Doubling framerate for free on a GTX 970 after usage of Nvidia Expierence - at same settings!

[alQamar]

DISCLAIMER:
So far the described behaviour is not generally reproducible, neither the issue of having low framerates (around 30 fps) on the campaign map is given for a majority. So far only 2 (including myself) out of 5 reported that this trick doubled the framerate at same settings.

At the moment this "magical" fix cannot be confirmed to work for anyone that owns a 970. I am awaiting more results via the Steam community.

Spoiler for target settings 1080p resolution, target FPS on the campaign map <50-60 fps, may be more or less depending your CPU but should not be around 30 fps that I had: 

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Hello everyone,

while I was playing my Coop campaign, my framerate at maxed out settings (Antialiasing off) with a 1080p resolution varied from 15-45 fps with a good average of 30 fps.
I have found a thread on Steam http://steamcommunity.com/app/364360...7304416284098/ describing a quite obvious solution to improve the performance.

I opened Geforce Experience, and clicked the 'optimize game' for total war: warhammer. So Geforce Experience selected the settings.

To be honest I never used Nvidia Expierence for adjustment of game settings before, because basically I thought this tool would only adjust graphical settings to supported games, to ease things for people that have no clue what MLAA or HBAO actually means.

Curiously I have checked the Nvidia Expierence tool this time, as on the other hand people on Steam reported about occasionally framerate drops, that I have experienced myself. Framerate wents down to 15 fps instead of 25-30 for a matter of time and recovers again.

However after I have applied the Expierence settings I noticed 2 remarkable things:

- VRAM usage was limited to 3.5 GB. Everyone that has got a GTX 970 might know about why this can be important.
- framerate now doubled (40-80) in comparison to the state before at the same settings


Quite unfortunately I cannot reproduce the former state anymore. So regardless what I setup in the Warhammer options the game will only use 3.5 GByte VRAM, delivering an insane fluild gameplay. This despite the fact that there is no limit set in the preferences.txt.script and in the graphics options it still says I am having 4 GB VRAM, so there is no hardlock set in the game. I might be there is hardlock set in the driver now, but I cannot find it.
Even after resetting the graphical options (default / recommended) and setting them to maxed out settings again (AA disabled), this behaviour persists.
So it is not like Nvidia Expierence tampered the preferences.script.txt and some adjusted setting are not visible in the game.

I have no clue what is going on and what Nvidia Expierence did to the game, but the result is awesome.

Spoiler for Expierence settings after one time usage and manually adjusted settings: 

Spoiler for Warhammer settings and VRAM / sidenote: fps seems to be limited to 30 in menu (an often requested feature to reduce load, noise, heat, power consumption): 

usual framerates around 30 fps on the campaign map, VRAM usage 3,9-4 GByte on campaign map

Spoiler for framerate before of Nvidia Experience, and manually adjusted maxed out settings: 

usual framerates around 60-70 fps on the campaign map, VRAM usage 3,5-3,6 GByte on campaign map

Spoiler for framerate after one time usage of Nvidia Experience, and manually adjusted maxed out settings: 

Conclusion: it seems that hitting the optimize button in Nvidia Geforce Experience enabled a VRAM capping, to avoid that the VRAM will be completely allocated by Warhammer is it would by default. As we know 0.5 Gbyte of the 4 Gbyte VRAM are just attached with a slow 64bit junction to the GPU. If this does the trick, well done.

[A Barbarian]

Conclusion: it seems that hitting the optimize button in Nvidia Geforce Experience enabled a VRAM capping, to avoid that the VRAM will be completely allocated by Warhammer is it would by default.

Actually, I don't think so because I run the game in 4K with ultra settings (I even added SweetFX with SMAA and other effects) on 2x970s and VRAM is NOT a problem since although the framerate is low (capped @ 20fps), it is very 'smooth' (=very even). VRAM shortage introduces pretty typical framerate fluctuations. When I raise the resolution to 4400 pixels I get exactly those stutters which can also be fixed by lowering the texture resolution.

Also, a low level of VRAM shortage usually doesn't manifest itself in constant low performance (in your case it's less than half) but in a typical choppiness, especially when u move the camera around and new textures have to be loaded and old textures have to be swapped out (then framerate will go very low for maybe 0,5 - 2 seconds and stabilize much higher until new textures have to be loaded).

So, while the advice of using 'NVIDIA Experience' might be a good idea for many people, I have doubts about the reason for your initial performance problems. Maybe u had 'VSYNC' switched on before? It is known to cause some issues in TW-Warhammer.

[alQamar]

Hi Barbarian, I really tried to investigate the reason and searched for a way to reproduce the former state but it wasn't possible at all. Whatever I do, even deleting the preferences.script.txt will result in a cap to 3.5 Gbyte VRAM for the good of having a decent framerate. So far I have not found a way to return to the previous state where the VRAM was completely allocated, resulting in low FPS. That's all I can see in the difference and you'll also see in the screenshots (green UI overlay).

I have doubts about the reason for your initial performance problems.

I know this all sounds like very weird magic but I am not able to get it either. I heard about the issues with Vsync and also official advice to revert to an earlier driver prior 368.22, but I did not follow this advice so far.

Vsync was definitely turned off.

Can you report me about your VRAM usage on the campaign map? Before things changed it was pretty much fully allocated except in battles.


It would be interesting to know if this is at all reproducible for other players using a GTX 970. I due to the quite low activity in the Warhammer forum I doubt to get many responses where people could try this.
Perhaps you could try it your own, disabling SLI for a while and check the performance before and after at a same resolution.

