FPS Performance & Spell effects

Feedback and Suggestions
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The FPS performance of this game has always been very underwhelming for as long as I’ve owned it. It’s very inconsistent between maps and also depending on which enemy type are in the map.

There have been some patches which have stated performance increases and reworks. While I don’t doubt there has been significant work done, it really hasn’t done much in terms of smoothing out what I mentioned above.

I have what is considered a pretty good PC. The oldest component in my PC is a GTX 1080 which to be fair, is still a really decent GFX card. So I could safely say that my PC can run Last Epoch on Ultra settings @ 60FPS, especially when I can run other games at 60+ FPS which are seemingly more system intensive.

Except I can’t run Last Epoch on Ultra @ 60FPS. If I stand still somewhere with no enemies on the screen, I’ll average somewhere in the mid-70FPS range. As soon as I move and enemies appear, you can take at least 20FPS away. If I teleport into a pack of enemies, or run over to them and start fighting, I can see my FPS drop down to 30, 25, 20… 10! It’s all over the place.

Now, in most modern games, if I can’t run at 60FPS on max graphical settings, I drop it down to High, or Very High, or Medium etc… or I customise the settings so that the game looks good and runs great.

On Very Low settings (which is what I have to play on now), I can idle in a map with no enemies on the screen at 100+ FPS. Usually it’s 120ish. This is great, obviously. Even on Very Low settings, if I jump into a pack of enemies, my FPS drops wildly and is very inconsistent. Even on Very Low, I have still experienced my FPS drop down to 10FPS.

I have tried all of the settings I can try. Full screen, windowed, VSync on/off, max FPS foreground/background, all the detail settings, various VRam texture amounts (that’s new), Streamer mode, Motion blur on/off (off, always off). Nothing seems to make the FPS consistent.

From what I can tell, Spell Effects are playing a huge role in decreasing the FPS of the game. There are some enemy types that are just ridiculous. Here’s a few off the top of my head.

  • Wengari Shaman (Cold spell)
  • Big spider with blue crystals on it (Lightning Orb bomb)
  • Molten looking chimera scorpion thing (Launches Rocks from its tail)

There’s others of course, but I just can’t recall the 3D model or the attack. There’s also some maps that I feel add to the degradation of FPS, namely the Coral-looking map. That map in particular I have noticed performance issues.

Is there any chance we can have a Spell Effect slider to turn down the effects?
(some of the spell effects are so intense, that when there’s 2 or 3 on top of eachother it’s like a simulated flash bang on my screen.)

What are the plans for more performance updates and is there any kind of ETA on those we can look forward too?

I love this game, but it’s frustrating to play with such inconsistent FPS performance.

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Yes, a slider or something for skill effects would be nice. However I think some of the fps issues we have in big packs are cpu-based due to the number of procs on AoE skills, necro minions, etc.

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Mostly this. The other big issue is the Engine used. Afaik it’s not a state of the art engine and brings problems along with certain situations aka a lot of stuff happening at once. Then again the game works better then some PoE builds I played where everything foze out untill i was dead or everything on the map died through proccs. I’m okay with the performecen right now but yes i think it could and should be better.

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A slider would be useful, or something to tone-down the effects. Sometimes player effects completely hide ground effects making them difficult to see.

i5-6600k @ 4.5ghz, gtx 1080ti, 24gb memory.

I have to play with Shadows on Very Low (= Off) because although they are really well done (and I love the low sun, long shadow effects - very pretty), the fps drop with combat and multiple mobs on screen is too much. Some areas’ light effects can also cause temporary drops as you move past lanterns/lights. I also have Reflections, Ambient Occlusion and Volumetric Fog all set to very low.

@Sile, you may want to try these settings. The game is not as pretty as it could be, but I get better fps during battles.

Standing at End of Time WP, my CPU is at 55% and my GPU is at 75%.
At Council Chambers, CPU 75%, GPU 75%.

Picking random WP’s, I get 55-75% CPU and 75% GPU and all I’m doing is standing still.

That seems a little over the top on usage - without any spell effects, monsters on screen etc, I would expect those numbers to be much lower. Over 1/2 cpu/gpu used already, so when the fighting starts there’s not a lot left available for spell effects, especially when it all kicks off!

I was trying out Spreading Frost node of Elemental Nova in Arena.

On later waves - as the packs get larger and larger - when Spreading Frost triggers the whole screen locks for a few seconds and then releases, making this skill almost impossible to use in Arena.

If I left click when the screen is locked up, I get a blue circle and program not responding and a crash. So it’s a series of “heart in mouth” moments using Spreading Frost in Arena as my fps goes up and down like a badly behaved yo-yo and makes the node pretty much unusable.

I mentioned the problem with these in 0.7.9. Link

They continue to cast spells on their buddies even when they are not on the screen. If you run past 1 and then another etc, the fps gets lower and lower and it never recovers unless you backtrack and kill the shamans - as you backtrack and kill them, the fps slowly recovers to "“normal.” Or FPS recovers for me when I leave the area.

I’m sure performance is on their “to do” list, but may have a lower priority right now as the game is very playable and they have a lot on their plates right now.

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The difference with PoE is, it now has 2 options for what renderer you choose. Vulkan has, for the most part, fixed all the performance issues for me. I can run that at max settings at high FPS pretty consistently. However, yeah there’s still some slow downs which are very frustrating and can get you killed. I generally run PoE on Medium to High gfx anyway. They have done a lot of work improving their effects and the options surrounding them.

