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Prey (2017) PC performance thread

ISee

Member
I'm not very knowleadgeble on the types of windows a game can have but does borderless windowed have a bigger impact on performance than fullscreen?

Borderless window can decrees fps in some games a bit, while not at all in others. But in general the performance cost is rather insignificant.
Borderless Window mode is also a good way to force vsync in a game, when the ingame methods do not work properly.

Witcher 3 (with mods) fullscreen
Witcher 3 (with mods) borderless

Dishonored 2 fullscreen
Dishonored 2 borderless
 

nOoblet16

Member
I'm not very knowleadgeble on the types of windows a game can have but does borderless windowed have a bigger impact on performance than fullscreen?
Yes in some cases, due to how resource allocation works as full screen suspends applications and the desktop while borderless means it is just a window without border meaning everything else is running in the background as normal. In full screen mode it's the GPU driver that controls what is displayed on screen while in borderless window mode it's the windows desktop manager that does it.

Basically you may get a performance hit, it may be minimal or non existent but it also depends on your machine and the game really. Personally I don't notice any difference in my PC.
 

JaseC

gave away the keys to the kingdom.
Which file is it that people are modifying ? I've seen people say game.cfg and autoexec.cfg...so which one is it ?

Game.cfg if you don't need to set it to read-only, autoexec.cfg otherwise. The latter doesn't exist by default and needs to be created.

Edit: Oops, I was supposed to edit this into my post above.
 

Jaker

Neo Member
For anyone that doesn't like the offset crosshair, I've found that it can be changed to be central.

Go to steamapps\common\Prey\GameSDK and open the 'game.cfg' there.

Change

Code:
g_reticleYPercentage			= 0.575

to

Code:
g_reticleYPercentage			= 0.5


EDIT: Word of warning - this may actually mess with computer interfaces slightly. I didn't notice any issues with interfaces at first, but after a couple of hours of play I'm suddenly noticing that buttons on computer screens don't always highlight when I mouse over them, and it takes a few tries of moving the mouse around to get the buttons to highlight. I'm assuming that it has to do with this change, but I haven't investigated fully.

EDIT 2: Well I kept playing with this change in place, and the computer interfaces seem fine apart from the particular one that caused me to write the edit above. So it seems safe, I think...?
 

Xcell Miguel

Gold Member
Note : if you want to go back to 381.89, you can just install them over 382.05 without uninstalling with DDU, I just tried and the game does not stutter anymore on my 980 Ti.
 

pa22word

Member
For anyone that doesn't like the offset crosshair, I've found that it can be changed to be central.

Go to steamapps\common\Prey\GameSDK and open the 'game.cfg' there.

Change

Code:
g_reticleYPercentage			= 0.575

to

Code:
g_reticleYPercentage			= 0.5

Thank god.

Damned halo and its negative Y crap stinking up my new System Shock game, tsk tsk tsk
;)
 

Sky87

Member
I assume you can go back to previous areas even after completing the game? There aren't any point-of-no-returns?

Seems pretty open and metroidvania-esque to me, so that would be weird.

EDIT: Replied in the wrong topic, oh well.
 

etta

my hard graphic balls
Anyone playing this on ancient hardware?
What settings would get me 60fps on a 2500K@4.5/680 2GB?
I got the game on Xbox but I kinda dislike this temporal antialiasing, makes it a bit muddy in motion.
 

pa22word

Member
Anyone playing this on ancient hardware?
What settings would get me 60fps on a 2500K@4.5/680 2GB?
I got the game on Xbox but I kinda dislike this temporal antialiasing, makes it a bit muddy in motion.

The game says you're okay according to the system requirements, but you're going to have to cut a LOT to get down to >2GBs VRAM usage I would think.
 

gossi

Member
Anyone playing this on ancient hardware?
What settings would get me 60fps on a 2500K@4.5/680 2GB?
I got the game on Xbox but I kinda dislike this temporal antialiasing, makes it a bit muddy in motion.

You're going to really struggle to get 60fps on that hardware.
 

pa22word

Member
Hmm, when I use these I lose all shadows in the opening level :D Something is seriously broken here.

(edit) when I add supersampling I get the shadow removal with those settings. Removing the supersampling var shows the shadows again.

I just got around to playing with downsampling, and changing resolution at all seems to utterly fuck the shadows with those custom cvars. Also, DSR resolutions seem to break the game's implementation of the mouse cursor at non native resolutions unfortunately.
 

Tecnniqe

Banned
I just got around to playing with downsampling, and changing resolution at all seems to utterly fuck the shadows with those custom cvars. Also, DSR resolutions seem to break the game's implementation of the mouse cursor at non native resolutions unfortunately.
I change from 3440x1440 to 6880x2880 a lot and the cursor works fine in the menu and game.
 

pa22word

Member
I change from 3440x1440 to 6880x2880 a lot and the cursor works fine in the menu and game.

hmmm, weird...

