Downsampling performance drops

[John_Aether]

For those who are not familiar:

Pixels are basically square, this means that rasturized images have jaggy edges.

There are many forms of Anti Aliasing.  These methods aim to reduce the visual impact of jaggy edges.

Downsampling is one technique.  Render the image at high resolution, and scale it back down to the display resolution.

It is one of the most computationally expensive forms of AA.

 

For the most part, Warframe loves downsampling.  I can run at 1.5X to 2.0X my display resolution at all times with framerates usually above 120.

Fortuna is different.  While running at my native resolution of 1440P, I can get anywhere from 75 to 180 FPS in Fortuna.

When I downsample at 1.5X, I can get FPS drops to as low as 27 FPS, and an <average> framerate (if you can call it that) of 50.

 

Considering that I can run the same 1.5X downsample in POE and NEVER drop below 80, why does downsampling in Fortuna cause such a LARGE hit to performance?

 

I would love any feedback/suggestions on why this is happening.

 

 

[Dendonflo]

Fortuna is way more recent than PoE, when PoE came out the performance was way worse than what it is right now, I think we just have to wait for the devs to slowly optimize Fortuna update after update.

 

If you use 150% / 200% resolution scale, also check that you have no AA enabled, the bigger the resolution, the bigger the performance hit with AA, and since you're already downsampling from a much higher resolution, you're not going to need it. FXAA and SMAA shouldn't really touch performance since they cost basically nothing, but TAA on big resolutions can destroy performances.

 

 

You could also always just use 100% resolution scale and a TAA antialiasing when in Fortuna, TAA's been reworked recently if I'm not mistaken and it has way less ghosting than before, it also feels sharper, it's less effective than pure SSAA (downsampling) but it does the job.

Edited November 14, 2018 by Dendonflo

[John_Aether]

Dendonflo, to follow up:

I used to use 1.5X and SMAA, but since the TAA rework, 1.5X and 30% TAA.

The difference between SMAA and TAA30 at 1.5X resolution is maybe 3 frames under low load, and maybe 5-6 under high load.  There is still ghosting from TAA, but I don't get the shiny sparkles from SMAA's rough approximation, and when you downsample with TAA, the sharpening becomes essentially negligible.

 

I think I found the problem:

As it turns out, Anisotropic filtering looks as though it is forced on in Orb Vallis.  Since I use 16X Aniso usually, increasing the resolution increases the GPU load of Aniso multiplicatively.

Since I was already at 1.5X reso, and 16X Aniso, since Orb Vallis has Aniso forced on, it was like 16X16X1.5 load, if you get my drift.

With Aniso at 4X in Orb Vallis, I get an average FPS of 75-80, with very few dips below 60.

With Aniso at 0 (OFF) in Orb Vallis, I get 100 FPS average, with very few dips below 87.

IN SUMMARY:

3072 X 1728 RESOLUTION W/ ANISO 16X in Orb Vallis = 50 FPS average

3072 X 1728 RESOLUTION W/ ANISO 0X in Orb Vallis = 100 FPS average (Plus it looks like Aniso is still on)

 

Aside from the inconvenience of having to turn Aniso on when I leave Fortuna/Orb Vallis, I guess this isn't the worst bug ever, but it should still be looked in to.

 

[Dendonflo]

Oh yeah, why didn't I think about that, I had to disable Anisotropic to keep 60FPS with my GTX760 on ultra in fortuna, I forgot that it was semi-bugged and taxed way too much ressources, the latest patch apparently optimized anisotropic in Orb Vallis, maybe you can try with it maxed now, I don't knwo if they entirely fixed it, but it should be better now.

[Sziklamester]

After the recent changes and updates the cetus and the plains also seems buggy. Before for me not happend any problem but now with a messy rain the fps drop so high for me not sure if anyone else has the same issue. My pc is not bad and I play this game for years and since then I had no problem to run this game and I feel something just not optimized or messed up with some changes.

Also the ai on coba seems weird and the mobs stuck into every object without trying to go for the defense target. Orb in other hands seems the same and not sure what they do as play test but it should not be too laggy/buggy.

[MillbrookWest]

For posterities sake: AF, like Texture quality, has a minimal perf. footprint, sure. But, it can actually be kinda expensive. You'll just never notice because (in modern games at least) the Shader units will always be the things that slow you down (GPU's - like CPU's - are comprised of many different parts which aren't all used fully at any given moment).

But that being said, like Texture quality, AF does have a a point where it tanks.

AF is very bandwidth heavy, which is why you see all the consoles go without it - they'd rather use the bandwidth for something else.

DE used a lot of new shader techniques in Orb Vallis, which itself is very bandwidth heavy. I don't know what they are doing with the shaders (it could be a DX9 legacy thing which is why they are eager to drop it) but Orb Vallis could suffer from bandwidth contention issues when settings are turned up. This will be exacerbated if you then run with a DSR factor (for Nvidia) since resolution plays a part in the amount of bandwidth used (more pixels being pushed through).