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Nier: Automata PC performance thread
- Thread starter JaseC
- Start date
The rays never really bothered me all that much.
I do want to give the SSAO a go (it should be easier than the bloom really, no pyramid of targets involved but just a single one and, as far as I could tell only 3 passes on that).
The problem is that I have very little time this week and next week.
I completely agree. There are some issues with the game but aesthetically I think this game is great. There is variety in the areas and each area does a lot for me in terms of world building. The game has great atmosphere and I think the washed-out look adds to that.
The lighting quality also helps. I mean, the GI is expensive (some might say unreasonably so), but it helps to make all the very distinct lighting scenarios in the game quite believable and aesthetically pleasing.
Play in borderless fullscreen mode
Play in borderless fullscreen mode
I have it selected in FAR and it doesn't do the trick
Dragon1893
Member
That bloom fix seems nice, gotta try it tonight.
I'm glad the performance hit is minimal, I still get a few hiccups on my rig in certain areas even with GI at 16.
I guess there's a positive aspect to not having time to play lol, I'm only halfway through route A so I'll play most of the game with these fixes.
I'm glad the performance hit is minimal, I still get a few hiccups on my rig in certain areas even with GI at 16.
I guess there's a positive aspect to not having time to play lol, I'm only halfway through route A so I'll play most of the game with these fixes.
Wonder Peter
Member
After all these fixes i can play this at almost locked 60fps 1080p medium settings on my 7870 thanks everyone.
SapphiCine
Member
After 12 hours of playing, finally had the white flash of death. Only lost 10 - 20 minutes of progress.
Only lost 10 - 20 minutes of progress.Absolutely. Looking at comparison screenshots, I was sure it wasn't worth how demanding it was, but actually playing the game, I don't wanna touch the GI option. Even after installing FAR for the bloom fix (and holy shit the CPU thing makes a big difference in the City Ruins), I made sure to set GI to "Ultra".
Busy waiting is underrated for games.
I guess it isn't nice behavior in terms of good process citizenship, but it often fixes a whole lot of scheduling issues, and on a modern system with 8+ hardware threads it doesn't really hurt anything.
In Little King's Story I implemented a new frame limiter, and what it does is if it e.g. needs to wait for 12 ms, it will sleep for 10 and then do busy waiting for the remaining 2. To make sure the OS actually gives the thread back control in time, while not completely hogging the HW thread.
I feel really lucky - over 30 hours in, and not a single crash still. (Other than the several dozen produced during mod testing and development of courseAfter 12 hours of playing, finally had the white flash of death.
)You speak as if this is their first PC port.
It's their fourth.
Maybe it's just me but it almost seems like people are bending over backwards here to defend this port.
Because, from the outside looking in, it looks like this isn't an actively bad PC version, but rather an imperfect PC version. If PG had a couple of dedicated PC dev staff (or a couple more, if they already have some), I think these issues would've been found and fixed before release.
I mean, this isn't being blindly unaware of what PC users want, like some, it's just got a couple of "rookie mistakes" in the code.
Dragon1893
Member
So for the blur, playing at 1080p, should I set it to 1/4 of that resolution?
I don't want any significant performance hits, but I'm guessing that will be too low despite fixing the ratio.
Not a single crash on my end btw but I've only been able to put in 7-8 hours.
I don't want any significant performance hits, but I'm guessing that will be too low despite fixing the ratio.
Not a single crash on my end btw but I've only been able to put in 7-8 hours.
lordfuzzybutt
Member
No, you set it to the same width, so in your case 1920.
Dragon1893
Member
It's just you.
Compared to what other companies shit out, it's a good port.
As in:
- It allows for arbitrary resolutions.
- It has all the features and assets of the best console version.
- Performance-wise, it runs pretty much exactly as well as the console version on comparable hardware.
- It's decently playable with gamepads and mouse/keyboard, with the correct prompts.
- It even has some PC-specific features, like MSAA or having separate audio settings when not in focus (which is really appreciated).
- Talking about audio, that also works correctly with various surround setups -- not always a given with recent PC ports.
There are some niggles like the fullscreen resolution thing, or the frame limiter, or the post-processing resolution, but those are either easy to resolve externally, or also an issue on consoles (so not really specifically a porting problem).
Could it be better? Sure, but the overall narrative that this is a "terrible port" is founded either on a lack of understanding of what MSAA is and its performance impact, or on expectations which simply aren't viable for something which drops to 50 FPS on PS4 Pro at 1080p -- and then it's not a port problem.
Agree with everything, except mouse/keyboard. Feels unplayable with that setup, especially because they don't allow you (to my knowledge) to bind dodge to a button. Having to double tap a move key sucks.
It's also false as the game does not have any mouse prompts and has no real in game mouse support, they just use an emulated analog stick and map it to mouse movement. It feels like total shit. Not to mention it has the worst camera mouse settings of any game I've played since the og dark souls. I have no idea what the Fuck they did but playing with it the options forever I still never got it to feel right.
Also, the game does not let you rebind mouse buttons, and has no support for 5 buttons mouses.
The most asinine thing that I found though was that they see seemingly mapped rotation of the pod during isometric and 2d segments and aiming during the Gundam, shooter style fight things to both WASD and mouse rotation, which makes it thoroughly impossible to aim correctly during those segments.
It's such a shame because I really feel that the game would control much better than a gamepad on kbm if the implementation was coherent, but it's absolutely not here.
Complaining about mouse support is like people who complain bout no mouse suppprt in dybasty warrior ports.
These type of games will never work brilliantly on a mouse n keyboard due to the nature of movement and combat.
