Fiddled with the hidden settings panels. I forget exactly. It's still not as good as I think it should be, but at least it doesn't look like utter crap now. Basically it amounted to setting everything to maximum then disabling the details I didn't want, like Bloom, Lens Dirt, Depth of Field, Motion Blur and Dithering.
That's a big part of the problem. My screen is exactly twice those dimensions, and for some reason Subnautica doesn't like it. I can turn everything on, and deal with the ~45 fps I get, but I don't want all those other settings. AA is also spotty, I turn it on and off and try both methods and various quality settings, and they are inconsistent.
I'll keep fiddling with it now and again, maybe I can come up with some way to achieve optimal quality somehow. I might play with nVidia Inspector and see where that gets me too.
Edit: So I went back in and tried what I thought I remembered, and here's what worked best:
1) Set the Preset to High so that everything is maxxed by default.
2) Turned off AA via the AA Quality setting (so weird) as well as Bloom, Lens Dirt, DoF, Motion Blur Quality and Dithering (why is there dithering? Dithering is just primitive AA).
3) Noticed some banding so I turned off Ambient Occlusion (after trying other things, makes little sense that Ambient Occlusion causes banding).
The quality is much better now, at least as good as the screenshot you posted, so I will see if it stays that way. The fps is tolerable, running between 30-ish and 60. I still dream of the day when a straight line actually looks like a straight line when viewed at anything but precise horizontal or vertical, but it's not bad if I don't examine it too closely. I can get almost perfect 60fps if I downgrade to 2560x1440, but then the quality suffers, so I have to decide whether to accept the loss in quality or the fps. Since this isn't fps pvp I can likely go with the sub-60 fps without problems as long as I don't hit any sub-20 spots.
Kouji_SanSr. Hινε UÏкεεÏεг - EUPT DeputyThe NetherlandsJoin Date: 2003-05-13Member: 16271Members, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue
edited May 2018
The deformed lines can be caused by using a higher FoV, although seems you're using the a lower value judging from your screenshot. That stuff tends to ... Well just look at the four "circles" on that texture in my screenshot. @90degress you get those elliptical deformation nearer the edge/corners of the screen.
By the way, my settings are with everything set to "High" and AA=TAA with all the tickboxes set to "on". I have turned off DoF, Motion Blur and Dithering. So one of those might be the cause for that strange loss in textures quality... Also I've just recently turned off Bloom, that stuff looks cool for bioluminescence. But now that I've arrived at the lava zones, it is kinda, well not exactly blinding, but it does hinder visibility
Not sure about lens dirt, I find the little particle effects"neat"
I originally was running the game in 3840x2160 (Native 4k) which is how I normally run my games, but based on the graphics quality, it doesn't look like the game actually supports UHD resolutions with textures higher than 1080p.
At least I didn't see any noticeable difference in graphics quality, but the game's performance was abysmal in 4k.
So I dropped it down to 1920x1080 and it more or less looks the same and performance is passable, but definitely not a very well optimized game. Lots of micro-stutters and other odd frame drops despite my hardware being cutting edge high end stuff.
I originally was running the game in 3840x2160 (Native 4k) which is how I normally run my games, but based on the graphics quality, it doesn't look like the game actually supports UHD resolutions with textures higher than 1080p.
At least I didn't see any noticeable difference in graphics quality, but the game's performance was abysmal in 4k.
So I dropped it down to 1920x1080 and it more or less looks the same and performance is passable, but definitely not a very well optimized game. Lots of micro-stutters and other odd frame drops despite my hardware being cutting edge high end stuff.
I think the engine is showing its age. The big problem I have is the pop-in.
I originally was running the game in 3840x2160 (Native 4k) which is how I normally run my games, but based on the graphics quality, it doesn't look like the game actually supports UHD resolutions with textures higher than 1080p.
At least I didn't see any noticeable difference in graphics quality, but the game's performance was abysmal in 4k.
