horrible frame rate on high end PC

[GAREWOLF]

Not sure if this issue has been addressed, (burn me if so) but I have built a brand new PC with high end specs and I cant seem to get this game running smooth. I have no idea why this could be unless it's some sort of compatibility issue. There's nothing I can think of preventing me from running this game fully maxed out. I've narrowed it down to the soft lighting, but I can't imagine my machine not being able to handle it. 

NVIDIA RTX 2070 Ultra

AMD Ryzen 5 3600X

64Gb Ram

Any idea why this game is chugging so hard? 

 

Thanks!

[STiFU]

Hi GAREWOLF, welcome to the dark side.

You are right, your PC should be able to run TDM with ease. How many fps do you currently get? If you don't know, you can enable fps display via the console. To open the console, press ctrl+alt+tilde (they key below escape), and then enter com_ShowFPS 1. Here are some questions for you that should help us narrow the problem down:

1. You said that soft lighting leads to the performance issues. I assume you mean soft shadows. Does it also happen on other soft shadow qualities or just on highest?
2. Does it also happen with the other shadows implementation
3. Do the performance issues happen on all maps or just a specific one?
4. Can you post your darkmod.cfg?
5. What version of TDM are you running? 

[stgatilov]

Any program or game can bring any PC to its knees by setting something higher than it makes sense. And wasting more power does not necessarily means the visual look becomes much better. Modern games tend to limit configurability to avoid this, e.g. providing "low/medium/high" presets (sometimes even without individual settings).

Here is one particular story. When TDM 2.06 came out, the soft shadows had "Extreme" setting. However, most players set this setting to max value, only to learn that their PC cannot handle it. So we decided to remove it from the menu But even "Very High" setting can be quite punishing for GPU depending on circumstances.

 

Aside from that, there are many different FMs in TDM created by many different people across 10+ years. Some of the FMs are very modest in performance requirements, while some of them have many lights and are quite slow even with medium settings and good PC. All of this is up to the author: they can also make their FM waste any PC if they are not careful.

There are even some famous places which are known to waste processing power. For instance: NHAT cave with its sick stalagmytes eating CPU; Right Properly which has a large street section with many lights and guards.

 

The bottom line: while your PC is definitely stronger than what most players have, you won't be able to play everything effortlessly if you set ALL to max.
I guess the most slowdown usually comes from soft shadows quality and antialiasing. Also check that Render Scale displays 1 and not higher. High resolution (aka 4K) also increases GPU load 4x times, in which case it probably makes sense to reduce Render Scale to something like 50%

Of course, this may be some sort of issue as well. But better report some specific case then.

[duzenko]

1 hour ago, GAREWOLF said:

I have built a brand new PC with high end specs and I cant seem to get this game running smooth

preventing me from running this game fully maxed out

NVIDIA RTX 2070 Ultra

AMD Ryzen 5 3600X

64Gb Ram

Any idea why this game is chugging so hard? 

You forgot to tell us your AA/SS/RS/resolution config, as well as what fps rate you consider 'smooth'

We can't have a meaningful conversation without that

But in general, I've heard people on this forum saying 40 fps is good enough and mappers tend to have systems like yours or better (not that I personally agree with the fps statement but the community consensus is this)

So the short and quick answer to your question is, TDM mappers don't care about `smoothness` like you do, and it's by design.

[GAREWOLF]

It's really odd, I'm getting around 10-15 FPS. I'd consider 40 to be more than sufficient. As far as I know I have the most recent version of the game. It's playable with the soft lighting feature turned off (around 40-60 fps) but if I turn it on and get near a torch it has dropped as low as 5 fps. I didn't really see much in the way of this problem searching through the forums so I thought I might have had something going on in my system. I'm okay with playing it without the soft lighting, but man it sure looked pretty. I've attached my darkmod.cfg file if that helps. Thank you guys! I can't wait to dig into this beautiful game!!

Darkmod.cfg

[duzenko]

Quote

seta r_customHeight "2160"
seta r_customWidth "3840"
seta r_multiSamples "16"

I suggest you change your AA to 2x

Multisampling does not make sense on hi-dpi screens, especially as high as 16x

You think if the setting is available and you run what you think a 'high end' PC then it must be maxed out but it's there for low-res screens like 27` 1080p or 720p 19`.

Even so, 16x is your hardware cap, but it still does not mean it is supposed to be playable in ALL resolutions.

Just out of curiosity - what fps in what games you have with 16x MSAA in 4K?

[HMart]

No wonder he is having that huge drop in fps! With that amount of AA samples especially at that resolution! IMO at that resolution you don't even need anti aliasing.

Duzenko, perhaps I'm mistaken but I seem to remember a old discussion in the defunct Doom3World forums that multi-sample AA makes idtech 4 lights much heavier, because when the surface is rendered per light, it is essentially rendered again and again for the amount of the AA samples you set, is this right?    

[cabalistic]

Sort of. What you describe more closely describes super-sampling, i.e. where you render everything at a 16x increased resolution and then scale down the final result. MSAA is a bit smarter and only uses the 16 samples along edges. But still, high resolution and high AA is a deadly combination for even the most powerful of GPUs (not to mention it uses insane levels of GPU memory)

So yeah, the immediate issue here is that the settings are way too high and need to be lowered. That being said, I do feel I should warn that the TDM engine is not the most efficient engine out there, at least not for modern-day hardware. The underlying Doom3 engine was written years ago with very different requirements in mind, and the consequence is that TDM does not efficiently make use of modern multi-core CPUs and GPUs. So if you feel that the quality-per-performance ratio you get from TDM on your hardware is not quite up to par with modern AAA games, you are not wrong. We do try to improve things with time, but it'll never quite reach top-tier performance

[duzenko]

1 hour ago, HMart said:

No wonder he is having that huge drop in fps! With that amount of AA samples especially at that resolution! IMO at that resolution you don't even need anti aliasing.

Duzenko, perhaps I'm mistaken but I seem to remember a old discussion in the defunct Doom3World forums that multi-sample AA makes idtech 4 lights much heavier, because when the surface is rendered per light, it is essentially rendered again and again for the amount of the AA samples you set, is this right?    

Draw call count is the same but the pixels (or samples) are 16x to draw.

But talking about idtech4, it does draw each light (on top of the entire scene during the depth pass) separately, and if the fillrate is the bottleneck, then AA makes it yet 16x times worse.

[HMart]

2 hours ago, duzenko said:

Draw call count is the same but the pixels (or samples) are 16x to draw.

Thanks for the clarification guys,  at 4k or high that is a considerable increase in shader work per light pass, I bet even a RTX 2080 super would slow down a fair bit, depending on the complexity of the lighting.   

Edited April 12, 2020 by HMart