34 réponses à ce sujet

[Scoobydooby]

Hey all,

 

I had recently spoken with users on the Guru3d forums about how Windows 8 lead to much better performance than Windows 7 for DAI. This intrigued me, so much so that I managed to get Windows 8.1 installed on a second SSD drive to test and see how much better it could be vs my Windows 7 install, which I use as my primary OS.

 

The following is my take on this.. there are a couple differences between the two as far as setup is concerned, and I will detail the differences, but other than this, I believe it gives a pretty accurate depiction of how the game responds to these different OS versions using the same hardware and settings.

 

*This test was done right at the beginning of the game so nobody should find this information or the screenshots to be "spoilers" but if I am mistaken, please let me know and I will add the spoiler tags*

 

 

System Details

 

Intel 2600K @ 4.6ghz (HT On)

Gigabyte Z68-XP UD4 Motherboard

Patriot Viper 8GB DDR3 @ 1833mhz

Gigabyte G1 970 SLI

H100 Corsair Cooler w/ 2x 120mm fans

Corsair HX1050 PSU

Display: Qnix 27" 2560x1440 running at 100HZ

 

*Differences between Windows 7 & 8 with this system include:

- Windows 7 is installed on a Samsung Evo 250GB SSD

- Windows 8 is installed on a Corsair C300 256GB SSD

 

- Windows 7 graphics driver being used is iCafe 344.47

- Windows 8 graphics driver being used is Nvidia 344.80 hotfix

 

*All directx and .net packages verified and updated prior to test.

 

 

GPU Driver Settings

 

*Settings are Global*

 

Ambient Occlusion: Performance

AF: 16x

FXAA: Off

Gamma Correction: On

Mode: App Controlled

Transparency: Off

CUDA GPUS: All

Max Pre-Rendered Frames: 2

GPU Acceleration: Single Display Perf. Mode

Power Management Mode: Max Perf.

SLI Rendering: Nvidia Recommended  (** In Inspector, Set DAI Vsync > Force On**)

Shader Cache: On

Negetive LOD Bias: Clamp

Texture Quality: High Quality

Threaded Optimization: On

Triple Buffering: On

Vsync: On

VR Pre-Rendered Frames: 1

 

 

Game Settings

 

User Config (placed in Dragon Age Install Directory)

---------------------------------------------------------------------

GameTime.MaxVariableFps 200

thread.processorcount 8

thread.maxprocessorcount 8

thread.minfreeprocessorcount 0

RenderDevice.TrippleBufferingEnable 1

PerfOverly.DrawFPS 1

PostProcess.DynamicAOEnable 0

GSTRender.MotionBlur 0

GSTRender.MotionBlurEnabled 0

WorldRender.MotionBlurEnable 0

WorldRender.TransparencyShadowmapsEnable 0

WorldRender.LightTileCsPathEnable 0

--------------------------------------------------------------------

 

In game graphics settings

--------------------------------------------------------------------

Resolution Scale: 100

Graphics Quality: Custom

Mesh Quality: Ultra

Tessellation Quality: Ultra

Texture Quality: Fade Touched

Shadow Quality: Ultra

Terrain Quality: Ultra

Vegetation Quality: Ultra

Water Quality: Ultra

Post-Process Quality: Ultra

Ambient Occlusion: SSAO

Post-Process Antialiasing: Off

Multisample Antialiasing: 2x MSAA

---------------------------------------------------------------------

 

control settings

 

Mouse Smoothing > Set all the way to the right.

---------------------------------------------------------------------

 

Origin In-Game > Deactivated

 

Game Resolution is 2560x1440 @ 100hz

 

 

 

 

Screenshots (to enlarge fully, click on thumbnail, then scroll over photo and click on the magnify icon in the top right corner)

 

Windows 7 (x64)

 

 

Windows 8.1 (x64)

 

 

 

General Game and Visual Performance Explanation

 

Windows 7

• Camera Movement is laggy and game overall has a faint stutter to it.. combination of lower framerate and just general hitching effect. 
• Cutscenes lag and hitch, audio also hitches slightly during scenes and also when entering and leaving a cutscene.
• Textures "shimmer" when using SLI, Do not when not using SLI
• Framerate can vary wildly between 40-90 FPS.. could also be the reason for laggy visual experience.

