[7.0b5] getting some frame drops, seems audio related

[Daemonjax]

Generally the game runs fine (still have to force it to use vulkan over the dxgi swapchain for best performance, but whatever).

However, I noticed I sometimes get some framedrops (also measurable by enabling nvidia's debug frametime graphs using nv profile inspector -- the umd graph shows the framedrops, while the flip graph stays stable), and it seems to be the first time an audio clip is played the first time since starting up the game -- like explosions, voice communications, weapon imapact fx. And then after that, that particular audio clip plays fine (like as if it's now cached).



Now, I haven't played this game in a quite a while (since 6.2 was public beta), and so in the meantime I upgraded my gpu to a 4070ti super (mainly for cyberpunk 2077). My previous gpu was a 1070ti (which I managed to get to run this game buttery smooth @60 fps native res). I'm using the same exact graphics settings (mostly high, but some things that don't really matter are on medium or low), except now using TAA instead of FXAA. But anyways, it's possible it's driver related... I'm not about to throw in my 1070ti and check, but MAYBE I'll get bored enough to do that. I also switched from using my onboard realtek sound to an old soundblaster z I had laying around... maybe sb drivers suck that hard?

I'll figure it out eventually.

Side note: Some graphics settings actually look better (or maybe less bad is a better way to put it) to me on Low, particular SS reflections (no oily faces in stations).

[Alan Phipps]

DxDiag link?

Any mods?

[Daemonjax]

DxDiag link?

Any mods?

No mods. I'm at work, I'll throw up a link to my dxdiag later. My gpu driver version is 551.76 -- that's from march. It's fine. But yea, it's one of the things I would update if I can't figure this out... But I'm delaying the decision because nvidia is bundling their newer crap beta control panel app and I don't want to even think about it right now. The game is smooth 99.99% of the time -- certainly smooth enough for me to enjoy... but, it does annoy me a bit that it was actually slightly smoother (like 100% smooth) on my 1070ti with basically the same settings back when I last played.

My system is tuned right now for playing cyberpunk 2077 buttery smooth at max settings, so I suspect I may have to re-tune it completely for this game. One thing I already did was drop my lcd's response time boost to the lowest setting (off) to get something like motion blur in this game. That helped a bit with perceived smoothness. Cyberpunk has plenty of ingame motion blur, so for that game I have it set to the 2nd fastest response time (the fastest creates noticeable visual artifacts in basically every game).


Does the game engine's main/rendering thread just stop while loading an audio clip, or is the audio loading done async in another thread, and the audio clip just gets delayed if it can't load it that same frame? I'd expect the latter, but it's behaving like the former. Hmm... I'll try decreasing the windows audio process priority when I get home (edit: nope, not it).

Ya know... I had a similar problems with No Man's Sky (although, different enough)... It would have some stutters when loading textures, because it was behaving too aggressive instead of more slowly streaming them. I had to reduce that game's process priority to low, and also change my system's process scheduler to use a fixed time instead of giving the foreground app more slices to slow it down enough. 100% buttery smooth after that (well, I had to do other things too). But I had that problem with that game even with the 1070ti iirc. Probably nothing to do with anything, because that game's engine is pretty janky. But both use vulkan, and it's something I can quickly test/revert (edit: nope, that's not it).


Update:
dxdiag: https://pastebin.com/KqBFgwxP
vulkinfo: https://pastebin.com/mZcz2xVC

Been a couple days... Tried everything. I even updated my GPU drivers -- the new drivers have broken nvidia frame graphs, which sucks. And no performance differences (but that's to be expected). I'm stumped. I'm never stumped. Also not happy with the frame pacing in general (with vsync) -- something doesn't seem quite right... like something is competing with the rendering thread. I'm actually having great difficulty identifying which cores the rendering thread(s) are running on... as if it moves around. One weird thing I noticed was that I could completely flatten the graphline for fps (as measured when the user mode driver starts processing present) by setting my vertical refresh rate to 59.900. Not 59.95. Not 59.00. Not 60.00. But 59.900 (or 59.901 actual as reported by both cru and windows). While seeing a flat line is nice and all, I don't think it really matters since it's probably just a measuring problem. Sidenote: Verified for like the millionth time I still need to use dxgi swap chain in this game, otherwise I get that weird frame skipping issue reminiscent of dx9+vsync without using a framecap.

Anyways... maybe I'm just mis-remembering how smooth I got 6.2. Maybe other games have me spoiled. Maybe there's a performance regression in 7.0