modified Corsair H60). Stock clock speeds, have not needed to overlcock for the games I play. 

 

I average 40 - 60 fps in the cities. 80 - 100 fps while out in the country side. I used the following tweak guide: http://www.dayztv.com/standalone/dayz-performance-guide-crash-fix/ when for back in the .4x updates era where it caused some noticeable performance drops. 

 

Hope you see better frame rate soon. Try as suggested and load more stuff onto the GPU to help out your AMD processor.

Edited February 17, 2015 by The Riddler

[sneakydudes 278]

Put 16 gb in that baby and you will be happy.

[gogogokitty 0]

Put 16 gb in that baby and you will be happy.

8gb isnt even close to used up when running dayz, he will not experience any gain from adding more of what is not being fully used.

[sneakydudes 278]

8gb isnt even close to used up when running dayz, he will not experience any gain from adding more of what is not being fully used.

16gb will improve his whole system, very recommended. I've been doing this a long time.

Just make sure you get a dual matching kit or find similar memory.

[soulfirez 901]

16gb will improve his whole system, very recommended. I've been doing this a long time.

Just make sure you get a dual matching kit or find similar memory.

AH why will he be happy??? If he isnt using the ram he has now how will more ram help (unless its faster ram or he loads the game on to a ram disk).

More ram only helps the system do jobs that require MORE RAM. Having it certainly wont hurt anything ( and its cheap now so many people do have 16 or more gig of ram) but unless he is rendering video or some other ram intensive job it wont do allot of anything for him.

[deebz1234 243]

wow that has to be the most uninformed statement ever.

 

8gb is plenty for any game these days.

 

no one needs 16gb for a gaming rig, yet.

 

its nice to have, but with any current game you wont see performance increase.

 

CPU + GPU upgrades (or OC)  = happy dayz

 

i am only using 8gb dual chan for now ddr4 was expensive and not worth forking out big $$ for.