Performance drops sometimes on entering new zones

Bug Reports
1

In general the game runs great for me, pretty much capped at 60 fps all the time.
But two times when I entered a new zone during the compain, the perfomance dropped to something like 10fps.
If I go to the previos zone, the perfomance is great again, if I portal out of the zone - too, but if I return to the “broken” zone, the perfomance drops back.
After I restarted the game, the same zones started to work properly. so I suspect they loaded somehow incorrectly.

Zones where I had the problem:
Necropolis of the Deep (60fps) > Yulia’s Haven (10fps)
The Citadel Sewers (60fps) > The Immortal Summit (10fps)

The last game session (with the second occurance) was pretty short, I started at Yulia’s Haven,
went to Nests of the Fallen, completed a quest there, returned to Yulia’s Haven, finished the quest, went towards The Citadel Sewers. Killed some monsters on the way, but nothing crazy.
Everything probably took me less than 30 minutes. I have much longer game sessions sometimes without any problems.

Tried to repro a couple of times by going fr[performance_drop.zip|attachment]
om The Citadel Sewers to The Immortal Summit, but didn’t happen again.

System information, Game log, Graphics settings:
(upload://27QhPrNfW9yQaltQAp0TJRQLmtQ.zip) (26.9 KB)

2

Hey there… Welcome to the forums…

The game is in beta and is generally unoptimised so there will be situations where you will see performance drops…

Known situations that affect performance are usually high mob or minion density and multiple concurrent skill procs (from the player/minions/mobs). Sometimes performance can also be directly related to the build/skills the player is using - for example a rogue proccing acid pools all over the screen or a sentinel proccing auto smite attacks on 20 mobs at the same time.

While its hard to confirm, as not everyone has issues in the same place, there are also maps that are more complicated and require more from a system than others… Sometimes these are just unoptimised (the devs regularly update maps for performance & pathing) but other times there may be a bug in the actual map design (e.g. the particle graphic effects in the backgrounds).

Of the zones you mention. Immortal Summit has been reported as a potential performance problem map, but not the other…

Obviously in-game settings dramatically impact on the extent on the performance loss in these types of situations. Special features like grass can impact things when one map might have none and another a lot… Hardware and drivers also play an important part in this and its generally recommended to be more conservative with settings than you would in a fully completed and released game.

If you include:

  1. your player.log
  2. le_graphicsmanager.ini
  3. output from a dxdiag report

then maybe I can make some recommendations to help minimise bigger fps/performance drops…

3

Hi @vapourfire,

Thank you for your reply. Yes, I understand that the game is in beta and I hope my report will help the team make it better =)

I already uploaded the files you mentioned in the original post, please let me know if I did it wrong and should reupload them.

I don’t think the reasons for performance drops that you listed could be related to this bug, at least not directly.

In both cases on my screen were very little mobs/minions (in the city there’s no monsters in the entire zone). And the problem persisted even when I didn’t use any skills.

The most interesting thing is that most of the time these zones work perfectly for me, steady 60fps.
So usually the graphics settings, my character, monsters, sceneries don’t cause even slight problems there. Everything works great.
But during these two times the zones somehow became completely unplayable because of the consistent 10fps performance. Other zones at the game session were fine, I could travel between two zones and get back and forth 60 > 10 > 60 > 10 … fps.
But after I restarted the game, the broken zones started to work at 60fps and I couldn’t reproduce the issue, even though I didn’t change any settings, or my character and at least in Yulia’s Haven the monster/npc density also didn’t change.

So I strongly suspect that zones can break during loading.

4

Nope… didnt work… just showing this…

5

There might be something in the player.log file (or the -prev if it has not been overwritten yet) that could indicate what is happening…

Loading into maps is one of the biggest “strains” on the system resources as it unloads the old and loads the new in a few seconds - this is usually when people with older hardware and/or those trying to use higher settings experience problems… So hopefully the logs have something the devs can work from…

6

Attempt 2 to upload:
performance_drop.zip (26.9 KB)

Interestingly enough, a broken zone stays broken when I leave and re-enter it.
So if it breaks once, all the consequent loadings/unloadings are also affected.
But only for that one zone.
And it’s not a temporary problem during/around the loading.
The zone stays broken even after the “strain” is supposed to end (i.e. after the zone is fully loaded).

