Low FPS with GTX1080.

YES! I have a miracle cure - you need to actually downgrade your computer. It runs very smooth on i386 or Pentium 4, the game is optimized the best to run on those. Sorry, I can't help myself...

 

There are a couple more questions I would like to know about your system and how you play the game. Are you playing in windowed mode or in full screen mode? What are your virtual memory settings set to?

 

@Andartianna - I assume your question is for the OP?

 

Yeah that's what I would have expected.

 

Things will look prettier here and there and you might be able to jump up to a higher resolution, like 1440p, but really that's about it. You don't NEED to upgrade if you are experiencing comfortable performance today.

 

You dont mention hard drive. you should in the least be running an SSD and significantly better if you can run a m.2 PCIX drive (like the Samsung Pro 850/950 m.2).

Your video card is also significantly aged. I believe we'll see the 2070/2080's from Nvidia by summer. Pick up a 2070 if you can. They may be extremely expensive though due to crypto mining.

I had to buy my son a Alienware laptop instead of a new PC (with a GTX1070 with 8 gigs of DDR5 ram) because PC GPU's are practically half the cost of the laptop I bought now. But the thing also has a new gen 8 Intel i7 with 6 core proc at 4.4 ghz too. I think this may be the first time ever that I have seen performance laptops with more power then my usual build my own box's at a cheaper price.

 

OK very exhausting nights, since I make 3d videos and can play around with unity/cryengine/unreal editors @ around 25 stable FPS on very high polygon/light count and transparency, the problem is turning into a kind of obsession because I literally am at the lowest possible settings in SOTA and I was getting stereoscopic lag when turning the camera which gives me motion sickness. Since I really want to play, I got used to it but its straining my eyes and it gives me urticaria.

But I stumbled upon something massive last night, so I will freeze right here and now and will walk the steps backwards and see what makes the most difference in FPS, in adventure scene with lots of vegetation and movement, because thats pretty baseline and where I mostly want good performance for *sigh* longer grinding sessions without side-effects.

System specs :

Windows 7 pro 64bit, DELL XPS 8300, Intel Core I7 sandy bridge @3.4GHz Bus@99.9 MHz
16 GB DDR3 RAM checked with Memory Test.
Brand new Kingston SSD drive for OS/SOTA, running perfectly.
AMD Radeon HD 6450 1GB with most recent crimson driverset (I know it sucks, lol)

So my major find yesterday was a little program called RadeonPro, which seems pretty legit and kind of old school way to access my graphic card preferences. I can set it a custom profile for different games like many similar card software.

Yesterday I probably tried a hundred different combinations, must have restarted my computer a 100 times... so please bear with me here :

I just restarted the computer, start SOTA on overland map, right now I get dips @5 fps and highs of 15 fps tops, the game seems very heavy and sluggish @ screen resolutions of 1900.

Right off the bat I can set the game graphic quality to good, with not much difference : dips @ 4.5 highs of 17 fps. Strange, it should be significantly lower. Somehow activating depth of field gives me back the FPS I got on fastest. Strange.

I now have shadows, cloth simulation and depth of field on good quality, for the same FPS I had with settings on fastest.

Lets now play with resolution :

At absolute lowest resolution of 1024x768.

I now get dips @ 10 FPS and highs of 25 FPS. The game FPS still fluctuate like crazy, which makes movement unnatural.

Back to fastest settings :

I try a slightly better resolutions in the 1300x1200.

No more dips, stable over 12 FPS, highs in the 20.

Makes more sense now, somehow everything is smoother. I can use anti-aliasing, depth of field, cloth simulation now without any hit on performance.

Still not where it should be...

My main issue is that whatever I check on in game or on the card software except for resolution, it makes no difference at all.

I can overclock my GPU where its supposed to overheat and go mad, even boost the voltage... and it stays perfectly calm around 65 celcius... that is not normal, so I guessed the bottleneck must be somewhere else.

Then it dawned on me, that stupid :

WINDOWS.

I found out that windows automatic timeout settings for an app was set at 1 millisecond (WTF).

So each time the client was waiting for an answer from the server, the game went unresponsive and the computer reactivated desktop in case I wanted to tab out (pretty useful when working many business apps, but when gaming?)

Then I found out that the people making those GPUs, had no clue... I look at the new cards functions like limiting FPS, it should have been there 20 years ago with the first GPUs... its useless to push your GPU out of its own cache by overloading its processes... Personally I think 15 year old me with basics in C and Java understood this already.

So why not Nvidia and AMD ?!

So you're telling me that after all those years, noone in those huge corporations making billions have thought that maybe if the card is being outbuffered and causes queues, then windows would so something nasty, as usual ?!

I was red mad... this is simply another facet of the programmed obsolescence fiasco.

So I went in REGEDIT, started to scour the options for timeout delays.

Had to change 3 of those values in local machine and desktop settings.

I put the value at 15000 milliseconds, to hell with multi-tasking.

The game now runs a comfortable 15 FPS baseline and peaks in the 30 FPS, and I can double click anywhere, I never click through the game activating the desktop anymore causing stutters and flickering.

All of this with 3 values in REGEDIT.

I think we should TEAM UP, and find more tricks like this.

Now I am pretty sure from playing around, that there is also a timeout problem with the audio drivers, everytime I play music in game, my FPS drops, everytime I hear alot of sound effects in a town, my FPS drops.

This isn't normal and well...

PLEASE HELP ME FIND THE PROBLEMS