User Interface Lag / FPS Drops with Radeon GPU and 2.0.8

wftoEric

3 years ago
Views 5,110
updated 3 years ago
Accepted

Hello,

I have returned to the game after a very long time away. Really enjoying it. However, I have noticed some heavy FPS drops when there are a large number of menu items / user interface items on display. The main menu is especially bad. Also, the post-level completion summary is bad too. I have a new desktop computer that plays other modern games at 60+ FPS without issue. WFTO is chugging below 30 FPS at the main menu. Main Menu > Single Player menu is possibly the worst. It drops to 16 FPS when mousing over the menu items.

AMD Ryzen 5 5600X 6-Core CPU

32 GB RAM

AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT GPU

Windows 10

Game is installed to an NVMe m.2 SSD. Western Digital Black SN750.

Game version: latest steam release, 2.0.8.

Radeon driver version 21.3.1.

I don't have anything overclocked.

I have my monitor refresh set to 60 Hz. The Radeon software reports my average FPS for my other games at 55-56 FPS. War for the Overworld averages 20.4 FPS.

Additionally, I see a huge FPS drop when activating the Prospector ritual on the Goldrust My Pet Dungeon level. The FPS drop remains until the Prospector map reveal ends. Then the game goes back to 60 FPS.

DxDiag.txt

output_log.txt

Game Version:

Steam Public

Platform:

Windows

AMD UI Framerate Issue

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Lee "Noontide" Moon Designer & Community Manager

3 years ago
Accepted

Thanks a lot for all of this data. I apologise that I have yet to have time to review everything you've provided as I've been getting ready to wrap up for the holidays.

I will be on leave until the new year from tomorrow but I will be pushing for us to plan for another WFTO maintenance patch in 2022 if we can afford the resources to do so. As part of that I'd like to get us a chance to look into this if we can.

I'll be in touch if there's anything more we can pull here. Cheers,

Lee

Reply Link

3 years ago

Here is a screenshot of the AMD driver options in their default state:

WFTO-Driver.PNG

I tried toggling various settings. By the end of my testing, I had set everything to "disabled" or "use application settings" and it still didn't fix the FPS issue.

Some context on the MS Flight Simulator 2020 FPS being limited by CoherentGT.

https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/cpu-bug-limited-by-main-thread-is-causing-the-bad-fps/190971

https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/limited-by-coherentgtdraw/158416/10

However, in their case I'm not seeing talk that it's AMD specific. Nvidia owners are affected as well. So this may not be relevant.

Hello Lee,

Thanks for the extensive info! I did play around with game settings and AMD driver settings for about 30 minutes last night. I did not find anything useful. I did find that Anti Aliasing blurred the model details too much when zoomed out, but that's not a performance issue. I did not find a silver bullet setting that fixed the Controls Menu FPS lag. What I did notice, though, is the Main Menu runs at 60 FPS immediately after launch until a menu option is clicked on. Once a menu option is chosen, the FPS drop remains until a game session is started. The biggest positive impact to FPS was setting the resolution to 1080p instead of 1440p, but that was previously stated.

Windows Task Manager shows my GPU utilization to be >92% when running at 1440p. However, I don't hear the cooling fans I would expect for that level of effort. In fact, the GPU temp is near idle. Let me test that.

2 minutes of FurMark: 90 degree GPU

10 minutes of 1440p Controls menu: 56 degree GPU

Idle at Windows desktop: 46 degree GPU

That does feel like the bottleneck is software or driver related.

The Prospector lag I think has to do with large updates to Line of Sight / Fog of War. I also get similar lag on the first cast of Revelation. Claiming a Perception Shrine causes a momentary FPS stutter. And casting Prophecy sometimes causes a small FPS stutter.

As an aside, I did see that Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 struggled with FPS lag due to CoherentGT latency last year or so. It seems the cockpit dash was rendered with CoherentGT HTML and sometimes had process latency > 100ms.

I'm happy to run some debug commands or do a quick screen share on Discord if that would help out.

Thank you,

Eric

3 years ago
Pending Customer

Hi wftoEric,

Thanks for all these details and including your logs and DXDiag as well as taking the time to test out various settings in the AMD Control Panel. This is a lingering issue that I think is rapidly moving up our triage list to investigate due to the number of AMD users seemingly affected across all PC Platforms.

It is certainly very peculiar and not what one would expect as the game runs generally very well on Nvidia, which I regret to say is what our work PCs have exclusively used since 2017. I'd really like to get this in front of a developer's eyes when we're next doing a pass on WFTO.

My suspicion is that for some reason something in AMD's software isn't playing nicely with WFTO's UI Middleware CoherentGT, which is third-party. The issue seems to get worse when playing at larger resolutions which could potentially make sense if we consider that the UICanvas grows dynamically with the resolution. I would suspect that if there was no UI at all the game's FPS would be pretty stable for you.

I think the prospector FPS drop may be unrelated but I will investigate to see if I can replicate that particular issue on Nvidia hardware or not.

I'd like to ask if you can fiddle with some more options on the AMD side until we can rebuild a testbed for AMD (we dropped our AMD QA Machine in 2020 when we moved out of the office in response to Covid)

I've not seen an AMD configuration in quite some time however so the very best I can request is to disable all features where possible or select performance option where required specifically for WFTO. If the problem persists we can reasonably assume that adjusting the options available to the end-user are unlikely to yield results. It might be helpful for me to see a screenshot of your configuration for WFTO in their software.

Thanks,

If I change the resolution to 1920 x 1080, the Controls menu produces only a very small amount of FPS lag. Running at about 56 FPS instead of 60. However, the Prospector cast lag is still there and very noticeable. It drops to about 30 FPS for 2 seconds, but it recovers before the end of the Prospector cast. This is different then when cast at 1440p resolution. At 1440p, the FPS lag remains until Prospector ends.

Disabling Freesync both in the Radeon drivers and in my monitor settings seems like it maybe changing the FPS lag, but I wouldn't call it better. It still lags badly in the Single Player menu and even worse on the Controls menu. It still lags when casting Prospector.

I found that if I open the Controls screen mid-mission and close it with ESC, the FPS lag remains at 10 FPS (!) until I open the Main Menu again with ESC and go into Options.

I re-enabled Freesync and I can reproduce this exact behavior with the Controls menu FPS drop sticking around after closing the menu until the Options menu is opened again. And actually, the FPS sticks at 20 instead of the 10 with Freesync disabled. I'm not sure Freesync is relevant here. The FPS returns to 60 once Display Options is opened again.