Garbage Performance and Broken AA (1660 Super)

[OnlyTaffingCowardsHide]

I was just in a bad mood yesterday. Not gonna pretend TDM looks great for what it requires performance wise though. 
And yeah, there's more to a game than dynamic shadows, especially when it runs like a steaming turd compared to other games that do the same thing. I mean soft shadows have been around forever, and there are far better options for antialiasing than what is built into this engine. You could make an argument for volumetrics requiring more gpu power but I'm not even testing that. 
I can't even remember the last time I played a game that requires a restart to set the display resolution, and when they do they will typically specify, not just indicate the higher res while not actually changing the settings.
So yeah, Thief may not have dynamic shadows, but it looks great and runs great with HDMod. 
This game just isn't optimized, I can play numerous newer games at higher res with soft shadows and more advanced lighting, even volumetrics, and plenty of older games run @4k no problem. 
It is very much a case where modern effects were hacked in, but even when they are turned off I'm having trouble pushing 4k, while pushing 4k/60 in other old games with dynamic shadows and reshade fx.  

[OnlyTaffingCowardsHide]

9 hours ago, datiswous said:

I'm using the Linux driver

Think we've spotted the problem 

[SeriousToni]

43 minutes ago, OnlyTaffingCowardsHide said:

I was just in a bad mood yesterday. Not gonna pretend TDM looks great for what it requires performance wise though. 
And yeah, there's more to a game than dynamic shadows, especially when it runs like a steaming turd compared to other games that do the same thing. I mean soft shadows have been around forever, and there are far better options for antialiasing than what is built into this engine. You could make an argument for volumetrics requiring more gpu power but I'm not even testing that. 
I can't even remember the last time I played a game that requires a restart to set the display resolution, and when they do they will typically specify, not just indicate the higher res while not actually changing the settings.
So yeah, Thief may not have dynamic shadows, but it looks great and runs great with HDMod. 
This game just isn't optimized, I can play numerous newer games at higher res with soft shadows and more advanced lighting, even volumetrics, and plenty of older games run @4k no problem. 
It is very much a case where modern effects were hacked in, but even when they are turned off I'm having trouble pushing 4k, while pushing 4k/60 in other old games with dynamic shadows and reshade fx.  

I personally think that a valid point is the lack of a popup that shows that the game needs to be restarted after making crucial changes. I am 100% sure we had this in the past already. My guess is that it was overseen when the GUI changes were made to the main menu. If someone has access to the bugtracker and could test this again by changing their resolution and depending on the outcome would open a ticket it would be very nice ! (a sentence that long can only happen when a German like me tries to write proper English lol) 

[HMart]

14 hours ago, datiswous said:

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.

Indeed like you said TDM engine is not outdated, at lest not like the original Doom 3 engine is.

Yes is not using PBR and nanite and raytracing and all that new Unreal Engine 5 stuff that makes it a very fast engine ... not ... but the TDM engine has a ton of updates, above the original idtech4 engine from Doom 3, IMO has now more in common with idTech 5 than idTech4.  And all done by a very tiny team of TDM players, with the necessary knowhow, on their free time, for absolute free. 

Man some people don't deserve to get nice things for free... And I'm not talking about you datiswous.

To anyone wondering, here is some of the things TDM engine has above original idTech4 that I'm aware: 

- soft stencil shadows like Wolfenstein 2009 (original is hard stencil shadows only).

- new shadow system using shadow maps.

- volumetric lighting (aka god rays).

- more advanced AI system (so more CPU heavy).

- GLSL shaders support and OpenGL 3.x akin to D3D10/11 level, (original is OGL 2.0 akin to d3d9 level and uses ARB assembly shaders only).

- modern multicore support (original is single core only).

- unlocked framerate (original is locked at 60hz)

- 64bits color support

- Screen Space Ambient Occlusion

- Parallax Occlusion Mapping

And a ton of more changes, like LOD support, obj models support, improved gui system, improved scripting system, better window system with support for high dpi monitors and 16 by 9 and other screen ratios, etc, etc.  None of these changes were easy to make and took years of hard work, again for free, for a free game that we wall consume without paying a dime. IMO the lest some people can do, is respect that! Enough said. 

