Hello friends. Here’s the scene: Last year I bought a 4090 and upgraded my 3440x1440 screen to HDR with GSYNC. Since then I’ve been frustrated with a wildly varied framerate (capping around 70-80 FPS), visual stutters, and inexplicable screen tearing even with VSYNC on and or at multiples of the default refresh rate where tearing should not occur. This has existed through multiple driver updates including several ‘clean’ driver installs which seems to indicate the issue was with GD somehow.
Fast forward to post 1.2 and those issues are all completely gone. VSYNC is off and I get over 100 FPS pretty consistently. The framerate still varies wildly but doesn’t usually drop below 60-70 FPS while sometimes getting close to 150 FPS. Screen tearing is completely gone. And, the weirdest thing of all: when I start the game I get the HDR notification.
inb4 Nvida AI HDR because I am deliberately not upgrading to that as it causes a performance hit in Star Citizen. I did install it, but I removed all drivers manually as well as doing a clean install for the downgrade so I know that’s not the case here.
I’m not complaining at all, of course! I’m just curious that if Crate did make some significant changes that greatly increased performance in a patch, why was it not mentioned anywhere I can find? Also… how does the game support HDR while not having a toggle for it?
On my rig windows 11 just converting GD from SDR to HDR and notify that. I am also getting constant 100+fps now, but I don’t think there were any changes to game engine etc. There were no information about it in patch notes that I’ve noticed. Still for a quite old game the performance isn’t ideal IMHO as for rig power on my side. Maybe on NV things are better than on AMD? Idk really
Agreed; GD has never been IMO the most optimized game but in some of the recent changes have made a big improvement. Seems like it’s running pretty well for you, too!
I experienced some FPS stuttering on a decent laptop with RTX 3060. The problem is that GD uses a very old single-core renderer made for Titan Quest decades ago. Changing engine architecture to multi-core is not possible at this stage. Maybe they could rewrite the renderer to use Vulkan instead of DirectX. That could be doable. The advantage of Vulkan is that it has much lower driver Draw Call overheads, so in theory they could squeeze more performance from a single-core renderer. This could significantly reduce FPS stutter without the need to change the whole architecture.
I found a little trick which reduces this stutter problem: disable vsync completely. This will result in some light tearing, but the FPS stutter is greatly reduced, because frame delays can be spread more smoothly. The idea is that if a frame render time doesn’t fit in 16ms (60 FPS), then it might fit in 20ms. With vsync enabled, if a frame is late, then it will miss its vsync and you get 32ms or worse per frame which halves your FPS.
I’ve tested GD on vulkan, seen no changes in performance, so switched back to DX. I am also playing without in-game vsync and do not experience stuttering. GD was stuttering a lot on my old rig but after an upgrade that problem is gone forever (I hope, lol).
Yeah, the CPU core usage is still poorly optimized but the performance issues are gone.
I was getting noticeable tearing and stuttering with VSYNC off on the same rig just a month or so ago. The only thing that has changed on my end is the GD update.
