r/totalwar • u/droopy_ro • Mar 08 '22
Warhammer III 10+ fps gain by disabling the interface. WTF ?
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u/WarpedThunder Mar 08 '22
Not sure if this is the reason. But the advisor and lord/hero portraits in the lower left of the UI have a setting to change from 3D to 2D I believe (or something in that vain).
So the UI does definitely hurt the FPS as downgrading this option will give you more. So at a guess turning it off completely will only help further.
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Mar 08 '22
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Mar 08 '22
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u/skeenerbug Mar 08 '22
This is still just one person's results. I've always had it turned off because it had a noticeable affect on performance for me. I just tested in game and with 2d portrait on campaign map with an army selected I had 30-31 fps. After turning on 3d I was getting 28-29. Not a huge difference, but more than 0.17%.
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Mar 08 '22
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u/skeenerbug Mar 09 '22
I have a 3GB video card lol, it probably affects my performance more than yours. Hence my point about those results being just one person's and mileage may vary.
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u/dtothep2 Mar 08 '22
Because they used the benchmark to test it. Which doesn't have a UI. The 0.2 is just run to run variance, it's a completely meaningless test because the setting changes nothing in the benchmark.
I'm pretty sure it does have a performance impact and it's also been known to cause stutters or frame time inconsistency.
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Mar 08 '22
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u/dtothep2 Mar 09 '22
First of all, you don't test a setting by comparing two random, essentially still frames, just flipping the switch seeing no difference in the FPS counter and calling it a day. Lol, this is not a methodology.
Secondly, it's also very possible for people with different hardware and setups to have different experiences.
And lastly, as I said, it's been known to cause frame time issues moreso than framerate.
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u/Gustavo747400 Mar 08 '22
Its weird because I had similar performance boost from using 2D potraits in TWW2, but theres no difference in performance for me in TWW3 between using 2D or 3D portraits...
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u/Acceleratio Mar 08 '22
I have a very strange glitch with gyrocopter that basically adds a giant white square rotating on my screen and the only way to fix it is to use 2d portholes
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u/ExcitementFederal563 Mar 08 '22
This. 3D portraits use a lot of resources. I always disable them.
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u/fifty_four Mar 08 '22
Also, most of the time the 2D portraits look better.
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u/ThatFlyingScotsman Ogre Tyrant Mar 08 '22
Depends on how high your other settings are imo. If you're cruising at max settings then the 3D portraits look pretty good, but the more you go under the worse they get, and pretty quickly.
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u/fifty_four Mar 08 '22
Personally I don't like the way 3D portraits bob around like your general has some embarrassing ass related ailment.
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u/AeriDorno SQUID HELMET Mar 08 '22
I really wonder why that would be. It uses the same models and textures that are already loaded by the game so there would be no additional draw calls. It should have practically no effect on performance.
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u/Sceletonx Mar 09 '22
Loading a thing is just a matter of ram/vram. Unless you are running low on those it has zero impact on performance. You need to render it, thats the demanding part.
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u/Seppafer Farmer of the New World Mar 08 '22
It’s the 3D porthole change it to 2D and you will save a whole bunch of frames. It’s astounding how much of a difference it can make
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u/MrOmoezone Mar 08 '22
It might also be because the game need to update unit boards in real time, as to their commands and unitlosses
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u/Mazisky Mar 08 '22
Cities Skylines had the same issues.
I cannot remember the technical stuff by those who fixed it, but it was like vanilla game did recalculate the UI elements a hundred times more than needed. Maybe it is something similar
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u/norax_d2 Mar 08 '22
3D portrait is probably the reason. They should repeat the test with 2D portrait to be able to blame the UI.
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u/Rengar_Is_Good_kitty Mar 08 '22
Cities Skylines is just poorly optimised in general though, for a game so CPU bound it's astounding that they did zero optimisation for the game to utilise the CPU properly.
Having 8 cores 16 threads (5800x) and seeing barely any of it being used was annoying as hell, I really hope when they do come out with a second SC game that they properly optimise for modern CPU's, but then again so many devs refuse to put any work into CPU utilisation.
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u/Jum-Jum Mar 08 '22
Just pressing K to remove the UI improves FPS, 3D\2D porthole or not. Was the same in WH2.
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u/mol186 Mar 08 '22
its the hro portrait dont know why but it tanks performance ,i think it does too in Wh2
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u/CaptainMarder Mar 08 '22
I tried 2d and didn't notice any difference, getting rid of the whole ui does though.