[jaxa]

I've been able to run the game on quad-cores at around 720p30 (capped to 30 performs better) with HD 530/UHD 630 integrated graphics, and 1080p60 (maximum of the monitor) with the GTX 970. That's not exactly what I'd call demanding, although I haven't paid close attention to AA or other settings, so I may have been running on EZ mode.

Because mappers are free to make their missions as large or small as they want, with varying amounts of visportal/etc optimization, it's possible that a specific mission is 10x harder to run than the norm (I'm not naming names but you know who you are ). But that should be rare and the training mission is probably a fair baseline.

I have a 4K TV now, so I should test it on that sometime... after I get something better than an i3-10105/UHD 630 hooked up to it.

Edited July 10, 2025 by jaxa

[chakkman]

17 minutes ago, jaxa said:

I've been able to run the game on quad-cores at around 720p30 (capped to 30 performs better) with HD 530/UHD 630 integrated graphics, and 1080p60 (maximum of the monitor) with the GTX 970. That's not exactly what I'd call demanding, although I haven't paid close attention to AA or other settings, so I may have been running on EZ mode.

That's the point. With a slow GPU, you have to limit resolution and framerate, and might also have to lower settings. You can't expect a low tier GPU to perform well in 4K resolution, with medium to high settings.

That said, the OP's GPU should be good for 1080p and medium to high settings. But, not on 4K.

TDM in general is not THAT demanding. Like most games these days, it's highly GPU dependant. And, again, antialiasing is very expensive in this game. In my experience, it has the heaviest impact. With x4 AA, there shouldn't be an issue. Even x8 AA is fine here. Whenever I switch to x16, I have half the FPS I had before.

Edited July 10, 2025 by chakkman

[OnlyTaffingCowardsHide]

11 hours ago, HMart said:

Indeed like you said TDM engine is not outdated, at lest not like the original Doom 3 engine is.

Yes is not using PBR and nanite and raytracing and all that new Unreal Engine 5 stuff that makes it a very fast engine ... not ... but the TDM engine has a ton of updates, above the original idtech4 engine from Doom 3, IMO has now more in common with idTech 5 than idTech4.  And all done by a very tiny team of TDM players, with the necessary knowhow, on their free time, for absolute free. 

Man some people don't deserve to get nice things for free... And I'm not talking about you datiswous.

To anyone wondering, here is some of the things TDM engine has above original idTech4 that I'm aware: 

- soft stencil shadows like Wolfenstein 2009 (original is hard stencil shadows only).

- new shadow system using shadow maps.

- volumetric lighting (aka god rays).

- more advanced AI system (so more CPU heavy).

- GLSL shaders support and OpenGL 3.x akin to D3D10/11 level, (original is OGL 2.0 akin to d3d9 level and uses ARB assembly shaders only).

- modern multicore support (original is single core only).

- unlocked framerate (original is locked at 60hz)

- 64bits color support

- Screen Space Ambient Occlusion

- Parallax Occlusion Mapping

And a ton of more changes, like LOD support, obj models support, improved gui system, improved scripting system, better window system with support for high dpi monitors and 16 by 9 and other screen ratios, etc, etc.  None of these changes were easy to make and took years of hard work, again for free, for a free game that we wall consume without paying a dime. IMO the lest some people can do, is respect that! Enough said. 

That's not what I'm saying at all. It's still an old engine at baseline. Maybe IDtech just isn't all that efficient overall, but I've seen other devs do some incredible work with it. For example, it's easier to run Dishonored 2 on my hardware than Dark Mod with all the bells and whistles, and I think we can all agree Dishonored 2 looks better and does a better job rendering open environments without performance drops.
The way these effects have been added is more like Oblivion Reloaded, or ENB, though perhaps Oblivion Reloaded is a bad example because it actually runs quite well in comparison. 
They are not well optimized, particularly the shadow and antialiasing code, I've yet to even test volumetrics.
The Ambient Occlusion method looks like crap compared to newer methods used in MXAO (reshade) or RTAO (Nvidia), and is quite a performance hog in it's own right.
It's nice to have options sure, but there are simply far better options available via external methods.
It's fine though, I'll just turn off the fancy effects and enjoy all the great fan created content, just would have been nice to know what I was getting into/what all should have been disabled by default. 