Windows 8

• Camera Movement much smoother, most likely due to higher framerate, but less hitching also
• Cutscenes are FAR less laggy and hitchy.. audio does not hitch and overall is much smoother.. still not perfect, but best I have yet seen.
• Textures "shimmer" when using SLI, Do not when not using SLI 
• Framerate is far more stable - varies between 75-85 usually.. makes for much smoother overall visual experience.

 

** When forcing Vsync through Inspector, the shimmering textures are reduced quite a bit, but do still remain here and there. **

 

 

 

Summary

 

I'd like to start by saying this is not meant to be a be-all-end-all explanation, but rather my own findings during testing in a single portion of the game. Obviously other areas with different textures/effects/npcs/scripting/cutscenes will yield far different results, as will the variety of hardware out there that users have in their systems. 

 

The main purpose of these tests were simply to highlight the difference between these two OS versions and to open discussion with the community about these findings. 

 

I imagine that with an incoming patch and/or updated graphical drivers, the contrast between these two tests would be lessened considerably (one could hope) and make the game more stable across the board, which in turn may make these findings moot.

 

If anyone would like any further tests done, please let me know and I will try to make them happen. Likewise, feel free to post any impressions or questions. 

[Scoobydooby]

As requested, single card screens.. Gains are far more moderate with only one card. 

 

Windows 7

 

 

Windows 8

 

 

 

Also just to add, I understand that comparing using different drivers may seem senseless, but the reason for this is that I've already used updated nvidia drivers on the W7 side, and found that the 344.47 worked best overall when using that os, so this is the reason I elected to keep them installed. 

[DemGeth]

Hi

Have you run a test using a single gpu?

Could be interesting

[DemGeth]

And nice work: )

[Verrenus]

Wow, thank you so much for going through the trouble to try this! The performance increase appears to be even more significant than I thought, I might actually give Windows 8.1 a try myself now, just for this! 

[jtzako]

I'm on single GPU, maxed settings and the game runs perfectly on my system using Win 8.1.  My DA:I is installed on a normal HDD but windows itself is on an SSD.

 

I know from past experience with other games, that my system ran much much better when going to Win 8 from Win 7.  The OS is far better at memory management and seems to have a smaller memory/cpu footprint when games are running.

[Xhaiden]

Personally, I've also noticed much less hitching/stuttering in cut scenes between older and newer GPU's ( and  GPU drivers ) even when both are above the system requirements and even if there wasn't a huge fps difference. The game seems to be optimized much more towards newer generation hardware and drivers. 

 

It also seems like nVidia and ATI are playing catch up with drivers right now in regards to DA:I. 

[randal51]

No way, man!  I so totally hate Windows 8's new, terrible, and completely avoidable UI so much that I'm going to believe that it sucks in every way imaginable!

 

(This was sarcasm.)

[- Archangel -]

Well, I don't have any benchmarks, but seems to run well on Windows 10 preview.

[Deepsetsoul]

I dont believe this. I think this is a placebo effect.

People are just desperate.

[Etragorn]

It's believable. The driver subsystem for 8.1 is easily an entire generation of engineering beyond Windows 7. It allows for better performance in several ways which are just not possible with Windows 7 just because the drivers are completely different. Windows 10 will be even better with the next driver model they are working on. With Windows 10 they have made an emphasis on gaming, since those changes can also be ported to the XBone OS and its Direct X. Keeping your OS up to date, regardless of how you feel about the UI, makes a big difference in game performance.

[Scoobydooby]

The difference is pretty obvious to me, and I'm not a Windows 8 fan at all. It pained me to even install it.

 

I've been playing now for several hours, and though the framerate is still all over the place sometimes, the experience is way worse on 7 than on 8.

[Eelectrica]

I'll hold out for Windows 10, and hope the performance boosts carry over.

Still very nice work, and thanks for taking the time to research and provide this info.

[texhnolyze]

Interesting findings.

Have you progressed to Hinterlands yet?

[DragonAgent]

I posted the same thing without the detailed info stuff a few days ago and went un-noticed. If you don't want the game to run like crap, go to Win 8.1

[Elevon]

I dont believe this. I think this is a placebo effect.

