Suddenly very low framerate, low CPU utilization?

[Doomjoon]

Last game I played was somewhere on 1.7.*. Today, I booted up a new game on 1.8, and I immediately noticed massively downgraded performance. I even tried downgrading my graphical settings from the way they were before, and the game still sits at around 15 FPS just when looking around (before, I'm fairly confident my framerate was more than 60 FPS). Actually interacting with the game made it even worse. And simply switching from the paper map to the terrain map takes like 1.5 seconds. Opening up the politics menu (which takes up the whole screen) made the game run much smoother, so I assume it's some issue with terrain rendering.

Additionally, I've noticed that the CPU utilization while running the game is very low. All 8 logical cores sit at around 10-25% utilization, same being for total utilization, which seems very low for a CPU intensive game. Some users on discord shared their own utilization, and it was at around 40-60%. I've tried running some other games, and they all run smoothly, and even the non-CPU intensive ones sit at around 45% utilization for the most utilized logical cores.

GPU utilization is full though, so maybe the GPU is the bottleneck, but again, the game used to run at at least 4x the FPS, and all the other games I play are fine, so I doubt it. And my GPU isn't exactly weak...

So far I've tried:
- verifying game files
- completely uninstalling and reinstalling the game
- disabling all mods
- setting CPU priority to high

My PC specifications:
- CPU: i7 6700k
- GPU: GTX 980 Ti (6GB)
- RAM: 16GB 2400MHz DDR4
- MB: ROG HERO MAXIMUS VIII
- Installed on an SSD


EDIT: Also tried cleaning up my Victoria 3 documents folder, didn't help.

EDIT: Forgot to mention, I'm on Windows 10.

 

[AndrewT]

- completely uninstalling and reinstalling the game

Did that include deleting the Documents/Paradox Interactive/Victoria3 folders ? If not please try that too.

If those don't help:
DXDIAG is a program you run from the Windows search box on the task bar. After running it will open a window and start collecting info with a progress bar in the lower-left corner. When it completes click the 'save all information' button and save it to a file then attach that file here.
IF dxdiag.txt fails to attach here, rename it to dxdiag.log , or zip it up.

Please attach here your Documents/Paradox Interactive/Victoria3/pdx_settings.json .
From your Documents/Paradox Interactive/Victoria3/logs/ folder, attach here system.log , error.log

 

[Doomjoon]

Did that include deleting the Documents/Paradox Interactive/Victoria3 folders ? If not please try that too.

If those don't help:
DXDIAG is a program you run from the Windows search box on the task bar. After running it will open a window and start collecting info with a progress bar in the lower-left corner. When it completes click the 'save all information' button and save it to a file then attach that file here.
IF dxdiag.txt fails to attach here, rename it to dxdiag.log , or zip it up.

Please attach here your Documents/Paradox Interactive/Victoria3/pdx_settings.json .
From your Documents/Paradox Interactive/Victoria3/logs/ folder, attach here system.log , error.log

Yeah, I've done the Documents folder cleanup.

Here are the requested files (error.log is empty):

 

[AndrewT]

I don't see any cause of this in those files. Your CPU and GPU are better than the recommended.

If you revert to a game version that used to run faster, in the Steam Betas tab for the game, is it fast again? Or still slow?

 

[Doomjoon]

I don't see any cause of this in those files. Your CPU and GPU are better than the recommended.

If you revert to a game version that used to run faster, in the Steam Betas tab for the game, is it fast again? Or still slow?

Went back to 1.7.7, FPS jumped from 15 to 50 (not quite 60+, but some areas like Northern Russia, where I tested this, are more demanding than others).

So I guess that my GPU doesn't like the new shaders... I assume there's nothing to do but hope for a patch?

EDIT: I'd also like to point out that my CPU utilization jumped up to 30-45% (from 10-25%)

EDIT: If it wasn't clear from before, the paper map runs fine. It's just the really graphical parts that cause issues.

 

[AndrewT]

So I guess that my GPU doesn't like the new shaders... I assume there's nothing to do but hope for a patch?

If GeForce Experience or the Nvidia app are running, exit them before starting the game. Does that help at all?

Otherwise I don't know what is causing this to you - your theory on your GPU may be right, but if so where are the other such reports? Of course yours just may happen to be the first of a tidal wave ... !

 

[Doomjoon]

If GeForce Experience or the Nvidia app are running, exit them before starting the game. Does that help at all?

Nope, didn't help :/

Otherwise I don't know what is causing this to you - your theory on your GPU may be right, but if so where are the other such reports? Of course yours just may happen to be the first of a tidal wave ... !

Well, as powerful as my GPU is, it is quite old. I don't know how many people are still rocking the GTX 900 series. Maybe some feature other than raw power is missing? CPU utilization also seems suspicious but I guess it makes sense if the GPU bottlenecks...

Anyway, if anyone wants further info, I'd be happy to assist. I do love the game enough to try.

 

[AndrewT]

Please install and run the free utility Speccy. Send its output to a text file and attach that here please.


https://www.ccleaner.com/speccy/download

 

[Doomjoon]

Here you go:

 

[AndrewT]

Not that I think it is likely the problem, but do make sure the latest victoria3.exe is in all the Kaspersky exceptions lists, an dthat it is not doing realtime scans of the Documents/Paradox Interactive/Victoria3/ folders.