Id never dream of playing a game like thia bayonetta etc on mouse n keyboard it would be handicapping yourself for no reason. Saying its a bad port because of that is just silly
These type of games will never work brilliantly on a mouse n keyboard due to the nature of movement and combat.
Id never dream of playing a game like thia bayonetta etc on mouse n keyboard it would be handicapping yourself for no reason. Saying its a bad port because of that is just silly
KimonoNoNo
Member
Wrong thread perchance?
Dragon1893
Member
Nah, we all just missed the MP part of the game for some reason.
SunBroDave
Member
Can anyone tell me why I can't launch the game anymore after migrating to the Test branch for version 0.3.0? I came from 0.2.3 and now the game refuses to launch and I get the Metal Gear "!" noise.
I think anyone moving to 0.3. from any 0.2 branch needs to uninstall and re-install. I remember reading that, though I can't recall where, but it may fix your problem.
Sändersson
Member
I just want to clarify that I was specifically talking about some noticeably bad textures in this game and not the game as a whole. Also I never said the game is "bad port" and stated that it runs well without any problems for me.
SunBroDave
Member
Ah, after uninstalling and reinstalling 0.3.1 (which is now in the Main branch), I can play again. Thanks a lot.
Durante -
Does using an ultrawide display change what value to use for the Bloom setting? I'm using a 3440x1440 monitor, and the value defaulted to 3440. Should I stick with this or should I be using 2560 since that is the width for the 16:9 equivalent of my resolution?
Tales from the ass: the post
Games like this have always played better on a keyboard and mouse because you can entirely separate camera movement from action keys and change direction of your attacks with lightning speed precision not possible on a controller. As long as you have bare minimum support, which this game does not have, you have better controls than on a pad because you can more than 1:1 map face button commands to the mouse and have complete camera control 100% of the time.
Trying to explain that not only is perfectly possible but some people actually enjoy playing with mouse and keyboard is always futile and an exercise in frustration, so eh. Think what you will. Also, nobody said it is a bad port because of that, so I'm not sure who you are talking to.
SapphiCine
Member
Those are good points. I hope the devs are proud of what they were able to accomplish within​ their limitations.
At the same time I hope they are enabled (by SE) to address the various lingering issues.
Dragon1893
Member
Reading the OP should get you up to speed, basically there are a few fixes that are pretty much a must. With those installed it's pretty much smooth sailing at this point. The game is a bit more demanding than its visuals might imply.
I've never tried it (playing with a Steam controller), just going by what a friend (who plays everything with mouse/kb and hates controllers) said.
Neither will be ideal. Try both and report back what looks better
Give it a shot sometime and maybe you can suss out what's wrong with it, because I guess I lack the knowhow of the backend to properly articulate what's exactly wrong with it, but it just feels so weird. Like the camera is, like in ds1, being dragged across the screen via mouse input. I turned down all of the tracking and it made it feel a bit better, but it's almost like it has preprogrammed deadzones and the speed at which you can change directions with a mouse breaks the acceleration curve or something. It's functional, but I ultimately jumped to a pad because of the aforementioned issues with the pod and shooter controls. I tried binding the in-game aiming controls elsewhere off the keyboard, but the pod/shooting direction still resets to WASD direction on input.
I wish someone would break open the game and find the raw configuration files so I could find out what's causing it and rebind things, but as it is the game is not really functional as intended when played on kbm.
Uhhhh whoops >_>
BennyBlanco
aka IMurRIVAL69
Good observation. Hadn't even thought of that. Still finishing up Zelda but looking forward to getting into this.
Not really, all these fixes worked with other Denuvo games. Mods that would heavily modify the exe don't work.
Kaldaien was posting some clarifications on this on the steam forum. He said you can basically do whatever you want as long as you don't mess with the DRM section of the exe or mess with its encryption process.
He was only referring to modifying it at runtime though.
That only applies to modifying the executable on disk. There's only very few things you'd need to do that for:
- Enabling the Large Address Aware flag in 32-bit games that run out of memory without it. This is getting very rare.
- Disabling ASLR in games that use it (NieR: Automata doesn't). This is something a modder would do for themselves to make analysing the game easier. Not being able to do it is somewhat of a minor annoyance.
- If you don't have deeper reverse engineering skills, you may want to hexedit the executable, e.g. to change the resolution in a resolution-locked game. For someone who does have reverse engineering skills, this'll be just as easy though.
Cant think of anything else you can't do by modifying the executable in memory, while the game's running, which Denuvo does nothing to prevent (so long as you don't try to mess with itself or the license verification system it's tasked to protect). And modifying the file on disk is a bad idea anyway, as any modifications you make will be overwritten by any future official updates to that file.
Things Denuvo also doesn't do (at least in NieR: Automata): Protect against running the game inside a debugger (by exiting the game or trying to break your debugger), distort the executable making it harder to analyse (apart from, of course, the DRM part).
Steam DRM, which for purposes of copy protection is absolutely pointless these days, has given me more trouble.
Edit: Come to think of it, I haven't actually checked myself whether Denuvo prevents on-disk executable modification, since I haven't had a reason to even try, I'm just assuming that's the grain of truth in all this.
I code on C# for a living and this is (aside from the obvious) pretty much unreadable to me.
You sirs are magicians. Thank you very much.
fair points, guess other than messing with games starting and randomly kicking people out of games(ME:A multiple times for me) it really isn't THAT bad and has no effect on modding.
For what it's worth, this sort of code doesn't tell the story of why it works (though the comments here do)