CPU or GPU, that is the question?

I think that your biggest boost will be to max out your RAM. It made a lot of difference for me.

 

8700k cpu

 

Penguin,

Have you confirmed in your NVIDIA settings that SOTA is using your discrete graphics rather than the integrated?

The reason I ask is because your performance is similar to my mid-range laptop (i7-6700hq, 16GB ram, gtx 965m ti). I play on the highest graphics settings except for reflections, I believe. Your system should run circles around this game.

DDR4 won't improve your performance assuming that your DDR3 isn't total rubbish. SSD/NVMe might improve loading times, but won't do much once you're inside the instance. Your graphics card is already monstrous, and four cores at 4.2 GHz is pretty outstanding. I can't say whether SOTA is optimized for more than 4 core performance. Lacking more than 4 threads should not bottleneck you except for extremely computational titles. Updating your already high level components is going to cost a mountain of money (have you seen GPU and ram prices lately) without much in the way of benefit.

Checking your NVIDIA settings is the only solution I can think of.

P.S. My computer ran like complete and total rubbish in the beginning during R55. It was a slideshow. It was so slow that I couldn't double click most of the time. I've recently returned to the starter locations and they run buttery smooth.

Good luck solving your problem.

 

Same

 

Make sure you don't have the reflections setting set to "high" that will kill fps. The "medium" or "low" settings should run much better. SotA does seem to rely much more on CPU vs GPU, but your graphics card is fine it is better than the one I am using (GTX970). However, upgrading the CPU may require a new motherboard, I would try adding more ram first.

 

At least on my system, it consumes GPU much more than it consumes CPU. Just idle, GPU usage will be "steady" at around 46-50% while CPU is more around 20%. It's useful to use the task manager in windows to see where the system spends its time. And I use the "fastest" setting under graphics and disable most effects. Non-idle, the GPU is often 70-80%.

I covered this a bit in the R57 QA, like https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/f...sota-consumes-a-massive-amount-of-gpu.138788/

May be worth reading through that thread

 

Don't know how much Unity is the problem, but fact is: i got a second GTX 1080 on SLI and it didn't improve my framerate by one single frame. Then i guess the bottleneck is the engine itself.

 

GTX 1070ti is bad azz, upgrade the CPU to the newest i7 that will fit in your motherboard.

 

You won't see a huge performance increace with a new CPU, espechally with AMD Ryzen or Threadripper. (all the cores are useless to SotA).
SotA (Unity3d) has a very poor multithread utilisation.

 

Is this a unity specific issue?

 

Yes, mostly.
There is always to much main thread utilisation and the other cores are waiting.

 

Yes.

Although unity have introduced ecs and jobs which would make use of them but you have to do plenty to convert over.

 

Wierd - not really what I see when monitoring my CPU per core usage whilst playing SOTA - shot below is running a single instance of the game in a very busy scene (At my house in Rift's End) and nothing else using significant CPU / GPU time. I know many games don't use more than 4 cores well but my cores are pretty consistently evenly loaded.