[OnlyTaffingCowardsHide]

2 hours ago, chakkman said:

That's the point. With a slow GPU, you have to limit resolution and framerate, and might also have to lower settings. You can't expect a low tier GPU to perform well in 4K resolution, with medium to high settings.

That said, the OP's GPU should be good for 1080p and medium to high settings. But, not on 4K.

TDM in general is not THAT demanding. Like most games these days, it's highly GPU dependant. And, again, antialiasing is very expensive in this game. In my experience, it has the heaviest impact. With x4 AA, there shouldn't be an issue. Even x8 AA is fine here. Whenever I switch to x16, I have half the FPS I had before.

And that's MY point, is that it is indeed quite demanding once you turn on any of the hacked in fx or try to use AA, as demanding as many much more modern better looking games.
Also 4k isn't super demanding in comparably older titles, it's not the resolution itself that tanks performance, it's the overflow of the vram buffer. I'm playing through Tony Hawk's Underground right now @4k with several demanding shaders (mxao, ambient light), 60fps and barely topping %50 gpu usage. 
No soft shadows sure, but the game looks pretty good with all of those fancy shaders, and came out around the same time.
Yes I only have 6gb vram to work with, but the 3060ti only has 8. I fail to see what this engine is doing that requires so much wasted vram. Perhaps it simply isn't implementing performance optimizations that would normally be in play at 4k, like scaling the resolution of effects independently from render resolution.
I'm happy to discuss performance optimizations, but I'd prefer to do so with someone who actually knows what I'm talking about, not someone who is going to repeatedly announce that I'm not using a 4k card, which is obviously dependent on the content being rendered.  

Edited July 10, 2025 by OnlyTaffingCowardsHide

[OnlyTaffingCowardsHide]

2 hours ago, jaxa said:

I've been able to run the game on quad-cores at around 720p30 (capped to 30 performs better) with HD 530/UHD 630 integrated graphics, and 1080p60 (maximum of the monitor) with the GTX 970. That's not exactly what I'd call demanding, although I haven't paid close attention to AA or other settings, so I may have been running on EZ mode.

Because mappers are free to make their missions as large or small as they want, with varying amounts of visportal/etc optimization, it's possible that a specific mission is 10x harder to run than the norm (I'm not naming names but you know who you are ). But that should be rare and the training mission is probably a fair baseline.

I have a 4K TV now, so I should test it on that sometime... after I get something better than an i3-10105/UHD 630 hooked up to it.

I agree, it's not too bad to run at low res/low settings. 
I also agree that larger missions tend to be much more difficult to run. 
The question is what could be done about that? Is it something that could be addressed with engine level optimizations, or is it something that needs to be designed for by individual map authors, many of whom may not understand how to optimize large spaces avoiding engine limitations?

[Wellingtoncrab]

I honestly don’t know any mappers who are using 4k or much in the way of MSAA as a target when considering performance. The 1660 is the card I actually built all of Iris on - and it was frankly a nightmare to keep it running at 1080p/1440p.

I don’t think your expectations are as reasonable as you think. Vanilla Doom 3 is not that scaleable of a game relatively speaking. I agree that Void in D2 is a very impressive example of forward rendered dynamically lit game. It also rather obviously quite different at some pretty fundamental levels.

But if your expectations are ultimately that we are going to live up to that level of resource development - the base of which is already 2 entire generations of idtech ahead as a starting point, I think we are going to continue to disappoint you.

I have however seen since my time mapping, quite substantial performance improvements across versions. But we mappers are greedy and “optimization” is in the eye of the beholder- we are going to use that overhead to do more with the game.

Sorry.

[OnlyTaffingCowardsHide]

1 minute ago, Wellingtoncrab said:

I honestly don’t know any mappers who are using 4k or much in the way of MSAA as a target when considering performance. The 1660 is the card I actually built all of Iris on - and it was frankly a nightmare to keep it running at 1080p/1440p.

