[NEW MERCENARIES] Please note that all new forum users have to be approved before posting. This process can take up to 24 hours, and we appreciate your patience.
Is Vindi Poorly Optimized Still?
So I recently upgraded to a new laptop, expecting a jump in performance in the game but instead it seems like Vindi is running as poorly as ever. I'm not even talking about the new areas, I'm still getting fps drops in places like Hilder Forest Ruins and the Sewers, even in Regina where it's just one small area. My computer can run Witcher 3 with graphical mods, all settings ultra, and hairworks on at 70fps easily but it can't do a steady 60fps here? That doesn't make any sense. Here are my specs btw:
CPU: i7-6700HQ 2.6GHz
GPU: GTX 1070
RAM: 16GB
Thoughts?
Comments
You have a quad core cpu with 2 logical cores per physical core. If you monitor your cpu usage, you'll find one of your cores maxed out, 1 with low use; and the remaining 6 completely idle.
PS: Funny enough.. a water cooled p4 at 5+ GHZ would run vindi better than any modern cpu.
Ah see I knew Vindictus was a single-CPU, CPU-heavy game, but I thought at this point, one core out of eight on a 6th gen i7 would be able to handle it. But I guess not +pain.
https://vindictus.gamepedia.com/Vindictus_Tweaks_and_Fixes
Unfortunately, I don't know if it no longer works or if it's even possible anymore.
Most of the wiki, if not all, is outdated. Pretty sure including this.
The reason they do this is because the 6700 or 6700k would draw too much power to be in a laptop. Thats not to say it wouldn't work but if they put the full version of the processor in there, the laptop's battery life is going to be dramatically reduced. So from the manufacturer's point of view, downgrading to something thats more power efficient greatly extends the life of the battery making the laptop more appealing for purchase to the general public. Achieving this efficiency normally rears its head in the form of lower clock speed, or not as high of a turbo boost.
I would ask if you had a GTX 1070, or a 1070 (Mobility) aka laptop variant. But that doesn't matter here seeing as it's only about a 10 to 12% performance difference & seeing how vindictus is mainly CPU bound, your GPU isn't going to play too big of a part here.
Just a note on how much clock speed impacts performance. I OC'd my Fx-8150 from 3.6Ghz up to 4.1Ghz. My framerate used to hang around the mid-30s to mid-40s, but after just a 500Mhz boost, my framerate now hangs around the mid 40s up to 60. Granted my FPS does drop sometimes, but the drops aren't as low as they used to be when I was running at 3.6Ghz. Clock speed isn't the only thing to look at though, because if you take an Intel 6700k clocked at 4.1Ghz, it's going to beat the hell out of my fx-8150 despite them being clocked identically. This is due to IPC, but that's another can of worms for another conversation.
Tl;dr: By going with the laptop, you ran the risk of buying one with a downgraded processor to compensate for running on battery power thus creating your bottleneck.
This is all that you said that matters. You're running a CPU at 2.6GHz. Yes, Vindi is poorly optimized, but only if your CPU is slow; it will use ONE core, and it will ONLY use that core, and it only cares about your clock speed. You could overclock an old ass Pentium single-core to 4+GHz and probably get the same FPS as an i7 7700, because that's all Vindi cares about. You can run Witcher 3 at high settings, but that's a game that will actually use your admittedly very very very good GPU, and it'll use it a lot.
But I also have my Nvidia settings where PhysX by default uses my GPU, so that probably makes it better. If you haven't done that already, right-click your desktop, click Nvidia Control Panel, and turn PhysX from CPU to GPU.
I don't think you understand how the PC market works... New does not mean better, and sometimes means worse or more frustrating. The whole point of this article is that newer PCs in the western world have quad-core which this game isn't designed for. Getting a new PC will literally not change the situation.
To elaborate; yes, Pentium 4 is single-core. But that doesn't matter. The game is being handled by ONE core out of the 4 cores just fine. It's just that the FPS meter doesn't work properly in quad-core. Actual FPS is still all good, so long as the game is being given a free core - which is what is normally supposed to happen by default.
