[SOLVED] Days Gone runs like crap (kind of)

alexalexa221

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Apr 20, 2020
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Hello

I started playing Days Gone recently and I noticed low GPU utilisations when going in places with a lot of elements to render such as villages and camps. The game runs fairly well on my PC and I have it locked at 72 FPS using the in-game V-sync. The issue is that when I go to a populated area such as the ones described above, the framerates suddenly drops to as low as 50 FPS and the GPU utilisation remains low rather than being used at 99%. I reckon this could be a game optimisation problem, however, I would really want to hear your thoughts and possible fixes.

Specs:
I5 9400f
RX 5600 XT Red Dragon (I am using an unlocked BIOS which makes the card run at 2000MHz core frequency and 1864 memory frequency, but I can go to higher if I want)
16GB RAM 2666MHz (I decreased the timings manually)

Thanks
 
Solution
As a good man here in the forums wrote to someone else today "FPS is CPU and GPU is eye candy". Now while that is not strictly true it certainly is the case with your 6 core, 6 thread CPU. It is one of those CPU's that is not ageing well and newer titles are going to put it under pressure.
Rendering is done by the CPU, ie. what goes where and the GPU converts that into a pixel..... so the more there is to render in busy areas and only 6 threads to do it, it cannot feed the GPU fast enough therefore the FPS drops and the GPU stays at under 100% because it is waiting on the CPU.

If you had a 6 core with 12 threads and hyperthreading then you would probably not have this issue on a 6 core CPU so if on the socket you could up-grade to lets...
As a good man here in the forums wrote to someone else today "FPS is CPU and GPU is eye candy". Now while that is not strictly true it certainly is the case with your 6 core, 6 thread CPU. It is one of those CPU's that is not ageing well and newer titles are going to put it under pressure.
Rendering is done by the CPU, ie. what goes where and the GPU converts that into a pixel..... so the more there is to render in busy areas and only 6 threads to do it, it cannot feed the GPU fast enough therefore the FPS drops and the GPU stays at under 100% because it is waiting on the CPU.

If you had a 6 core with 12 threads and hyperthreading then you would probably not have this issue on a 6 core CPU so if on the socket you could up-grade to lets say an i9 9700k which you might get second hand now that would give you 8 cores which would make a difference. Not a blow your socks off one but you would notice it.
 
Solution

alexalexa221

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Apr 20, 2020
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As a good man here in the forums wrote to someone else today "FPS is CPU and GPU is eye candy". Now while that is not strictly true it certainly is the case with your 6 core, 6 thread CPU. It is one of those CPU's that is not ageing well and newer titles are going to put it under pressure.
Rendering is done by the CPU, ie. what goes where and the GPU converts that into a pixel..... so the more there is to render in busy areas and only 6 threads to do it, it cannot feed the GPU fast enough therefore the FPS drops and the GPU stays at under 100% because it is waiting on the CPU.

If you had a 6 core with 12 threads and hyperthreading then you would probably not have this issue on a 6 core CPU so if on the socket you could up-grade to lets say an i9 9700k which you might get second hand now that would give you 8 cores which would make a difference. Not a blow your socks off one but you would notice it.
This is such a strange case to me because I have seen some videos where AMD GPUs combined with i7 11700Ks or Ryzen 5 3600s were still not fully utilised at 100% similarly to my 9400f. On the other hand, newer CPU models such as the 5600x managed to hold a 99% GPU utilisation with minor dips to 90% from time to time. My question is, do I really have to buy a new-gen CPU to play the game normally or is it an optimisation issue that could be potentially fixed... even on my 6 cores <Mod Edit>?
 
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Your 6 cores are not <Mod Edit>, far from it but the lack of hyper threading in new games that take advantage of it is going to cause the shortcomings you are seeing. A Ryzen 3600x has 6 cores..... but 12 threads not 6,so you cannot compare an apple and an orange. For example
3600x top, Your i59400f below... the 3600x is faster, newer tech, more Cache.... it is not a fair fight. As for the 5600x it keeps the GPU at around 90-100% because it can feed the GPU with enough data.It smacks the bottom of a 3600x so the i5 9400f is nowhere near it.
Kerne
6
6
Threads
12
6
Grundfrequenz
3.8 GHz
2.9 GHz
Maximale Frequenz
4.4 GHz
4.1 GHz
Gesamter L1-Cache
96K (per core)
64K (per core)
Gesamter L2-Cache
512K (per core)
256K (per core)
Gesamter L3-Cache
32 MB (shared)
9 MB (shared)
Technologischer Prozess
7 nm
14 nm

Just because 2 CPU's have 6 cores the is 9400f is more comparable to a 4 core Ryzen 3300x which is well below a 3600x.
 