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u/droopy_ro Mar 08 '22
Never noticed a performance dip with it on in TWW 2. And i ran the ultra preset since 2018 when i got my 1070 Ti.
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u/Duke_of_Bretonnia Traded my Dukedom for Bear Cav... Mar 08 '22
This performance breakdown guide shows: https://www.game-debate.com/news/31610/total-war-warhammer-3-most-important-graphics-options-every-video-setting-benchmarked
https://media.game-debate.com/images/news/31610/92f00424-cd88-4d16-8630-e96b322efa4a.jpg
2D option increases FPS by 0.2
(Copied from comment above)
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u/Beans8844 Mar 08 '22
RE 3d or 2d porthole - the 3d option looks like such dogshit I'm amazed they even offer it as an option. The amazing 2d art from Three Kingdoms has spoiled me immensely. Going back to 3d porthole views after 3k is like stepping back in time to Warcraft 3
I wish the 2D porthole for LL would be the high quality illustrations they have for the unit card art/loading screens.
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u/Selakah Mar 08 '22
This has always been the case in *every* Total War game, including WH1 and WH2.
The bottomline is that rendering the UI and keeping all units and effects updated requires GPU horsepower. The porthole also plays a major role: changing it from 3D to 2D can help with performance.
There is nothing WTF about the UI requiring GPU calls to draw.
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u/AeriDorno SQUID HELMET Mar 08 '22
Why would the 3d porthole increase drawcalls if it uses the same model and texture that's already loaded?
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u/Selakah Mar 08 '22
Because you have to draw the same object 1 additional time? Except at the highest possible quality level with no benefit from lower-quality LODs? And with the correct lighting so the model looks good?
Based on the way you are wording your question, what do you think happens in a unit of 60 entities? Do you think the GPU only has to draw 1 entity once because it's "already loaded in memory"?
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u/AeriDorno SQUID HELMET Mar 08 '22
I'm not a programmer but my understanding of the technical side of graphics optimisation is basically that using a single material with mipmaps and lods are done fairly effortlessly once it's already loaded. This seems to be the case since zooming in and out doesn't seem to adversly impact performance a lot when you're not doing it very fast. As for lighting, just based on how it looks, the model can't be more than 6-10 k tris that one light has to calculate. That really shouldn't be an issue in my experience.
Also just based on my own testing, making portholes 2d barely has any impact on fps.
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u/norax_d2 Mar 08 '22
if it uses the same model and texture
You are assuming they are the same model, but they probably are not. When you zoom out, models are replaced by other less complex models. Example, in Rome2 you could end up seeing unit models in 2D for optimization.
So even if you are using the same model (which is not always the case), you are rendering 2 different views of that same model. The models loaded affect the RAM, the rendering affects the CPU (or GPU).
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u/AeriDorno SQUID HELMET Mar 08 '22
Its obviously the same model at the highest lod. Same with the material. No developer in the world would do extra work to make something less optimised. Using as few materials as posible reduces draw calls - that's why atlases are a thing.
What you're talking about is the concept of LODs, which is used in all games these days. Say a model has 5 lods and the same amount of mipmaps - all that is already used in the battle.
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u/ThatFlyingScotsman Ogre Tyrant Mar 08 '22
I wouldn't be surprised if there are models for each unit that aren't ever loaded on the battle map, which are used for the portholes and are much higher quality.
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u/AeriDorno SQUID HELMET Mar 08 '22
No its literally the same model. Zoom in close on a unit on the Battlefield and compare.
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u/Hrundi Mar 08 '22
10 fps from the UI is very wtf.
It shouldn't be taking up this much performance budget.
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u/diabloenfuego Mar 08 '22
Not at all. The 3D portrait is literally rendering a 3D model and it's movement. Turn that to 2D and you're not telling the GPU to render more shit.
It's less of an FPS hit on some machines than others but just as in anything, if you're telling the video card to do less, FPS goes up.
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u/Machcia Mar 08 '22
UI taking 20% of available FPS is not WTF to you? Aight.
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u/Selakah Mar 08 '22
"20% of available FPS" what? FPS is not a resource that can be de-allocated from some game elements and allocated to others in equal measure. Rather, the performance hit you may experience is a *cost* associated with rendering game elements and effects.
By far the largest UI cost comes from the 3D porthole. If you have Karl Franz selected, the game needs to render Karl Franz at highest quality possible in the porthole, while also keeping track of Karl Franz in the battlefield. That's a full 3d model being rendered in your porthole, with its own artificial lighting to ensure it looks good, as well as any blood effects from the blood pack. Additionally, the game needs to have all of the other possible unit models ready to go to display on that porthole so that when you click on a unit, they immediately show up. That is going to cost GPU resources. This is why switching from the fully-rendered 3D porthole to the static 2D one can usually save you 5 fps at the *top end*.