Wonder if it's just non 1:1 scaling that breaks it? Because of course the first thing I tried was bumping to 4k (have a 2560x1440 mon) and it totally broke the UI.
 

etta

my hard graphic balls
The game says you're okay according to the system requirements, but you're going to have to cut a LOT to get down to >2GBs VRAM usage I would think.

You're going to really struggle to get 60fps on that hardware.
Hmmm, maybe I'll get it on Steam to see how it runs in the first two hours and if it's good I'll refund and get it from CDKeys.
Are the first areas indicative of how the game runs in general? Because that was the opposite case with Dishonored, I did the same thing and got burned by it lols.


Ok let's go

q2VSz05.png
 

theblaydrunner

Neo Member
The sound mixing is awful! or bugged out? One half of this room has a blaring alarm going off and (in the same room) 5 feet away it's total silence. It's happening all the time too :( certain ambient sounds will just abruptly cut out at certain distances from the source area. It needs to be way more gradual than this..

Really enjoying it otherwise

Edit: here is an example of the crappy audio mixing that came up right after I posted this:
https://streamable.com/jl1is

Yep. I can't believe more people aren't talking about this. Can be really jarring at times. I hope this gets looked at.
 

pa22word

Member
Yep. I can't believe more people aren't talking about this. Can be really jarring at times. I hope this gets looked at.

I assume people aren't talking about it because they're tired of it falling on deaf ears after Bethesda has had the same issue across multiple studios across multiple releases across multiple engines across multiple years.

I mean it really sucks and is extremely aggravating, but it seems to be company policy to put out shit sound work, so what do you do?
 

Shredderi

Member
The sound mixing is awful! or bugged out? One half of this room has a blaring alarm going off and (in the same room) 5 feet away it's total silence. It's happening all the time too :( certain ambient sounds will just abruptly cut out at certain distances from the source area. It needs to be way more gradual than this..

Really enjoying it otherwise

Edit: here is an example of the crappy audio mixing that came up right after I posted this:
https://streamable.com/jl1is

That's almost comical.
 

pa22word

Member
Also, it's worth pointing out that there is a distance for sound effects to fall off cvar in the game.cfg that's in the GameSDK folder in the game's main directory. If it's really bugging you and you're desperate you might try playing around with that a bit and seeing if it helps. Also a cvar there for item highlights if you're a purist and want that shit off your screen.
 

TronLight

Everybody is Mikkelsexual

This keeps happening whenever I turn on SSR in game. SRR and SSAO settings always reset upon restarting the game, so when you load a game you have to re-activate them... Any fix? :\
 

pa22word

Member
This keeps happening whenever I turn on SSR in game. SRR and SSAO option always reset upon restarting the game, so when you load a game you have to re-activate them... Any fix? :\

No idea about the bugged image, but the latter you should be able to fix just by setting the game.cfg file in the Saved Games location to read only I would think.
 

kinberg

Neo Member
Anyone know a fix for the really really low/tuned down voice-com audio?

Just using the audio sliders does not seem to do much for me :/
 
Yep. I can't believe more people aren't talking about this. Can be really jarring at times. I hope this gets looked at.

I mentioned it and showed a vid a few pages back. I guess you get used to it eventually. Its a shame really as sound imo is what makes a game better, more so than other aspects for me at least. Thankfully when its not obvious it does a decent job at creating atmosphere in later levels.
 

Tesser

Member
Can anyone with a 980 share their experiences? Surprised I managed to get 70+ FPS at 1440p with most (though not all) settings maxed out (shadows and aliasing were the only options turned down by one), given previous games set at the same resolution had me vary anywhere from 45 to 60FPS.

The contrast in quality and performance between Prey & Dishonored 2 on PC is palpable.
 

Pimpbaa

Member
The sound mixing is awful! or bugged out? One half of this room has a blaring alarm going off and (in the same room) 5 feet away it's total silence. It's happening all the time too :( certain ambient sounds will just abruptly cut out at certain distances from the source area. It needs to be way more gradual than this..

Really enjoying it otherwise

Edit: here is an example of the crappy audio mixing that came up right after I posted this:
https://streamable.com/jl1is

Yeah I get that too, and I have the PS4 version.
 
Ohh, noticed supersampling can be enabled. On a 1070, think i could use that and max settings and still keep 60? or should i go for 1440 instead?
 