7

Ok… Lets see… Oh damn its a laptop… arggh… :wink:

First things I notice:

  1. Your OS could use an update… its 19042… The latest is 19044… However, earlier in the year around 19042 time, there were MS patches that messed up gaming - they have since been replaced but I would recommend you upgrade to at least 19043 to be sure. and also make sure that there are no failed updates…

  2. On this same note, please make sure that all your laptop firmwares/bios/device drivers are up to date…

  3. Your GPU drivers - there is an update for your iGPU driver release Dec 2021. Your 3070 driver looks recent enough and I am going to assume based on the lack of DirectX errors that its ok…

  4. Its a laptop… Laptops have their own voodoo juice that handles swapping between the iGPU and discreet GPU on a system to save battery life and juggle performance dynamically - this works well, but it makes finding performance issues very hard… The first thing you have to do on a laptop is ensure that the game is ONLY running the discreet 3070 GPU and NEVER on the iGPU… When LE loads into a new map, for a split second it stops using the GPU and on some laptops, this randomnly confuses its voodoo to assume the the iGPU must take over… which would obviously give really bad comparitive performance once loaded… You can set LastEpoch.exe to only run on the 3070 no matter what in two places - at the driver config level or in the advanced graphics options on Windows 10… Hopefully this will be the solution as its really easy to resolve.

  5. Also related to laptops… make 100% sure that the laptop is locked in performance mode when trying to play LE (probably with its power brick plugged in). … some laptop voodoo can also dynamically adjust the clockspeed/performance of its gpus and this dynamic action can cause bizzare problems in the game ranging from crashing to freezes or even big FPS spikes. On the same note… make sure that the voodoo sauce app that your laptop uses is also up-to-date…

  6. As you are using Steam, please make sure to do a game file verification to ensure that the install is ok…

  7. A few other things:

    • Your system is reporting LiveKernelEvent 17d errors - Livekernelevents are not what you want to see in a log as they can point to something serious that needs dealing with… I have seen plenty of 141 & 144 but never seen a 17d one… I was only able to find one reference to this - here. From a few weeks ago… It may not specifically apply, but I would recommend you look at your View Reliability History and Event viewer and see if there is anything more specific about this. The key is you should not leave any livekernelevent unexplained as it could point to a potential failure of some kind - usually just as the warranty expires.

    • I dont think Nioh2 will play on your system.

8

Thank you for your recommendations. I’ll try to follow them, but I’d like to highlight that when the problem occurs, it breaks one zone permanently (until restart) and doesn’t affect other zones.
So, I can “fix” the performance just by going back to the previous zone or “break” it again by going to the broken zone.

I’m not a game developer, but I’d be quite surprised if my OS somehow managed to figure out in what zone I’m now and switched to iGPU only when I’m there =)
Just based on that, I somehow doubt that it’s my laptop’s problem and not the game’s problem. Will post here when/if it happens again after updating the OS, etc.
Also I can try to check what GPU is under the load when it happens.

It actually runs fine, except sometimes it refuses to launch (crashes on launch) until I reboot my laptop. Haven’t had such problems with any other games and it seems to be a somewhat known issue (example article). Kernel errors could be related to these crashes.

9

I understand your response…

However, what you are experiencing is not something that can be reproduced - I loaded up those maps when you first posted to see if the new patch 0.8.4 had caused a new problem but I have no issues and no subsequence loading of a map or next map makes any difference…

So the next step is to try an isolate what is different between your setup and anyone elses…

If you do nothing else: PLEASE enforce the GPU used by the game engine… This is a common laptop issue and usually solves a lot of performance related problems for games and even 3d apps.

Kernel errors could be related… Again up to you, but I would not feel comfortable unless I knew exactly why these where happening.

10

Also, FYI I played before through the whole campaign on an older patch on the same laptop and haven’t encountered this problem. It was when the big ocean boss was the last one.
And now I had it twice in two days.

Drivers, etc could obviously change since then, but just an extra data point.

11

Again… the forum would be flooded with people having this issue if it were a common problem… I am not saying the game may not be at fault - a lot has changed with each patch but unless everyone else is having the same issue there has to be a set of criteria specific to you that is causing this. The devs could have changed something to fix another problem and inadvertently caused what you are experiencing.

Ideally it would be good to try and find a similar laptop to yours using the same GPU & CPU and see if it does the same thing… Unfortuantely that would probably be very hard to do…

Drivers… Yes… this is always possible… earlier in the year there were Nvidia drivers that cause very specific problems on 30 series cards. Rolling back was a temporary solution until new drivers came out.

12

That is at least 2 patches ago… maybe even more as Lagon was the last boss for a while… lots of changes since then.

On this same note… Did you install anything new between your last playthrough and playing on this new patch? Anything upgrades, updated?

13

Yes, I skipped at least one major patch.
8.2 sounds plausible.

By installed, you mean hardware? Hardware - no.
Software - yes. From interesting ones I installed nvidia voice recently, it should’ve created a virtual audio input/output. But I didn’t launch it for a long time, don’t know if it could be related.

