Horizon Zero Dawn

Discussion in 'Games, Gaming & Game-demos' started by Stone Gargoyle, Dec 4, 2019.

  1. Astyanax

    Astyanax Ancient Guru

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    Steams Vulkan precache definitely avoids the longer rebuilds, but COD, BF5/BFront, should pre-generate, tomb raiders should...

    to be fair, not every game will delay you pre-menu to get it done, they'll do it in the background as a low priority but then when you start level loading they'll do it as a high priority task.
     
  2. Arabaldo

    Arabaldo Active Member

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    Now that the game is released, you can use the coupon on epic...
     
  3. syklonis

    syklonis Member Guru

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    Well, thankfully I'm not running into the performance issues as the reviews have shown. Running around in the first area now and everything is very smooth, everything maxed except clouds. 60fps almost everywhere at 1440P on my good ole' GTX 1080ti (knock on wood so far lol) Maybe the issues were at 4k..
     
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  4. anxious_f0x

    anxious_f0x Ancient Guru

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    I’ve been checking out the dynamic resolution scaling mode at 4K and I’m also not seeing it being anywhere near as bad as the DF video, GPU usage stays around 90%, definitely doesn’t look 1080p either.

    I’ve always found Digital Foundry to be pretty reliable but I’m just not seeing many of the same issues on this occasion.

    One issue I was able to replicate was the weird FPS and GPU usage drops around the first town you visit with a lot of NPCs in it, this is also one of the rare areas where the PS4 Pro dropped frames as well, so there’s definitely something strange going on there.
     

  5. JonasBeckman

    JonasBeckman Ancient Guru

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    Borderlands 3 on D3D12 builds a ~800 MB cache total split between the game in one folder caching separate files for I think it was compute, vertex and pixel along with Microsoft getting roughly a ~100 MB Windows D3D cache file in another folder and if enabled AMD and NVIDIA driver caching would probably get a big part of this too which can be optimized and utilized faster by the drivers.
    (Or so I guess even if the game does caching and low-level API games in particular store caches of their own.)

    Even on a SSD that initial cache time is 4 - 5 minutes and the following start-ups where it builds or adds to the Windows OS cache takes a couple of seconds.
    Game and driver updates I generally delete all cache files as from checking file sizes the game (hopefully) invalidates older data but adds so the file size gets larger and larger and since new game updates and drivers requires a full rebuild anyway it saves a bit of storage space removing the old stuff but it still takes the same amount of time.

    OS updates I throw out the Win10 cache file, changes to the D3D files I throw out the entire thing just in case bit overkill but it works.
    Specifics I would assume only D3D12 compiler DLL files would maybe need this done just in case but eh might as well be thorough but these are mainly updated between Win10 major build changes only and seldom if at all for the cumulative mostly security oriented monthly updates.
    (Well not just security but most of it for the general update cycle focuses on that.)

    Still would have preferred a generic pipeline cache file it could start with something like DOOM and a few others on Vulkan API (And I think a few on D3D12) utilize to cut down the compile time or maybe do it on the background getting the main menu up quickly.
    Can see the game itself taking some 8 - 10 minutes if nothing bugs even on a SSD if there's a ton of small files and stuff for building the FAQ's suggested 2 GB cache total going by how it takes a lengthy amount of time for Borderlands 3 which is roughly half of it.


    EDIT: OS cache when invalidated just makes a new folder starting over from this location instead, disk cleanup has a way to remove these but it likely cleans the current cached files too unless if in use by whatever running process makes them.
    (Various UWP apps and then a number of D3D12 games from my checks.)


    EDIT: Ah fatigue, quoted the right quote this time.
     
    Last edited: Aug 7, 2020
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  6. syklonis

    syklonis Member Guru

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    So I forced AF, and immediately ran into stuttering issues. I have really never seen a game react this bad in a long long time by forcing AF. So unfortunately I suggest letting the application control it until the devs can hopefully patch in a fix for that. Other than that, so far so good..need to reach the first own as Anxious_f0x mentions above!
     
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  7. Amaze

    Amaze Ancient Guru

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  8. Darren Hodgson

    Darren Hodgson Ancient Guru

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    Don't play Call of Duty or Battlefront which might explain why I've only seen two games out of literally 900 installed games that compile shaders during loading (Detroit: Become Human and Horizon Zero Dawn). Red Dead 2 uses Vulkan but I do not recall that having an extended loading time the first time I loaded it up. In fact, that game ran great for even at launch...

