Performance drop while observing when water comes into view

My setup:

RTX3060 running dual 4K monitors @60Hz. Game is set to Full Desktop mode. Can share more details if necessary.

The problem: Just like that. If water is not on screen, performance is great, but once water appears there’s a major drop in FPS. Tried to save video but damn GeForce app just recorded audio.

UPDATE: In case it is important, I was observing a game in 2X speed. Reducing the speed to 1X did not help though.

Hey @webJose! What map was this on? Or have you noticed that it isn’t map specific?

I don’t do a lot of observation, so I cannot tell you for sure if this super consistent. It was a map that had water at the top and bottom, and also a lake in the middle.

I am available for testing depending on the hour. Let me know if the devs want me to do stuff.

I experienced this on the team islands map (don’t remember its exact name).

If fully on land performance is fine, if fully on water too, but if there’s a mix of water and coast there is a considerable drop in performance. I go from about 65fps down to 47fps or so. 2/3rds water, 1/3 land with no units in sight seems to be the best way to reproduce it. I can take screenshots with the Rivatuner overlay.

RTX 2060
i9 9900k
32Gb RAM
Nvme SSD

4k at high settings and 80% render scale. I’ve added the relevant values in parenthesis in case the screenshot quality doesn’t let you see them.

On land. I have v-sync capped at 60fps, so look at GPU utilization too (60fps - 67% GPU util):

On full water (60fps - 94% GPU util - big hit to performance already):

Partial water/land (49fps - 99% GPU util)


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To me the issue is much worse since I enjoy too much dual 4K monitors and playing full desktop. My PC is able to reach 144 FPS in my laptop display, a 144Hz full HD display. When I go to dual 4K @60Hz my FPS drops to about 20 under normal, land-only conditions.

Whenever water comes into view, I drop to 8 or so FPS, making the game very hard to enjoy. Yes, math sounds about right: 4K = 4 * Full HD. So dual 4K is 8 times as much screen so 20 * 8 = 160, which is probably what my PC can do on a single Full HD display.

It seems that it is a feature of the Relic graphics engine, where dragging the camera and focusing it on large areas of water makes the GPU double its use, I also noticed this in COH 3. Most likely it is something related to the textures and terrains of the game, anyway, it would be great if the developers pronounce on the matter on whether this will stay like this or if a solution is being worked on, especially for low-end PCs.

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Same here. Using an older GPU though (1080ti), but it works perfectly on land, soon as you go to shore areas, scrolling around noticeably lags. On any map. Noone ever made any sense of this issue?

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Thank you for reporting all! If you see this consistently, please contact support with your DxDiag and warnings.log file. Thanks!

Thank you! I sent a message with Dxdiag to support.

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Hi, has this been resolved? I’m also playing on a high end rig, land maps work fine (not great, just fine), but water maps are unplayable due to the immense amount of lag that I get hit with whenever an inch of water comes into view.

Any fixes for this yet?

There were/are a few different issues at play here, so it’s hard to say for your specific situation. If you are still seeing this, please contact support with your DxDiag and warnings.log file. Thanks!

to me that sounds like tech debt issue, smt essence is full of, it isn’t alone in that, but i don’t see how they could make renderer so overdemanding for what is being put out, especially water part

Hi, long time no see. It is not a matter of “IF”. It DOES happen, to a lot of people. Maybe super high end PC’s or single-monitor people don’t really notice, but I bet this is there for all. Instead of imposing the ########### of each one of us uploading DxDiag, which I bet won’t reveal anything special, why not organize some testing sessions with users and the devs?

I bet the people that don’t complain are on single monitors, or dual non-4K monitors, or on just beast rigs. This is real my friend. Cheers!

Wow, the word “b U ro cra-z” is redacted!???

actually, all PCs are effected, regardless of specs, the drop is the same, about 50%, but 50% with 120 fps as default is not noticable compared to 70 fps

Didn’t say it wasn’t, but you just kind of proved why we need people to upload DxDiags / warning logs. Every set up is different! The more we know about who is seeing this and when, the better.

My personal setup is getting quite dated and I don’t notice the issue at all, honestly.

In any case, this is the answer at this point:

And that isn’t just because data helps. If CS gets inundated with people having the same issue, it’s possible more resources may get allocated.