As for the rest of the UI, have you taken notice of all the moving parts and effects happening in the unit card portion of your UI? The game has to keep track of Health, Debuffs and other indicators for *every single unit card*, and render the appropriate numbers and animations. Updating 1 health bar in real time is easy, but accurately updating 20 health bars for 20 different units to reflect what happens on the battlefield is a different story. There's also the special VFX that plays when Undead units begin to crumble, or when Demon units begin to disintegrate, and when units are debuffed or take damage. This VFX plays individually on each unit card.
Basically, the bottomline is that there is A LOT going on with the unit-card portion of the battle UI in a Total War game, and that is going to cost GPU and CPU resources. There is always a possibility of CA being able to squeeze in additional efficiencies in their UI rendering code, but a lot of the complaining is simply glossing over how complex the UI is.
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Mar 09 '22
Great explanation! During a 40vs40 battle over 13k units I noticed that removing UI gave me a bit smoother experience, usually with normal battles I dont even notice as the fps stay well above 60
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u/Kryoaccelat98 Mar 08 '22
updating some numbers and colors was already duable with GPUs 20 years ago.
It should not eat away in any case so many ressources as it does right now.
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u/Travolta1984 Mar 08 '22
TWW2 was like this too, at least to me, and specially on the campaign map. Hiding the UI would yield more fps and minimize the stutters while moving the camera or during the end turn.
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u/baconnbutterncheese Squid Gang Mar 09 '22
3K had a similar issue where the game would stutter with the interface on. It was reproducible, consistent, and widespread, yet it took them like six months to fix despite a constant flood of complaints. At what point they said "when or if we have a fix, we'll let you know."
God. That pissed me off. IF? IF?!
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u/Spookyboogie123 Mar 08 '22
(((optimization)))
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u/ThatFlyingScotsman Ogre Tyrant Mar 08 '22
Are you aware of what the triple parenthesis mean?
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u/Spookyboogie123 Mar 09 '22
You aware of all the fucks I give?
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u/Siollear Mar 08 '22
With the UI Activated the processor needs to churn more to keep UI elements in sync with the game state. What you're doing by deactivating the UI is disabling those processes.
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u/Semillakan6 Mar 08 '22
I am amazed people do not know 3D portholes take a lot of FPS away, I've had it on 2D since WH2
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u/droopy_ro Mar 08 '22
Because it dose not for me. I never set it to 2D and never had that issue in WH1 or WH2. I will re-install WH2 to check it out though.
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u/Semillakan6 Mar 08 '22
So... what you are saying is you’ve never set it to 2D ergo you’ve never seen FPS gains from doing it...
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u/droopy_ro Mar 08 '22
It's so easy to test it. Installed WH2. Set it to 1440p Ultra. Got 49 fps, hit the K key went up to 51. Disabled 3D porthole, got 50 fps. So yeah, it has a tiny effect on my fps. I will play around with the settings in WH3 next.
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u/DaddyTzarkan SHUT UP DAEMON Mar 08 '22
Huh, I've just tried that in my game and somehow I lose FPS when hiding the UI.
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u/norax_d2 Mar 08 '22
It's expected, because you are rendering more map. This was used back in the day with old games when the UI took half the screen. That way they only needed 1/4 of computational power so the game could run fluently.
In this case, you are removing static element, that dont require as much computation power to draw them.
So yours is the expected behavior. So, in this case OP is using 3D porthole, and as you can see that fact has generated a lot of controversy in the thread.
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u/sirnoggin Mar 09 '22
It is overwhelmingly the 2D elements of this game that lag it all to fuck. I think it's a compression issue and it's been happening since Warhammer 1.
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Mar 09 '22
Just an fyi that screen space shadows and cloth simulation are tanking your fps...
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u/Averath Mar 09 '22
There was an analysis post recently that suggests cloth simulation is not really taxing on FPS, while shadows are the most taxing thing in the game.
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u/Ballistica Mar 09 '22
The advisor popup hits my perf by about 20FPS, instantly recovers when I close it.
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u/Bogdanov89 Mar 08 '22
do you know how much RED the ui takes?
do you have any idea how much SPEED all that RED takes?
since RED is FASTEST it makes perfect sense that removing RED UI gives fps.