I don’t think your expectations are as reasonable as you think. Vanilla Doom 3 is not that scaleable of a game relatively speaking. I agree that Void in D2 is a very impressive example of forward rendered dynamically lit game. It also rather obviously quite different at some pretty fundamental levels.

But if your expectations are ultimately that we are going to live up to that level of resource development - the base of which is already 2 entire generations of idtech ahead as a starting point, I think we are going to continue to disappoint you.

I have however seen since my time mapping, quite substantial performance improvements across versions. But we mappers are greedy and “optimization” is in the eye of the beholder- we are going to use that overhead to do more with the game.

Sorry.

No dude, it is what it is, and I completely agree with what you're saying. The tech just isn't up to par performance wise with modern rendering techniques, no need to apologize for that. At least you're willing to admit what I've been saying all along, rather than trying to convince me that "it's totally optimized bro cause opengl 3 and LODS".
I've tempered my expectations accordingly.

[Wellingtoncrab]

I think a fairer comparison is something like skin deep. The game is awesome - it is very polished and smartly scoped for the engine and uses a modern idtech4 fork.

The game runs very well in missions and is even steam deck rated. There are however “interstitial” missions and interludes which are much different in terms of scope and design - and on a device like the steam deck performance cannot really be sustained - even at low resolutions.

Brute force only goes so far with the base technology.

[HMart]

1 hour ago, OnlyTaffingCowardsHide said:

No dude, it is what it is, and I completely agree with what you're saying. The tech just isn't up to par performance wise with modern rendering techniques, no need to apologize for that. At least you're willing to admit what I've been saying all along, rather than trying to convince me that "it's totally optimized bro cause opengl 3 and LODS".
I've tempered my expectations accordingly.

I never said the engine is totally optimized, you invented that on your head, what I said, is that the engine is updated way above and faster than the original Doom 3 engine and that is a fact.  Some of the missions on this game, wouldn't run at all, on the original engine because of how heavy they are.  That is how improved it is. You don't know how this game and engine evolved, how slow it was and how fast it has become. I'm here almost since the beginning, even when it was a mod of Doom 3, almost two decades ago, this engine and game have improved a ton.

Also If you think the engine is not up to your standards, then do something about it! It is open source the code is there, for anyone to change and improve, if you can do better than the people that worked on this, then do it!  If not stop bad mouthing their work and behaving like they own you anything or that you paid anything for this game and deserve better service!

Edited July 10, 2025 by HMart

[chakkman]

1 hour ago, OnlyTaffingCowardsHide said:

Also 4k isn't super demanding in comparably older titles

4K is very demanding, as the GPU has to process double the pixels, when compared to 1080p.

And, you can't really compare "comparably older titles", because TDM is in an ongoing development, and has seen many changes to the engine over the years. Actually, one of the recent updates has significantly improved performance on multi core computers. So much for that.

Your GPU is simply better entry level, so, you have to live with lowered details.

[HMart]

40 minutes ago, chakkman said:

4K is very demanding, as the GPU has to process double the pixels, when compared to 1080p.

...

Not only that, if he turns on MSAA (multi sampling antialising) that can quadruple or more the amount of pixels the engine has to shade.  And this engine uses full real time PER PIXEL lighting, meaning the more pixels you give the lighting system the slower it becomes.

And comparing this engine to other titles, imo means nothing, because we don't know how they handle lighting, shadowing, culling, compared to this one.  Thou he talked about Dishonored 2, and I know that game uses a different visibility culling system to TDM engine, if I'm recalling well is based on a third party tech called Umbra (also used by Unity3D) that does the job entirely on the GPU.  TDM still uses the original portal system from idtech4 and it runs entirely on the CPU.  D2 engine also does character skinning (rigging and animation) on the GPU, TDM still does it on the CPU, and many other things, both engines are not comparable. One was improved by highly skilled professionals, paid to do so, another was improved by people with different skill levels, again and will not tire to mention, for absolute free.  Very different things. 