Also I just remembered one interesting thing about zone switching. Sometimes when I start traveling to a new zone and my screen is already showing the loading screen, I can hear that the monsters from the previous zone are still attacking me for some time. And I spam one of my attacks that also heals me to make sure I don’t die. I definitely encounter it when there’s a time travel animation (with the “space” tunnel), don’t remember whether I did it before getting the performance issue.
But using skills / attacking / being attacked / killing monsters during the loading screen sounds like something that could cause bugs =)

14

Software… hmm… Some people have trouble with the VB-Audio virtual audio devices that are used for streaming… But I dont recall that causing performance issues… I have no experience with Nvidia Voice but from the webpage it is using the GPU & AI to improve voice streaming - so its using your GPU but realistically unless that app is buggy, your 3070 should be able to handle that kind of processing…

Out of interest… have you tested these issues on a Very Low quality setting? I have found that some settings seem to enable a lot more than expected on the back end… For example, dropping for VeryHigh to Medium doesnt look much difference but the games stability / performance on less capable hardware is much improved… Be interesting to see if a Very Low setting makes any difference to your broken zones…

Zone switching and hearing the mobs attacking… Thats quite an old bug that I thought was fixed/changed so that you couldnt be damaged while it loaded a new area - there are a few posts about that from some community testers… It would be pretty odd that you are still experiencing that one. Did you run the Steam file verification?

15

Nope. Given that in the non-broken zones the performance stays great, not sure that’d change anything. I have some more interesting stuff to share, let me know if you still want me to try this after seeing it =)

It is possible that I cannot be damaged, don’t know how to reliably test that. So far just didn’t want to risk it and healed just in case.

I intentionally didn’t try to fix anything yet, wanted to try to repro it more and check the theory with iGPU. Yesterday I tried to run through the last two zones from my path and I couldn’t repro. Today I decided to repeat the full path and was able to repro the problem 2 times in a row. The second attempt I have even recorded: link.

Near the end I had to cut out small parts to not share my personal stuff with the entire world, so don’t be surprised by some time travels =)

00:00 - 05:10 : my route to repro the bug
05:10 - 05:35 : showcase of the low fps
05:35 - 06:00 : showcase that in the previous zone the performance is still great
06:00 - 06:40 : same, but with town portal
06:40 - 08:14 : performance graphs

Notably, we can see that while I’m in the broken zone, it uses 85% of my 3070 (so not iGPU) and 90-100% of one of my CPU cores. And when I leave the broken zone - 35% of 3070 and all cores are utilized ~evenly. Also it allocated 300 extra MB of RAM betwen 6:40 and 8:15.
It’s not in the recording, but I left the game open in the broken zone for a bit longer and I believe it ate all the remaining RAM and made my Windows quite unhappy about it =)
So, looks like a memory leak or an infinite loop that creates objects while I’m in the broken zone.

And here are logs for my first repro:
performance_drop_2.zip (430.1 KB)
and the second (recorded) repro:
performance_drop_3.zip (746.6 KB)

Also, just in case, the first two times I had this issue, I didn’t have the boots that create the vines, so they are probably not related.

I’ll try to follow your recommendations from before and see if any of them help, will keep you updated.

16

Ok… I am about to call it a night but the thing that I noticed the most in a quick view of your video:

Alt tabbing to task manager rather than using an overlay like Rivatuner or that Nvida one you were using can cause skewed figures because you are forcing the GPU to run in both 2d mode for the taskmanager window and 3d in the background and the game has the background limits in place which are flaky at best so I am just looking at the Nvida one in the corner…

On the bottom right metrics, shows your GPU Clock drops from an average of 1905MHz in the ok sections to around half of that in the “broken sections” ~ about 1000Mhz The memory MHz also drops from 7000 to 6000… Your GPU dropping half its clock speed could more than explain the performance drop from 60 to 10fps…

Only issue is why is it doing that? your gpu is not reaching thermal throttling and is idling even in the broken sections when only the game is displayed…

So I was looking at your settings again and I noticed something odd.

Your laptop monitor supports 1080p @ 240Hz… effectively 240fps…
Your settings are showing you have vsync enabled AND
you have framerate limiting enabled at 60fps…

The vsync should be telling the game to go to 240fps which the framerate limit would be telling it to only go to 60… Normally these settings are exclusive but in your ini file they are both enabled… Not sure how this happened or what this could potentially be causing for the game… In the past, vsync has caused odd issues with LE so the recommendation is to use the framerate limiting as the default… I would suggest checking this in-game and seeing if the settings menu is showing both enabled. If not, then I would edit the ini file in notepd and set Vsync = Off… Maybe this will have an impact… I dont know… its definitely odd…

With the same issue… at a driver level… are there any overrides or half vsync settings enabled on your GPU… Is there anything the driver is enforcing like antialiasing etc?