So I dropped it down to 1920x1080 and it more or less looks the same and performance is passable, but definitely not a very well optimized game. Lots of micro-stutters and other odd frame drops despite my hardware being cutting edge high end stuff.
I think the engine is showing its age. The big problem I have is the pop-in.
Not really, the engine is showing us that it doesn't like to be forced to do stuff it really wasn't designed for
I originally was running the game in 3840x2160 (Native 4k) which is how I normally run my games, but based on the graphics quality, it doesn't look like the game actually supports UHD resolutions with textures higher than 1080p.
At least I didn't see any noticeable difference in graphics quality, but the game's performance was abysmal in 4k.
So I dropped it down to 1920x1080 and it more or less looks the same and performance is passable, but definitely not a very well optimized game. Lots of micro-stutters and other odd frame drops despite my hardware being cutting edge high end stuff.
I think the engine is showing its age. The big problem I have is the pop-in.
I don't know if it's something they did in the last patch but the pop in is horrendous! It's never been this bad before.
I originally was running the game in 3840x2160 (Native 4k) which is how I normally run my games, but based on the graphics quality, it doesn't look like the game actually supports UHD resolutions with textures higher than 1080p.
At least I didn't see any noticeable difference in graphics quality, but the game's performance was abysmal in 4k.
So I dropped it down to 1920x1080 and it more or less looks the same and performance is passable, but definitely not a very well optimized game. Lots of micro-stutters and other odd frame drops despite my hardware being cutting edge high end stuff.
I think the engine is showing its age. The big problem I have is the pop-in.
Not really, the engine is showing us that it doesn't like to be forced to do stuff it really wasn't designed for
You mean like running at a locked 60fps @ 1080p?
Yeah... It definitely has a real problem pulling that off. And even when you throw a ton of GPU/CPU horsepower at the problem, it still can't run smoothly 100% of the time.
Having beat the game and never once being able to maintain a locked 60fps despite running at the pedestrian resolution of 1080p instead of my preferred 3840x2160, I'm afraid you are well within Apologist territory with your comment.
I really hope that the developers seriously address whatever is behind all these head scratching fps issues. I saw nothing in the game's graphic offerings that could account for such crappy performance with an overclocked 1080ti / i7 7700k combo. Hardware that can easily maintain a locked 60fps in Native 4k on all of my other currently played games.
And yes... The over the top POP-IN is seriously immersion breaking. I've got 11 GB of VRAM on my GPU. Why wasn't that used to cache all that stuff so it was visible earlier and without popping in?
I think @BigGrayGolem comment referring to an aging game engine is SPOT ON!
Kouji_SanSr. Hινε UÏкεεÏεг - EUPT DeputyThe NetherlandsJoin Date: 2003-05-13Member: 16271Members, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue
edited May 2018
Calling out the devs for releasing a game that isn't really "done cooking" yet? How does that make me an apologist? My comment is actually taking the piss of Unity and how it's used for Subnautica Also I've been calling them out for the HUGE issues with the interface and the various QoL issues. It's all just so bloody clunky
The thing is, it looks like they're using the engine in a way it wasn't designed and while they have been able to work some magic to make it run at "acceptable" performance, which is subjective. No amount of horsepower you currently throw at the problem, an engine bottleneck is not going to somehow disappear if it has trouble loading and unloading world chunks and entities properly. Which is quite obviously the main cause for the stuttering, the biggest impact when running recommended specs or above, is to throw a SSD in there. But even then, the problem is not going to go away entirely.
Besides, you seem to be misunderstanding something, which isn't really obvious and rather counter intuitive in any case Running a rig at FullHD while it is capable of 4K, your GPU/MEM/CPU combination isn't going to see huge increases in performance compared to less powerfull rigs able to run at 60FPS. Mostly because it is, from what I can see the chunk loading/unloading responsible for the stuttering. Your rig will basically run your hardware at a much lower load, because the extra horsepower simply isn't needed to display the comparatively tiny 1080p frames/sec at the same FPS, so expecting "huge" increase performance is simply you being uninformed about how an engine bottleneck is not going to go away by brute forcing it.