There's also some way to go into properties and force a program to run on a custom core or something...but that's hard to do on MMOs which run multiple programs at once, or go through a launcher. But normally you don't have to do that; Windows is supposed to run its background programs on one core, share what little room is left, and delegate CPU-heavy programs like games to their own cores, which it does even for Vindi. Only really, really, really old programs fail to get switched to alternate cores, and Vindi isn't one of them.
---
In case you want hard data, the image on the left is with Chrome open and Windows doing its thing. You can't tell from the static image, but all of the processes are moving between cores, sometimes a core has 70% or more, sometimes less than 5%, and it keeps switching around.
The image on the right is with Vindictus active. Vindictus.exe and the other Nexon processes are also moving between the cores, but each process remains the whole process. As you can see, my quad-core's CPU usage went from 7% to 23%, and my RAM went from 30% to 40%. That's because being quad-core or single-core doesn't matter when it comes to handling a game. And the percentages in each core are mostly low.
In-game, I also get a nearly constant 59 FPS on the meter but in dungeons that bounces from 0 to 60. That's because the game's FPS detection is off on a quad-core, and it has nothing to do with how much CPU/RAM is being used, or what the Internet speed is (which is excellent, might I add).
In all honesty, I could probably have Vindi and GTA5 running at the same time and still get top TRUE FPS in both, because nearly every computer in the market in the past 5 years can handle that kind of thing (which is another reason why consoles are trash).
Spec:
I7 7700HQ
GTX 1060
16 GB RAM
While the base clock speed is 2.8 Ghz, it can turbo boost to 3.8 Ghz and MSI Dragon Center even OC it 10% more while plugged in. The 7700HQ is on par with the 3770K, the 6700HQ should have 0 trouble running vindi.
Even in BDO, I'll have around 60 FPS even in populated area.
I don't want to pick holes in your words, but this is not the first time someone misunderstands the concept of multiprocessing. : P In an SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) system there are no special cores and the programs usually don't affect which cores should be used. (only if they set the affinity but that's very rare) You see as if it used one core more than the others because the currently running thread on that particular core uses that much more processor power than the other thread on the other core. But context switches are so fast that it goes through all of the idle cores before the hardware monitor program could refresh its informations. The interval unit is called time slice or quantum, it's several milliseconds, and it's calculated from several factors, and it's also different on every kind of CPU. But basically one active process runs on all cores almost simultaneously, even the background processes, the system and the scheduler itself (that does the context switches) chooses the next idle core and executes the context switch on that core if necessary before delegating the thread execution.
However with setting the affinity in the task manager you can tell the scheduler to use specific cores for the process. But if you set more than one cores, it will be switched between those cores. Almost the same as on all cores but you can achieve something like higher priority if you find the active processes and set different affinities for them. Another thing that can be useful, but i heard that it caused problems in Vindi, is if you set a higher priority for the process. But it shouldn't be the problem most of the times especially because there are usually 1 or 2 running threads, the rest are waiting or sleeping or they are just short-living threads. Btw, with the affinity you can eliminate the context switches on that core thus saving some processor power, the only downside of it is that it won't utilize your cores evenly.
Yep, that's what I was thinking of - setting affinity! I tried that a few times on MMOs but doing it through properties is impossible when you go through a launcher, in my experience.
I've set higher priority before, too. But I find that makes relatively no difference, and that in MMOs it's better just to set the QoS to the game server.
Have you tried setting it in the Task Manager?
Btw, as i said setting the affinity only for one process won't prevent the system from doing context switches on that particular CPU core. Because the default affinity of a program is all cores, so it will only make difference if you set all the active processes' (the processes that use CPU often) affinities to different cores so the system can reduce the rate of the context switches drastically. I found an interesting article about the speed of it: http://blog.tsunanet.net/2010/11/how-long-does-it-take-to-make-context.html (the test was done on Linux, but the relevant part is how different the speeds are on different CPU's)
Yes, setting the priority won't make much difference because there aren't many active processes at once. It would only make difference if you had like 8 active processes that use much of every CPU core, so in that case setting the priority would run the process as first on all cores.
That's the only way to do it with launcher games, but unfortunately it only lasts during that one iteration of the process, which is why it's better to do it through properties if available.