Garbage Performance and Broken AA (1660 Super)

[OnlyTaffingCowardsHide]

Recently upgraded from a Gtx 970 to a 1660 Super and got better framerates in pretty much every game, except this one.
Not only does it not really run any better, antialiasing appears to be completely broken.
Has anyone actually had any success maxing this game out at 1080 with anything short of a 4090?

Edited July 6 by OnlyTaffingCowardsHide

[I.C.H.I.]

Soft shadows and volumetric effects destroy performance the most and in general it's not worth using them even on a middle range hardware if you want solid 60 FPS experience on big levels. And from my experience soft shadows may look very ugly with severe banding artifacts in some places if you set them to maps instead of stencil.

Also, I wonder how much worse performance will get when people start using parallax mapping everywhere?

[nbohr1more]

What OS and driver versions?

Please post your Darkmod.cfg

[jaxa]

I ran the game at 1080p on a GTX 970 and had a good time, aside from some rare areas in some missions. Unless there's bugs involved, there must be some combination of settings that work well with a 1660 Super.

[OnlyTaffingCowardsHide]

I have heard mention it may run better under Linux, but I've never tried it, my Darkmod.cfg is standard, nothing tweaked except the ingame settings.

Soft shadows and volumetrics did indeed tank performance on my 970, and probably on the Rx 590 I was using before that. It does seem to run better on Nvidia cards.
Sounds like my expectations are just off the mark for the experimental effects, though stencil often barely runs better than maps, I suppose that could also be cpu bound (Ryzen 4500).
I would like to find a fix for the broken AA though, maybe the 1600 series just doesn't support it anymore but I'd heard there were 3rd party tools that could re-enable it?

Edited July 6 by OnlyTaffingCowardsHide

[datiswous]

Fyi if you want to set aa to FXAA, you have to set it in your driver settings (or in a profile) and disable aa in tdm. At least that's my experience I had on a 1050ti. performance is very good, but the type of aa is not the best quality wise.

Currently on a 3060 I decided to switch to ingame aa (setting 8 ) because I can with this gpu. 

Also, don't set aa setting higher than 8 (if you do use ingame aa). Difference between 8 and 16 in performance degration is huge. Not worth it.

 

When there's vl in a scene, shadows of vl are automatically set to shadow maps (because stencil shadows are incompattible with vl, so it's decided to force shadow maps so to not break the scene), even though you might have set stencil shadows in settings.

In my experience, the low setting for stencil is good enough. for shadow maps you need at least the medium setting, but the higher settings do make it better.

Edited July 7 by datiswous

[I.C.H.I.]

Inb4 it makes your eyes bleed. You can adjust the softness but it's like a whack-a-mole and in general shadow maps suck ass in TDM, so I'd rather turn this crap off.

Maps vs. Stencil on high softness:

[datiswous]

I think you have to put the slider all the way to the left for shadow maps?

[I.C.H.I.]

As I said, you can adjust it, but you will lose the softness while the banding doesn't disappear entirely. And then what is the point of having it? Also, sometimes peter-panning happens but that's a meta-flaw of shadow maps.

[chakkman]

21 hours ago, OnlyTaffingCowardsHide said:

I would like to find a fix for the broken AA though

What exactly do you mean when you say it is broken?

In my experience, AA is the biggest hog in the game. I'd recommend 8x AA as the highest, as 16x will slaughter your GPU. Any other settings have a rather low impact, as far as I could see. Not sure about soft shadows.

Edited July 7 by chakkman

[chakkman]

On 7/6/2025 at 2:05 AM, OnlyTaffingCowardsHide said:

Has anyone actually had any success maxing this game out at 1080 with anything short of a 4090?

I have most settings on max on a RTX 3060 Ti at 1080p. 100+ frames in most missions.

Mind that the RTX 3060 Ti is a lot faster than your GTX 1660S, of course, so, your card is rather sub mid range. Rather better entry level. Nonetheless, I'm, sure that you can set most settings to at least medium to high, and still get a good frame rate. If you avoid the hogs, like setting the AA too high. 4x will surely do as well.

