Still bad performance???

[Boeroer]

Unity3D games seem to be heavy on the CPU in any case (I mean if you look at the visial quality you get for that). NWN2 wasn't made with Unity of course, but POE and Deadfire were.

[Guest Ontarah]

21 minutes ago, Gel214th said:

So I’m not saying that there may not be optimizations issues because there certainly are, but this is the fault of your machine not any one game. Your computer is supposed to be able to run flat out for extended periods of time without overheating. If your computer is overheating it indicates that there is a problem that you should fix, because sooner or later it will lead to a failure. For example your machine should be able to run a prime95 test for some time without overheating, or a Furmark test without overheating. 

It's not just me:  https://www.google.com/search?q=Deadfire+overheating&rlz=1C1CHBF_enUS692US692&oq=Deadfire+overheating&aqs=chrome..69i57.3495j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

And again.  It's *only* Obsidian games that do it.  Including NWN2 which is over ten years old.  I've spent a lot of time monitoring my core heat with stuff like Core Temp and experimenting with manual control of fan speeds with stuff like Argus Monitor.  I've manually changed affinity of which cores it uses around with this and other games just to see what it does.  And the result has been the same so far.  Obsidian cooks my CPU.  Other games do not.   

Edited May 7, 2020 by Ontarah

[Gel214th]

2 hours ago, Ontarah said:

It's not just me:  https://www.google.com/search?q=Deadfire+overheating&rlz=1C1CHBF_enUS692US692&oq=Deadfire+overheating&aqs=chrome..69i57.3495j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

And again.  It's *only* Obsidian games that do it.  Including NWN2 which is over ten years old.  I've spent a lot of time monitoring my core heat with stuff like Core Temp and experimenting with manual control of fan speeds with stuff like Argus Monitor.  I've manually changed affinity of which cores it uses around with this and other games just to see what it does.  And the result has been the same so far.  Obsidian cooks my CPU.  Other games do not.   

Yeah, ok. So if you do a Prime95 or a Furmark Stress Test your computer is fine? 

My point is your machine's cooling is borked if any game or program can cause it to "overheat". Think about if you had a car, and you complain that on very hot days when you drive through the countryside the car overheats, but when you drive in the city it's fine. In this case, you are blaming the countryside and the sun for your car overheating. 

I bet if you played Ashes of the Singularity your PC would overheat as well, because that game is CPU intensive. 
If you were to actually follow those links you would see several people suggest the same thing to the people complaining. 

 

 

 

But hey, you do you  

  

[Guest Ontarah]

I've taken my machine apart and cleaned out the heatsink and reapplied thermal compound.  The point is that the game should not be applying that level of stress in the first place.  To go to your car analogy, it's more like my car is overheating because I'm using it for dirt track racing.  Deadfire should not run with the equivalent stress of a dirt track race on a car.  

If your machine meats the recommended specs and you are maintaining it and it does not have crappy case design that doesn't vent heat right, it should not be overheating. 

Edited May 7, 2020 by Ontarah

[Gel214th]

1 minute ago, Ontarah said:

I've taken my machine apart and cleaned out the heatsink and reapplied thermal compound.  The point is that the game should not be applying that level of stress in the first place.  To go to your car analogy, it's more like my car is overheating because I'm using it for drag racing.  Deadfire should not run with the equivalent stress of a drag race on a car.  

Yeah, that's not a good analogy. The game is running on my machine, under the same load as yours, and my machine is just perfect. No overheating issues whatsoever. You skipped the point I made that if you were to run Ashes of the Singularity or any other game that stressed the CPU you would face the same problem. It isn't the game, your PC should simply not be overheating. 

[Guest Ontarah]

This is a roundabout way of saying that it's not the devs job to optimize better because the player should just be able to handle whatever load on whatever component the dev wants to throw at them and that the player should just be able to adjust accordingly.

When the solution is basically "buy a different CPU" when my CPU is within the recommended specs, no, it is not unreasonable to consider it a fault in the game.

Given we seem to have a fundamental difference in understanding in what it's reasonable for devs to expect of players to make the game run on their system, I see no particular reason to keep going in circles on this.   

[Boeroer]

My CPU is about the same as yours iirc - I have no such problems.

[Guest Ontarah]

Just out of a sense of anal obstinacy I'm running Prime95 right now.  All 8 cores holding steady at 100% load according to core temp.  Average core temp holding in the 70-75 degree range.  Gonna let that run for about 30 minutes and then do the same with Deadfire under the same conditions.  There's almost no point other than my obdurate pride because I know Deadfire routinely gets to 85+ within about ten minutes, but I'll just appease myself if nothing else.   

