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Firewatch PC performance thread

Turn off shadows and turn down bloom. You can leave everything else on Ultra.

Then turn off vsync and enable it in the Nvidia control panel.
 
I just got this and my game is locked at 24fps for some reason. Tried turning v-sync both on and off but no success.

GTX970 on a 144fps G-Sync monitor. Might just return the game at this stage since I find only one other guy in this thread with the same problem on the whole internet when searching.
 
I just got this and my game is locked at 24fps for some reason. Tried turning v-sync both on and off but no success.

GTX970 on a 144fps G-Sync monitor. Might just return the game at this stage since I find only one other guy in this thread with the same problem on the whole internet when searching.

Try changing your monitor's refresh rate to something else, I'm pretty sure I've seen that bug before and that "fixed" it.
 
Turn off shadows and turn down bloom. You can leave everything else on Ultra.

Then turn off vsync and enable it in the Nvidia control panel.

turn shadows off?

giphy.gif
 
I just got this and my game is locked at 24fps for some reason. Tried turning v-sync both on and off but no success.

GTX970 on a 144fps G-Sync monitor. Might just return the game at this stage since I find only one other guy in this thread with the same problem on the whole internet when searching.

I had the exact same problem. ..and then it just went away and everything is fine. All I did was switch my monitor's refresh rate from 144hz to 60, then relaunched the game. I may have disabled G-Sync while I did this, I don't remember.

Once the framerate corrected itself, I was able to put it back to 144hz + G-Sync.
 
Just finished this and the game ran fine above 90fps and well above , maxed at 1440p 144hz
i7 4790
16G. Ram
Gtx 980
1440p on latest rog swift.
 
Finally got the game to run. Really enjoying it. Runs like butter. I was expecting some stutter, but I've yet to encounter any. Smooth sailing so far! Running at 1440p too. I haven't tested with an fps counter yet, but I would be shocked if it wasn't 60 fps or more at all times. Only thing I needed to adjust was FOV. Bumped it up to 80 I believe. Sure, it breaks the full body animation, but much better than feeling sick after 20 minutes.

Specs:

6700K (4.8ghz)
32gig ram (3200 DDR4)
980ti (EVGA AC2.0+)
Samsung 850 Pro SSD
 
i5 4590 @ stock speed
8GB RAM
GTX 970
HDD install

Ran like a dream on Ultra/1080p. I think it only dipped to 50fps for a while in one area (Cottonwood) but didn't encounter any performance issues outside of that.

I have a fairly similar rig and also got some performance issues in that area. Weird.
 
i'm running this on an i5 4460/R9 270/16GB X51 on my 2560x1080 21:9 monitor. all on ultra except shadows, i would estimate something like 40-50fps with zero tearing.

there are some really lo-res objects in the world but i guess that'll be the same for everyone. overall kind of surprised how well this runs considering the thread.

oh also i'm using a steam controller after picking one up last week, and this is the first game i've played where i actually think it works great with the default config.
 
Performed very well for me most of the time, 80 - 100fps, max settings 1440p. There were occasions where it dropped into the 50s - 60s but they were fairly rare and didn't last that long.

i7 4770K, 980Ti, 16GB of RAM, installed on an SSD, etc.

Also, anyone notice this LoD thing for the shadows? Was quite jarring once I started noticing it (look at the shadows on the rock and around it):

http://i.imgur.com/OHC5C9h.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/C8Gua1h.jpg
 
Statement dedacted. Some areas do look pretty rough/harsh with these shadows (even on high), but they don't look too bad for the most part. Just started actually playing the game for real. Really enjoying!
 
Performed very well for me most of the time, 80 - 100fps, max settings 1440p. There were occasions where it dropped into the 50s - 60s but they were fairly rare and didn't last that long.

i7 4770K, 980Ti, 16GB of RAM, installed on an SSD, etc.

Also, anyone notice this LoD thing for the shadows? Was quite jarring once I started noticing it (look at the shadows on the rock and around it):

http://i.imgur.com/OHC5C9h.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/C8Gua1h.jpg

This is an issue with how Unity does its shadow cascades. We're looking to optimize it in an update but it will require a lot of poking around how unity's doing its shadow quality stuff under the hood.
 
This game hates my laptop's dedicated GPU. It won't allow me to play with it at all.

All it does is to load the game and use the Intel HD 5500 graphics card. Is there any way to force this game to use the other GPU or is that a no-no?
 
This game hates my laptop's dedicated GPU. It won't allow me to play with it at all.

All it does is to load the game and use the Intel HD 5500 graphics card. Is there any way to force this game to use the other GPU or is that a no-no?

You should be able to do that in your nvidia control panel. We have a guide up for how to tell your system to play on your dedicated GPU.

Also hopefully a future Nvidia driver will have an exception for Firewatch and default it to the dedicated GPU, but not yet.
 
