Low preformance issues on hi-end rig

[crommcruac]

Hello everyone.

Sounds like a never-ending story but... I'm experiencing 2 major issues with the performance of FO4 engine which I'm trying to fix for last couple of days and I've run out of ideas.
My rig is as follows: Windows 10 64-Bit; CPU: i7-9700K @ 5GHz; GPU: RTX 2080 Ti; RAM: DDR4 48GB @ 3200MHz; HDD: PCIe NVMe 2TB SSD
You can see that this should easily do 100+ FPS - and it does but in the wasteland areas far from any buildings.

1. Well known major FPS drop in urban areas / settlements. It can drop to 5 FPS in basic settlement with just a few houses built.

I have identified that the problem above is related to increased draw call numbers and a CPU bottleneck they cause. Whenever there is increased draw calls when looking at the urban or built-up areas something starts to gnaw on one core of my CPU - and one core only. The other cores are pretty Idle with 10-20%. This is causing FPS to drop drastically with GPU being occupied at about 30% - lots of spare GPU power to use. Well, I guess that's obvious as if there is a CPU bottleneck there is not much do do for the GPU at 5 FPS.

Do you know ANY way to even that CPU load to the other cores?

I'm obviously aware of overall 'bad optimisation' of the engine that everyone blames. Yes, I am aware of broken precombines and famous Boston FPS fix - but that won't help in settlements as they are in definition not-precombined. Yes, I've tried to apply all tips & tricks I could google including lowering the overall quality to low; lowering quality & disabling shadows & godrays; disabling vsync; setting CPU priority to real-time; setting iNumHWThreads; setting multithreading in console/ini; setting power options in Windows - you name it.
All these solutions help a little but not as much as I'd expect. For instance turning the shadows down or off increase the FPS to 10 (!) but something still occupies one CPU core when lots of objects are in the screen (lots of draw calls)
Yes, I use a lot of mods but I've tested also raw unmodded game (only Boston precombine Fix) and have exactly the same problem.


2. Sudden drops in FPS for no reason.

I've made an interesting observation recently. I've saved the game on some random hill looking towards some factory and buildings. Next day I've loaded that game and to my surprise I've got solid 90 FPS and full load on GPU. My happiness was premature. I looked away from that factory and then looked back and it immediately dropped to 16 FPS - only 30% GPU load. Literally just looking away and back. Reloaded the game - still 16 FPS. Restarted the game, loaded - back to 90 / 100% load. Looked away and back - 16 FPS / 30% again. I've repeated this like 10 times - always the same result. I mean, seriously, WTF?
I've investigated it more and found out that with lowering the shadows quality I'm able to run around for some 30sec to 1 minute and then it suddenly drops again. And only restarting the game helps.

I've read somewhere that this may be due to some memory 'leak' coming from some shadow of broken light source and only restarting the game would help - and it does. Thing is it happens with shadows lowered to minimum as well - just seconds later.
Is there any way to avoid that?

 

TL;DR: low FPS, tried everything, nothing helps. HELP! :smile:

Edited March 26, 2021 by crommcruac

[HeyYou]

Did you do anything with precombines? Load any mods that break them?

 

What background processes are running? With that rig, you shouldn't have ANY FPS issues, at all......

[crommcruac]

Yes, I do use mods that break precombines. However even without those mods I have exactly the same problem, especially in settlements - one core maxed, the rest almost idle.

I don't run any heavy processes in the background, without F4 the CPU is on 2-3% load.

I know that on that rig F4 should fly. Imagine my frustration watching all those vids on YouTube where people having worse rigs have to LIMIT their FPS to 60 because their comps are too fast for F4 :mad:

 

EDIT:

I have downgraded 452.06 drivers - latest supporting 3D vision - to 411.63 - one of the first supporting RTX 2080 Ti.
Finally some improvement!
The CPU is still occupied at only 30% having one core maxed out... BUT the GPU is now at about 70% and the framerates almost doubled to 30ish (60 in 2D) in build-up areas making the game playable.
Also, no sudden drops of FPS observed before

Edited March 28, 2021 by crommcruac

[HeyYou]

Once precombines are broken in a save, they stay broken. Just disabling the mods that broke them won't change anything.

 

Uninstall all mods that break them, verify they aren't disabled in any of your ini files, then start a new game, and see how framerates are.