[Boeroer]

I don't doubt that you have those problems. Deadfire IS heavy on the CPU - I just don't experience that magnitude of heating-up (and the game runs pretty nicely for me, too). 

[Rimiu]

Game has definitely stutter issues.

First game had it as well. As well as memory leaks.

Same thing for Pathfinder Kingmaker which has savegame bloat on top. 15 seconds "quick"save in the endgame with an nvme ssd anyone?

 

Neketaka has a huge fps drop for me as well.

 

I'm running a 2700x 32gb Ram and a 2080. This shouldn't run this bad.

 

 

I honestly blame the unity engine here.

[Gel214th]

1 hour ago, Ontarah said:

Just out of a sense of anal obstinacy I'm running Prime95 right now.  All 8 cores holding steady at 100% load according to core temp.  Average core temp holding in the 70-75 degree range.  Gonna let that run for about 30 minutes and then do the same with Deadfire under the same conditions.  There's almost no point other than my obdurate pride because I know Deadfire routinely gets to 85+ within about ten minutes, but I'll just appease myself if nothing else.   

Well.... what happened? 

[AeonsLegend]

The NVidia GTX 2000 series have known performance issues with older games or certain types of game engines. I've seen many complaints about the 2000 series with this game. I play with a GTX 980 and I have like 10 second loading times. I do have an M2 SSD with over 500K IOPS so that's good. PC is from 2015.

[Guest Ontarah]

On 5/7/2020 at 4:12 PM, Gel214th said:

Well.... what happened? 

Deadfire overheated my computer after about 15 minutes.  It got to 80 degrees and I shut it down before it got hotter.  It doesn't always take it up to the threshold where it crashes, but in say a 3 hour gaming session, it usually overheats and crashes my system at least once if I don't monitor temp incessantly. 

The stress test did not.  The hottest it got was 75.

Also, noteworthy that the stress test ran all the cores at 100% while Deadfire did not.  It would hit like 70% on some cores but most stayed at 50 or lower. 

But really, dude, I'm done with this.

People who have a rig within specifications that is maintained should not *need* to stress test and jump through 70 PC gaming master race hoops to keep the game from overheating.  If they do, the game is not optimized well.  

Edited May 9, 2020 by Ontarah

[Boeroer]

Well - as several of us now have said: we don't have those problems.

[Gel214th]

2 hours ago, Ontarah said:

Deadfire overheated my computer after about 15 minutes.  It got to 80 degrees and I shut it down before it got hotter.  It doesn't always take it up to the threshold where it crashes, but in say a 3 hour gaming session, it usually overheats and crashes my system at least once if I don't monitor temp incessantly. 

The stress test did not.  The hottest it got was 75.

Also, noteworthy that the stress test ran all the cores at 100% while Deadfire did not.  It would hit like 70% on some cores but most stayed at 50 or lower. 

 

That is absolutely incredible. I feel like you should make a youtube video showing those results since I'm certain many PC builders will want  to know how a game that doesn't peg your CPU to 100% could cause your machine to overheat, when a Prime95 test that DOES peg your CPU to 100% would not. Sucks that your machine can't play it. 

[Guest Ontarah]

2 hours ago, Boeroer said:

Well - as several of us now have said: we don't have those problems.

I don't have issues with long load times.  Anybody who does clearly just hasn't bought an SSD and has no reason to complain. 

I also have no stutter.  Anybody who has stutter clearly just has too many windows open in Chrome in the background and has no reason to complain.

(And yes this is sarcasm if that isn't clear).

A source of disagreement seems to be whether it's reasonable for a given game to run your CPU/GPU/whatever at extremely high load rates for extended periods of time or not.  I don't think it is.    

As for the weird core thing, there were always one or two cores that were running at about 20-30% higher than the others.  My guess is that those do occasionally get slammed at 100% intermittently and that that's what is causing the overheating.  I was not literally watching core loads for 15 straight minutes.  I was checking it maybe every minute or so. 

I loaded it up again and I'm doing nothing but standing in a not especially taxing indoor area with no ocean, weather effects or lots of of NPCs walking around, and the cores are all fluctuating over about a 30% range just from this topping out in the 60 percentile and at about 25 at the low end.  I'd expect from that that spikes in more intense areas would go way, way higher.  

