Game mode: Online private | Single-player
Type of issue: Performance
Server type: PvE
Region: NA
Mods?: No
Edition: Steam
FPS performance in the volcano is much worse now since the 2.7 update. I do not know if it is related to the recent rain issue or not.
1. Go to the volcano.
2. Observe lower and inconsistent FPS.
I agree, this also happens to me.
I just randomly guess that some sort of particle emittering or view/preload is causing that.
It might be related to it, but I doubt it since the fps drops in the areas which receive rain is significantly higher.
Glad I’m not the only one noticing this.
In most of the reported cases you are not the only one “suffering” from it. 
I haven’t seen a difference. I have my graphic settings on medium, so that may help (I’m ignorrant when it comes to computers, so that’s just a guess). Honestly I don’t notice much of a diffence in quality between high and medium.
Likewise. I don’t see the difference.
(I have a base on volcano)
Hello, could you please send us a detailed list of your PC specs?
@Pliskin I’m not sure if this will be detailed enough so please let me know if I missed something that you’d like to know. I am also willing to send you a full spec report generated with DirectX if you’d like me to direct message you it.
GPU: Nvidia GTX 1070
CPU: i7-4790k
RAM: 16 GB
OS: Windows 7
Storage: Game is installed on an SSD
My settings are as shown in the screenshot below. Unfortunately lowering the settings only seems to offer a minor improvement so I do not think the issue lies in there. (Apologies for the poor crop job in the image, I just wanted to include all my settings in one image.)
you can play on full ultra with that pc specs!
This may sound a bit strange, and honestly I don’t understand it yet either. But when the no rain indoors patch was released. The FPS rate dropped off quite a bit. But lately in the last week or so. The FPS rate is back to normal when it rains in my game.
If the issue with the FPS in the volcano is part of the FPS when it rain. You might want recheck to see if the FPS is still crappy in both The Highlands and the volcano region in your game.
I wish I had good news about this. If this is happening to you, there’s unfortunately very slim chance that it’ll ever get truly (properly) fixed. I’d love to be able to blame this on FC, but it’s probably not actually their fault (in THIS case). Anti-optimizations are likely to result whenever they update their version of the game engine internally and/or whenever they attempt to import up-versioned engine features; due to a surfeit of compounding issues within the engine itself, they will only get harder and harder to fix over time as a rule. This is becoming a major obstacle to progress and performance-maintenance across the industry, but particularly for UE projects.
(I’m bored and waiting on coworkers to catch up at the moment, so the following is what’s going on in more detail, for those who are curious):
The “optimization”—along with many other recent ones added to the game—causing this performance problem isn’t actually an optimization at all. What they are actually doing is offloading work to previously-unused/unavailable instruction sets which are present only in more recent (processor) hardware. Sounds good in principle, right? Those instruction sets can perform some specific jobs much more efficiently than otherwise possible without them; that’s why they exist. So, sure, in theory it’s great to have that option… unless you don’t have hardware with those instruction sets. But in that (very common) case, updates to any major game engine will normally preserve—and even typically enhance!—legacy/fallback functionality for the vast majority of framework projects that aren’t running on brand-new hardware, (with any subsequent overhead additions handled strictly by the new offloads, per industry standards and common sense). Done correctly, it should only improve performance across the entire user base overall, barring the odd bonafide bug. Simple, right?
Here’s the thing: In CE’s case, (being a UE title), the developers in charge of that engine framework (UE) are absolute morons that have all but completely abandoned support for all but the latest hardware releases… pretty much just because they can. (Though Intel/Nvidia’s aggressive financial incentives sure aren’t helping. They’re fast becoming the electronics equivalent of a medical insurance company). Every time they push a new build, they don’t bother preserving legacy functionality very well—if they deign to attempt to do so at all—and thus more and more (perfectly-capable) legacy hardware gets arbitrarily pushed out of the compatibility pool, with those needless incompatibilities then being inherited by any project (e.g. CE) that versions up.
This leaves primary framework users (game developers) to foot the bill for framework developers’ incompetence and corruption - typically in the form of struggling to write their own hacky framework patches, (not something that most framework-prefab studios are at all suited to doing), which in turn are almost guaranteed to break something else.
So, thanks to the UE de(generates)vs, your application can’t offload that “legacy” work anywhere, and no longer knows how to do it the way it used to; suddenly that once-manageable workload just got harder for your hardware to do - for absolutely no good reason, and with no upside whatsoever for you. Voila! Performance hit for you! And you! And YOU! Everyone gets a performance hit!!
UE (CE’s core framework) development team is by far the worst in the industry in this regard, and it’s getting worse year after year. Send UE game devs your deepest sympathies. Send UE framework devs your goriest hatemail. GL <3
Very interesting post, was a good read. I do agree with you that the UE development team is bad and I personally think UE isn’t a great engine either. With that being said the issue of the volcano FPS performance does seem to be fixed. I booted up my game after today’s update that fixed the rain FPS problem and the volcano performance is back to normal. I don’t know if the two were related (I suspect they were) or what but I’m holing a solid FPS there again.
sounds good, but in this case it’s complete nonsense. if you as a developer want to update your game to a newer engine version, then the scenario described above may be valid. however, this is not done with conan, among other things due to the described compatibility problems between old and new systems of the respective engine version (and hardware is only a secondary issue), and therefore this is not the reason for the performance problems. no new engine version or incompatible old hardware. a simple simple side effect / programming error of the rain system changes was the cause and it is fixed with 2.8. without changing anything in the used engine version (btw. conan is ue 4.15.3 since ages).
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