High FPS vs. HQ Graphics - the best balance?

Grim Dawn General Discussion
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At 4K, I’m averaging in the high 80’s outside of Crucible (but Gsync is awesome so I don’t notice drops into the 60’s)

I’ve nitpicked over the settings for many the years now (since dx9 was the only client) - as long as you have a solid rig, just turn off anisotropic filtering in-game and force within drivers. Also, turn off ambient occlusion.

AO is the big one, but for some reason AF eats frames too

  • I’m on a Ryzen 3600X & GTX 1080 for reference
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I changed my Lighting setting from “Low” to “Medium”, so I made a small update to the original post with the following.

Lighting: BIG change in performance. I set this to “Medium”. You can increase this to make fights look better, especially in dark environments, but your FPS will lower. I don’t recommend using “Low” because that causes a bug where shadows suddenly disappear and reappear at certain times of day. Only set this to “Low” if you have Shadows turned off.

There are a couple of posts on reddit and steam discussing the issue:

The last link above dates from 2017… and if you search the thread for “Shadows”, you’ll find people reporting the bug even back then. I guess this bug is quite old!
I’m surprised I never noticed this bug before; or perhaps I never really understood it.

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Haven’t the shadows been fixed?

I know what bug you’re talking about, but it is gone after 1.1.9.8.

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Oh. I had no idea there was a hotfix to solve the issue.
Unfortunately it’s still happening to me on the latest version.
Should I report the problem somewhere?

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Several things I have done to increase FPS and enjoy the beautiful graphics.

  • Upgraded my CPU and GPU (Now running a Ryzen 5 5600 CPU and AMD RX 6650 XT GPU)
  • Run the 64 bit version of the game (use deferred rendering).
  • Run the game using Vulkan instead of DirectX. (Download the newest DXVK and place dxgi.dll and d3d11.dll into your x64 folder) [The first time ever you load an area it will create a new cache so give it a moment, but all playtime afterwards will be buttery smooth)
  • Give the mod GrimTex a try, the creator says he made sure compression was modernized on all textures to DXT5 whereas Grim Dawn natively uses DXT3… many users report smoother gameplay due to this. I’m playing in the 1.2 Play Test Beta patch, Crate has updated and modernized the rock textures in the game which are now aesthetically more beautiful; therefore, I’m only using the FX folder of GrimTex which for me makes a huge aesthetic difference. I will probably try the full mod again when the creator has done another pass of all the textures (assuming he will do this once GD 1.2 goes live).
  • Make sure your Nvidia or AMD Software profile is updated and optimized and use FreeSync or Gsync if your monitor supports it. Set an FPS lock [I use Radeon chill and set min and max FPS to 120] (Also keep your GPU drivers up to date). Also, I use Radeon Image Sharpening which really helps most games pop and vastly makes shadows look better in Grim Dawn.
  • If you have an HDR monitor and Windows 11 - utilize AutoHDR - it really makes the game that much more beautiful.
  • Play around with video settings, I run everything on max now. However, I enjoy particle density set to low or medium [this doesn’t affect quality but the density] as I find many spell effects to be way oversaturated on higher (especially in big battles). Also, I enjoy the clarity of disabling Depth of Field.
  • Continue to wait for more updates to the game. I’ve been playing since the game’s release and slowly over time and with expansions - Crate has optimized the game more and more. They really put a lot of love into this game and continue to do so with the upcoming 1.2 Patch and Fangs of Asterkarn announcement.

I would say the biggest stop to the microstuttering was me upgrading the CPU and GPU. I think, like others have pointed out have a higher Clock Speed CPU probably helps the most. I have seen awesome results using Vulkan over DirectX 11. Since upgrading my PC, I have stopped using the CPU core affinity switching. It may have helped a tiny bit back when I used a much slower CPU and my old Nvidia GTX 1060. One thing of note is the FPS does drop when playing multiplayer, but I still mostly play single player.

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Unfortunately, I found another graphics-setting-related bug, and so I had to change my Particles setting from “Low” to “Medium”. It turns out that certain enemy attacks become absolutely INVISIBLE with this setting on “Low”. One such (deadly) example is the water wave attack of Moosilauke, which triggers Trozan’s Sky Shards.

I changed the original post with the following:

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report it in the bug thread?

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Id say its normal if their attacks are flashy low will disable them for potato pcs…

This game is not demanding… i could max it out on a 7 year old pc at 1440p…

If you have a potato its not the games fault

The game however is limited to take advantage of better hardware… so even with a £3k+ pc it wont utilise the pc properly… engine limits.

So if you have a pc with a lioe a 3700 cpu and 2070 grpahics card you should be good

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I have pretty powerful hardware but I also have a 4k monitor, and some games just can’t run at a stable framerate at 4k, no matter what GPU you have or graphics options you set. I’m well acquainted with microstuttering. But DXVK completely eliminated it, giving me a perfectly smooth 60 FPS even with all graphics settings maxed. Thanks for the suggestion!

