Jump to content

Very bad optimization compared to v15


Sunbather

Recommended Posts

Hello there,

I started playing Vintage Story with v15 or v14, and got really enamoured with the game. Still, I put it aside since I wanted to wait for some more features and especially some more optimization.

Back then, my fps oscillated between 60 fps and 110 fps, but were mostly around 80 fps no matter the area I was in.

Full of anticipation of how v17 would play, I reinstalled the game again yesterday night but soon was shocked about how worse the optimization has become. I constantly dipped below 45 fps (imagine the feeling of that on a 144hz display!), hovered mostly around 65 fps and randomly got 80 fps not really in relation to what happened on the screen. That does not mean a lot, I know  that --- but when I am standing on a mountain overlooking a lake with activated ripples and all, and I get constant 70, and then I stand in front of a mountain my visiblity mostly blocked and I plummet down to 45 fps then there seems to be something off. Also, I was walking around across the landscape and without the landscape changing much, the usage of my GPU jumped from 60 % to 98% within the blink of an eye, jumped down back back again and so forth.

Then a storm kicked in and visibility was only 5 meters or so. My fps were a constant 80 now. So I got the hunch that the visibility range is at fault and I put it very low (before, the slider was at about 2/3) and I gained some extra fps. I also toyed around with literally every other setting but never was I able to regain the same high fps that I experienced when I was playing the game in its v15 iteration. And back then, I even played with the (now discontinued) shader mod!

All in all, a very disheartening experience and I just closed the game after experimenting for 20 minutes with the settings and overclocking my CPU even up to 4.25 Ghz.

 

It looks to me like you've implemented volumetric lighting but I am not sure and there is no way to turn that off in the menus anyway. Could this be the culprit?

Is some serious optimiztation effort planned in the near future?

I am not exaggerating when I say that Vintage Story is unplayable for me right now.

 

 

System:

Ryzen 3600 (overclocked to 4.15 Ghz)

Geforce RTX 2060 Super

2x 8 GB @3200 Mhz

Game on NVMe SSD Crucial P5

 

Drivers are up to date; no problem with any other game whatsoever.

Edited by Sunbather
Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 11/12/2022 at 10:12 PM, Epihnea said:

Hello would you mind sharing your Graphical Settings ( Screenshot if possible ) ?

Like I said, I played around with the settings and even put everything to low (and all the boxes unticked) and got like 20fps plus but with abysmal image quality.

When I started, however, the settings were just the default ones, I guess. Or at least, I didn't change anything. Only after the fact, I adjusted the settings.

But does your answer indicate that this is not a well known issue and the game should be running much better? (Maybe it's the current Nvidia driver? They seem to fuck up a lot lately when it comes to their drivers (and their power cables... and their price politics...).

 

Edited by Sunbather
Link to comment
Share on other sites

5 hours ago, BigBadBeef said:

1440p, 125% resolution scale, 608 view distance, god rays enabled.

This is running 80fps, with 1% lows being at 40fps on my 7 year old gtx 980 with 4GB vram on Linux.

So I don't think there is any justification for such low frames.

Man, I have a 1060 and I can't get anywhere near that level of performance. I'm sure it's unrelated to the 90 mods I have installed.

  • Haha 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

14 hours ago, l33tmaan said:

Man, I have a 1060 and I can't get anywhere near that level of performance. I'm sure it's unrelated to the 90 mods I have installed.

My card is 15% faster with 1GB more VRAM, running Linux , which means I have also more system resources overhead.

 

Newer doesn't always mean better. Back in 2015 it was so over the top that my vendor turned pale when I explained the parts I wanted. In the end I had to order them to be shipped from germany. It even has the third revision prototype pci-e 3.0 storage, which is today called m.2, a xeon processor equivalent to the i7 4790k, and and 16GB of RAM when no-one in their right mind put more than 8GB in any home desktop pc.

 

Back in the day, there were a lot of smartasses who told me that this is not how a gaming rig is made. 7 years later, they all had to completely replace 2 computers while I, just this year, began contemplating my next masterpiece of long-lasting gaming performance.

I am a pc building expert of over 20 years now. I do everything except showcase "bling bling" pc's... these are for scrubs that want hide the fact that they're nothing more than audacious noobs.

But enough self promotion. In short, my pc is faster, and 15% may not sound much, but it compounds into quite a bit higher framerates.

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 11/14/2022 at 1:32 AM, Epihnea said:

I suggest setting fps counter to max (Unlimited FPS ) and removing instanced plants as this setting does not work properly on Nvidia cards. This should fix your issues.

Hello Epihnea,

sorry for only getting back to you now. I recently bought Factorio and well, I was a bit too busy to play Vintage Story, haha.

Instanced plants was turned off from the beginning but I did change the FPS to unlimited as you suggested. Didn't really help to be honest.