17

It supports 240fps, but I configured it in windows settings to run in 60fps mode (just because I don’t need more and I don’t want to give my gpu more work than necessary).
I checked the settings. I suppose an older version of the game allowed me to configure vsync + 60 fps limit (that is not super weird given that my display runs at 60hz), but when I tried to change them now, it only allowed to have either vsync or fps limit.

Also I updated my windows and verified game files.
None of that helped so far, here are more logs:
performance_drop_4.zip (29.3 KB)

Also, given that I can consitently repro the problem now, maybe I could collect some more useful logs for you? E.g. if you have some --verbose / --debug hidden options or if you can give me a special build, I’m happy to help =)

18

I recorded one more video: link.

This time I played in window mode, so the alt tab doesn’t screw up the task manager.
The graphs look consistent with what happens in the game (gpu drops during loading, etc).
So hopefully you can use them. I hope/suspect that 2d Windows stuff is randered by iGPU, at least the task manager shows that it is doing something.
But I’m not sure how to interpret the graphs. Task mananger shows clear difference in gpu usage between broken and good zones. But nvidia overlay doesn’t show it (or I don’t see it that clearly).
CPU also behaves interestingly in the task manager.
With this video I think I disproved the theory about memory leak / infinite allocation.
At one point I managed to get RAM up to 12gb, but then it dropped back to 11.
Another interesting thing is that in the window mode the game only dropped to 20fps when I first visited the broken zone, and after I reentered it, it dropped to 10 and stabilized there for all the following visits.
Maybe it was higher on the first visit because the game window (and resolution) is smaller now. But then I don’t understand why it dropped again on the second visit.

Also, I updated my GPU drivers and that also didn’t help.

19

Window’d mode… yes, that stops the skewing of the numbers.
Window’d mode changing performance. Yes, it does affect fps for some users but usually not substatially enough to be relevant.

240fps, changes etc… I have been playing for about 18months and the game has never allowed vsync and framerate limiting at the same time - its illogical for it to have ever done this. There are plenty of issues with driver level overrides vs game configs that cause problems for players… especially if they contradict - the game tends to do very weird things.

I am concerned about the GPU Clock speed fluctuations - this is unexplained and I dont feel it should be ignored. I was too tired to check things last night but I have looked up your card specs and discovered some interesting things… the base clock ranges from 1110Mhz on the 115W version to 1215 on the 125W version. Its boost is 1560 to 1620. Its memory clock is 1750 MHz… From both your videos, your GPU Clock is going all the way from about 900Mhz (after loading) to 1905Mhz (400Mhz faster than its boost) and your memory Mhz is between 6000-7000Mhz… (5000mhz faster than base!). These figures dont make sense… I would assume that Nvidias own performance overlay would be reporting its card correctly? So what kind of overlock/boost configuration do you have enabled to get those kinds of numbers? What BIOS configs are enabled for overlocking? Are you overlocking things?

Debug information is in the player.log - there are no further configs to output more data. The logs are not showing any performance related messages that would normally come up if people were experiencing graphics related Fps…

Just to clarify something here:

  1. I dont work for EHG. Although offered, I declined to accept a Community Tester role. I am just a player like you with access to the exact same info as you and I have no contact with EHG staff beyond what anyone else has. I have been assisting here on the technical support section for the last 18 months because I have time & EHG is understaffed/applied elsewhere and I could help people who were struggling.

  2. For whatever reason, I get the feeling that I am not providing any value here. You seem to be cherry picking whatever I suggest/explain and just doing your own thing. Resolving technical issues requres a very methodical approach ticking off each thing one at a time as its proven or disproven to be involved. I have made various suggestions, provided explainations from what other people have experienced, recommendations etc… I have lost track of what you have and have not done and which order you have done them in… I am also getting the feeling that I am discovering things (like vsync/fps etc) rather than you volunteering this information when I ask if you have made any driver level changes… its making me wonder what else is going on that you are not saying… I also have no idea if you have done any of the suggestions - like making sure performance mode is enabled on the graphics card or just doing a Steam verification… or rolling back a driver because there have been problem drivers…

So… I am going to take my leave of this thread and use my time where it may be more productive helping more people…

Sorry…

20

I’m sorry that you get such a feeling =(

I’m gradually making my way through your inital list, it’s sizable, so not all at once (so far steam verification, win update, gpu update, fixed vsync/fps settings as I stated in the previous two messages).
Fps/driver changes - sorry for that. Driver changes just sounds like something too low level for me to touch. Or I could imagine that you meant Nvidia control panel that I didn’t change. Just chose from a list of 2 possible options in the display settings. Didn’t connect these two things. And I didn’t overclock anything myself.

In any case, I can understand you, I very much appreciate what you’ve already done and good luck cracking other issues. It’s increadible that this forum has people like you =)

I guess I’ll make one more post here when I finish following all the recommendations in case anyone will care.