Also maybe the game is set up in such a way that it will experience timing issues when going beyond 60FPS, I dunno... There are some settings in the F1 or F3 menu IIRC, where you can force the view distance to be further away beyond default settings or perhaps it was console commands... Maybe you can stop the popups to some extent, I do believe these settings have to be manually set every time you start the game.
I really wish when it came to “performance improvements” they didn’t have to downgrade the maximum quality of Subnautica for everyone when it came to settings. Not everyone has potatoes for their CPU & GPU. I wonder if the limitations are caused by the size of the game and available RAM or even the preformance of the Unity engine the game runs on all together. I own a gaming PC but it is not all that powerful but is configured to run games pretty well so optimization for a broad spectrum of computers would really help. One thing I wish they would fix in the future is whenever you are in a Seamoth you won’t see the terrian loading in front of you when traveling at fast speeds.
Kouji_SanSr. Hινε UÏкεεÏεг - EUPT DeputyThe NetherlandsJoin Date: 2003-05-13Member: 16271Members, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue
edited May 2018
This whole debacle kinda reminds me of the engine choke in GoldSrc (original Half-Life engine). Get this, Natural Selection was probably the most detailed game on there with maps that were decked out with atmospherics, run time entities and lot's of detail in the world.
NS1.04 and earlier choked the engine even rigs nowadays would have trouble running it, not because of sheer power but because of the engine not giving a damn. Well maybe rigs in this day and age could brute force it, I'm actually not sure Anyway, the mapping guidelines had to be updated:
No more than 255 run time entities
A maximum of ~700-800 Wpolies per areas with ~1000-1200 Wpolies for commander view.
For reference, a random world model or weapon model in this day and age probably goes well beyond 5-10K polygons with the world in general in newer games mostly showing you ~40-60K polygons on average depending on what's happening on screen and what game you're playing obviously. And I've heard of much higher polygon counts as well, TBH I'm probably out of date with my polygon count claims here
Not to mention HAIR and splines or cards for that, surely that will up the polygon count drastically right?
But yeah, these "mapping guidelines" were there just to make the engine run properly, seems Unity is having the same issue to some extend
Did everything here. I set up a RAMDisk big enough to copy the entire Build18 folder into.
I copied said files and make the symbolic link from the SSD to the RAMDisk for that folder.
I also broken the link to the original files just to make sure those weren't being used.
I opened up my older save file with my largest base. These are my findings.
- Initial load times were different, but not overall faster.
- The atrocious levels of studder inside my overly large base were just as bad.
- Outside, the draw distance of chunks was unchanged, but considering I didn't change the clipmaps, that's to be expected.
- I got a modest 10-20 FPS increase, with noticeably higher minimums.
There was some effect, but it wasn't enough.
I might later try loading the entire Subnautica folder into RAMDisk and see how it runs there.
But for right now, this wasn't enough to alleviate the worst issues that come with building too much.
I also replied with:
You could try also mirroring ONLY the CellsCache portion of your save there as well (NOTE you will have to mirror or manually copy any changes after saving or your resources changes like mining and door unlocks won't be saved).
But honestly IDK if that would do much. I wonder if there's a way to record what files Subnautica spends the most time accessing. Maybe with Microsoft SysInternals Process Monitor? hmm
For the depth of field slider. What do you recommend setting it to? I at least want the DOV showing in a way proportionate with the players actual head.
Guys! i'm a big fan of this game! But since release perfomance has drastically went down. Creatures and landscape just pop out of nowhere. And i have quite an impressive rig. Please fix optimisation, i like to replay your beautiful game.
Terra Join Date: 2017-02-27 Member: 228342Members
Comments
Well what did you do to fix it?
Now my question is, how much compression did ya use on that jpeg?
I'll keep fiddling with it now and again, maybe I can come up with some way to achieve optimal quality somehow. I might play with nVidia Inspector and see where that gets me too.
Edit: So I went back in and tried what I thought I remembered, and here's what worked best:
1) Set the Preset to High so that everything is maxxed by default.