Edited July 10, 2025 by HMart

[OnlyTaffingCowardsHide]

6 hours ago, HMart said:

I never said the engine is totally optimized, you invented that on your head, what I said, is that the engine is updated way above and faster than the original Doom 3 engine and that is a fact.  Some of the missions on this game, wouldn't run at all, on the original engine because of how heavy they are.  That is how improved it is. You don't know how this game and engine evolved, how slow it was and how fast it has become. I'm here almost since the beginning, even when it was a mod of Doom 3, almost two decades ago, this engine and game have improved a ton.

Also If you think the engine is not up to your standards, then do something about it! It is open source the code is there, for anyone to change and improve, if you can do better than the people that worked on this, then do it!  If not stop bad mouthing their work and behaving like they own you anything or that you paid anything for this game and deserve better service!

Lol, you're certainly entitled to your opinion. Yes I remember when it was a Doom 3 mod... I also remember running it on a Radeon HD 4670 and thinking things would significantly improve over the years performance wise. As far as I can tell, things haven't improved near as much as I had hoped, if anything some of the missions/added fx are far more demanding than ever.
While I can still appreciate it for what it is, this tired old claim that one can't criticize something that is free doesn't make any sense. I admit that my initial criticisms were a little over the top/rude, after a night of drinking and frustration, but that doesn't mean I won't suggest improvements. I mean if someone left a pile of trash on your lawn, would you say "oh boy free trash!", not that this mod is trash but you get the point.

There isn't much I can do about the environment size problem, though I find the LOD settings do actually help quite a bit with that. All I can suggest is alternative shaders and antialiasing techniques.
For shaders it seems MXAO offers better performance and an up to date implementation, but there are many other Reshade shaders available that can do a good job of ambient occlusion and global illumination with minimal performance cost. TurboGI for example is built to run on anything, and I've also had good results with Large Scale Perceptual Obscurance. For anti-aliasing you really want to be using DLAA or DLDSR (pretty much the same Nvidia tech). Or some other form of a.i based supersampling available from modern AMD/Intel cards.
If that's not an option you can at least enhance the in game aa with the MFAA setting in the Nvidia Control panel, and apply some SMAA via reshade.

Beyond that I am not a developer, so I can only point toward other projects that have much better performance. Not all of them professional/corporate projects either, just consider what some devs have done with mods like OpenMW, Oblivion Reloaded, Community Shaders, Daggerfall Unity and the Dream mod. We're talking massive open environments with soft shadows and many other rendering techniques. I just find it difficult to believe that shadows can't have soft fuzzy edges without absolutely tanking performance, but maybe the engine really is that bad at doing shadow masking/filtering. 
If the engine really is so un-salvageable though are there not other options available these days that could provide a much better experience going forward? Cryengine perhaps, or whatever OpenMW is using?

Edited July 10, 2025 by OnlyTaffingCowardsHide

[OnlyTaffingCowardsHide]

6 hours ago, chakkman said:

4K is very demanding, as the GPU has to process double the pixels, when compared to 1080p.

And, you can't really compare "comparably older titles", because TDM is in an ongoing development, and has seen many changes to the engine over the years. Actually, one of the recent updates has significantly improved performance on multi core computers. So much for that.

Your GPU is simply better entry level, so, you have to live with lowered details.

No, in most games that look better I don't have to live with lowered details, that's kinda my whole point here.

[chakkman]

That is your subjective opinion ("games that look better").

And, as you mentioned Dishonored 2 earlier, it's pretty comparable to TDMs performance in maximum details.

Note also that some fan missions look significantly better than others, due to lighting, the amount of detail and the textures in the maps.

Edited July 11, 2025 by chakkman

[jaxa]

On 7/10/2025 at 10:13 AM, OnlyTaffingCowardsHide said:

I also agree that larger missions tend to be much more difficult to run. 
The question is what could be done about that? Is it something that could be addressed with engine level optimizations, or is it something that needs to be designed for by individual map authors, many of whom may not understand how to optimize large spaces avoiding engine limitations?

I think it comes down to peer pressure (people will notice if an FM is extremely demanding, and mention it during the beta testing phase), and peer assistance (mapping help from people who know what they are doing).

