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Dishonored 2 PC performance thread

A lot worse. I'm getting like 38-42 FPS average on Ultra 1440p + FXAA and 60 FPS mark is almost unreachable if you think about it as an almost constant thing. I've seen 60 only in a very few places and like.... 15-20% of the time at best.


interestingly enough i got my first crash while playing hitman playing in DX12. Gonna try again in DX11 see if I notice a boost.
 
Look how pathetic this shit is man, we pay 60$ for a game and we have to wait for it to get patched, im so pissed off

Im so tired of these releases where we have to fiddle with settings, edit inis and god knows what tools to squeeze a few fps, make a proper fucking pc port already

I'm done fiddling with the settings, honestly. It'll just lead to more frustrating. When setting everything to low still makes you dip below 60fps on a game that looks like dishonored, something is just not right.

I'm gonna be playing other shit since I'm past my refund playtime and hopefully if it never get fixed they'll do a no mans sky and allow refunds or it'll get fixed and the great game underneath this mess will finally reveal itself.
 
if it never get fixed they'll do a no mans sky and allow refunds
Valve denied it was ever a thing: http://www.pcgamer.com/no-mans-sky-refunds/

He must be playing Dishonest 2.

PC impressions from IGN review:
PC Version Impressions by TJ Hafer

The PC version of Dishonored 2 has had a rocky launch, with many gamers reporting major performance issues and giving it a “Mixed” rating on the Steam store page. Arkane has acknowledged the issues and promised an update to resolve them “in the coming days.”

That said, I haven’t been able to replicate those problems. My experience with Dishonored 2 wasn’t flawless, but I seem to have dodged the worst of it. Running a Core i7 4770K with a GeForce GTX 1070 and 16GB RAM on Arkane’s “Auto” settings (a mix of Very High and Ultra), I was initially faced with unstable frame rates: I would cruise along at 60fps for a good part of a level before experiencing random drops into the 40s. It never became unplayable, but it was certainly noticeable, and that’s something that shouldn’t happen on a system that exceeds the recommended spec (which lists a GTX 1060). A fresh restart and closing down background processes like a video streaming on my second screen allowed me to play without significant variance in the frame rate for a good few hours, even in instances of high action.

Then I tried to replicate some of the more egregious reports I’d heard about PC performance. After reading through Bethesda’s performance FAQ, I experimented with setting everything on Ultra, on which, somewhat to my surprise, I was still able to maintain 60fps in virtually all situations. The one setting that did seem to have a negative impact, oddly enough, was turning off Vsync. While disabling Vsync will normally uncap your frame rate and allow your game to run as fast as it can at a given moment, in this case disabling the setting seems to introduce inexplicable jitter to the frame rate in complex scenes. Though, again, the dips were never to the point of making it unplayable - I never saw my frame rate counter drop below 30 in any of my stress tests.

Alt + Tabbing out and back in (another possible culprit nominated by Bethesda) seemed like it might cause a gradual, progressive increase in instances of jittery frame rate, but I didn’t test this extensively enough to say for sure how much of an impact it had. Restarting the game almost always granted me a smooth 60 fps for a good while in cases where I suspected this was happening. In general, the game was very well-behaved with Alt + Tab in the short term. I wasn’t able to pinpoint exactly what may have been causing issues for those with similar - or even better - hardware, but the recommendations I can give include keeping Vsync on, closing background processes, and restarting the game if framerate seems to become unstable after Alt +Tabbing out and back in. I ran into no instances of sub-60 framerate that were not solved by those steps.

The world looks fantastic on Ultra and Very High settings. Textures are far from breathtaking, especially if you’re used to playing with modded Ultra HD textures in other games, but they’re well above the standard of other multi-platform games I’ve seen this year. The lighting and post-processing is first-class, lending a delicious sense of atmosphere and depth to every location I skulked my way through. Even the distant backdrops that never become part of the playable space, like the soaring sea cliffs of Serkonos, are rendered with volumetric fog and lighting in such a way that they feel eerily real.

The menus are more than tolerable. My mouse cursor seemed to have some level of sluggishness and acceleration when navigating them, but there were no responsiveness issues actually clicking on options - a problem that still exists in Skyrim Special Edition, five years after the issue reared its head in the original game. The options available are also fairly respectable. Field of view is adjustable between 65 and 110 degrees (I found that my sweet spot is somewhere around 95).

