I love this game, I have owned this game since it came out and have not stopped playing, but patch after patch I always hope that the game will be further optimised so that big fights with lots of enemies on screen, don’t slow down and can remain fast and responsive.
My computer specs are not too bad, not the best but they do meet the recommended requirements. Ryzen 1700 4Ghz, 16GB 3200Mhz, 1080Ti OC. I can tell when the frames drop during big fights with lots of enemies on screen, my skills don’t feel responsive and as a result, I don’t feel responsive and it can - and sometimes does - impact my experience.
I know this is an old engine, but surely there must be something one can do to make this easier?
Slightly longer answer: If I recall, at some point during the early access period (I don’t remember exactly when since I’ve been playing since Build 17 or something), or maybe it was when Ashes of Malmouth and the associated console related stuff came out, this all blends together, they improved it as best they could. It did result in some marginal gains. Also, iirc, this is a cpu-limited issue that results in core throttling. It’s essentially the same thing that occurs in World of Warcraft in their larger raids. Multiple cores sit relatively idle while the first core throttles.
Edit: I’m with you, though. I wish it could be improved as well. It would make the game significantly more enjoyable in multiplayer (which was never a focus and was added as a bonus for players), and solo play. If I had one wish for the game, it would be improved performance. The developers have spoken fairly openly about wishing the performance were better. If they make GD2, they mentioned they’d do so with a different engine.
Unfortunately, the GD engine is primarily single-threaded.
When Ashes of Malmouth came out, the engine switched from DX9 to DX11. We saw a HUGE reduction in stutter and some notable fps gains.
It basically boils down to your processor’s single-threaded IPC.
(You’d need a Coffee Lake CPU overclocked to 5.0Ghz… Even then, it would only be approximately 16% faster - as per comparing Cinebench
single-thread scores for your CPU at 4.0 and an 8700K at 5.0)
27th July:
drazac :if you do decide to make Grim Dawn 2, can you confirm that one of the goals would be to use new engine
I can’t actually confirm that for you because there’s really two avenues we could take with Grim Dawn 2. Either we start with a new engine and we rewrite a lot of the mechanics that we added for Grim Dawn to add it to that engine or we take the Grim Dawn engine and overhaul major components of it to bring it up to speed with whatever era we’ll be in at the time technology-wise.
5th October:
CepheidSauron :How much more can this engine be pushed?
Zantai_GD :any engine can be pushed as far as you’re willing to dedicate programmers. Just look at unreal
Medierra :At this point, the limit is the existing game / content, not the engine. So we could potentially keep the engine and totally update it if we went on to make a totally new game with it.
7th December:
Dragon_RW : Hi, will this engine still use a single core to do all processing?
That is a misconception. I am well aware that the engine is heavily based on one core, it does not however run on a single core, it never has. We’ve actually made improvements to that over the years and it utilises additional cores more than it does many years ago. Could that be improved? With infinite resources anything can be improved, but there are diminishing returns.
The game will have an x64 version most likely when FG comes out, but Zantai’s said he doesn’t expect most people to see any improvement in performance.
I think the engine they have right now is great, it looks modern and I would imagine it allows them to pump out content rapidly with just a small number of people. If they can improve this engine so that it runs a constant 60fps+ during big fights on modern hardware, I’d be more than happy.
I found that upgrading my monitor to g-sync and using full screen mode with v-sync turned off at the 2560 x 1440 resolution with direct port connection from g-card to monitor instead of HDMI has dramatically increased FPS in this game for me.
The only time I see any slowing motion is when I’ve been in the crucible for a few hours with 3 other peeps, for some reason it starts off great for the first 4 rounds of 20 - 50 waves and then it starts to slog like there’s some kind of memory leak or something. All I have to do is remake the game and it’s gone again for a few more hours.
But aside from that the upgrade I did helped me personally play this game with no lag or slow motion during huge fights and it looks amazing.
Im running a 9900k and 2080ti and still see some dips and slowdown here and there. Its just a old engine and not much can be done realistically i guess. Its mostly fine though so i dont care.