Edited July 7 by chakkman

[OnlyTaffingCowardsHide]

On 7/7/2025 at 7:07 AM, chakkman said:

What exactly do you mean when you say it is broken?

In my experience, AA is the biggest hog in the game. I'd recommend 8x AA as the highest, as 16x will slaughter your GPU. Any other settings have a rather low impact, as far as I could see. Not sure about soft shadows.

Well, upon closer inspection, it appears that it isn't broken entirely.
AA works but doesn't seem to be as effective at any given setting.
Maybe it's just my imagination.

Assuming the in game AA is entirely built into the game and not just enabling driver level AA, 
I must have had some additional form of AA active in the GTX 970 driver settings, perhaps MFAA.

Generally my take away from this is that many of the settings/fx built in TDM kinda suck performance wise...
I suppose that's what you get when hacking experimental modern fx into a game engine from 2004,
and i suppose the AA is either FSAA or MSAA at best.

Edited July 8 by OnlyTaffingCowardsHide

[OnlyTaffingCowardsHide]

Yep, that AA system sure is strange. I did indeed get better results enabling MFAA in the nvidia control panel, but performance is so garbage for the image quality improvements, I actually had better results using DSR to render at 4k instead of 1080p, where I was able to drop from 8x ingame AA to 4x with a better picture and better performance.
I haven't seen that sort of behavior before with Antialiasing in any game, even back when games used MSAA instead of shader based.

[OnlyTaffingCowardsHide]

On 7/7/2025 at 7:09 AM, chakkman said:

I have most settings on max on a RTX 3060 Ti at 1080p. 100+ frames in most missions.

Mind that the RTX 3060 Ti is a lot faster than your GTX 1660S, of course, so, your card is rather sub mid range. Rather better entry level. Nonetheless, I'm, sure that you can set most settings to at least medium to high, and still get a good frame rate. If you avoid the hogs, like setting the AA too high. 4x will surely do as well.

If by "alot" faster you mean ~%50, then yeah where you're getting 100+ I'd be getting 75. 
Still I'd rather drop a couple settings to play at 4k and not have to rely on in game aa.  
For an RTX card you're probably better off just using DLAA, or rendering at 4k via DLDSR.
Currently I've settled on 4x aa at 4k, but I'll probably end up using some SMAA via reshade instead.
I get what people are saying about shadow maps, but I find they look better than stencil when set to high, most of that noise is removed at high when softness is set low enough. 
You have to look at softness differently for stencil and maps, just because the slider is set lower doesn't mean the shadows are less soft.

Edited July 8 by OnlyTaffingCowardsHide

[OnlyTaffingCowardsHide]

On 7/7/2025 at 4:28 AM, datiswous said:

Fyi if you want to set aa to FXAA, you have to set it in your driver settings (or in a profile) and disable aa in tdm. At least that's my experience I had on a 1050ti. performance is very good, but the type of aa is not the best quality wise.

Currently on a 3060 I decided to switch to ingame aa (setting 8 ) because I can with this gpu. 

Also, don't set aa setting higher than 8 (if you do use ingame aa). Difference between 8 and 16 in performance degration is huge. Not worth it.

 

When there's vl in a scene, shadows of vl are automatically set to shadow maps (because stencil shadows are incompattible with vl, so it's decided to force shadow maps so to not break the scene), even though you might have set stencil shadows in settings.

In my experience, the low setting for stencil is good enough. for shadow maps you need at least the medium setting, but the higher settings do make it better.

Have you tried DLAA or DLDSR in Nvidia driver settings? 
I've found rendering at 4k via DSR is better than in game AA, I can only imagine a.i based DSR would offer even better results!

[chakkman]

56 minutes ago, OnlyTaffingCowardsHide said:

If by "alot" faster you mean ~%50, then yeah where you're getting 100+ I'd be getting 75. 

It's a bit more, actually. More like ~75% to 80%.

