Video card upgrade: GD under Linux/Proton, Necro crawls in certain spots

Grim Dawn General Discussion
1

I’ve been playing Grim Dawn for a short time now and am now just getting to certain areas of the game and finding GD crawls, almost to a halt. This is mostly neat the top of Korvin Basin, particularly in the area where the chaos portals open and hell hounds stream forth.

I’m currently running a Radeon R9 380 4GB video card on a system with a Xeon E5-2960v2 (10 core, 20 thread) at stock 3GHz, with 64GB of RAM. The OS and Steam both live on an NVMe drive. I’m running GD using Proton and Steam under Xubuntu 22.04.

Having seen others comments about the game crawling in places, I suspect the issue could be some of my in-game settings.

Would something like an 8GB RX580 improve performance much compared to the R9 380? Is GD optimized to use more VRAM? What matters the most on a video card for GD?

2

I’ve seen GD use up to 2.5GB’s of VRAM but that’s only when playing at 4K…

If anything, due to GD being heavily single-thread dependent, I’m guessing your 3Ghz Xeon is the primary bottleneck.

  • Try turning off Ambient Occlusion. For me that provided the biggest fps boost.

EDIT: If you’re playing GD at 1080P using the 64-bit renderer, the R9 380 4GB should MORE than adequate for max settings etc… Meaning, your video card isn’t the issue

3

Unlikely, I’m running the game fine on a dual Xeon E5-2650 (v1) which is 2GHz (IIRC). Drive is an mSATA SSD, videocard is R7 250X 1GB, so all of them weaker than chaslinux’s. Temporarily playing on Windows, will switch to Linux when I’ll have the time.

So I’m guessing either the settings or Linux/Proton setup or some daemon/service running in the background might be the problem.

Edit: Forgot to mention, I’m playing on 1080p, so resolution could also be the problem, just as you said.

4

not gonna pretend i’m tech savvy enough to contribute much real stuff here, but did you have a glance at this?

“deferred render”, “cpu trick” etc etc,
also someone just posted this on steam earlier, which kinda sounded similar to the Nahimic issue yet a bit different, but curiously still sound related (others have similarly expressed their own issues, non nahimic related, to custom sound cards etc/background sound programs)