    ... Horizon Zero Dawn on the other hand. Don't know what to make of the PC port really after almost 3 hours playing it. Seems very unoptimised to me in comparison with Death Stranding which runs awesome on my PC maxed out at 1440p and well over 60 fps. Horizon on the other hand defaults to the Favour Quality preset but the game, even with G-SYNC, does not feel smooth and it never hits 60 fps, it seems to peak at around 57 fps but averages anywhere between 38 and 52 during gameplay. Even switching to the PS4 (Ordinary) setting only increases the framerate by 1-3 fps on average and still does not hit 60 fps. It doesn't hit 60 fps on the Lowest preset either. VRAM usage is also very high. I noticed 9 to 10.5 GB of it being used, which I am sure is the cause of the extreme stuttering and 2-5 second pause during the first benchmark run (I literally saw the scenery drawing in piece by piece at the start!).

    In the end, I decided to cap the framerate with RTSS to 30 fps which results in GPU utilisation of about 40-45% and CPU utilisation of about 50-60% max. This is on the Favour Ultimate Quality preset at 1440p and it seems to hold 30 fps 99.99% of the time except for a second or so when switching to cutscenes or when saving. Oddly, despite playing with a controller the game does not feel as smooth to play as it did on the PS4 Pro, which ran at a checkerboarded 4K. The game looks slightly better but I'm disappointed that the game is not running better. Capping at 30 fps also reduces the stuttering which is more noticeable when the game is running between 30 and 60 fps. However, it doesn't fix it completely and the game feels "heavy" and a little laggy. It's not too bad once I adjusted to it but after playing Death Stranding at 60-90 fps this is a real blow to the Decima engine to have to run it at 30 fps!

    I have also noticed some minor flashing artifacts while playing though it is real corner-of-the-eye stuff and, no, I am not using image sharpening as mentioned in the NVIDIA driver notes. I am surprised to see that NVIDIA have not released an updated driver to fix this issue but then it seems many issues go unfixed for months so maybe I shouldn't be (the Forza Motorsport 7 issues for example). AMD seem to be better at getting game ready drivers out for release than NVIDIA these days.

    P.S. The cutscenes look and run "odd" at anything other than 30 fps IMO. In fact, the whole game just seems to work better at 30 fps which is what the engine was designed to do on the PS4.
     
    Last edited: Aug 8, 2020
  9. MerolaC

    MerolaC Ancient Guru

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    Yes, I know.
    I didn't have time to test in-game.
    I will see how that goes for me.
     
  10. Amaze

    Amaze Ancient Guru

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    Yes I have also seen some flashing artifacts. Sort of looks like when you overclock memory too far, but they don't show up very often yet.

    I should also add I have no kind microstuttering or the kind spikes that Digital Foundry saw. It's pretty smooth with Rivatuner locked to 60 at 1080p.
     
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  11. MaXThReAT

    MaXThReAT Master Guru

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    No game stopping issues here. Performance is what I expected with my old CPU/System, getting between 30-60fps Ultra setting. Seeing some artifacts as well. Like I said no major issues though. Beautiful freakin game.
     
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  12. Pandora's Box

    Pandora's Box Member Guru

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    So the game runs smooth as silk for me at max settings with clouds set to high and motion blur off. This is a definite improvement over the PS4 Pro. It looks absolutely stunning at native 4K on my CX OLED in HDR. I may drop down to 1440P so I can play at 120hz refresh with HDR instead of 4K at 60hz with HDR. I get 58fps in the benchmark at 4K with max settings and clouds set to high with motion blur off. I did set anisotropic filtering to 16x in the nvidia control panel as it definitely is not working with the in game settings.

    Looking at MSI Afterburner after playing the game for a while: It looks like the game is using all 12 cores on my 3900X but is not using the SMT cores, they sat idle the entire time I was playing. System RAM usage was around 11.5GB while playing, after exiting the game it dropped down to 2.5GB. My 2080Ti was pegged at 100% load the entire time, temperature was at 76C - which is higher than it usually is when playing other games (around 68C). I may repaste the GPU this weekend, something I have been meaning to do for a while now.

    Played the intro area and hunted some small animals. my god - I KNEW that playing with a mouse and keyboard in this game would be a night and day difference compared to on the PS4 with a controller. This game was meant to be played on a pc, I can precision aim on a rabbit bouncing across the screen and still hit it.

    I did not finish this game on my PS4 Pro as I got frustrated with the controller. I think knowing that if I was playing with a mouse and keyboard I would not have been missing the precision shots I was trying to make with the PS4 controller. When they announced this game was coming out on PC - I knew it would be a day one buy for me.

    Definitely know what I'm going to be doing all weekend.

    PC Specs:
    • AMD Ryzen 9 3900X
    • Noctua NH-D15
    • Asrock X470 Taichi
    • EVGA RTX 2080 Ti XC Ultra Gaming - GeForce Driver 451.85
    • 16GB G.Skill DDR4 3600MHz 16-16-16-34 1T
    • Inland 1TB NVMe SSD (Game is installed on this drive)
    • Samsung 840 EVO 1TB SSD
    • Samsung 840 EVO 750GB SSD
    • EVGA 850 G3 PSU
    • Fractal Design R6
    • Sennheiser PC-37X Headset
    • LG 55" CX OLED
     
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  13. kx11

    kx11 Ancient Guru

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    tried it myself and it seems alright, reflections and clouds hits fps the hardest, the game did hog 11gb of vram during the benchmark :p

    [​IMG]
     
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  14. XenthorX

    XenthorX Ancient Guru

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    Driver issues with Nvidia, Control Panel sharpening makes the game ground texture completely bug out.

