Occlusion Culling Perfomance Issues/Drop--Comprehensive

[JarvanLance]

I played this game on my Radeon HD 5770 and had no problems. Framerate was always smooth. When I upgraded to a Geforce GTX760 the problem described here in this topic began. Even on the settings I previously used for my HD5770 I still get framerate drops that just didn't happen before I upgraded to the GTX760, and those drops happen exactly as the first post describes. Just wanted to add this information because it might be relevant. Could it be a problem for nvidia cards only?

PS.: The only thing I upgraded was my video card. Everything else remains the same.

[ReiqMagnus]

I played this game on my Radeon HD 5770 and had no problems. Framerate was always smooth. When I upgraded to a Geforce GTX760 the problem described here in this topic began. Even on the settings I previously used for my HD5770 I still get framerate drops that just didn't happen before I upgraded to the GTX760, and those drops happen exactly as the first post describes. Just wanted to add this information because it might be relevant. Could it be a problem for nvidia cards only?

PS.: The only thing I upgraded was my video card. Everything else remains the same.

Interesting... if what you say is indeed true, I may try out my old GTX 480 and some < 320.xx drivers and see if it is related to newer revisions; if that turns up with nothing, I may swap to a r290 or something when I am RMA'ing my GTX 770. I will post an update on the matter if the thread is still around for what its worth.

[RaineMagus]

Can't suggest anything here, yet never observed the aforementioned performance hit while turning the camera w/ occlusion culling enabled.

-ASUS P8C WS (bios 3402)
-Xeon E3-1270 v2
-Geforce 690 (331.82 currently, yet never witnessed it in all prior releases either)
-Kingston KVR DDR3 1600, 9965525-055 (32GB, ECC enabled)
-Dell U3011
-Windows 8.1 64bit

-vsync enabled, 60fps target set in-game. Nothing else relevant to list really.. Rotating the camera maintains 60 fps, or whatever the FPS level is at the time (around players at the market board).



---Possible that the issue doesn't occur in SLI setups, or with the massive bandwidth of PCI-E 3.0?

Also, before someone asks "Why aren't you playing in 'max' settings" -- A Geforce 690 cannot handle 2560x1600 at 60 fps (even in dungeons) consistently. The general best SLI scaling that you achieve is 70%, yet there's areas such as the first boss in WP where SLI scaling goes to "zero" if High-Quality Transparent lighting is enabled (50% usage per GPU). In those cases, FPS drops to 35-40 -- which takes a hit in your DPS potential.


I'm actually in the process of (have ordered) a Radeon 290x to replace this card. Without the SLI scaling issues at specific map locations, and seeing as you can't reach 100% performance scaling as is (in SLI), I fully expect a single 290x to run better.

Glad to hear this may be NVidia isolated... Will post back results with the 290x and also try different resolutions / shutting off one of my GPU's to see if I experience your observed effect.


Edit #2 -- 1920x1200 & 1920x1080, one GPU disabled, cannot reproduce FPS drop during camera rotation (in the overworld and near the Uld Market Board).

[ReiqMagnus]

Well, Windows 8.1 is a huge difference, there isn't much else aside from that--memory amount, bandwidth, and PCI-E bandwidth are irrelevant in this case or would have a non-existent affect on performance. The GTX 770 is the same gk-104 in the 690 and the Xeon E3-1270 you have is comparable in terms of performance to mine (especially if it is not overclocked). The other main variable would be server pop...

May I request that you disable vsync and the fps cap, as well as comparing your fps with occlusion culling on/off and attempt the process again? If there is any significant change in fps the issue is present, just not as severe.

The performance hit mainly happens in certain hotspots, so you would want to be in roughly the same place and facing the same direction as I was in the screenshots--if you look directly at the market board, or face to the opposite side of the retainers, the performance hit isn't anywhere as severe or is simply not there, respectively.

[RaineMagus]

I can now confirm, having checked the market board in the northern section of Uld at multiple times of the day, including prime-time, that there "IS" indeed a performance drop when rotating the camera. The drop is however, very insignificant (2-3 fps dip at the maximum when the game is running > 100 fps, with vsync off and the camera aimed directly into a wall).


Basically to put it another way: I won't notice it unless I disable vsync, the ingame FPS cap / target, disable high-quality transparent lighting, SSAO / FXAA, etc, and additionally move myself to the back alley facing the board (through the wall) -- [Obstruct LOS to the most possible players / objects]. I also had to move up to using the latest MSI Afterburner to actually "see" the FPS hit, using 2.3's new "Sliding Window" based FPS calculation (rather than the once per second of older versions). (the drop is an almost instantaneous hickup)


Honestly, I'm not sure that this is a bug so much as intended behavior (an optimization as pointed out by Syx). As long as the camera isn't rotating / moving, the scene isn't changing in terms of static-objects in the world between the observer and those objects to be occluded. If a player is stationary (as players primarily are standing infront of the market board or retainer bell) there's no reason to check object-occlusion a second time (until said time as they move). The same can be said for static geometry behind the wall. It's also not necessary to perform VFC against these objects either, or to recompute the view frustum unless the camera is moved. So really ... the FPS drop during turning could be fully intentional in terms of caching object occlusion, and a check re-performed on an interval during camera position changes (or object movement) rather than every frame (this would explain how certain objects can remain occluded when panning the camera initially around a corner -- not being visible for a split second). It would be expected that complexity is slightly higher during panning the camera.