I refunded this at release but I'll grab it again if they ever fix the hitching every 30 seconds, it really pissed me off.
 
Yep, pretty ridiculous there wasn't an option to remove it. Completely unnecessary for a lot of people.

Interestingly, the lack of a crosshair in The Witness is one of the causes of frequent motion-sickness/nausea within the game. Due to something related to depth perception, without the crosshair to associate your depth to the monitor/TV (and with narrow FOV) it is making many people nauseous, so perhaps having the crosshair isn't as big of an issue as it would be without it as standard. I guess the option to choose would be nice though.
 
Shadows definitely look better on Low. Unity is super weird.

giphy.gif

It looks like High renders more accurate distant shadows at the cost of shadow resolution nearest the player while Low is the opposite. That's... one way to go about things.
 
Interestingly, the lack of a crosshair in The Witness is one of the causes of frequent motion-sickness/nausea within the game. Due to something related to depth perception, without the crosshair to associate your depth to the monitor/TV (and with narrow FOV) it is making many people nauseous, so perhaps having the crosshair isn't as big of an issue as it would be without it as standard. I guess the option to choose would be nice though.

Yeah, that's why I said "for a lot of people". I get that it's there for people who get motion sickness but there should have been a simple option to disable it for everyone else.
 
i5 2500K @ 4.5ghz
GTX 970
16gb ram

With everything maxed out it runs at 60 but with constant stutters (MSI shows dipping to 57-59). GPU doesn't go above 50%, CPU doesn't go above 50%, VRAM usage doesn't go up 2000 or so. Since none of the hardware is being maxed out, lowering settings doesn't help.

I read an article that said this is because it's an i5 and only hyperthreading can eliminate the stutters, so I might be done here. It's just too irritating to play. I'll give a try at limiting the fps to 30 but if that's not satisfactory that's it for me.
 
i5 2500K @ 4.5ghz
GTX 970
16gb ram

With everything maxed out it runs at 60 but with constant stutters (MSI shows dipping to 57-59). GPU doesn't go above 50%, CPU doesn't go above 50%, VRAM usage doesn't go up 2000 or so. Since none of the hardware is being maxed out, lowering settings doesn't help.

I read an article that said this is because it's an i5 and only hyperthreading can eliminate the stutters, so I might be done here. It's just too irritating to play. I'll give a try at limiting the fps to 30 but if that's not satisfactory that's it for me.

Exactly what I was experiencing and the reason I refunded it. I'm hoping it'll be fixed one day so I can rebuy it.
 
Any update on this (shadow LOD/draw distance being improved)?

It probably wont happen until we move to a newer Unity release, if then. We are targeting moving Firewatch to Unity 5.4 at some point (when its out of beta, when we can migrate all the code, and have fixed any bugs that come from that), but that should fix some things, which I hope include the mysteriously capped shadow resolution. But, no promises. (5.4 also supports better performance on multi-core systems which is what I'm actually excited about.)

Älg;198253828 said:
Anyone else getting audio glitches during conversation? Usually during the beginning of a sentence.
Are you hearing this consistently, at the beginning of every sentence, or sporadically?
 
Älg;198273170 said:
It doesn'y happen at the beginning of every sentence, but it only happens at the beginning of sentences.

Months ago I had a situation where if no speech played for a while (a few minutes), when it started up again there'd be a small pop, but we were never able to chase it down and it also stopped happening, but maybe that's what you're experiencing?
 
It probably wont happen until we move to a newer Unity release, if then. We are targeting moving Firewatch to Unity 5.4 at some point (when its out of beta, when we can migrate all the code, and have fixed any bugs that come from that), but that should fix some things, which I hope include the mysteriously capped shadow resolution. But, no promises. (5.4 also supports better performance on multi-core systems which is what I'm actually excited about.)

Cool beans. Thanks for the update.

It's truly bizarre how High works -- it appears to sacrifice resolution of some shadows nearest the player in favour full-res distant shadows. If need be, I'll settle for Medium, but having high-res shadows across the board would be nice. I pre-ordered the game the moment it went up, so you guys have my support regardless.
 
Cool beans. Thanks for the update.

It's truly bizarre how High works -- it appears to sacrifice resolution of some shadows nearest the player in favour full-res distant shadows. If need be, I'll settle for Medium, but having high-res shadows across the board would be nice. I pre-ordered the game the moment it went up, so you guys have my support regardless.

Whatever is happening under the hood to prevent it, the issue we are having is that our shadow map resolution seems to be capped and it seems to be happening in a deep, dark place in code that we don't have access to. So we can push shadow distance out, but that ends up lowering resolution overall. I THINK medium's shadow draw distance is closer and still has four cascades (so it will look more crisp at mid range but doesn't extend as far out), and low quality only uses two shadow cascades, but I can't remember the exact tuning. Ideally "high quality" would actually use a way more crisp, high res shadow map, but we are being owned by something out of our control right now. We're still looking into it and hope we can eventually improve it though.
 