And, if you really want to play in 4K, then the game will perform even worse, obviously. That card is really not a 4K card.

Edited July 8 by chakkman

[datiswous]

My driver settings don't have these options.

[datiswous]

1 hour ago, OnlyTaffingCowardsHide said:

I suppose that's what you get when hacking experimental modern fx into a game engine from 2004,

Well the (current) engine is not really from 2004. For the rest I think you don't really have a clue what you're talking about, so maybe be not so dismissive?

[OnlyTaffingCowardsHide]

49 minutes ago, chakkman said:

It's a bit more, actually. More like ~75% to 80%.

And, if you really want to play in 4K, then the game will perform even worse, obviously. That card is really not a 4K card.

In some games yeah it looks like you're right, sometimes even more when hitting memory limits.
I guess user bench isn't all that accurate these days.
On the topic of 4k though I did just test it and it runs fine 60+. 
4k may be less demanding than you think in a lot of games. The AA system in game is the worst I've ever seen, so you lose a lot less going to 4k than you do doubling the AA.

 

Edited July 8 by OnlyTaffingCowardsHide

[OnlyTaffingCowardsHide]

37 minutes ago, datiswous said:

Well the (current) engine is not really from 2004. For the rest I think you don't really have a clue what you're talking about, so maybe be not so dismissive?

It's not using a massively outdated version of ID tech?
For "the rest" maybe you can be more specific about what you think I'm getting wrong, so that I can tell you why you're probably wrong, lol.

[OnlyTaffingCowardsHide]

52 minutes ago, datiswous said:

My driver settings don't have these options.

Then you should probably install the proper driver... or look up where the setting you're looking for is located, because you probably just missed it...
Or insult me some more while you keep using a massively outdated aa method rather than one of the key selling points of the RTX cards... 

Edited July 8 by OnlyTaffingCowardsHide

[OnlyTaffingCowardsHide]

My god this game is a steaming turd. Turns out it wasn't even setting the res to 4k until restarting, despite not indicating that in any way. Still DLDSR is a good option for RTX card owners, as you aren't actually rendering at 4k.
I'm just gonna pretend I didn't even bother trying to figure out this cluster f%#k of a hackjob, and go back to playing Thief.  

Edited July 8 by OnlyTaffingCowardsHide

[SeriousToni]

22 minutes ago, OnlyTaffingCowardsHide said:

My god this game is a steaming turd. Turns out it wasn't even setting the res to 4k until restarting, despite not indicating that in any way. Still DLDSR is a good option for RTX card owners, as you aren't actually rendering at 4k.
I'm just gonna pretend I didn't even bother trying to figure out this cluster f%#k of a hackjob, and go back to playing Thief.  

Bye bye!  

[datiswous]

15 hours ago, OnlyTaffingCowardsHide said:

Then you should probably install the proper driver... or look up where the setting you're looking for is located, because you probably just missed it...

I'm using the Linux driver

[datiswous]

15 hours ago, OnlyTaffingCowardsHide said:

It's not using a massively outdated version of ID tech?

No it's not using an outdated engine. IDtech4 was open sourced and tdm is using that source, but has been building onto that. This means the current version of the engine tdm is similar, but not the same as idTech4 (at least that's how I understood it).

Also many performance improvements have been made over the years compared to original idTech4, but it's also way more demanding.

 

15 hours ago, OnlyTaffingCowardsHide said:

Then you should probably install the proper driver... or look up where the setting you're looking for is located, because you probably just missed it...

I'm using the Linux driver.

 

15 hours ago, OnlyTaffingCowardsHide said:

I'm just gonna pretend I didn't even bother trying to figure out this cluster f%#k of a hackjob, and go back to playing Thief.  

You're making it sound like Thief (whatever version) is comparable feature wise. I mean these games are super old and unimpressive graphic wise compared to tdm (not including Thief4). But I guess if raw performance is the only thing you care for..

Also, aparently you find it ok to miss out on the many amazing missions people have made for tdm. Maybe do one step back and think it over.

Edited July 9 by datiswous