Genuine technical question for the developers
I am genuinely curious as to what makes dbd so hardware intensive. Specifically for last gen console; why does the fan blow like crazy and the frame rate drop so frequently?
Seriously, what causes it to happen? What makes it possible for Horizon Forbidden West on ps4 to run more smoothly than dbd?
Of course it's not just dbd, there are plenty of games that run worse than they should. I'm just more interested in dbd's case since it's been around for 6 years noe
Comments
Spaghetti code. That's it.
But how does the code make it run poorly?
Honestly the map reworks didn't help
Something around the resident evil chapter just made this game awful
A lot of the older content in this game is likely not optimised. By that i mean that the code isn't very efficient, and by that i mean that the code is coded in way more lines than it could have been.
Code efficiency has little to do with the number of lines. In fact, it's usually the case that better optimised code actually uses more lines of code, because it uses different algorithms to achieve the same result depending on size of dataset, needs, etc.
Code is inefficient if (a) you're running unnecessary code and (b) it's an inefficient implementation of a specific algorithm. You can resolve both by adding in more logic gates and different implementations for various tasks... which means more code (and of course, much better structure which is what's being inferred here)
From what I've read over the years, one of the crippling issues is that every asset for each & every Killer is loaded into every trial, no matter which Killer is being played. So when something is needed, it needs to go searching along an ever-growing string of code to find it and fire it up. Each Killer, perk, add-on, charm, etc. Not sure about cosmetics but prolly them as well.
And apparently nothing less than a full recoding from scratch can solve this, which the mobile version did but they can't/won't for all other versions.
yeah, sucks when i paid for the game and meet the minimum requirements but i just cannot play because i randomly get 5 fps every other day for no reason.
bhvr is a joke and honestly they need to be sued.
The Horizon games have incredibly aggressive culling of everything not in the screen. I can only assume DBD renders everything, all the time, at an time. If probably has some weird assets that don't need to be loaded in knocking around as well. They don't fix this cuz it would break the game.
To put it simply, framerates are the end result, they don't say a whole lot about what goes on behind the scenes.
Say you want to hit 60 FPS on the last generation of consoles. In order to do this, both the GPU and CPU must be able to render a frame in 16ms (1 second / 60). If either one can't do this, it becomes a bottleneck and starts to lower the framerate. You could have the most badass GPU out there, but if the CPU can't handle it, your framerate isn't going to go any higher.
In DBD's case, we're already below that threshold on the GPU side of things. We could add more details and sparkles and it generally won't lower the framerate for those consoles. On the CPU side of things, however, there's still some work to be done to get the frame times under 16ms.
We're constantly working on improving that by doing things like optimizing off screen objects (so they aren't updating when they don't need to be), and a whole bunch of technical things I can't even begin to explain. This all takes time, however, since doing something as simple as preventing an animation from playing off screen may prevent a sound effect that's tied to that animation from playing.
Every game is different, though. Some will have relatively little going on for the CPU to deal with and be very GPU heavy instead.
This is not the case.
Can we assume that serious consideration is being given to upgrade to UE5? It seems that opens up huge possibilities for optimisation?
I got a same question, as DBD juices my CPU as much as a BR game would,
and feedback,
changing some things in GameUserSettings, and adding launch commands: -dx12 -fullscreen
removed lags that I didn't even used to have before and suddenly got them
I didn't quite get your comment, are you saying you can modify the ini file to gain a better performance? could you explain how?
Wait is that why chests that had already been opened don't open till you walk past them?
This would just be a new game. You're asking for dbd2
Then lets just do it for PC as well and screw the rest. :D
With the help of this video:
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTqKRmmOlZs"
I didn't copy paste the files though, I just changed the values carefuly,
I have Vsync on false, FPS limit on 120, all the quality values ([Scalability groups]) on 0.
And since my Graphics Card supports DirectX12 I have in launch commands on Steam -dx12
More lines != less optimized. Sometimes more lines can mean faster code because the more lines method runs faster.
Reducing the amount of lines is called golfing and is usually done despite optimizing
As killer that's so annoying 'cos you think someone's there and waste time looking for them
Thank you for clarifying that. I've read it a bunch of times and always thought it was obnoxious if true. :)
I play on Xbox, so I'd be in that "screw the rest" category my friend!
Haha as would so many! More people on consoles unfortunately. They have you guys missing out on better optimization and PTBs.. :(
Upgrading to a whple new engine would take a brand new game to happen
How so? My understanding is that UE4 assets, etc, work perfectly well in UE5.