Best way to Benchmark Graphics in GD?

Grim Dawn General Discussion
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1

What’s the best way to test the graphics performance of this game?
I need this so if I change graphics settings or my computer hardware I can measure the increase / decrease in performance accurately.

TL;DR: the answer I’ve found: Best way to Benchmark Graphics in GD? - #8 by Coincident

I want to test the worst FPS scenario, and not just “go kill Korvaak”.
The worst FPS I’ve found so far is the Crucible of Crags, round 103: easy to repeat in 2 minutes, LOTS of caster mobs at once, and on Challenger difficulty the risk of death is almost zero.
On max settings my FPS there can drop to 30; whereas I easily have 120+ FPS on Korvaak.

The problem is that the Crucible is still very random. The types of mobs that spawn on round 103 are random, and doing 2 tests I can get extremely different results just due to fewer caster mobs spawning, or moving in a different way, or dying faster.

Is there a place that’s as graphic-intensive as the Crucible, but has consistent spawns?
Maybe there’s a game mod with non-random monster spawns?

So what’s the most consistent, non-random, way to benchmark the graphics in GD?
I’ve been using Crucible of Crags, round 103, on Challenger difficulty. Is there something better?

2

I have biggest fps drops in Arkovia. It appears that undead spawns really slow down the game.
The other thing you could do it is go to the Tomb of the Heretic and kill a lot of embodiments of hunger. They leave an annoying particle effect on death.

3

Crate of Entertainment
just do a really tanky build that can survive a lot
then fight him for a while
when there is a bunch of boxes and they are all shooting and meteors are falling; welcome slideshow

4

It’s important to note which Crucible arena you’re using for benchmark. Some arenas are much slower. Here’s how they compare on my PC before monsters even spawn:
40 fps - Grove
45 fps - Bog, Crags
50 fps - Void
55 fps - Woods, Sands, Legion
60 fps - Stars
65 fps - Deep
80 fps - Dead

5

This could work in the sense that it’s somewhat consistent in terms of performance, but it has two other big problems:

  • The time to reach Crate is too high. On a benchmark it’s important to be able to repeat the test multiple times within 1/2 minutes.
  • Risk of death means you need an ultra-powerful char, which is not something everyone has / can create.
    That’s why I picked Crucible instead of anything else; you can start on 100 and reach 103 in less than 2 minutes, and if you do it on Normal/Elite, the risk of death is almost zero for pretty much any character.

Absolutely. I was using the arena of Crags, because that’s where I had the lowest FPS. I will give the Grove a shot to see if the numbers are even lower there.

6

you can teleport to Crate using Grim Internals
you can use GDstash you craft yourself a strong/“immortal” tank build to survive “anything” Crate fight shows at you so you can stay in it
*assuming you’re on PC ofc

since it’s for benchmarking purposes, and you’re not actually farming Crate, i wouldn’t really consider these cheating
it’s sorta like if you entered dev mode and gave yourself godmode health to test the fight out

7

Interesting, I didn’t know you could do that with Grim Internals. This might be worth a shot then.

8

TL;DR:
Running Crucible of the Bog, on Challenger difficulty, on round 103 is the best/most consistent way I found to benchmark the game graphics.

Here’s how I benchmark:
1- Load Crucible of the Bog on Challenger difficulty
2- Spend 15 tributes to start the crucible on round 101
3- Clear round 101 and 102 quickly; these do not matter
4- Move to the center of the arena as soon as 103 starts, benchmarking starts here
5- Do not move, attack, nor cast anything excepting healing. Let the mobs slowly die to retaliation/pets/procs.
6- Exit to menu as soon as 104 starts, benchmarking stops here.

Use Aspirant difficulty if you die too fast, or Gladiator difficulty if the mobs die too fast with this method.

Round 103 is caster-heavy, which is great to test. But it’s still random: sometimes a lot of mobs spawn, sometimes just a few do. To solve this, repeat the test a couple of times with the same settings. I backup a save game file with 100 tributes, and I run these steps 6 times until I run out of tributes. This takes ~6 minutes. Then I change one of the settings I want to test, copy-paste the backup save game, and try again. 6 runs are enough to balance out the randomness in spawns, and gives a good amount of data to compare over several setups.

I’ve done a significant amount of tests and benchmarks, and the Bog arena takes the cake, even when compared to Grove and Crags. Perhaps it’s the fact that there’s water in the center and reflections might play a role? In the middle of huge fights, the Bog is where I consistently get the worst performance of all the arenas (~20 FPS on max settings).

Now about the Crate of Entertainment… welp! This was quite a lot of work! Here’s what I found:
Using Crate of Entertainment to test is not practical: the setup is complicated and the results feel… arbitrary. If I make a cheated super-retaliation character, the fight is over in 20 seconds, and my FPS never go below 60-80; so not enough of a stress test. If I make a cheated non-retaliation char that can survive forever, the fight can last for 5+ minutes, after which there’s sooo many crates and projectiles on screen that the game slows down to a crawl (fewer than 10fps), and sometimes freezes; no matter the video options. I can’t really compare the performance of different graphics settings this way.

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