Just from standing around in the room though, I've hit 78 average as a max and I have no yet noticed a particular core hit 100% load.

I'm standing on the docs at Neketaka now and it's hit 82 as the max but there's not a noticeable spike in load. 

Maybe it's also partially the additional heat generated by the GPU which is not even doing anything during the CPU stress test?  I don't know.

It's weird enough that I'm gonna try to do some research on it. 

[Boeroer]

It is not reasonable. Of course it's bad that your CPU heats up that dramatically.

But you can't blame it on Deadfire alone because as I said: we don't have that. So some special "negative synergy" of your system, maybe your installed software and Deadfire has to happen there. 

Maybe you could check if it's the case with all Unity games (if you are willing to install another one) or if it's Deadfire alone.

Deadfire is a bit heavy on my CPU as well, but it's not getting significantly hotter than with other stuff.

[AeonsLegend]

Just because your CPU is running at 100% doesn't mean your system should overheat. Even at longer periods of time. There's no direct correlation between CPU utilization and overheating. There is however a direct correlation between how your system cooling is setup and overheating. This means that it can only handle a certain amount of heat that it can disperse. Anything over that will cause heat to increase, perhaps to dangerous levels. If your computer overheats, it's a good idea to look at your cooling systems. I bought my system specifically for optimal cooling (air flow, fans, etc.) There's no game on the planet that can overheat my computer.

[Zelse]

The game doesnt run acceptable on (high) multicore CPUs because it doesnt know how to properly utilize multiple cores. There was a mod by Kaladein that fixed the issue - steam forum thread is still there. The mod isnt being updated and when asked Kaladein responded that the mod was intended to point out the issue to the devs but they never ended up fixing the issue.

^this is also the reason your CPU overheats that much

 

So basically the game will run like ass on systems with "high end" (not sure if we call every 6+core high end these days lmao) CPUs because spaghetti code.

 

Source and reference: have an 8core i7 myself - know how ****ty the game runs on it. Steam forums - look for Kaladeins CPU fix or something.

 

Edit: Its also sad to see the same old faces defend the same crap that has been known for a very solid amount of time (even if you dont know this specifically - the massive performance issues have been brought up by so many people. Denying them is just insane - like - definition of insanity - insane). People repeating the same old "runs perfectly fine for me" "your fault it doesnt run on your high end system" garbage are just absolutely disgusting filth.

And the same garbage people lying out of their buttcheeks and making stuff up farm upvotes on this gross circlejerk forum. So sad.

Edited June 13, 2020 by Zelse

[Boeroer]

Quite a good alpha strike - but then a fatal Spiritshift into:

...which is the weakest form one could choose. Lol noobs... 

[thelee]

On 6/12/2020 at 9:49 PM, Zelse said:

The game doesnt run acceptable on (high) multicore CPUs because it doesnt know how to properly utilize multiple cores. There was a mod by Kaladein that fixed the issue - steam forum thread is still there. The mod isnt being updated and when asked Kaladein responded that the mod was intended to point out the issue to the devs but they never ended up fixing the issue.

^this is also the reason your CPU overheats that much

 

So basically the game will run like ass on systems with "high end" (not sure if we call every 6+core high end these days lmao) CPUs because spaghetti code.

 

B doesn't follow from A.

Unity probably handles worker threads very badly, this is probably the most certain statement one could make. YMMV though. I tried special K/whatever on my AMD 2700x and didn't get much of an improvement back in the day. Most people are very very bad at properly measuring performance ("most people" also includes some hardware review outfits), so anecdotal stories of getting +10-15 fps are overblown to me since a bunch of other things might be different with your tests. I had gotten some initial gains, but with repeated testing it mostly seemed to be an artifact of having improperly measure cold-start-deadfire performance to non-cold-start-deadfire performance (and also confounding factors of things happening randomly in Nekataka). The more I tested it, the less it seemed like I got any gain whatsoever. (Though now that this thread has been necro-ed, I will probably give it a shot on my newer 3700x build just to see if it helps.)

However, this has almost nothing to do with CPU overheating. Any competent PC build should be capable of dissipating the heat from 100% cpu usage, and the cpu should also be capable of thermal throttling (same goes for GPU). There's nothing special about Deadfire or Unity that would cause this. It's hardware problems, pure and simple. Saying that normal cpu usage causes cpu overheating is misinformation.