Maybe there are things that can be done with the engine that can help support more gigantic "open world" style maps but I'm not sure what they are. It is reasonable for hardware recommendations to go up as the game evolves over decades and mappers push the limits. A bargain bin i3-10105 smashes the old A6-3400M I used to play TDM on, and multiple cores can actually be utilized.

23 hours ago, HMart said:

Also If you think the engine is not up to your standards, then do something about it! It is open source the code is there, for anyone to change and improve, if you can do better than the people that worked on this, then do it!  If not stop bad mouthing their work and behaving like they own you anything or that you paid anything for this game and deserve better service!

Le code it yourself geg

I say excuse the rudeness as long as the criticism is anywhere near valid (debatable). Man's sober now at least.

23 hours ago, chakkman said:

4K is very demanding, as the GPU has to process double the pixels, when compared to 1080p.

It's actually quadruple the pixels:

1920 x 1080 = 2,073,600
2560 x 1440 = 3,686,400 (~1.78x 1080p)
3840 x 2160 = 8,294,400

[OnlyTaffingCowardsHide]

5 hours ago, chakkman said:

That is your subjective opinion ("games that look better").

And, as you mentioned Dishonored 2 earlier, it's pretty comparable to TDMs performance in maximum details.

Note also that some fan missions look significantly better than others, due to lighting, the amount of detail and the textures in the maps.

Ok, since you have a problem with my semantics, how about "games that are technically superior".

Edited July 11, 2025 by OnlyTaffingCowardsHide

[OnlyTaffingCowardsHide]

Ha, you folks are gonna laugh but it was partly reshade causing the problem.
This is the only opengl game I ever play, and even the lighter effects in reshade contribute to significantly reduced performance that wouldn't be a problem in DX or Vulkan. 
Disabled a lighting shader and gained an extra 10 fps at 4k. Settled on medium stencil shadows, 4x aa, and ao set to low (too noisy to bother with higher settings anyways).
This is only in the starting cathedral, but overall it runs much better than I thought.

[Frost_Salamander]

1 hour ago, jaxa said:

I say excuse the rudeness as long as the criticism is anywhere near valid (debatable). Man's sober now at least.

eh... no. There is no excuse to be rude.  If they apologised, sure.  Nobody's perfect.

18 hours ago, OnlyTaffingCowardsHide said:

 I mean if someone left a pile of trash on your lawn, would you say "oh boy free trash!", not that this mod is trash but you get the point.

No, I don't get the point.  Nobody left TDM on your lawn.  You put it there yourself.

Nobody, ever, needs to put up with crap like this.  I don't care if you are John f****** Carmack. Nothing is worth putting up with yet another toxic contributor to an arguably borderline toxic community.

[OnlyTaffingCowardsHide]

2 hours ago, Frost_Salamander said:

eh... no. There is no excuse to be rude.  If they apologised, sure.  Nobody's perfect.

No, I don't get the point.  Nobody left TDM on your lawn.  You put it there yourself.

Nobody, ever, needs to put up with crap like this.  I don't care if you are John f****** Carmack. Nothing is worth putting up with yet another toxic contributor to an arguably borderline toxic community.

There are plenty of excuses to be rude... like if you just don't like someone...
First day on the internet?

[Wellingtoncrab]

@OnlyTaffingCowardsHideLook dude - we have next to no rules here but that doesn’t mean you get to do our act however you want “because internet”.

I think you have established you don’t have much to elaborate on in terms of your feedback about the game not running as well as you would like at 4k. So it follows you do not need to argue or pick fights about it. Unless that is the actual point.

There is appeal in working within the limitations of older technology that not everyone understands. The “trash” as you put it, represents an opportunity for us to express something we might otherwise not be able to. 

So you are free to criticize it, but you don’t need to denigrate it or our members while doing so. Even if no one stops you, it’s not welcome here.

 

[chakkman]

3 hours ago, OnlyTaffingCowardsHide said:

Ha, you folks are gonna laugh but it was partly reshade causing the problem.

Actually, I was rather facepalming than laughing.

But, I guess it could be a good learning effect, which should teach you that you should first check your stuff, before blaming anyone else's work for problems on your end.