The mouse and keyboard controls are overall very responsive and friendly. It's possible to adjust X and Y axis stick sensitivity individually if you’re playing with a controller, and mouse options allow you fine control over sensitivity and smoothing. You can also fine-tune the level of auto-aim or turn it off entirely, independently for mouse and controller. Finally, there’s an option called “Adaptive Resolution” that is supposed to be able to dynamically adjust resolution if your framerate starts to drop, but I found that it had no significant impact on my machine.

So this is a tricky one: for some people Dishonored is unplayable right now – I've seen streamers with beefier machines than mine struggle to maintain 20fps on relatively low settings – but we’ve had minimal issues. Thus our high recommendation comes with a caveat: to be safe, you should probably wait for the patch before you buy. If it runs poorly for you, and you opt for a wait and see approach instead of getting your money back now, don't play more than the two hours you're allowed to remain eligible for a Steam refund.
 
BTW everyone, if you want a quick semi-elegant compromise to getting better performance I suggest making a custom resolution in your graphics card's control panel.

I made a 1920x810 (21:9) aspect ratio and then selected it in the game menu as well. It gives you the ultra wide viewing angle (yes, you actually see more to the left and right), but it gives you black bars on the top and bottom of the screen. Personally, this doesn't bother me and I quite enjoy it. It gives me a significant boost to frame rate. I also believe "environmental details" is what kills my framerate the most. I keep it at medium and the game looks fine, but I can keep my textures at high to very high.

GTX 960 here.
 
BTW everyone, if you want a quick semi-elegant compromise to getting better performance I suggest making a custom resolution in your graphics card's control panel.

I made a 1920x810 (21:9) aspect ratio and then selected it in the game menu as well. It gives you the ultra wide viewing angle (yes, you actually see more to the left and right), but it gives you black bars on the top and bottom of the screen. Personally, this doesn't bother me and I quite enjoy it. It gives me a significant boost to frame rate. I also believe "environmental details" is what kills my framerate the most. I keep it at medium and the game looks fine, but I can keep my textures at high to very high.

GTX 960 here.

That's an interesting solution.

So are we still waiting on a patch to fix this game?
 
I don't want to bash on the developers for not working the weekends. But let's be honest here for a moment. The PC version at least should not have been released in this state, especially not when you're coupling it with 'play early' initiatives. I mean, I took a day off to relax and fire this game up but I haven't touched it since.

We don't even know whether or not the performance issues will ever be entirely fixed. I am no expert, but from what I have read the engine is quite problematic (at least what it was based on) + the communication at times has shown that they might try to downplay the issues.

All in all, I would be really surprised if this first patch irons out a lot of the issues. I still paid the full price of admission for it though, and I might have to keep it on the shelf for most likely (being realistic here) a month or perhaps even longer. So, on the one hand, I feel sorry for the devs who poured a lot of their soul into this, but on the other hand.. they deserve the bad word of mouth right now, there's a (very) good game underneath and hopefully they can turn it around performance wise as well.
 
you should expect things like the loading times with 30 fps cap and mouse issues to be fixed. framerates will probably not see meaningful improvements
 
I don't want to bash on the developers for not working the weekends. But let's be honest here for a moment. The PC version at least should not have been released in this state, especially not when you're coupling it with 'play early' initiatives. I mean, I took a day off to relax and fire this game up but I haven't touched it since.

We don't even know whether or not the performance issues will ever be entirely fixed. I am no expert, but from what I have read the engine is quite problematic (at least what it was based on) + the communication at times has shown that they might try to downplay the issues.

All in all, I would be really surprised if this first patch irons out a lot of the issues. I still paid the full price of admission for it though, and I might have to keep it on the shelf for most likely (being realistic here) a month or perhaps even longer. So, on the one hand, I feel sorry for the devs who poured a lot of their soul into this, but on the other hand.. they deserve the bad word of mouth right now, there's a (very) good game underneath and hopefully they can turn it around performance wise as well.

Of course game should be tested better before release, i dont think anybody will disagree with that.
Just people should not expect patch already when we had a weekend, its really simple logic :)
 
Of course game should be tested better before release, i dont think anybody will disagree with that.
Just people should not expect patch already when we had a weekend, its really simple logic :)

I doubt it's QAs fault, I worked as a QATester many years ago and lots of issues ( even severe ones ) were marked in Jira as soon as they were submitted as Closed(Known issue)

And they stayed that way, so I doubt it's QAs fault in this case, theyre not the ones who decide whats fixed and whats not
 
Yeah, the game also has crash problems in DX12 and there's bugs too. F DX12.

still getting dips below 60 on hitman on my 1070 which is ridiculous imo.

