Poor framerate on 0.47

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Zaphida
Posts: 12
Joined: 20 Aug 2022, 13:15

Poor framerate on 0.47

Post by Zaphida »

0.45
Image
openmw.cfg
settings.cfg
openmw.log
0.46
Image
openmw.cfg same
settings.cfg same
openmw.log
0.47
Image
openmw.cfg same
settings.cfg same
openmw.log
0.48
Image
openmw.cfg same
settings.cfg
openmw.log

PC Specs:
16GB RAM
GTX1650M Max-Q driver version 516.94
i7-10750H

I think the screenshots above speak for themselves.
Mods disabled, vanilla textures used.
Can someone help me understand why a game with 20 year old graphics runs so poorly on a modern engine on a modern PC? And why one version iteration (0.47->0.48) has such a drastic improvement? I recall the game being playable on my HP Stream 11 in 2017.
If the issue is something on my end is something that can be fixed then I am keen to get it fixed so that I can play tes3mp.

I also noticed that on 0.48 OpenMW applied a windowed resolution of 1700x960 when I selected 1368x768 using the ingame menu. I changed the resolution and mode because it started in fullscreen mode despite 0.47 starting in windowed mode using the same settings.cfg
User avatar
AnyOldName3
Posts: 2668
Joined: 26 Nov 2015, 03:25

Re: Poor framerate on 0.47

Post by AnyOldName3 »

None of those screenshots show twenty-year-old graphics - you've got the view distance much further than people ran the vanilla engine with when the game was new, and it was a draw call hog back then. Draw call count grows quadratically with view distance (unless you've got a system to prevent it doing so, like shipping LOD with your game, which Morrowind didn't, or having a complicated runtime system to batch objects, which OpenMW does) so it doesn't take much of a view distance increase before you're pushing more draw calls than a modern game, even if those draw calls are sometimes cheaper.

As for your framerate differences, the most likely causes are:
  • 0.45: let's treat this as the baseline
  • 0.46: this release added things like shadows, so has a bunch of stuff to render that isn't a thing in 0.45, so obviously doing extra work takes longer.
  • 0.47: there're extra graphics features, but also some of them make things run faster under some situations (e.g. object paging makes high view distances significantly cheaper than the old exterior cell load distance setting), so whether it's faster or slower than 0.46 depends on your mods and settings. To be this much slower, it's most likely that your machine's elected to run it on integrated graphics as it looks like you're on laptop hardware. We can't be sure because we added logging of the GPU used after 0.47 came out.
  • 0.48: This is presumably the culmination of optimisations added since 0.46 showing their effect, but without accidentally running on integrated graphics.
Zaphida
Posts: 12
Joined: 20 Aug 2022, 13:15

Re: Poor framerate on 0.47

Post by Zaphida »

I thought I had put the viewing distance down to vanilla-like levels but on checking looks like I forgot. So yeah, that is definitely true.

As for running on integrated GPU... yep. You're right. I had checked the task manager to make sure this wasn't the problem and saw GPU 0 - 3D and thought okay it's running on the GPU so that's not the problem. But GPU 0 is the integrated GPU. It should say GPU 1 for the dedicated GPU. Letting Windows decide on my system causes 0.47 to run on the integrated GPU and 0.48 on the dedicated GPU. So I changed this in Graphics settings and now the framerate issue is resolved. Thanks!
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