However, I have now found that almost everything depends on the View Distance which I touched before but only went down as low as 560 or so. I do think that the game loses a LOT of immersion if you set it to anything lower than that and even on 560 blocks the view distance is not as one would like it to be. I have now resorted to go down to 448 blocks, I think, and I get a somewhat stable framerate of 80 to 100 fps.

I do still think, and especially since the game seems so dependent on the rendering distance, or rather it seems to render everything within a certain distance, that a lot of optimization could be done here. I mean, if I stand in front of a hill and see literally nothing, why then does it still tank my fps when I raise the view distance slightly. 

All this is backseat programming, of course, and I don't know a thing about optimization. But from a gamer's perspective the fact remains that the game does need optimization, and that the game ran better for me (with activated shader mod!) in previous versions - and even then, as I stated, I stopped playing because I wanted to wait for better optimization.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

7 minutes ago, Sunbather said:

I mean, if I stand in front of a hill and see literally nothing, why then does it still tank my fps when I raise the view distance slightly.

View distance equates to chunks loaded. So even if you are staring at a wall and nothing else needs to be rendered (assuming that you have occlusion culling activated), that still means the entire loaded area must be kept in memory at all times. Memory can run out, and if it's the video memory that runs out, then the GPU must start swapping data into the main memory and back to keep track of everything, which greatly slows it down.

And then there's everything that comes along with keeping a large area active: loading entities and processing their AI, shifting the colors with the slow change of seasons, lake ice and snow melting/accumulating, ticking plant growth, running block updates, simulating weather, and so on and so forth.

I'm not saying there isn't room for optimization, because I think that's true for all software. And Tyron has said repeatedly that he'd love to have a dedicated graphics programming expert for the game (but they're kind of way too expensive). But you should still understand that view distance is one of the single most performance-hungry settings in the game regardless of optimization, and also why that is.

As an aside -

14 minutes ago, Sunbather said:

I do think that the game loses a LOT of immersion if you set it to anything lower than that and even on 560 blocks the view distance is not as one would like it to be.

I'm not sure if you've ever played Minecraft, but a view distance of 560 in Minecraft terms would be 35. And without installing mods, Minecraft is capped at 32 (and struggles rendering even that).

So you're essentially saying "the game loses a lot of immersion if you have the view distance set any lower than what is already higher than the measuring rod for all block games can render on any setting". Now, I'm quite firmly in the camp of 'more view distance is always better', too, and love Minecraft mods like Distant Horizons and such... but let's keep a wee bit of perspective, alright? ;) Else we might get into the realm of complaining that the amount of fizz in our champagne is slightly off today and how that will ruin our mood... :P

  • Amazing! 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, Streetwind said:

But you should still understand that view distance is one of the single most performance-hungry settings in the game regardless of optimization, and also why that is.

So you're basically teaching me what I have already concluded in my previous post?

And regarding the rest: my VRAM is at half capacity, my system memory is used to about 70 percent (11 GB of 16 GB, compare the game Squad which uses almost 100 percent of my RAM).

 

2 hours ago, Streetwind said:

I'm not sure if you've ever played Minecraft, but a view distance of 560 in Minecraft terms would be 35. And without installing mods, Minecraft is capped at 32 (and struggles rendering even that).

So you're essentially saying "the game loses a lot of immersion if you have the view distance set any lower than what is already higher than the measuring rod for all block games can render on any setting". Now, I'm quite firmly in the camp of 'more view distance is always better', too, and love Minecraft mods like Distant Horizons and such... but let's keep a wee bit of perspective, alright? ;) Else we might get into the realm of complaining that the amount of fizz in our champagne is slightly off today and how that will ruin our mood... :P

 

I have not and won't ever play Minecraft. So the rest of your argument falls flat. Ironically quoting me on what I have never said (but what I am allegedely "essentially saying") doesn't make sense whatsoever when that whole sentence is supposing I had played Minecraft and compared it now to Vintage Story. Quite a discombobulated argument if I may say.

On a sidenote: I drink beer, and can't really say anything about champagne. However, I do like my beer cold or at room temperature. That funny temperature in-between - not cold yet but not really room temperature anymore - is decidedly not to my taste. As is the current performance of Vintage Story.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

So I've made a little video yesterday and uploaded it now: at the end of the day, it confirms what I have written above but I still find it appropriate to give some video proof of the erratic performance. Especially in the beginning the frames are all over the place. I then lower the settings and get up to 200 fps but the game does not look good. At the end of the video I find a setting that allows for more or less constant 80 fps but still missing the view distance I would call a minimum for immersion (about 550 to 600).


EDIT: Please excuse the Afterburner overlay being so small!

 

 

Edited by Sunbather
Link to comment
Share on other sites

×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

We have placed cookies on your device to help make this website better. You can adjust your cookie settings, otherwise we'll assume you're okay to continue.