Stability and performance issues over time

Ever since the start of the closed Beta last week-end, I’ve been experiencing an issue with performance over time. I was encouraged to see the open Beta patch update seemingly address it :

  • Fixed a bug that could cause degraded performance over time

But unfortunately my specific issue that I’m encountering is still happening. So I decided to try an record exactly what’s going on.

While I’m playing, I always use MSI Afterburner & RTSS to monitor stats/fps. I corroborate that fps overlay data with the /fps in-game command, and it matches. I also use RTSS’s frame limiter, and cap it at 98fps (my display is 100Hz 1440x3440).

When I join or start a game, my fps is in between the high 80s-low 90s in town and outside areas, and locked 98 when I’m in an enclosed area (I used the Den of Evil to try and replicate the issue). After a while, my Afterburner-RTSS overlay just disappears. Coincidentally, at this point, the in-game fps counter shows framerates dropping by a fair amount. In town and open areas suddenly vary from low to mid 60s, and enclosed area like Den of Evil are at low to mid 80s. Fully closing the application and restarting the game makes my RTSS overlay reappear, and frames are back to normal until the problem reoccurs. The time it takes varies quite a bit - it can be 5 minutes to 20 minutes. It does not seem to be related to an area switch, or waypoint usage or anything, as I was able to reproduce it in the Den of Evil by just killing monsters.

When I take a look at my RTSS monitoring data when I was testing it in Den of Evil, I can see where my framerate data line goes from 98 immediately to 0 (it wasn’t really 0 - it was at mid 80s according to the in-game fps command, but RTSS is reporting it at 0). Then, I can also see when I closed the application (it goes from “0” to simply no data line). I don’t seem to be thermal throttling - GPU temps were at 77C when the drop happened, memory usage was normal and clocks remained consistent. GPU usage did drop, by about 10%.

Like I said, I’ve used this monitoring software in countless other games, and having the overlay disappear never happens. More concerning, however, is the seemingly associated drop in performance when this occurs. Truth be told, I doubt that RTSS is causing this, but rather that the overlay’s disappearance is a symptom of something happening within the game, that’s also causing the performance drop?

In-game graphical settings :

  • Fullscreen mode (1440x3440)
  • Vsync off (Vsync enabled in GeForce global settings along with Gsync, with frame limiter at 98)
  • Resolution scaler at 100%
  • All graphical settings set to highest expect anisotropic filtering at x8 and anti-aliasing set to FXAA

My hardware :

  • RTX 2070s
  • Ryzen 3600
  • 16GB 3200 CL16 RAM
  • NVMe PCIe gen3 1GB drive

EDIT : I should add - I did see another user in this forum report something similar with Afterburner’s overlay, but unsure whether or not this was associated with a performance drop.

rivatuner OSD to stop working could be due to anti cheat measurements that deactivate any kind of overlay, the performance drop however is a miracle.

That could make sense, so before the Beta ended I went back and tried to play a spell, only without the overlay. I played 4h, and the in-game fps command overlay stayed consistent. I verified afterwards in Afterburner and it jives up with what I saw during that time.

So… looks like there is indeed something within the game that’s tripped up by the 3rd party overlay. And, it looks like that trip-up is causing some performance issues. A bit odd, but glad I was able to find a solution in case this persists on the full release.

Cheers!