GHG

Gold Member
Any settings/fixes for the sound issues? I'm about to jump in to the PC version. I remember someone in the demo thread saying there are some things you can fiddle with in the sound settings to make things better?
 

pa22word

Member
Any settings/fixes for the sound issues? I'm about to jump in to the PC version. I remember someone in the demo thread saying there are some things you can fiddle with in the sound settings to make things better?

See my previous post above^

No idea if it'll work or not, but it's worth toying around with if it's really bothering you a ton.
 

GHG

Gold Member
See my previous post above^

No idea if it'll work or not, but it's worth toying around with if it's really bothering you a ton.

Cool thanks, will take a look at it if I find it intolerable after playing for a little while.
 

pa22word

Member
Also to JaceC: the game doesn't actually rewrite over your custom fov values. If you put in a value that's inadequate for the game's 3 decimal place requirements once you change any options in game and the cfg repopulates it adds the decimal places in automatically. This makes me think that they already have the fov slider built into the graphics settings ui but just have it disabled at the moment because it's breaking some shit. I bet if we found the right cvar we could even turn it on, lol.
 

JaseC

gave away the keys to the kingdom.
Also to JaceC: the game doesn't actually rewrite over your custom fov values. If you put in a value that's inadequate for the game's 3 decimal place requirements once you change any options in game and the cfg repopulates it adds the decimal places in automatically.

Ah, cheers.
 

Tecnniqe

Banned
hmmm, weird...

Wonder if it's just non 1:1 scaling that breaks it? Because of course the first thing I tried was bumping to 4k (have a 2560x1440 mon) and it totally broke the UI.

I've only tried 6880x2880 so maybe. All I know is for me the scaling keeps the menu, UI and gameplay working fine, nothing is off as far as I could tell.
 

pa22word

Member
It does nothing. I tested it. Unless ofc MaterialFX is not the ambient sound but something else entirely.

The game's log makes mention of the materialFX variable in relation to guns being loaded into the game engine, so I wonder if it's for adjusting player created sound in relation to the game world and thus enemy ai? If so, you could make stealth and combat very interesting by turning the value very high and suddenly having the entire level's worth of enemies swarming your ass with one shotgun blast.

Edit: erm, hey JaceC it's actually six decimal places not three.
 

dlauv

Member
I'd like to compliment the Borderless Window function in this app. It's the most painless I've ever used for toggling between monitors and you can even adjust brightness.

Is the SSR and SSAO fixed or nah?
 

Megasoum

Banned
I feel like there's still a ton of jagged edges in 1080p even with all the settings maxed out in game.

I tried the supersampling but the performance impact is just too much.
 
i7-7700K
GTX1070
16GB RAM

Add me to the list for the game playing better with the 381.89 drivers instead of the ones that are supposed to be "optimized" for Prey. With the new drivers I was running basically perfect through the opening places until you get to the main Talos 1 Lobby. That's when the Fire Nation attacked stuttering started occurring. Rolling back to the older drivers I still noticed maybe a minor stutter here or there but nothing as bad as I was seeing before. I went through the entire first floor of the Lobby fighting Mimics and exploring to test how it played and it was a lot better than the new ones.

So to sum up...try the 381.89 drivers and see if it helps you
 
I feel like there's still a ton of jagged edges in 1080p even with all the settings maxed out in game.

I tried the supersampling but the performance impact is just too much.

Try reshade or sweetfx and add some extra SMAA or other AA on top of the in game one. Its what I usually do and it works most of the times. Doesnt remove them entirely but helps.
 

Megasoum

Banned
The game does that thing where if you alt-tab in it and then press Shift it will remember the Tab and actually open the Steam Overlay...

Not a big deal but still annoying.
 
Try reshade or sweetfx and add some extra SMAA or other AA on top of the in game one. Its what I usually do and it works most of the times. Doesnt remove them entirely but helps.
The latest version of ReShade doesn't work with Prey (game crashes on launch). I tried an older build (ReShade Beta v.11) and while it did successfully inject effects, it actually prevented bringing up any menus and also prevented the loading screen from drawing any text.
 

JaseC

gave away the keys to the kingdom.
Is the SSR and SSAO fixed or nah?

No patch has been released just yet. The "update" some people downloaded shortly after the game unlocked was actually language-specific data that Bethesda had forgotten to add to some of the game's packages.
 
So are they lying or merely incompetent when they say how much testing has been done on the PC version? Screwy shadows, supposedly enabled graphical features not actually being enabled, bad sound mixing, etc.

I like the game, but these issues don't seem to be due to differing hardware configurations, which is the usual excuse.
 

dlauv

Member
Not saying you're wrong, but the sound mixing is incredible to me on 7.1 virtual surround sound headphones. It's one of my favorite things about the game, honestly.
 
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