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You didn't say what resolution you're playing at.

With my 8700K, 1080 SC, 16GB 3200 RAM spec, no OCs, I'm running at max settings 1440p DSR and with Vsync on to eliminate the slight screen tear otherwise, and I get 55-60 FPS. My GPU tends to stay high usage, and with Hyperthreading enabled, I tend to get about 4 cores in single digits usage wise, with the rest carrying the majority of the load. It does seem kinda odd though that the overall usage reads lower than I would expect given 8 cores are showing decent usage.

Optimization wise, the game can show a slight microstutter at times, which seems unrelated to FPS. I just did the You Alone I Have Seen mission, which is the first true take down an entire horde single handedly mission, and I didn't really notice any performance hit. I even intentionally played it via letting them chase me mostly, and captured it with all CPU cores showing usage in Afterburner. Now that I think of it though, it was those responding that spoke of the CPU being the problem.

Like I said, my GPU usage remained pretty high, so I can't help but think maybe the comments about your GPU not being fed the rendering data fast enough might be the case. It used to be that Hyperthreading didn't help much in most games, but some are taking advantage of it now. Your CPU is also quite a bit lower base speed than mine if you're running it stock though, so it could be also due to that. Your GPU is also a bit less powerful than mine. BTW, higher RAM speed can also help speed up how fast the CPU and RAM exchange rendering data sent to the GPU.

I have roughly 15 min of compression left on the video, I may have it uploaded within an hour, but it will take a bit longer for YT to process it.
 
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BTW, I should mention that patch 1.02 was just released about a week ago, so if by chance you've not played it more since then, you should definitely launch it and let that patch be installed. It mainly fixes stuttering issues that people had when playing with a mouse. I have also seen many say that when the mouse stutter happened, frames were dropping pretty bad. It plays a lot smoother for me now. I can also play without Vsync, and the horrible sluggishness with zoomed optics is gone. Makes the game a lot less stressful to play.

Unfortunately some, usually those with AMD GPUs, have reported worse performance since that patch, but that may just require a driver update from AMD.
 

alexalexa221

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Apr 20, 2020
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BTW, I should mention that patch 1.02 was just released about a week ago, so if by chance you've not played it more since then, you should definitely launch it and let that patch be installed. It mainly fixes stuttering issues that people had when playing with a mouse. I have also seen many say that when the mouse stutter happened, frames were dropping pretty bad. It plays a lot smoother for me now. I can also play without Vsync, and the horrible sluggishness with zoomed optics is gone. Makes the game a lot less stressful to play.

Unfortunately some, usually those with AMD GPUs, have reported worse performance since that patch, but that may just require a driver update from AMD.
Patch 1.03 just came up. I will try it when I have time and notice you if the frame problems fixed. By the way, I tried playing it at 2k using VSR and the bottleneck is gone. I was getting 55 FPS around busy camp areas however by turning geometry and fog settings down by one level I was able to hit 60 constant FPS.
 
Patch 1.03 just came up. I will try it when I have time and notice you if the frame problems fixed. By the way, I tried playing it at 2k using VSR and the bottleneck is gone. I was getting 55 FPS around busy camp areas however by turning geometry and fog settings down by one level I was able to hit 60 constant FPS.
Why did you drop just those two settings? Did you read a guide that said they are resource hungry? Not sure I'd want to drop geometry, but maybe fog. Do you know if dropping the fog setting means less fog or less quality to the fog?
 

RainingTacco

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Sep 21, 2019
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It's because you have gpu from AMD. I too have the garbage called 5700 XT and it works very bad in days gone. The game just shows how poorly coded is DX11 driver and doesn't utilize command lists. Anytime high amount of draw calls are made on the screen the performance is abysmal.

Stay clear of AMD garbage. I will repeat that to anyone who ever thinks about playing DX11 cpu heavy games on AMD garbage GPUs.