[JGodfrieL]

I have also noticed the the poor FPS when maxed out on 1080p. I didn't thought that the Gforce Exp "trick" would work but after reading your post , i will definately try it out after work. Thanks

[alQamar]

That would be great. Let me know if it solved it for your GTX 970

[M2TWRocks]

I have no idea what you guys are talking about, but I have a GTX 970 and will try this out when I get home. My game has been running great, but I just run it on recommended settings and have a i7 6700k.

[JGodfrieL]

M2TW - What are your recommended settings? Ultra or High? What resolution are you running? In my case i get with settings maxed out 25-50 FPS if i lower it to medium i get anything from 140-205 FPS. I'm guessing it has something to do with as alQamar said : "- VRAM usage was limited to 3.5 GB. Everyone that has got a GTX 970 might know about why this can be important." The textures that needs loading. Together with that i'm running a i5 4670K 3.4gh and 16GB RAM and we all know that TW games are CPU intensive so your i7 will def help you a lot.

[M2TWRocks]

M2TW - What are your recommended settings? Ultra or High? What resolution are you running? In my case i get with settings maxed out 25-50 FPS if i lower it to medium i get anything from 140-205 FPS. I'm guessing it has something to do with as alQamar said : "- VRAM usage was limited to 3.5 GB. Everyone that has got a GTX 970 might know about why this can be important." The textures that needs loading. Together with that i'm running a i5 4670K 3.4gh and 16GB RAM and we all know that TW games are CPU intensive so your i7 will def help you a lot.

I used to obsess over graphics and have mellowed out in recent years. (Mostly because I have no idea what I'm doing anyway.) I'm not at home now, but when I click recommended, almost everything goes to ultra except: (all this is from memory so I may be slightly off)

1) AA is set to MLAA or whatever it is
2) units size is set to large (this is the only thing I manually change - I put it on ultra)
3) Depth of field is off
4) the reflective surface option is off
5) unlimited vram is off
6) and I think I distortion effects and SSAO are on by default

It runs without a hitch. I only start using fraps and all that if I have fairly obviously low framerates. That has not been the case. It's perfectly smooth and the graphical quality is fine for me.

That being said, I'm going to do the recommended settings through the nvidea experience when I get home. I completely forgot they have that.

[alQamar]

Hi M2TWRocks, it is not that the settings are now different to what they were befor. Of course Expierience will adjust the settings according to Nvidia recommendations (refer screenshot) but even when I switched them back to maxed out settings (refer screenshot) I have twice the performance. If I would have just more performance because Nvdia Expierence altered the the graphics settings to lower ones, that would be a normal matter.

[A Barbarian]

Your original performance was lower than expected for some reason. Applying NVIDIA Experience settings did something to restore it to normal.

It's also possible that having NVIDIA Experience installed caused the original problems . That's not meant to be completely serious but it's still a possibility since I (and others ofc) had problems with that software before and since then I explicitly remove that software from every new driver installer package before installing it.

[JGodfrieL]

Just finished tested it - Used Gfrorce Exp to optimize the game and it maxed out all settings except AA that were at x2. I got Between 72 - 108 FPS in battle ,in the past i got with the same settings around 25 -50 FPS in battle. Thanks
alQamar !!

[SPARTAN VI]

I'll check this out when I get home. I have one GTX 970 in both of my gaming machines, Nv Experience on both, and TW:WH on both, but I haven't used it to optimize TW:WH. I'll record framerate data for campaign/map before and after as well as image quality before and after to rule out any trickery.

[alQamar]

Good idea Spartan I am eager to find a reason for this. Subjectively I haven't noticed a degration comparison pics would be perfect to have though Spartan. Godfried thanks for your try. Impressive I am not the only one with this behaviour.


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[JGodfrieL]

I'm the one who should thank you ,if it wasn't for your post i wouldn't have tried it.. The FPS also seemed to be more stable mostly going from 86 - 72 that is a lot better than jumping from 50 - 20.. I'm eager for the DX12 patch though looking forward to testing the performance then. Also I did set the Warhammer.exe to high priority through the task manager and used Razer's Gamebooster to boost CPU.

[Shika_mech]

Weird cause I always use the Nvida experience. Ever sense they came out with. This time how ever I've gotten. Better performance and almost 55fps by going with the recommended settings in options. If I use the optimized setting in experience I get huge screen tearing and halved frame rate. Curse AMD going to have to wait awhile for graphic driver

[Shika_mech]

Sorry for double post but I do have a Gtx 970 as well

[M2TWRocks]

I tried this and it dropped the framerate on my computer. No worries. Just put it back the way it was and it works great again.

[alQamar]

Bad luck we cannot get consistent results with this. Still have hope about the fiddling of Spartan IV
M2TW What's your framerate with max settings and AA off on the campaign map?
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[emcdunna]

Hey guys, TW:W doesnt show up on my GeForce experience as a potential game to "optimize". I have a GTX 660M

[Fallen851]

I've been getting great performance on high at 1920x1080 with a superclocked GTX 760. When I did the GeForce experience, it put a bunch of settings to medium and some to ultra, and I didn't like the results, so I went back to high on everything. I really thought I was going to have to upgrade for this game and was planning for a 970, but now I'm going to wait for the 1060 as I had wanted to, or for the next generation AMD card, whichever is better because the performance with my 760 is fine for this and 970's are quite expensive.