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  • Heads up, because I imagine the DF guys were too PC master race to notice, but you can smooth out a lot of the hitches by using framegen.

    There's this weird implementation in the game where if you set frame gen to auto it seems to automatically turn it off if you're over the fps cap and then turn it on when you drop below and it's worth giving that a shot. It took some tweaking but I did end up finding a mix where between that and VRR with a low enough cap to maintain it most of the time but high enough to get acceptable latency the game is... mostly playable?

    It was still a shock to go outside for the first time (most of the hitches seem to be around outdoors traversal) and it's still not perfect, but it did clean up a lot of it. Well, some of it. Your mileage may vary based on hardware and expectations, though.

    • Frame gen shouldn't be a crutch, and by design it's only supposed to enhance games that's get above 60fps naturally. It doesn't do anything good for the open world that constantly tanks to 45. It's not a master race thing, it's a poor optimization thing.

      • No, the point is the DF video never even tested framegen or upscaling before deeming the issue unsolvable in this video. I'm just trying to offer additional options to tune settings they don't cover in the video that may help.

        Frame gen, for the record, is fundamentally a crutch. Specifically for CPU limits. It serves no other purpose. If you don't need it as a crutch you don't need it, period. It takes you from wherever you can get natively to hopefully closer to your monitor refresh rate. If you can reach your refresh rate then you don't need it in the first place.

        Or at least it does that in the default implementation from GPU vendors where you're locked into uncapped, non vsynced FPS when using it.

        I'm calling out that there seems to be a specific implementation here to use it with a frame cap. And with that fame cap if you can get yourself to, say 45-60 fps you can get a semi-decent 90 or 120 cap out on the other end that does trim down some of the stutters, especially if you also have VRR to eat a few extra miliseconds.

        So it's not ideal, you're effectively locking the game to 90 or 120 and then trying to scrape by at 45-60 and double up with frame gen just so you can use an AI frame to slide in between the 45-80ms spike and eat the rest of the time difference with VRR. But hey, it kinda works, at least in my setup. Crutch or no crutch it makes the game more playable for me. I don't have the tools to measure exactly how much more playable, and I'd like to see DF test it, but at a glance it seems to help.

        That doesn't mean they shouldn't look into the cause and patch improvements, but if it can take the game from unplayable to playable for some people on some setups that's a good thing.

    • IME framegen hasn't meaningfully reduced the open-world hitching. It gets the framerate nice and smooth while standing still, fighting a bandit or whatever... until you walk a bit and the game becomes CPU-limited while streaming in new cells, at which point you noticeably hitch.

      The performance in interior cells (including cities) is very good even on Ultra settings.

      I suspect that this is one of the compromises they made by keeping the old engine running under the hood, because as DF notes this also happened in the original.

      • That is entirely possible. My setup seems to be in this sweet spot where the normal performance is high enough over the cap AND the framegen gets you enough extra smoothness AND the VRR is able to eat enough miliseconds off the hitches that it is noticeably improved (but crucially not perfect, so if you're more sensitive than me that may also be part of it). Still, even if it doesn't help for everybody it's worth a shot and not covered in the video.

        I bet there is something to having to load the world in chunks in the underlying engine and then having to render the chunk all at once in UE5 that makes UE5's struggles even worse. Still, the game was a shadowdrop, you have to assume they could have taken some time to try to figure it out a bit better.

        The worst case scenario is that further optimization isn't an option, but... I mean, even if it is related to what people think it's related they should be able to find some way to ease some of the load off. The observation that a lot of the performance hit is related to hardware Lumen alone points that way. Especially since having a faster base framerate does seem related to having smaller hitches. But hey, who's to say? I guess we'll see where they go from here.

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