(sorry for talking about hitman)

There's just nothing much else to talk about in this thread until we get more updates from devs, and I don't wanna shit up the main thread with PC complaints.
 
you should expect things like the loading times with 30 fps cap and mouse issues to be fixed. framerates will probably not see meaningful improvements

You're saying this in every PC performance thread lately and every time you're wrong and we do see a meaningful performance improvements with patches. Recent examples are FH3 and Mafia 3 (IIRC).

A lot worse. I'm getting like 38-42 FPS average on Ultra 1440p + FXAA and 60 FPS mark is almost unreachable if you think about it as an almost constant thing. I've seen 60 only in a very few places and like.... 15-20% of the time at best.

Is this still the case though? Internal benchmark certainly doesn't show this.
 
You're saying this in every PC performance thread lately and every time you're wrong and we do see a meaningful performance improvements with patches. Recent examples are FH3 and Mafia 3 (IIRC).



Is this still the case though? Internal benchmark certainly doesn't show this.

mafia 3 would be the only time framerates meaningfully improved actually. ive played the forza 3 demo and performance is just as bad as the first reports
 
mafia 3 would be the only time framerates meaningfully improved actually. ive played the forza 3 demo and performance is just as bad as the first reports

Framerates has improved meaningfully for me in the full version of Forza 3, performance is much, much better than it was at launch.
 
Yeah, Mafia 3 got a huge performance boost for most players. I went from 50 fps on medium settings to a locked 60 (around 70 uncapped) on high.
 
Mafia 3's framerates may have improved a bit but the frametimes didn't. It still stutters. Even noticeable when you lock it to 30.

BTW everyone, if you want a quick semi-elegant compromise to getting better performance I suggest making a custom resolution in your graphics card's control panel.

I made a 1920x810 (21:9) aspect ratio and then selected it in the game menu as well. It gives you the ultra wide viewing angle (yes, you actually see more to the left and right), but it gives you black bars on the top and bottom of the screen. Personally, this doesn't bother me and I quite enjoy it. It gives me a significant boost to frame rate. I also believe "environmental details" is what kills my framerate the most. I keep it at medium and the game looks fine, but I can keep my textures at high to very high.

GTX 960 here.

Interesting idea but it didn't make much difference for me with a 970. Same frame drops as before, regardless of resolution or settings.
 
Damn, I kinda want to keep playing (Mission 6) because I won't have a chance to play all week till Sunday, but the framerate and stutter is really annoying. Might just wait out this week and the first patch
 
An interesting detail regarding the mouse lag I just noticed...

I had RTSS limiting my fps to 60 since I was playing Skyrim yesterday. Forgot to disable that, and started up Dishonored 2 just to test out of a couple of things I read about here. I instantly notice, both in the menus and the tutorial, that the input lag is virtually gone.

I proceeded to confirm this by disabling and enabling the frame rate limiter several times, both with game restarts in between, and just by alt-tabbing. It's consistent. If I am limiting my framerate, be it to 60fps or 144fps (which it never even reaches), I get much less input lag than I do if my framerate is unlimited. This applies with vsync both on and off. I know it sounds like bullshit, especially when it comes to limiting to framerates that one never even reaches, but hey... dunno what to tell you. I confirmed it several times.

There's still the issues of some hitching and no raw mouse input, so personally I'm just going to keep waiting for a patch, but if someone considers the input lag the problem holding them from enjoying the game, you might want to give limiting the fps via RTSS a try.

If this was already discovered and told by someone, well, ignore everything and have a nice night.

6700k @ 4.6
GTX1080 @ 2050/5200
Win10
16 gigs DDR4/2666
gsync 1440p
 
I don't really want to defend this but the 1070 on Very Low was out of context. The original tweet had someone already on very low settings getting 40 fps. Harvey agreed that it sounded too low for those settings (ie you should be getting 60). He didn't tell him to play on Very Low.

And after seeing his home rig it should be very obvious that he is not the guy who should be providing technical advice on what system for what settings.

You should read more.

edit: see above.


I stand corrected, good to see he usually addresses the complaints in a normal manner, but I'd encourage him to refrain from saying things that would make players feel more pissed off. Like saying a 7900 is enough for "a good time" when a lot of people, even high-end players, are reporting performance issues. I hope it's a post-patch version he's playing and that it'll release on Steam soon enough.
 
Is this still the case though?
Unfortunately, yes.

