I was curious if the new patch fixed the issue I & other people were having in the past with high GPU loads while running the game. Unfortunately, it did not (for me at least). However, I did a bit more digging into the settings & discovered one massive influencing factor that I hope will help some other people currently suffering from max GPU load, but also to hopefully help point out an area of the game’s design/code that should be looked at for future optimization.
In my testing I expected the quality presets to have the biggest hit on gpu load, but oddly enough, there’s little to no change for GPU’s based on this setting (at least from what I can see in GPUz & Task Manager). The biggest influencing factor is FPS. By default the game is set to run with no FPS limit. The lower you drop your FPS, the better the load will be on your GPU.
However, even at minimum 30 FPS cap, the GPU load still seems unreasonably high when compared to other games (both indie & AAA); especially when comparing them at this game’s 30 FPS vs all other pc games at 60 FPS…
What’s most interesting (and a little puzzling/shocking to me) is that this GPU load will happen the moment you’re at the title screen. Obviously it’s because there are frames that need to be drawn & displayed, but this only highlights how little impact the quality settings have on GPU load (since there’s practically nothing happening at the title screen).
Below will be some captioned screenshots to help the devs see what someone with my specs has to deal with, but I’m also curious how they compare to other players based on their system specs. Having screenshots from variable builds will help to see how much of this is a factor of hardware & how much of it is a factor of software (aka. the game). I you want to replicate my test with a controlled similar/identical situation just make sure to run only the bare minimum required for the game (this means no chat clients, internet browser, etc.). Things like Discord do use GPU acceleration & can skewer results by adding unrelated GPU load.
-My Specs-
Ryzen 9 5950x
GTX1080
32GB DDR4 RAM (3600MHz)
Samsung 980 Pro nvme SSD
-Screenshots-
(All tests were done at 1440p & Windowed Full Screen mode)
Game running at 30 FPS & Performance preset
Game running at 30 FPS & Best Quality preset
Game running at 45 FPS & Best Quality preset
Game running at 60 FPS & Best Quality preset
Game running with VSync on & Best Quality preset
Game running at 60 FPS & Performance preset
Game running at 30 FPS & Performance preset
Game running at 30 FPS & Best Quality preset