People are just desperate.

 

 

Why desperate?..Win7 is already five years old,don't  you think Microsoft know how to improve performance on their newer operating systems?.

I think  some Win7 users are desperate to defend their ageing OS,nothing is top dog forever in speed etc...

[Influ]

This is the same experience I had when moving from Windows 7 to 8.1 a few weeks back. I touched on it in other threads with less detail, but it's good that someone made a detailed post about it.

 

The improvements of the display driver model in 8.1 allow for much more efficient utilization of the CPU when using DirectX 11.1. Further improvements coming with Windows 10 and DX12 are going to improve CPU performance even more. The largest downside of DirectX has been the increasingly large CPU overhead with increasing amounts of draw calls. Microsoft is looking to solve this with DX12 and it seems very promising so far.

[Etragorn]

Apparently beyond DX12, once they have completed optimizing how it load the CPU, they are looking to optimize how it utilizes GPU resources in a similar manner. We could all be seeing a huge boost in performance with our current CPUs and GPUs in Windows 10 (assuming we have drivers that take advantage of these new features... but that's a whole other matter...)

[DragonAgent]

 

I dont believe this. I think this is a placebo effect.

People are just desperate.

 

It's not, me and scoob have both done it and the performance on stressful situations (aka times you are easily bellow 60fps) went up by ~ 10fps on the worse case scenarios. (for me was 40fps min/ going to up to 50 on those same scenes running them on win8.1) And it also removed the horrible animation stuttering. For some reason the game has serious issues with stuttering on windows 7 even on high end systems and switching to win8.1 just resolves the issues this unapologetic console port has.

 

[c3lix]

Can confirm this. Was running win7 on my setup, was horrible stuttery with hitching and only with medium settings. Switched to win8.1 now and the game runs smooth, stable at 60fps with everything on ultra (textures high because vram) 4 times msaa ( drops to 50 in redcliff, stays at 60 without msaa). Overall i gained higher settings with at least +30 fps more overall.

I5 2500k@4,2ghz
Gtx690
Samsung ssd
8gb ram

[AlanC9]

I dont believe this. I think this is a placebo effect.
People are just desperate.

Desperate to use Windows 8? Anyway, how does a placebo effect change the numbers a framerate counter reports?

Anyone try the W10 preview with DAI yet? I've got it, but on a machine that can't run DAI.

[Elevon]

Desperate to use Windows 8? Anyway, how does a placebo effect change the numbers a framerate counter reports?

Anyone try the W10 preview with DAI yet? I've got it, but on a machine that can't run DAI.

 

 

Problem with Win10 is different builds so which one  you testing it with?...I'm pretty sure final RTM/retail build will be quite a bit better and different so not really useful to do benchmarks on a preview/beta OS at this time,also by  then  better drivers and final patch hopefully for DA:I.

[Scoobydooby]

Desperate to use Windows 8? Anyway, how does a placebo effect change the numbers a framerate counter reports?

Anyone try the W10 preview with DAI yet? I've got it, but on a machine that can't run DAI.

 

This will be my next test actually.. I already have a copy of Win 10 preview and can install on a 3rd SSD for comparison. 

 

 

To the above question, I have moved on to Hinterlands.. 

 

I plan on doing another round of testing in that area as well now that I'm there.. this time between 7, 8 and 10. 

[Proteus7]

Rumor is that neither Win 7 or 8 will support Directx12, it will only be supported by Windows 10. If this is true, I'm going to hold off on upgrading my gaming OS until Win 10 is released. I see no point in getting Win 8 at the moment if it won't support the latest rendering software.

[Scoobydooby]

Rumor is that neither Win 7 or 8 will support Directx12, it will only be supported by Windows 10. If this is true, I'm going to hold off on upgrading my gaming OS until Win 10 is released. I see no point in getting Win 8 at the moment if it won't support the latest rendering software.

 

One of the main reasons why I was loathe to move from 7 until 10 made its way out. I have zero interest in using 8 at all.. and as I have had the 10 preview installed in a VM on my work laptop ever since it was released, its very clearly superior to 8 and with DX12 support, that's just icing.