I've no idea if the difference is Windows 8.1 or my transition to Ivy Bridge / the P8C WS. Sadly I no longer have my P6T7 WS / Xeon w3580 (Gen 1 i7) to test with (which would be a near identical setup to yours). I can say though that my transition to the E3 1270v2 "did" eliminate all load-stutter that I had in Crysis 3 (without swapping Operating Systems -- as I used to run Win7 until almost the end of Win8 [due to severe issues with the mobo's NIC, TCP packets arriving out of order at the application layer] ). My w3580 was clocked at 4.13ghz on water cooling (the w3580 and w3680 chips are unlocked multipliers, which is extremely rare to see for the Xeon line).. The E3 1270v2 is "not" overclocked, as unlike the 3580 it's a locked processor (the P8C WS [and all C206 chipset motherboards for that matter] also do not permit bus speed adjustments [at all] without tampering with the bios).

That said, I can't shut off PCI-E 3.0 in the P8C-WS's bios (despite that alot of C206 chip boards do permit this). So, I can't really experiment in terms of what causes the improvement over your setup (minus if it's the OS). I can say though from experience that overkill bus bandwidth does have a very real, though subtle effect, on any loading / resource transfer related stutter in a game (despite that it doesn't impact total and average FPS very much).


EDIT: I suppose I could test this to the extreme degree by moving my 690 down to another slot that runs at PCI-E 2.0 x4. Yet this would be absolutely crippled due to the 690's onboard PLX bridge, and probably meaningless.

[ReiqMagnus]

So I just switched back to my old GTX 480 and tried the latest 331.82 drivers as well as the 314.22 drivers (I was reading around these were supposedly good drivers for FFXIV at the time). The issue was still present in its fullest, so it does not seem to be related to a specific architecture or driver revision on the nVidia side. I also need to reiterate that this issue in no way can be hardware related, as the performance hit is massive and any differences between my current hardware and even top of the line current hardware is < 30%. It must be game related (the feature not working correctly) or some kind of AMD/nVidia or OS compatibility issue.

Edit: I was planning on trying a high-end AMD card in the between time on my GTX 770 RMA, but after reading countless complaints about artifacts, failures, noise, and thermal issues, that is simply not going to happen any time soon until AMD fixes their mess of the R9 series. Also not going to touch windows 8.1 with a 10-foot pole; so unless SE wants to actually start investigating the active posts on this forum (which from the looks of it they never do, all the "solved" cases seem to be threads which just died out of lack of updates and apparently when people stop posting on them they consider the problem "fixed") the issue is going to remain unless an AMD user wants to thoroughly investigate the issue as well (screen shots and documentation w/ proper frame time monitoring). Honestly would hate for this game to turn into a Rift where the devs just stop caring about fixing technical issues because they are too preoccupied adding junk no one wants/needs/requests.

[DeusManibus]

I felt compelled to chime in here with my own experience, as I have been wrestling with this very same issue for the past few weeks. My setup is as follows:

AMD FX-8350 (very modest OC to 4.4GHz)
Gigabyte Windforce GTX 770 4GB
16GB Kingston Hyper-X RAM (1600MHz)
Asus Sabertooth 990FX 2nd Gen (latest BIOS update)
Samsung 840 Pro 256GB SSD (game is installed here)
Western Digital 1TB Caviar Black HDD

I usually run my games with Vsync enabled, as screen tearing drives me nuts. I can stand idle at 58-60 FPS, and spin the camera around to find the FPS dip as low as 36 FPS sometimes (45 is probably the norm though). With Vsync disabled, the issue is surprisingly more noticeable on my end, as I can stand idle at 110 FPS, but the dip from any camera rotation takes me as low as 55 FPS and causes a jarring "stutter" in gameplay. I run the game at high/maximum settings, but have tried the lowest possible settings as well, and this dip in FPS is still present, albeit not as jarring.

I have tried a few different driver releases - 320.49, 327.23, 331.40 (beta) and 331.58 (my current driver). Same, or similar, performance across the board in regards to FFXIV. In my desperation, I read multiple threads on various websites and tried several fixes that people have suggested - unparking cores, adjusting page file size, disabling/enabling HPET. Nothing seems to have an effect.

Just a few hours ago, I took it upon myself to drag my old PC out of storage and install FFXIV to it. This PC has an AMD Phenom 965 BE, 8GB of RAM, a 256 GB Samsung 830 SSD, and, most importantly, a 1GB HIS 6870 GPU. I cleaned up the computer, installed Windows updates, installed the latest AMD display driver, and fired up FFXIV. Much to my disgust, the camera rotation stutter that I experience on my "upgrade," the Nvidia rig, is nowhere to be found. I have not been able to replicate the aforementioned performance issues yet, and am doubtful that I will. While the rig isn't quite strong enough to maintain a constant 60 FPS at maximum settings, I've been playing on what I'd consider to be "medium" settings, and FPS is just sitting pretty at 57-60 FPS. I'm sprinting through the streets, jumping, and spinning the camera all around. No issues. I'm playing FFXIV on my old PC more smoothly than I even thought was possible.

I had read that AMD users were experiencing their own issues with the game, but this has me at a loss. I'm strongly considering selling the 770 at this point.

[ReiqMagnus]

Any chance you would be able to swap the GPUs from one rig to another? That would literally prove whether or not it is a problem related to nVidia cards or not (just to make dang sure it isn't anything else).

On a side note, unless you only play FFXIV, I wouldn't sell that 770--it is 2-3x more powerful in most games than that 6870 from any benchmarks I was able to find.

[AeryM]

Because I didnt mention earlier: I use an EVGA GTX570 OC. So it might actually be a nVidia related issue,

[JarvanLance]

From what I've been gathering, it really seems to be an nVidia issue. One of my friends had the exact same problem I reported earlier in this thread. He upgraded his old Radeon HD 4850 to a Geforce GTX 770. It's almost better to stick with his older card. The only reason he doesn't is because he wants to play other new games (AC4!) that benefit from his much needed upgrade.