Your GPU is a little warm at 50c, given the PC is substantially idle. Does it ever get up to or over 80c while running this game?

 

[Doomjoon]

The exclusion didn't help unfortunately.

As for the GPU temps, yeah I need to get around to changing the thermal paste, it's a bit of a pain. But the performance is a mess even before the temps reach 80, so I don't think that that's the main issue (and it's not different from 1.7.7). I will give it a shot some of these days though.

 

[Doomjoon]

(apologies for double post, not entirely sure if it's allowed)

I replaced the thermal paste on my GPU, temperatures shockingly enough went way way down but it didn't fix the issue.

 

[AndrewT]

I'm officially out of ideas on this one. Do you have any other machine you can test the game on? Or if you still think this is a GPU compatibility issue, a spare one to swap in?

 

[Doomjoon]

Not at the moment...

But since 1.7.7 works fine, and since every other game, including CPU-intensive and GPU-intensive ones work just as they did before, I'm not convinced that there is an overall issue with my hardware other than perhaps compatibility. If someone else has a GTX 900 series card to test the new update out that would help a lot. Other than that, from my perspective, there was a shader update that broke the game for me.

Only other thing I can still comment is that when I look at oceans, everything is fine, 60+ FPS. It's the land terrain that tanks my performance.

I guess I could ask if it is in any way possible to play with old shaders, but I'm not very hopeful about that answer.

EDIT: I've attached an image of what my HWMonitor program has to say about GPU utilization while playing Victoria 3. Memory is at around 92%, so I don't think that I'm running out of VRAM?

 

[LiberiusX]

I'd like to chime in here and say I'm experiencing the same issue. On my 5 year old desktop, 1.8 Vicky 3 is running smoother and better than ever.

On my laptop, I9-12900H, RTX 3070 Ti, things are fine unless I try to play in 4K. When I plug in my HDMI cable, the framerate slows to 20-25 fps. Similarly, the time it takes for a day to cycle is substantially slower, on speed 5 from about 2 secs per week down to about 5 secs per week. CPU utilization is only 25%ish. Strangely, I was also getting BSOD. I'm not experiencing this in any other game. HOI4, Warno, Mechwarrior: Clans, all run a little slower framerate in 4K but not 20 FPS. HOI4 doesn't slow down to a crawl either.

EDIT: I tried a complete reinstall. This has never worked for me before, but it seems to have fixed the problem.

 

[AndrewT]

EDIT: I tried a complete reinstall. This has never worked for me before, but it seems to have fixed the problem.

... of the game? Or something else such as Windows? Either way though, interesting!

Not at the moment...

But since 1.7.7 works fine, and since every other game, including CPU-intensive and GPU-intensive ones work just as they did before, I'm not convinced that there is an overall issue with my hardware other than perhaps compatibility. If someone else has a GTX 900 series card to test the new update out that would help a lot. Other than that, from my perspective, there was a shader update that broke the game for me.

Only other thing I can still comment is that when I look at oceans, everything is fine, 60+ FPS. It's the land terrain that tanks my performance.

I guess I could ask if it is in any way possible to play with old shaders, but I'm not very hopeful about that answer.

EDIT: I've attached an image of what my HWMonitor program has to say about GPU utilization while playing Victoria 3. Memory is at around 92%, so I don't think that I'm running out of VRAM?

You mentioned in your OP you'd done a reinstall, but in the light of that post perhaps it is worth trying again? In particular make sure there are no files or folders left under either the Steam Victoria3 or Documents Victoria3 locations, before installing again.

 

[Doomjoon]

Unfortunately, didn't work :/

I uninstalled and deleted everything in the steam folder and documents folder, so unless if there is some other step that LiberiusX took it didn't work for me.

 

[LiberiusX]

... of the game? Or something else such as Windows? Either way though, interesting!


You mentioned in your OP you'd done a reinstall, but in the light of that post perhaps it is worth trying again? In particular make sure there are no files or folders left under either the Steam Victoria3 or Documents Victoria3 locations, before installing again.

Eh, I started a new game and am at about 1840, and while there is an improvement after the reinstall, the game is back to taking quite a bit more to run each week on the laptop.

Laptop: speed 5; 4-5 seconds per week.
i9-12900H
RTX 3070 Ti
32GB RAM

Desktop: Speed 5; 2 seconds per week.
i7 - 8700K
GTX 1070
16 GB Ram

to recap: Only difference between the two setups is that I play the laptop on 4K monitor via HDMI, not on the laptop monitor. Again, Vicky 3 is the only game in my library that I've tried that DECLINES in performance between my desktop and laptop(on the 4K). HOI4 Doesn't experience any marked slowdowns.

Also, should note that I don't experience any negative performance issues when playing on the laptop monitor.

 

[AndrewT]

I have no more ideas, I am sorry folks! Nothing reported here makes any sense, technically speaking.

@PDX_Sosanna is there anything you can add in here? Thanks!

 

[Doomjoon]

Just to add, I've noticed it mentioned in other threads that CKIII is very similar to Victoria 3 in whatever way, and my CKIII works fine. Max settings, the game runs like a dream.

Since LiberiusX mentioned how resolution has weird impacts on performance, I tried playing with different resolutions, they don't fix the issue (other than expected performance gains. But it's still like 20-30 FPS on areas where before I had 15-25. Quite far from 50-60 I had on 1.7.7 at full resolution).