    Also gameside, my computer crashed (power outrage whole city) during game session, now everytime i log back, the outfit i was wearing has corrupted textures.

    5820k is really pushing its limit for me, 4621Mhz overclock on 6cores is stable for games but i wouldn't try video editing or heavy compiling with it, unless i want a BSOD within 30minutes.
    4.5Ghz to 4.6Ghz made a huge difference but i'm still CPU limited here.

    [​IMG]
     
    Last edited: Aug 8, 2020
  15. JonasBeckman

    JonasBeckman Ancient Guru

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    Per the performance articles and known info including from the developers.

    Yes.


    So let's see here.

    Heavy RAM usage, potentially also heavy VRAM usage I've seen examples up to and over 10 GB but I don't know if it also does this thing with reserving some 80 - 85% of the GPU total which is why it can read 10 GB VRAM "usage" yet still don't do much in terms of texture caching which is why it loads and unloads and you see pop-in and texture fade-in frequently. Just sets VRAM to X percent of total available but how much is actually utilized and how much is just zero filled nothing that's a question.

    Stuttering including from overrides like anisotropic filtering (Which is currently bugged in the game itself it seems as one of the known issues.) also part of the framerate limiter and the games enforcement of double buffered VSync and lack of backbuffers.
    (Game seems to be using two, 3 - 4 would be better for minimum.)

    Potentially also timing issues as the games framerate limiter even with full-screen can be off by a little bit which will make frame pacing and the resulting stuttering more noticeable.

    Games also outputting to 8-bit ... including for HDR where it should be doing 10-bit.

    Guerilla Games also confirmed animations run at 30 FPS so that's why hair, mouth movement and more looks weird at 60+ FPS.


    Game crashes and the shader cache are a thing too but the game is also D3D12 and pushing hardware in interesting ways (PCIE x16 seemingly actually makes a performance difference for one of the few times that happened.) so I would probably try minus RAM XMP's and other overclocking if I had any crashes although it's hard to tell if there aren't additional game issues too or possible driver problems both from AMD and NVIDIA that could factor in.
    One report on that so far was from Durante over on the Meta Council forums, two crashes after one to two hours and then reducing the GPU overclock the game ran for 6 hours stable so that's something to check on for anyone getting crashes at least. :)

    There's probably more, I picked the game up via Greenman at a 15% -20% off or whatever it was but am having work done on the existing backlog waiting on further patches before jumping into this.
    I am expecting the timing issues and frame rate erratic behavior and stuttering to be fixable but the 30 FPS animations would be a more major overhaul and then whatever else needs to be worked on or resolved could be well we'll see.




    EDIT: The skip cutscene button combination is Alt-F4 ? Now that's a choice of buttons that someone probably should have considered some other alternative for but oh well apparently it works and it doesn't just close the game. Ha ha.
     
    Last edited: Aug 8, 2020
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  16. Undying

    Undying Ancient Guru

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    Considering user above have the same gpu with 10900x pushing few fps more your 5820k is doing a great job still. I was expecting a bigger difference between the two.
     
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  17. kx11

    kx11 Ancient Guru

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    at 4k most of the work is on the gpu so it's not where the 2 cpus will show a gap in performance , also notice how his benchmark is using 20gb of SDram while mine is 10gb , weird game
     
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  18. Astyanax

    Astyanax Ancient Guru

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    there is definitely not 900 vulkan or dx12 titles, so that'd explain your experience.

    Forza's an edge case of an optimization that does not reproduce for everyone, WoW to some extent is affected and prior implementation of the optimization also triggered flickering on RE Engine (including DMC5)

    I fully expect now the issue has a reproducible STR in FM7 the remaining cases will be rectified since they likely have a singular root cause.


    Believe it or not, but this is actually preferred cpu utilization.

    If you want to make your game use SMT you have to get really low level with the cpu management so you're not running constant running threads on the SMT's.

    You need to clear the DX Shader cache in disk cleanup.
     
    Last edited: Aug 8, 2020
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  19. Darren Hodgson

    Darren Hodgson Ancient Guru

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    That wasn't the point I was making, only that most games load up quickly post-release and do not require a shader cache build that takes several minutes. It seems to be a step backwards to me, going from a seamless, transparent process to one that is obvious and intrusive. I read that every time a game is patched that the shader cache has to be rebuilt which for me takes over 15 minutes (Detroit: Become Human is the same) even though Horizon is installed to an SSD.
     
  20. Astyanax

    Astyanax Ancient Guru

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