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On my side there are few fos drops. If there are some, it’s right at the start if a map.

In general I see a lot of people post that have performance issues on relatively good rigs. The odd thing is that the game seems to run more stable on older rigs.

FX slider sounds like a good solution even if performance issues are solved. This way the game may get more accessible on low end machines.

I noticed fps drops with heavy network traffic. For example when I watch a stream on my 2nd screen, fps goes down. Also loading screens will make my video stream stutter or get stuck.

I did not expect such a high dependency on network traffic as I’m playing offline

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I think my real problem with all of this is there are well known enemy types chugging the performance of an otherwise playable game. Everyone knows the Wengari Shaman are problematic - but nothing is done about it. How hard would it be to just balance their skill (effects) more?

Same goes for the other problem effects. I wish the developers would take performance a bit more seriously. I really don’t understand how people are OK playing a game with such inconsistent frame rates. Not just LE, any game! High refresh rate monitors are more and more prevelant in gaming now. Not everyone has one, but that number is ever increasing. I mean, you’re doing something very wrong if you’re buying a 2070/2080/3080 etc and still playing on a 59hz monitor.

Anyway, back to the topic at hand. I would like to see EHG create a thread or a poll and gather information from the playerbase about problematic enemies and maps that lower frame rates. Grab all of the PC details (likely have a lot of that already) and see about making some changes. I’d love to play the game flat out, but I just can’t. It’s too frustrating. I streamed this game for a couple weeks on V.Low settings and with various GFX settings along the way, and the 10-13FPS (down from 70+FPS ) in large groups just burns me out.

I can’t be the only one… but again, I think a lot of people defend the poor performance and pin it on “Beta”. Sure… it’s been out for quite some time at this point. Let’s help to get the game in a smooth, playable state so that more people want to play it. I’ve had people in my stream and people I know personally outside of it that simply wont buy the game because they see how it performs. Kinda makes me sad because they’re missing out on one of the best skill systems in an ARPG.

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  • Molten looking chimera scorpion thing (Launches Rocks from its tail) - something is wrong with this patch i have fps drops too with R7 3700X and RTX 2080 Ti in 0.7.9 all was perfect.Yeah its EA but they did something wrong this patch.
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Ever since watching this Digital Foundry video on a Switch port of Ori and the Will of the Wisps, I’ve been wondering if EHG has also solved this apparent issue with Unity’s particle effect system (which is mentioned at 14:20 and the video should start there);

I don’t know enough about the subject, but it does appear it could be taxing on the CPU if too many of these particle effects are rendered with Unity’s innate particle system without some kind of similar solution incorporated by developer Moon Studios.

It’s definitely a good watch and interesting to see all the techniques Moon Studios leveraged to make their Unity game work on the Nintendo Switch with very few compromises (even if it is a side-scrolling game).

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Very interesting, though I’m curious to know how much of an overhead the recording/metrics software causes.

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That does point to a possible issue with the underlying engine.

Do you mean recording metrics in LE? Do you think that is what is using up 50% cpu and 75% gpu while standing still in town? (That sounds passive aggressive, but it’s really just a question!)

I know Elemental Nova will lock up or crash my pc if I use Spreading Frost and hit too many mobs, but I can hit far more mobs with Shatter Strike and not have any issues at all.

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No, on the video Andrew gave.

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Interesting vid… thanks for posting this

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Wow that video is pretty cool. The performance graphing they had and also that top view of the game world was pretty amazing.

I’m hoping EHG have some way of testing their game for bottlenecks in performance other than player feedback, since we all seem to have varying inconsistencies in performance.

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My notebook is an i5 8th generation, 8 ram, with a dedicated mx150 card, without ssd … it is a medium / low configuration, so in this type of game I usually put everything on low and close other programs, so I can play without many problems, both POE and LE. However in LE when I ignore the enemies on the map to get to the goal right away, the game starts to lose a lot of fps, it doesn’t happen in Poe … I think the game is calculating the action of the enemies even when they are very far from me, I don’t know, but it’s kind of frustrating, other than that I think the optimization is not that bad, but it can certainly improve.

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Disable the ragdoll enemie and making them disapear right ont heir death could be an option to improve our fps too

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Theres effects that have been catastrophically laggy since ive owned this game and its been that way for 2 years and barely improved so im not expecting it to change

Be nice if the devs didn’t add these clunky laggy animations that don’t even work properly

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That & all the calculations the cpu has to do that other games (like PoE & D3) don’t have to deal with (but obviously GD does). It’ll be interesting to see how multiplayer affects this, it should be both good (your cpu not having to do as much) & bad (who knows that the netcode is going to be like, plus ~400-500 wraiths on screen at once).

But yes,this game really does need more optimisation (in bucketloads).

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I’ve got an older “rig”, but I still retrofitted it with a Nvidia GTX 750 Ti which does a very good job on more graphically demanding games than this. I once posted about the stuttering issues that keep persisting no matter how much I fiddle around with Control Panel settings and the game settings. But I removed the post again hoping it would sort itself out with the next patch update. Sadly, nothing has changed and sadly, I cannot enjoy this otherwise very interesting development process. It’s a bit of a shame I have shelled out slightly above 30 EUR for the few hours I put into Last Epoch.

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Hopefully multiplayer’s shifting the computational burden from our pc’s to servers will help people in your kind of position.