Performance on the 7700XT: Shaders Going Rogue?

[punished_hank]

I'd like to share and discuss my experience of the game's performance with the Radeon 7700XT. If anyone can help me troubleshoot the performance issues I'm having, that is pure gravy.

My specs:

Ryzen 7 5700X

32 GB DDR4 3200MHz

1TB NVMe SSD (Samsung Evo 970)

Radeon 7700XT

Windows 10 64 bit.

All drivers are up-to-date (as in, I just used the AMD cleanup utility to wipe, then reinstall my video drivers).

My core experience of performance with this setup is: extremely variable performance. 

For quite some time now, on any graphics setting, no matter how high or how low, I cannot create a stable FPS environment. Moving around the world -- both to load new chunks and simply to move around the world within chunks already loaded -- generates noticeably large lag spikes. Typically, these manifest as sudden "hanging" or "catching" of the visuals -- and when monitoring FPS actively, you'll see a large drop in FPS. From say 80 (average) with 65-70 min to a sudden 8, or 17, or 22.

I have found that no combination of settings prevents this -- neither higher nor lower chunk upload rate limiter, neither turning off nor turning up RAM optimization, neither turning down nor turning off SSAO, shadow quality, God rays, neither running with FPS capped nor uncapped, with Vsync on nor off. Neither playing with nor without mods. I have also tried things more out-of-the-box solutions like running the game as an administrator, disabling the precision mouse pointer tech on Windows, disabling audio devices, etc. No meaningful performance changes.

The only thing that seems to consistently affect the prevalence of these FPS spikes is View Distance -- but only to a degree that seems unreasonable. I.e., the FPS spikes cease only when playing on "Absolute Minimum" settings -- with view distance set to the lowest value possible. Something that doesn't seem quite right for the hardware specs.

However, recently, while troubleshooting this experience again, I decided to reset the disk based shader cache for my graphics card. And wonder of wonders: performance was transformed.

Whereas for many days now, I'd been capping out at 60-80 FPS averages on Very High settings, after resetting the shader cache, I was suddenly seeing 200, 250, even 300 FPS, with minimums of 100, 120, 130. Capping or enabling Vsync would usually create a relatively stable FPS environment, with low micro stutter rate and sudden spikes down to only as low as 60 FPS while traveling the world.

However, upon exiting the game and reentering it some time later -- the same performance issues reemerged. 60-80 FPS being consistently displayed, with sudden spikes to 30, 20, or 10-15.

I'm attaching two screenshots -- the first from immediately after resetting the shader cache (I ran around my base, then stopped at this lookout point), the second from after exiting and reentering the game (Again, I ran around my base, then returned to this lookout point). I will also note: the screenshot on the left with the higher FPS shows 99-100% GPU for me through the Radeon interface. With the latter screenshot, my GPU is sitting at 60-70% utilization. No settings were changed.

This is odd, yes? Seemingly, the shaders are being saved incorrectly after being compiled, and seemingly, this is leading to lower GPU utilization and worse performance.

Practically speaking, I can simply reset the cache before I play. But very odd, or?

 

Edited December 17, 2024 by punished_hank

[punished_hank]

I am now finding I cannot consistently regain Turbo FPS mode just by clearing shaders -- twice it has worked, and now twice it hasn't. Both times it has worked, my GPU is 100% utilized. Both times it hasn't, it stays at 70-80% utilization (regardless, really, of settings).