Exactly what I was experiencing and the reason I refunded it. I'm hoping it'll be fixed one day so I can rebuy it.

Mark me down as another 2500Ker who experienced the stutter.

i5 2500K overclocked to 4.5 GHz
GTX 780
16GB ram
G-sync monitor
SSD

Constant hitching throughout the game. Nothing game-breaking, but still heavily marred the beauty of the game.
 
Anyone else had issues trying to change resolutions? I'm trying to play it at 3840x2160 but even after I select that resolution it's still rendering at bloody 720p? Any ideas?
 
Anyone else had issues trying to change resolutions? I'm trying to play it at 3840x2160 but even after I select that resolution it's still rendering at bloody 720p? Any ideas?

Are you trying to play on a native 4k screen? If not you'll have to manually change your systemwide resolution to 4k I believe since the game forces borderless windowed or something

Get a refund. It's a mediocre game anyway

Epic shit posting friendo, it's a good game.
 
Are you trying to play on a native 4k screen? If not you'll have to manually change your systemwide resolution to 4k I believe since the game forces borderless windowed or something



Epic shit posting friendo, it's a good game.

Yes it's a native 4K screen and my desktop resolution is set to 4K as well. I've got 30min logged into the game, even though I haven't gone passed the menus because I've been trying heaps of things to get it to work... I may have to get a refund soon if I can't fix it, though I'd prefer not to.
 
Yes it's a native 4K screen and my desktop resolution is set to 4K as well. I've got 30min logged into the game, even though I haven't gone passed the menus because I've been trying heaps of things to get it to work... I may have to get a refund soon if I can't fix it, though I'd prefer not to.

Hmm, looks like you can edit the resolution in the registry https://steamcommunity.com/app/383870/discussions/0/412448158166940746/

I'd give that a shot I guess?
 
Have any of you guys with 4k issues opened a support ticket with us at Campo about it? Is that included in "tried everything" :\ If it is, and you have written in, I'm really sorry we haven't gotten to you! I'm going to try some stuff on a 4K at work tomorrow now though. Sorry for missing these posts in here earlier.


Also re: some earlier posts, Unity 5.4 is in what may be the longest beta cycle of any non-major Unity release. We've seen a lot of performance gains and many full screen-related issues have been fixed (especially on Mac and Linux, which were both pretty bad in terms of full screen behavior in some older releases) but it's still not ready to build commercial games against :| I'm so excited for 5.4 to go final! More as it develops.
 
Also re: some earlier posts, Unity 5.4 is in what may be the longest beta cycle of any non-major Unity release. We've seen a lot of performance gains and many full screen-related issues have been fixed (especially on Mac and Linux, which were both pretty bad in terms of full screen behavior in some older releases) but it's still not ready to build commercial games against :| I'm so excited for 5.4 to go final! More as it develops.

Any idea if 5.4 will allow a higher shadow map resolution?
 
Have any of you guys with 4k issues opened a support ticket with us at Campo about it? Is that included in "tried everything" :\ If it is, and you have written in, I'm really sorry we haven't gotten to you! I'm going to try some stuff on a 4K at work tomorrow now though. Sorry for missing these posts in here earlier.
My PC is connected to my 4K TV and my desktop and the game are both set to display at native 4K as well. No problems whatsoever besides the not so good AA coverage, had to apply Reshade's SMAA filter to improve IQ to come close to what I was expecting when playing at 4K.
 
Any idea if 5.4 will allow a higher shadow map resolution?

I'm still not sure on this. There was some weird behavior we found with our setup relative to unity's expectations but I don't know if it means we can go higher properly.
 
Also re: some earlier posts, Unity 5.4 is in what may be the longest beta cycle of any non-major Unity release. We've seen a lot of performance gains and many full screen-related issues have been fixed (especially on Mac and Linux, which were both pretty bad in terms of full screen behavior in some older releases) but it's still not ready to build commercial games against :| I'm so excited for 5.4 to go final! More as it develops.

Somewhat off-topic, but have you run into any problems with scenes unloading in SECTR Stream? The 5.4 changelist mentions that calling UnloadScene from a volume trigger causes Unity to hang in 5.4.
 
There was an update for Firewatch on GOG, whats the changelog?

I think it was one patch behind the Steam release. It's now up to date with the latest steam changed.

Somewhat off-topic, but have you run into any problems with scenes unloading in SECTR Stream? The 5.4 changelist mentions that calling UnloadScene from a volume trigger causes Unity to hang in 5.4.

My experience so far is that that gives an error but works anyway. That doesn't bode well for 5.5 or whatever, but for now things SEEM okay.
 
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