2) Turned off AA via the AA Quality setting (so weird) as well as Bloom, Lens Dirt, DoF, Motion Blur Quality and Dithering (why is there dithering? Dithering is just primitive AA).
3) Noticed some banding so I turned off Ambient Occlusion (after trying other things, makes little sense that Ambient Occlusion causes banding).
The quality is much better now, at least as good as the screenshot you posted, so I will see if it stays that way. The fps is tolerable, running between 30-ish and 60. I still dream of the day when a straight line actually looks like a straight line when viewed at anything but precise horizontal or vertical, but it's not bad if I don't examine it too closely. I can get almost perfect 60fps if I downgrade to 2560x1440, but then the quality suffers, so I have to decide whether to accept the loss in quality or the fps. Since this isn't fps pvp I can likely go with the sub-60 fps without problems as long as I don't hit any sub-20 spots.
By the way, my settings are with everything set to "High" and AA=TAA with all the tickboxes set to "on". I have turned off DoF, Motion Blur and Dithering. So one of those might be the cause for that strange loss in textures quality... Also I've just recently turned off Bloom, that stuff looks cool for bioluminescence. But now that I've arrived at the lava zones, it is kinda, well not exactly blinding, but it does hinder visibility
Not sure about lens dirt, I find the little particle effects"neat"
At least I didn't see any noticeable difference in graphics quality, but the game's performance was abysmal in 4k.
So I dropped it down to 1920x1080 and it more or less looks the same and performance is passable, but definitely not a very well optimized game. Lots of micro-stutters and other odd frame drops despite my hardware being cutting edge high end stuff.
I think the engine is showing its age. The big problem I have is the pop-in.
Not really, the engine is showing us that it doesn't like to be forced to do stuff it really wasn't designed for
I don't know if it's something they did in the last patch but the pop in is horrendous! It's never been this bad before.
You mean like running at a locked 60fps @ 1080p?
Yeah... It definitely has a real problem pulling that off. And even when you throw a ton of GPU/CPU horsepower at the problem, it still can't run smoothly 100% of the time.
Having beat the game and never once being able to maintain a locked 60fps despite running at the pedestrian resolution of 1080p instead of my preferred 3840x2160, I'm afraid you are well within Apologist territory with your comment.
I really hope that the developers seriously address whatever is behind all these head scratching fps issues. I saw nothing in the game's graphic offerings that could account for such crappy performance with an overclocked 1080ti / i7 7700k combo. Hardware that can easily maintain a locked 60fps in Native 4k on all of my other currently played games.
And yes... The over the top POP-IN is seriously immersion breaking. I've got 11 GB of VRAM on my GPU. Why wasn't that used to cache all that stuff so it was visible earlier and without popping in?
I think @BigGrayGolem comment referring to an aging game engine is SPOT ON!
The thing is, it looks like they're using the engine in a way it wasn't designed and while they have been able to work some magic to make it run at "acceptable" performance, which is subjective. No amount of horsepower you currently throw at the problem, an engine bottleneck is not going to somehow disappear if it has trouble loading and unloading world chunks and entities properly. Which is quite obviously the main cause for the stuttering, the biggest impact when running recommended specs or above, is to throw a SSD in there. But even then, the problem is not going to go away entirely.
Besides, you seem to be misunderstanding something, which isn't really obvious and rather counter intuitive in any case
Also maybe the game is set up in such a way that it will experience timing issues when going beyond 60FPS, I dunno... There are some settings in the F1 or F3 menu IIRC, where you can force the view distance to be further away beyond default settings or perhaps it was console commands... Maybe you can stop the popups to some extent, I do believe these settings have to be manually set every time you start the game.
NS1.04 and earlier choked the engine even rigs nowadays would have trouble running it, not because of sheer power but because of the engine not giving a damn. Well maybe rigs in this day and age could brute force it, I'm actually not sure
But yeah, these "mapping guidelines" were there just to make the engine run properly, seems Unity is having the same issue to some extend
I also replied with: