Turn off V-Sync and Triple Buffering in-game, then force them both on in Nvidia control panel, look for 3D Settings, Manage 3D Settings, then click on the Program Settings tab, find Grim Dawn executable file and on the right turn on via a drop down list V-Sync and Triple Buffering. (not sure how/if that can be done with AMD cards, sorry).
I’ve done this and have all other settings on/maxed and haven’t noticed a single instance of jittering yet, with nearly 2500 hrs played.
I think the implementation of v-sync in-game is somehow flawed, but doing this simple fix works.
Triple buffering in Nvidia control panel works only on OpenGL, GD uses DirectX so that doesn’t do anything. Apparently the driver v-sync on AMD works only on OpenGL games, so AMD users need to use some third party program to force v-sync on if GD’s own is causing problems for some reason. Using windowed fullscreen mode would force both v-sync and triple buffering on using the OS’s own version of them, that could also help.
I’ve been recommending this to literally hundreds of people and threads like this since “last summer” (July I think? It happened right after the Windows 10 Anniversary update) when I discovered it, when Vsync actually became a problem. I found it because I happened to be among the first people to experience the issue since I was testing a new GD build at the same juncture as Windows pushed the Anniversary update. I figured out the problem, Crate released the build, people began freaking out, I began showing them the light.
Sorry OP… Can’t let somebody get credit for a fix I found and have been pushing ever since
Now, if you really want the game to run smooth(er) then download Nvidia Profile Inspector (learn how to use it, amazing tool that gives you much more power than Nvidia ever will) http://orbmu2k.de/tools/nvidia-inspector-tool
That’s the official author of the tool and it’s in German so you may need to choose the translate option. Download link is at bottom of page.
Run the profile inspector. Once it loads you will see a “Home” button with a down arrow attached to the graphic. Click the arrow and select Grim Dawn from the drop down list to load the profile you already made in the official Nvidia Control Panel. Now in your profile find the Frame Rate Limiter option and set it to whatever (I choose 60-62 fps). After that find the Vsync option and expand it and choose Fast Sync. Click Apply.
Your game will now run much better.
Here is an amazing guide… Nvidia Profile Inspector introduction and Guide
…that goes into great detail about using the tool and how to understand the various graphical options at your command, how they work and interact with each other. This is a great guide for graphics tweaking noobs who may not fully understand what the hell they are doing or what all these things actually mean. Read it. Learn.
All good. Just wanted it to be clear this has actually been common knowledge for a bit now. I believe I did suggest once or twice to Zantai that maybe they should add the info to one of their stickies in the Bug Reporting section but I don’t think they ever did.
Stuttering and framerate dropping seem never gonna be fixed. I’ve just reinstalled GD to try out if the performance is still shit at crowded places with tons of skill effects, same issue like before.
Firstly, GD doesn’t support SLI nor nVidia gives a shit about GD, bad luck for SLI configuration like me. I tried the Titan Quest DX9 compatible bits, it doesn’t improve nothing, scaling is bad and basically it’s the same performance as single GPU.
Secondly, forcing Triple buffering in nVidia control panel or via nVidia Inspector (I’d prefer this tool) doesn’t help because it only works in OpenGL, it had been confirmed before, don’t fall into placebo effect. The only working ways are: Windows Borderless, or forcing Triple Buffering (DX9, 32bit apps) via D3DOverrider. There’s a free tool called “Borderless Gaming” to force 64bits applications. Forcing Vsync via nVidia panel or the Inspector does provide more options than in-game, but it doesn’t help with the framedrop, Vsync is meant to prevent screen tearing only.
IMHO, the best ARPGs are the one which provide excellent performance in every situation, every milisecond counts, it could result in death or alive, rage quitting or happy farming, or even more serious result we could imagine. I raged so bad when my hardcore character died in Path of Exile just because of the frame dropped at that specific moment. Now they drastically improved it with the new DX11 engine, almost perfect stabling 120/144hz, a huge quality of life tbh.