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Could you please provide more details on PC specs you have? I am going to build new PC and GD is my only game to play so I want to choose wisely.

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saw your DXVK mention, made me curious if anyone has done some “benchmarking”/side by side tests with vanilla vs dxvk on Grim Dawn for windows :thinking:

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I would test it if I only know how to install it and where the dxvk files comes from :wink:

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I’m going to write this in hopes I can skip some people a lot of time. For about 3 days I’ve been trying to optimize Grim Dawns graphics to run a stable 244 FPS, I have a Ryzen 7 5800x, ATI Radeon RX 6600 and ~24G of RAM. I want to warn people running this games at a stable FPS over 60 is impossible on Windows and Linux with a mid end PC. (most of all this testing is running under Linux using proton) list of things I have tried:
~changing proton versions: (Proton 9.0-2 and lower, GE Proton9-11 and Proton experimental) Proton 9.0-2 gave the best results
~using core switcher: this did improve FPS (30-40 frames) and helps not overload one core for a long time
~ Switching GD launch options: GD x64 X32 and GD x86 dx9 GD x64 gave the best performance and works with the core switcher scrip natively
~ Lowering and raising graphics settings: OP haves the best balance, but at lowest graphics I could pull 550-500 FPS but as soon as I get into a somewhat decent fight it will drop to 111-180fps
~ Switching distros: I currently run GD in Blendos (arch based) and then run games through a Ubuntu container, but switching to full Ubuntu no notifiable performance increase
~ Vsync with and without triple buffering no noticeable performance increase
~ Running the game with GrimTEX at 50% texture resolution slight performance increase

In summary my findings are that sense Grim Dawn’s engine relies on one core heavily, even if you force it to use other cores it will move to another core this whole time my GPU has never maxed out while playing, so my theory as to why it wont run at 244 constantly, you need to buy a CPU powerful enough to run this game on almost one core to get extremely high FPS.

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I hope to one day get a complete re design and overhaul on the graphics so many people wont play the game cause it looks “old” I wish they would the game would explode like POE.

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graphics isn’t everything in a game, if anything D4 has proven that (and so many other non ARPG genre games ofc)
Minecraft is one of the most popular and active played games in the world, it manages this without UE 6 graphics/tech :joy:
If anyone decides to not play GD because of the visuals; imo that’s their (big) loss,
personally i would not want GD “updated” and end up looking like ex Wolcen, it wasn’t “good looking” to me, even if it had way more modern visuals and graphic tech, and just had something that appeared “off”

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This doesn’t make much sense. :face_with_raised_eyebrow: The difference between DXT3 and DXT5 is the way alpha values are stored. They’re otherwise the same size and use the same compression for colour values. They’re also both ancient. Maybe you mean BC7 which is newer (only 15 years old) and has better quality encoding (but still the same size).

Interesting. I have a 7900 (CPU) and 7900XTX (GPU) and suffer from stutters every now and then which makes no sense :sweat_smile: My old pc was running GD without any problems.
Maybe I should try this DXVK thing…

So many people are crazy. It looks perfectly fine. The lighting is well done imho. Sure it’s not state of the art, but I honestly couldn’t point you to anything that looks bad in the game.

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Of course it’s not be look at D4 sales and Grim sales graphics attract a larger audience and “old” graphics put many people off it would be a positive change. Not sure how it’s disagreeable. I’d like the game to get bigger and get more money.

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my point is D4 didn’t make many sales because of its graphics; but the name/franchise
and it’s still “divisive”/disliked aplenty by many ARPG fans; despite those graphics
Wolcen has better and newer graphics than Grim Dawn; how many players/audience does that game have?
image

so… :neutral_face:

“Because graphics doesnt’ make a game”, and modern graphics doesn’t equate to something looking good, i just explained how Wolcen is technically better/more modern, but looks off. And i think GD does look good, even with its older tech and sprites etc, it appears more fantasy than artificial/“matrix” to me.
The way i keep describing is i get the sense of having stepped into a oil painting, and that’s a positive(atleast to me).

So personally, i’d rather not upgrade GDs graphics and (potentially) make it look off, “waste” the resources on that, to appeal to a “handful”/the utmost superficial segment of players
I’d rather they spend that effort and resources on GD content/a sequel :smile:
*heck, i wouldn’t even be surprised if Crate saw sense in “remastering” GD visuals they’d probably do it, but seems like it’s not been worth it so far. Maybe they are estimating the portion of players willing to buy purely based on visuals aren’t actually that large
(or it’s just way more complicated with the GD engine :woozy_face:)

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The other thing is they still have to support the older specs for the game and DX9. Not sure how easy that would be if they went “modern”.

Also some of it is the art style itself.

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separate it like they did with the legacy launcher maybe? no clue how complicated that is or if adding more complexity to it or if doable at all