Question found a game that brings my 3700x to its knees

[maddogmcgee]

So I downloaded Pillars of Eternity 2 on the Windows Store and it has to be the most buggy, badly optimised games I have seen in a long time. I get around 20fps AND stutters down lower.

3700x, 6700xt and 16gig ram.

CPU usage is literally around 90-95 percent while playing. It's made by Obsidian who has been taken over my Microsoft so they don't even have the indie game no money excuse. Literally so bad I had to buy a GOG version so that I could download mods that try to fix it.

Anyone got any worse examples they can think of?

(apologies if this is in the wrong section)

 

[DAPUNISHER]

You have probably done all this, but just in case - https://steamcommunity.com/app/560130/discussions/0/2572002906843374108/

I wonder if turning off SMT and a few physical cores in the UEFI would have the same effect, since it would not have the extra threads to nerf priority with?

 

[coercitiv]

found a game that brings my 3700x to its knees

Sounds like you have it the other way around, you found the CPU that brought PoE2 to it's knees

 

[NTMBK]

Is it because it's the Windows Store version? That might be doing weird things.

 

[DrMrLordX]

Is it because it's the Windows Store version? That might be doing weird things.

He bought it from GoG.

 

[maddogmcgee]

Maybe I have just been lucky with games I have played in the past but this game seems just a mess all around. I got it for free on game pass which is why I tried it but the performance was horrible. I did play around with reducing the cores available to it in windows but refused to turn off SMT in bios for a single game.

Windows Store games are also different versions to Steam/GOG and have all sorts of weird copy protection going on, so are usually impossible to mod.

I liked the game so bought it on GOG for a small performance improvement and so I could download the mods I had seen. The mod link brought the CPU usage down by forcibly reducing the number of cores available and stopping SMT but the performance is still pretty bad. And by bad, I mean a stuttery mess, I am used to playing some strategy games well below 60fps.

Playing in the large towns, it honestly reminds me most of when I tried to play AOE2 on a 486 as a kid .

I would be raging so hard if I followed step 14 of their trouble shooting without having any success.

 

[StinkyPinky]

Weird, I don't remember having any issues with that game and I think I played it on a 8700k with a 1070 GPU at the time.

 

[NTMBK]

He bought it from GoG.

Missed that bit of the OP, thanks!

 

[JoeRambo]

POE and POE2 are great games. I dont remember having any issues with performance, I think I have played them on 8700K + my trusty 1080TI on 3440x1440 resolution without any problems. Tried loading it now on 10900K and 3090 and it is flying.

I think it could be problem with game/driver optimization not working well on ZEN/ZEN2 CCX architecture. Could be some locks, or inter thread comms or some bad interaction with AMD graphics driver.

Extreme example on what could happen to chips that stray from mainstream too much and run bad code that assumes things:

63 Cores Blocked by Seven Instructions | Random ASCII – tech blog of Bruce Dawson (wordpress.com)

Something like that could be happening to PoE2, on less extreme scale, but killing perf nonetheless.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

I looked around reddit, Nvidia forums, and a few other sites. It seems to affect AMD and Intel users indiscriminately. And there are Ryzen 5 owners reporting no issues, while a couple of Haswell i5 users are saying nothing helps much. I did see there were several fixes, including running the game as Admin, and adding -force-d3d11 to the command line arguments.

It also appears, that on top off CPU issues, Obsidian has fixes for Nvidia users - https://support.obsidian.net/articl...s-and-constant-crashing-with-nvidia-gfx-cards

 

[maddogmcgee]

Very interesting to hear that some people have had no problems at all. I must admit I dismissed the claims they had been unable to replicate some of the issues as larp. I have tried admin but try to force d3d11 tomorrow and see how I go. If I hadn't sold sold my wife's video card, I would test it on her system as well.

 

[LikeLinus]

I realize this is a bit off-topic, but I purchased my son and I, the Far Cry 5 game to play around with. His PC is an AMD 2700x w/ a 1060 SSC 6GB and the one (of many, lol) PC I was using was a 9700X with a RTX 3080 for testing (the GPU belongs in my 5090x). We were sitting side by side and started the game to get through the first mission, so we could Co-Op together. He was using my BenQ SW271 (27" 4K) and I was using an LG LG 27UL850-W (27" 4K). We both set ours to 4K and Ultra. Color me surprised when his actually ran the game pretty well and wasn't a shutter show!! He had to turn off one or two settings, but otherwise, it ran in the 40FPS range and didn't lag. I never looked at mine since I sent it to Ultra, HDR and the one setting he couldn't try, lol. But with us literally side-by-side, it was hard to tell the difference. I think that is one thing that reviews do not actually do. Just because his was probably running quite a bit slower FPS wise, it was still playable and wasn't horrible. We noticed a couple of slow downs, but nothing major and it didn't stop gameplay. Call me surprised! His 1060 wasn't horrible.

My oldest needs a new GPU thought. I need to build him a computer since he's been using a laptop in college the past few years, lol. My next project and then we can have a mini-lan.