Internal benchmark certainly doesn't show this.
It sure does on my rig (in-game and when I'm using benchmark) and it is such a huge difference when you campare with DX11 performance. It's just mind-boggling how bad DX12 is in this game and it downright unplayable for me in 1440p on Ultra. Honestly, it was expected so it's not like I was surprised to see this or anything.

As for Dishonored 2 patches, I really don't think that they can fix this game's performance for all people and make it run at a constant 60 FPS in 1080p Ultra the whole game from start to finish. And it's not like this game has something that we haven't seen before to make it perform so poorly. It's not DXMD with its fancy options for the future GPUs and even they is really not that special and all that impressive to begin with. I really hope I'm wrong cuz I want to play this game but I won't even touch it until they fix this shit.
 
mafia 3 would be the only time framerates meaningfully improved actually. ive played the forza 3 demo and performance is just as bad as the first reports

As someone who bought Forza Horizon 3 at launch, the distance between where it was then and where it is now is enormous.
 
It sure does on my rig (in-game and when I'm using benchmark) and it is such a huge difference when you campare with DX11 performance. It's just mind-boggling how bad DX12 is in this game and it downright unplayable for me in 1440p on Ultra. Honestly, it was expected.

Well...

gufc.png


It's a bit slower on Maxwell when GPU limited but the difference is rather small. On Pascal DX12 is always faster for me in the internal benchmark.
 
Wow, that is messed up if true. It makes sense, though, because I never noticed a performance difference between 75 and 100.

I don't think it matters that much, it doesn't seem to be doing anything at all.

Correct. I did some testing with it. Unlocked FPS, 33FPS locked and 20 FPS locked. With each FPS setting I adjusted adaptive resolution scale, took pictures when staying still and then even tried to move around.

There was zero adaptivity happening. Image quality was same, unchanged, in all scenarios.
 
Well...

gufc.png


It's a bit slower on Maxwell when GPU limited but the difference is rather small. On Pascal DX12 is always faster for me in the internal benchmark.
Forget everything I've said. It looks like Render Target Reuse is the option to blame for awful DX12 performance (enable it and see how the game runs), without it the game runs by a mile better using DX12 in 1080p, were as with DX11 I'm getting dips to high 50s in 2-3 sections of the map, but with DX12 it's always above 65 FPS and 70-75 FPS most of the time. In 1440p I can't get the same performance in these section even with DX12 and I've deeps to high 50s there all the time. But... 1080p has so much aliasing and even SMAA can't fix it so I guess I can live with dips to high 50s in 1440p and with much less aliasing.

This is my last post here about Hitman, I promise.
 
Mafia 3's framerates may have improved a bit but the frametimes didn't. It still stutters. Even noticeable when you lock it to 30.



Interesting idea but it didn't make much difference for me with a 970. Same frame drops as before, regardless of resolution or settings.

Gosh that's so peculiar. How can we all have such wildly different experiences...

=/
 
Wonder how my system would fair.

CPU - 5930k 4.2ghz
RAM - 32GB 2800mhz
GPU - GTX 970

GPU is a bit lack-luster atm.

What world do we live in where a 970 is already "lack-luster?" Maybe compared to the rest of your system, but normally it runs practically everything at high-max at 1080p.
Except Dishonored 2. You will most likely get very poor performance like the rest of us.
 
is it a known phenomenon that the framerate gets worse and worse with time? Like I'm at the same area at the beginning of the game. It ran a smooth 60 fps for most of it until i messed up and had to reload. Few reloads later i'm down to a 30-50fps for most of it.
I'm not pressing ALT+TAB or anything which would potentially make the framerate worse. Just reloading a save.
 
Older cards than 970 perform very well if the port is decent. If your game needs 1070 or something similar to get 1080p with uneven fps, you fucked up.
 
I just filed a ticket at Bethesda Support with my dxdiag file and some performance observations (especially regarding the "Low" CPU priority bug). I urge others to do the same, it might help with their data gathering and by extension; patch development.
 
is it a known phenomenon that the framerate gets worse and worse with time? Like I'm at the same area at the beginning of the game. It ran a smooth 60 fps for most of it until i messed up and had to reload. Few reloads later i'm down to a 30-50fps for most of it.
I'm not pressing ALT+TAB or anything which would potentially make the framerate worse. Just reloading a save.

Are you sure your driver settings for this game/global are set to "Prefer Maximum Performance"? I know mine reset from time to time, worth checking out.
 
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