 

The game won't run like ass on all high end systems. It's more complicated than "higher core count = bad". In terms of bad performance, I've seen reports from people with virtually identical systems as something I use, and I don't have the same problems. Saying "it doesn't happen to me" is extremely relevant in such situations, because it rules out software, or at the very least points to an underlying issue that is nonobvious and more difficult than "use this mod and it fixes everything." I've had Deadfire running on a haswell + 1060 pc and had no stutter issues (aside from the ones that always happen when you cast mirror image), so if other people with similar or better setups (including one person who had an ostensibly identical setup) are having stutter issues it rules out (obvious) software issues because the software is literally the same within a platform (e.g. steam literally verifies with checksums).

 

That being said, this is not a defense of Deadfire or Unity - for one Deadfire has serious cpu+memory leak issues. I think the severity is actually a relatively newer issue than from release - I don't know when it got this bad. It was extremely noticeable to me during my Ultimate run - I had to explicitly save/quit before and after my Belranga attempt because the sheer amount of spider corpses in my fight would cripple my otherwise pretty beefy PC, and if I continued on without quitting the game after beating Belranga I'd be stuck with 10-15 fps in fights, even if I quit to menu and long after I had left the Belranga map. In addition, every time you do a save/load cycle, something isn't being cleared properly (this was extremely obvious back in the day when hsip to ship combat battles or audio effects would have weird post-load effects). On both my newer build (a watercooled setup from a month ago) and a slightly older build (2700x w/ vega 64), I get 100% gpu usage and >60 fps (hard to say by how much because my main display is an hdtv with a max of 60). However, the more I save/load, my gpu usage starts dropping and my fps also starts dropping - basically my performance is becoming increasingly CPU-bound and is throttling my PCs ability to display frames faster. It is definitely not temp throttling - especially in my watercooled setup, my CPU and GPU temps stay cool the entire time. All I have to do is exit the game and come back and everything is fine again. This doesn't happen in other Unity games I've played, there is definitely something spaggheti-code going on with Deadfire (as if patches 4.0-5.0 weren't clue enough about the spaggheti code).

 

edit: tl;dr - instead of doing full VO they should have hired more programmers and QA testers. OR cut some features and have their existing programmers and QA testers have better coverage on the remaining features.

Edited June 15, 2020 by thelee

[kthun]

I've never bothered to try turning off half of my cores (all logical) and it gave me a 10 fps increase so that's great.  It's incredibly disappointing how poorly this game is made.  I get the same framerate in Queen's Berth (about 45 with normal settings) as I do running Shadow of the Tomb Raider on ultra.  Changing my graphics options does NOT affect my fps - it's clearly not a limitation of my GTX 1070 Ti.  Obsidian should take a page out of Larian's book and use a custom engine that actually runs well and has minimal loading screens.  It's not the user's fault for having a perfectly fine computer that runs most modern games at 144 fps - it's the developers for choosing the platform they did and making a poorly optimized game.

Rant aside, I really like PoE 1 and 2 but at some point the games started running a lot worse and it wasn't good in the first place for PoE 1.  I managed to beat PoE 1 twice but couldn't finish the DLC because every quicksave took at least 20 seconds, and every zone loading the same amount of time.  The game just got progressively worse and worse.  I think people said it was related to the amount of containers you've opened in the game or something.

At least they have my money though right?

[bugarup]

17 hours ago, kthun said:

 because every quicksave took at least 20 seconds, and every zone loading the same amount of time.  The game just got progressively worse and worse.  I think people said it was related to the amount of containers you've opened in the game or something.

I've read this was related to number of savegame files, as in loading times increasing along with that number. It indeed got a little better for me when I wiped majority of saves.

Edited June 30, 2020 by bugarup
I writt gud

[thelee]

38 minutes ago, bugarup said:

I've read this was related to number of savegame files, as in loading times increasing along with that number. It indeed got a little better for me when I wiped majority of saves.

it definitely was related to containers and items. the same game i had would get progressively worse the further i got in poe1. act i - fast area loads and saves. by white march - ages to load and save.

you can even verify by looking at save game file sizes. for deadfire they are all relatively compact - in poe1 they would balloon (istr to hundreds of MBs). iirc it was because there was no culling of inventories anywhere, and they were stored really inefficiently, so the more you looted, your save file sizes and load times would grow basically without bound. deadfire apepars to handle this much better by a) having vendors reset their inventory and even ignoring that, with a gigantic stash deadfire still doesn't have the same problem.

Edited June 30, 2020 by thelee