Poor performance on 4070ti

[tryptych99]

The game is not running great on my PC, when I'm killing lots of stuff I often drop to like 15fps. My PC runs Cyberpunk and other games on high settings and 2160p with no problem, the point being - it's not my PC (I won't bother posting specs).

I suspect maybe the game is not optimized for 2160p (btw is anyone else running the game in 4K?) and that's why it runs like crap but I'm wondering if anyone has any other suggestions to improve performance (besides the obvious 'reboot' or 'update drivers' etc)?

Thanks in advance

 

ps: when i look at task manager (only about 40% cpu/gpu are being used) I notice the game's priority is set to "below average". Setting it to normal or 'high priority' does not work. Anyone else noticed this?
 

Edited July 15 by tryptych99

[Marine X]

On 7/15/2024 at 1:41 AM, tryptych99 said:

it's not my PC (I won't bother posting specs)

 

This game is not easy to get newer PCs to run well. It is 20 years old, uses OpenGL, was designed for PCs with dedicated video cards, does not play well with the GeoForce Experience, does not like sharing it's connection and is very sensitive to changes in bandwidth. Ultra Mode can be more than Integrated Graphics or even some basic Video Cards can handle. Let's start with something basic.

 

Try running netgraph, type /netgraph 1 in the chat line and monitor the results, /netgraph 0 turns it off. It will appear in the lower right side of screen.

 

Spike shape: The height of the bar representing server ping time in milliseconds. Short is good, long is bad.

Green bars represent received packets.

Short = normal/good

Long = low bandwidth.

Yellow bars represent retransmitted packets.

Short = ISP/Router issues

Red bars represent dropped packets

Short = ISP/Router issues

Blocks of Red = Interrupted communications

[GM Impervium]

There might be a specific setting that's not playing nice with your set-up.

 

I'd try maybe setting all options to minimum, seeing how that runs, and then crank things up one by one until you start experiencing issues. Then just keep the problem setting low or off whie increasing other settings to find your quality/performance sweet-spot.

 

As an aside, I'm assuming that when you say you are "killing lots of things", that you're solo on a mission map. If you're only experiencing slowdowns like in a rikti raid, that's normal as there's way too much stuff for the game to handle, no matter how powerful of a computer you have.

Edited July 16 by GM Impervium

[ScarySai]

On 7/15/2024 at 12:41 AM, tryptych99 said:

btw is anyone else running the game in 4K

Fwiw, I do with a 4090.

 

No such issue on my end. Any performance issues I have are usually single thread limited sorts of deals that are short lived, like when a browser loads a video or something.

 

Or cranking the settings past the point of optimization that the single thread really just can't handle.

 

Check to make sure nothing outside the game is eating resources. Other than that, not sure what your problem could be just yet.

Edited July 16 by ScarySai

[agentx5]

On 7/15/2024 at 1:41 AM, tryptych99 said:

ps: when i look at task manager (only about 40% cpu/gpu are being used) I notice the game's priority is set to "below average". Setting it to normal or 'high priority' does not work. Anyone else noticed this?

 

 

City of Heroes is often CPU bottlenecked on the client because it doesn't do multi-threading properly.  Basically it's not your hardware, is that the game doesn't use your hardware to its full potential (namely your GPU is bored as mostly a single core on your CPU struggles to try to do it all)

 

If you pull up your CPU usage details when the game is running, especially in busy league raid battles, you'll see just a single core bearing all of the pretty much all of the load (single threaded) and thus your frame rate is GHz bound versus that CPU.

 

This is especially true if you have mouse "camera shake" turned on in setting (it's still the freaking default it seems for new players, for some insane reason) or if your particle/sprite count is high, or if your hit the 256 limit for simultaneous sound effects in combat.

 

I run with max textures, in 4K, high view distances, sprite effects counts reduced, vis_scale, FXAA 2x anti-aliasing (but 4x works fine too, I just prefer smoother), max shadows, max reflections, max character detail, mouse camera shake off and the game runs fine as long as I use one of my 3 macros to adjust vis_scale distance factor. 4.5 to 5 GHz overclocked 4790K CPU with DDR3 as I recall off-hand.  I have a a MIN 0.3, MID 3, and MAX 12 setup as macro button on power tray #4 or #5 for all of my characters. I usually stay on MID except in heavy raid battles where I click MIN to reduce things down so they run smoothly on things like the MSR "bowl" or HamiKazi's 

 

I've also forced my client to off-load some of the "heartbeat" telemetry to other cores, but sadly unless the Devs here do something I cannot do anything about the stack overflow lag issues from sound effects >255 or inefficient management of spite/particle rendering being handled by the CPU when it should be the GPU... 