GD is a great game, no doubt about it, I spent a few hundreds hours with it, and always coming back to the forum to check the patch note to see if there is some improvements in performance, but it seems Crate doesn’t give a shit about this issue.
As for enabling Vsync thru the NV CP and/or Inspector the only purpose for that method is if the in-game Vsync is causing stuttering when enabled (which has been an issue with Win10 since the Anniversary update last summer), which fixes it for most people I know of that have tried it. Triple-bufffering thru the NV CP can of course be ignored in that instance. It isn’t needed there anyway in my experience and would hardly affect any of your “real” complaints even if it was needed.
All I know about the SLI-bits thru Inspector is what others have posted.
The framedrops are, as everyone knows, due to the aged engine in question (and its imperfect multicore support) combined with, usually, massive amounts of action that can happen in later parts of the game/Crucible. My guess is that would be something that couldn’t truly be “fixed” without totally dismantling the engine and redoing the whole shebang. Maybe I’m wrong and that’s exactly what they are doing or attempting to? //shrugs Of course I’m just a pleb and don’t know fuckall about that kind of stuff (except in a roundabout way) so I can only speculate and theorize on the subject within my only limited knowledge of the matter that I’ve gleaned over time.
Hopefully the behind the scenes changes going on now can eventually alleviate some or all of that problem. We shall see.
@powbam: totally agreed, since the GD’s rendering engine is based on DX9, which is known for not optimizing multi-threading cpu, mostly 1 or 2 cores, and it seems that is the problem. Because GPUs can only draw frames when receiving orders from the CPU but in the heat actions the only single core cannot handle such many tasks, the result is frame dropping and low GPU usage.
I don’t think there will be a solution unless they change the rendering engine to DX11 to support multi-threading, hopefully that day will come.
Maybe they do but they can’t. Problem is the engine that they don’t/can’t touch. In addition to that, Directx 9 and windows au and nvidia 37x.x drivers have some serious issues when they are together. There is no single performance improvement let me tell you all why;
my rig has windows 10 that starts with 900~ mb ram (compare with yours ;)) due to me closed everything that can interrupt or quque threads such as cortana,telemetry,windows store, windows’s screen recording or any other stuff that works in background. I can see login screen in 5.5 seconds when i click power button. So, when my fps drops 60 to 40, my gpu usage is never over %40. This is probably not Grim Dawn’s fault since engine and the reason above.
We are upgrading the engine to DX11 as we speak… however, I don’t know how much impact that will have for people. It may improve performance a bit but I don’t expect it to work miracles, especially since most performance issues are CPU related.
We’re looking at additional things we can move out of the main thread but that’s a more difficult challenge. We already moved physics out of the main thread, which helped a lot but some of the bigger CPU intensive tasks are less easily separated.
A big part of the problem with GD is not that it’s graphically intense but that there is a lot of loading / unloading, enemy pathing and physics that place a heavy burden on the CPU. Frame rate can also fluctuate a lot, since by far, the biggest impact on frame rate occurs when the player gets near dense groups of enemies. This fluctuation causes it’s own problems, notably with v-sync.
As people have noticed above, v-sync can cause problems when framerate is near the v-sync thresholds. This isn’t due to our implementation, since v-sync is implemented at the graphics driver level but just a problem that might more often due to FPS fluctuating a lot. Everytime your framerate goes 1 FPS above or below the v-sync threshold, it switches to the next level and can cause a little hitch.
When I upgraded my system / monitor, I actually ended up with worse performance because of this and found that it improved significantly by turning v-sync off because my frame rate was often bouncing up and down around 120fps. With v-sync, every time it drops to 119fps or below, then back up, it will stutter. Likewise if your frame rate is frequently dropping below 60fps, then v-sync causes it to keep cutting back and forth from 60fps to 30fps.
So, good news - we’re still working on things that could improve performance… but I don’t know that any of it will be a silver bullet fix for any particular case. If you’re suffering from this v-sync issue, then the fix is going to be turning off v-sync or changing / adjusting your monitor and video card.
