I did some testing of the game last night.
While it looks absolutely gorgeous, I was about to give the experience a pretty harsh review, but then I remembered that I hadn't upgraded my Nvidia drivers. Last time I upgraded them was probably to play Starfield.
So, take everything performance-related below with a truckload of salt until I re-test with the latest drivers.
Performance related comments
So, on my system (Threadripper 3960, GeForce 4090) at to and everything at "epic" but DLSS and frame Gen disabled (using TAA 100%) I am stuck in the high 40's to low 50's in the games early scenes.
I suspect I am CPU limited, as if I switch to DLSS quality, I see next to no improvement. Maybe 1-2 FPS
The only way I can make it playable at these setrings is by enabling DLSS3 frame Gen. Then we immediately jump up to about 100fps. This LOOKS smoother to the eye, but mouse feel is laggy, jerky and it stutters like crazy.
It's playable maybe, but I wouldn't want to play the game like this.
I am going to try the latest Nvidia drivers, and maybe disabling SMT to see if that helps, (24C/48T often confuses games) but if it doesn't, this is probably the end of the road for the Threadripper (from a gaming perspective.)
The Threadripper has been a trooper over the last 5 years, but it might just be time for the looming upgrade.
I have ordered some water cooling parts from Watercool.de in Germany for a massive overkill water-cooled rack mount build, but they seem to be taking forever to ship. (Been listed as paid, not shipped for 7 days now). Not sure what is going on there. But once they arrive I will start putting together the loop and ordering parts for an AM5 system.
It will probably be a 9800x3D (if they don't wind up being unobtanium)
Right now the plan is to transfer the 4090 over from the Threadripper and keep the threadripper as my workstation, probably transplanting it into a rack mount case as well. It still does a good job as a workstation. It will need a GPU. I'm considering a contemporary workstation GPU I can pick up at relative low cost. Maybe a Radeon Pro w5700 as I have seen them on eBay for not very much money.
Gameplay related comments
So, overall, apart from my performance issues, the opening scene seems to play well.
Only gripe is one that I see time and time again in new games. Key bindings. I don't understand why this is so hard to get right.
I must be one of the few people out there who still uses arrow keys for games, having refused to move WASD as I didn't think it made any sense the first time around, and still don't think it does.
Having rebound WASD movement keys to arrow keys (up=forward, down=backward, left=strafe left, right=strafe right) this works just fine, until you try to climb a ladder. On ladders you still have to use W for up and S for down.
Annoying.
Also, as part of my standard keyboard bindings for FPS games, I make use of keys on the numpad for many things. Binding those works in the GUI config, but in actual game it ignores those bindings, and the numpad keys just act as some sort of weird camera free-look control.
There is nothing here I couldn't work around by remapping keys in the OS, but that is annoying, and I shouldn't have to do it.
Some additional testing.
Last night I:
1.) Upgraded my Nvidia drivers
2.) Switched the threaderipper to "Game mode" with SMT disabled, and "legacy" something (not sure what that does)
3.) Enabled PBO.
The result is a significant improvement. I'm pretty sure most of that is due to the driver update, as I am still significantly CPU limited.
Now the skips, judders and stutters are mostly gone. It is
almost playable.
I definitely confirmed that I am CPU limted though.
With frame gen disabled, with TAA at native res I'll hover at like 47-52 fps depending on the scene, with the GPU at 85%-95% load.
If I enable DLSS2 Quality mode, frame rate goes up by between 1 and 3 fps, but GPU utilization drops down to like 55%. So, yeah,
definitely CPU limited.
Enabling frame gen
does improve things, with framerates in the 85-100fps range. Yes, they
are fake frames, but the game does become a little bit more playable, but input lag is still not the greatest, and probably in line with playing the game at 45-55 fps.
The game is
so close to being playable like this, that I am tempted to just do it, in spite of this not being the ideal experience.
This has been one of my very top game series, and I have been waiting for this one for a long time. The call of the zone is strong. My experience will be WAY better with a motherboard/CPU upgrade though, so I am probably going to wait.
The way this game loads up the CPU, it hits all the **** cores (even when you have 24 of them with SMT disabled) at between 35% and 50%, meaning, turbo clocks on the biggest game thread don't help (because that biggest game thread doesn't seem to exist)
Even with PBO on, the CPU seems to sit at a 4.3Ghz all core clock, even with my somewhat overkill water loop keeping the CPU cores at 52°C. The Threadripper is supposed to ahve a max boost of 4.5Ghz, but I am guessing that is only when low numbers of cores are loaded up.
I mean, I guess I could probably overclock the Threadripper, but I probably wouldn't gain much. I mean, even if I got it up to - say - 4.8Ghz (which seems unlikely) we are talking ~12%. That could get me from 47-52fps up to like 52-58fps, a range I would still not be happy with.
So a CPU upgrade is in the cards, which was planned anyway...
Not quite sure what the hell is going on with my watercooling parts I ordered though. It has been over a week, and still no tracking number :/ At least they should have informed me of a backorder by now. Going to have to email Watercool.de to see what is going on.