 

Changing from OpenGL to Vulkan or DX11 would help resolve a ton of issues, but I don't see that happening sadly, we just don't have a team of engineers large enough (people x hours x pay) to make that transition. So all we can really do is to roll with it and adjust best we can on our clients.

 

GM Impervium's advice is also solid, good advice.

 

PS: Windows priority doesn't really do anything because it's not really competing much with background processes & services (or at least it shouldn't be, unless you have Symantec, McAfee, or similar bloatware & ransomware). Yes below normal isn't good, and glad you caught that; but it won't resolve the core issues

 

Edited July 16 by agentx5

[Krimson]

I hope it's okay because I just ordered a 4070 TI Super to replace my 3060. The 3060 runs the game great, not even MSR makes it blink.

[Mr. Apocalypse]

15 minutes ago, Krimson said:

I hope it's okay because I just ordered a 4070 TI Super to replace my 3060. The 3060 runs the game great, not even MSR makes it blink.

what processor do you use? out of curiosity

[Krimson]

28 minutes ago, Mr. Apocalypse said:

what processor do you use? out of curiosity

It's just an Intel i7-6700 3.4 Ghz with 4 Cores. I had considered upgrading, but the CPU doesn't do much with Artificial Intelligence, so 4 cores are fine. If I'm running an LLM, the layers of the model are being offloaded to the GPU and VRAM. 

[Mr. Apocalypse]

3 hours ago, Krimson said:

It's just an Intel i7-6700 3.4 Ghz with 4 Cores. I had considered upgrading, but the CPU doesn't do much with Artificial Intelligence, so 4 cores are fine. If I'm running an LLM, the layers of the model are being offloaded to the GPU and VRAM. 

I see. I was going to say something about CPU bottlenecks and gaming based upon your previous statement, but I see that you want it for the AI processing. I don't have much experience on that aspect of hardware pairing so I will take your word on the more powerful card being better for the AI. 🙂 

 

I have 19-9900k and a 3070 ti. I have upgraded the GPU 2 x from 1070ti -> 2070 super and finally my 3070 Ti.  All really cheap nib e-bay finds and I saw no real performance gain in this game @ 1080p.  but when I went up to the 2070 super I also moved to a 1440p res monitor and the 2070 was definitely an improvement, however the 3070TI only added very minimal frame rate increase in any titles due to my bottleneck now being in the 30% range. I kind of got caught in the wrong thinking that more card automatically meant more performance. At lease I only paid ~$200 per card and the purchases were really so I could hand the others down to my kids' PCs.

Edited July 17 by Mr. Apocalypse
correct spelling and grammar are not my natural abilities

[ScarySai]

7 hours ago, Krimson said:

I hope it's okay because I just ordered a 4070 TI Super to replace my 3060. The 3060 runs the game great, not even MSR makes it blink.

 

I highly doubt the gpu is the issue at all. You'll be fine.

[Krimson]

16 hours ago, ScarySai said:

 

I highly doubt the gpu is the issue at all. You'll be fine.

I'm not worried about it. Even if the game is borked after I get my card, I guess I'll just stop playing while I enjoy the new shinies.

[Krimson]

On 7/16/2024 at 9:19 PM, ScarySai said:

 

I highly doubt the gpu is the issue at all. You'll be fine.

It works fine for CoH. Now I need to get RTX Remix working.

[kelika2]

Shadows are brutal on most cards for most games.  Not sure why.

Im sure there is someone here in the antarctic with natural gas freeon tubes with a supercomputer that will disagree but just turn shadows off

[SableShrike]

I was getting pretty brutal stutter last week with my 4070 Super, and I started messing around.

 

Turns out the refresh rate limiter in-game doesn’t like my GSync.  If I don’t run the limiter at max FPS for my system, I get microstutters especially in the zones.  Not so much in missions, oddly.

Edited July 20 by SableShrike