Projectiles destroy my fps. Elp

The performance of my system gets progressively worse with every patch and it came down to the point where some projectile-heavy builds completely destroy my fps. Attack speed slows down, my char is missing hits.

Is there any modern solution to this problem? It’s very frustraiting when your system - i7-9750h 2060 RTX laptop - performs on high settings in modern AAA games while this fossil of an engine makes it lag in everything low/off.

What do you mean by projectiles? The projectile skills you use/spam? or; the projectile skills enemies cast?

For a player with an old laptop; I can say with the last a few patches they improved the low settings. I don’t get crash as I used to have and I don’t feel too much fps drops compared to 1.1.6.0 or those times.

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if it’s a laptop, do you have power management on high performance mode while plugged in to the charger/cable?

By projectiles i mean the stockpile of separate objects with own fx created by your char. They usually come in projectile form.

Power management is fine. The CPU gets hot but doesn’t hit throttling. Also in some other games it runs 95o hot without any performance issues.

not my point, but that if it’s using default/“balanced” power state CPU utilization can fluctuate a lot more than on performance powerplan, as it will maintain peak more instead of cycling down then up constantly in an attempt to respond to process “needs”

i mention this because it’s been a solution to others before, and i think twice like in the last week

I can say with confidence that the patches had nothing to do with any performance degradation you’ve experienced.

The game has had very little done on the backend for a long time now, and what has been done would have no effect on framerate. I certainly can’t add secret -fps modifiers to gear! So if the game has not changed, then the conclusion must be that something else has.

If the game is running poorly on the lowest settings on an otherwise decent system, laptop aside since those are inherently weaker than their PC counterparts, then that is the time to investigate external factors such as drivers.

This is not how engines work. Unreal Engine is 23 years old.

What AAA game you are comparing to is going to give you vastly different results. GD, and ARPGs in general, are very heavy on the CPU with tons of entities on the screen at once all moving around, calculating actions and creating FX and lighting.

Something like Witcher 3 has maybe 5 enemies on screen at once? One spell at a time? Many regard it as a gorgeous game, but its system load is entirely different.

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Tried to change the powerplan to performance but nothing has changed.

My laptop runs Three Kingdoms on high to ultra 60 fps, does that count? It’s a game with thousands of separate detailed human models on the screen performing their own actions, sending out hundreds of projectiles every second.

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why so angry, got lag-shot?

Well, I can say with my 4 year old medicro machine and up to three games and a movie running at the same time on different monitors, I never experienced GD lagging. Or slowing down. Only exception was endgame status of Civ6 running the final rounds in the back, so…

I am pretty sure, your issue is related to your machine. How old is it? Checked your ‘working memory’ status? Drivers? Background stuff running?

Think about how the units move in total war games. How the projectiles look and move. The possible actions units can take. The path mesh. The environment details.

It’s not thousands of separate entities acting individually. If it was, you’d be getting very different results.

Edit: I will add also that they’ve been using the same fundamental engine since 2000. Those fossil engines, am I right?

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My laptop also has frame rate issues and occasional freezing but i tried every solution i could find online and nothing worked. It has a lot to do with the game overloading a single core in my CPU.

So to summarize, what you are saying is smth has changed in my system, presumably drivers(?), that caused CPU to perform worse and worse while CPU is obviously not hitting its full limit (even temps are way below the throttling).

And it’s on a player that has higher end laptop CPU, which performs well in every other game and instance, including aRPGs, and has nothing to do with the engine?

I appreciate the replies but sadly they don’t help at all.

That’s what i got from the people on discord as well. They say there is some powban’s tool that helps solving it but apparently it doesn’t work with hyperthreading which my CPU has.

I run a script that automates the process of setting CPU affinity and it makes the game run a little better but it doesn’t help with the freezing and frame rate drops. My CPU is amd but it supports SMT (Simultaneous Multithreading) which is equivalent to HyperThreading so this could be the reason for me as well.

That’s exactly what he’s saying. He claims nothing has changed on the backend - by which he is referring specifically to anything that might have anything to do with performance related settings, issues, and so on. I don’t think he’s prone to lying about that.

As for what it might be, hard to say. Tons of external factors in an OS can come into play, very difficult for anyone not sitting in front of your PC to determine what the issue might be. Keep in mind that Windows itself can be your enemy.

This was claimed to have been “fixed” but… it’s Microsoft we are talking about here. Other than that, drivers, weird programs you may have recently installed, browser open with a bajillion tabs, the list goes on. My advice - crack open task manager and start playing whack-a-mole.


It can work with hyperthreading and has for some people.

[Tool] Core Switcher - Force GD to use all cores equally!

…the only way to determine if it works for you is to try it tho - manual steps are detailed that you can try first without needing to download anything.

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Yeah, i’m not saying he is lying. While over the years my performance did get worse with major updates, the latest patches (hotfixes) couldn’t change much. And just in this very patch some of my builds ran a bit smoother then they are now.

It’s obviously some micro changes within the system but i’m unable to pinpoint them because everything else is fine. I’m not a complete PC dummy, i usually manage to solve the issues myself. But this is just far beyond my knowledge.

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i’ll try that, thanks

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If I had an obvious solution for you, I would obviously share it. I can only provide information that can help narrow down the root issue.

You observed that your performance has degraded with updates. I am here to tell you that it is highly unlikely that game updates are the cause. It is also worth noting that individuals with inferior systems are not reporting issues, although that isn’t much to go on since we don’t have hard data on what fps they are running at and what you consider “destroyed fps”.

The engine could always be improved, and I have no doubt that framerate drops do occur in certain circumstances, but we have not made fundamental changes there in a long time so any recent changes in performance cannot be due to our tinkering with the engine.

So ruling out changes to the game, the only reasonable conclusion I can make is that something must have changed on the system end. You obviously didn’t change out hardware, so I would investigate the software.

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I did do a quick search of my thread…



…for your CPU and it appears noone yet has posted trying with your model so you would be the “first”.

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Perhaps running a DxDiag and running through/analysing it is an idea as it contains information on your system including drivers of all kinds. Or it could be an update somewhere or to the OS itself as powbam surmised or another internal software component is causing problems.

I have heard from my friends before that they have experienced faulty gameplay from one specific game (a AAA game as well mind you) that resolved after they removed some lingering, obscure drivers.

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It might also be handy if he details exactly what fps he is getting - is it consistent the entire playthru, or only certain areas or situations etc? The more info the better so people understand exactly what is occurring.

Some details if anyone is interested. I noticed my CPU hitting some kind of a brick wall with temps, they are so way below of what i have in other games, like sometimes 60 degress vs over 80.

I was trying several classic cold builds lately and noticed fps drops. Today i tried DM Infiltrator with Spirits. Spirits always cause slight drops for me, but in this particular build it seems like the spam of ice pools from Alkamos rings set together with Deathmarked granted skill have made fps go way down during the crowded Crucible waves, to the level of fps i usually had when i played on the old laptop with GPU turned off, like 20 fps and below.