Framerate Issues (Lighting Quality)

Hello everyone,

I'm having an issue with the "Lighting Quality" setting. Whenever I increase the setting to anything above "Lowest" my framerate drops to a, playable, low rate. I don't understand if it is my hardware or the optimization of the game. I don't have such an abrupt change in framerate with any of the other settings.

On the main screen, I get around 40-50 FPS with most settings near the highest; but when I set the "Lighting Quality" to anything above "Lowest" I get 20-23 FPS. Increasing the setting from "Low" to anything higher does not affect my framerate, it stays around 20-23 FPS.

Can anyone give me information on this situation? I don't understand why my framerate would drop 20+ FPS when changing this setting; and why changing anywhere between "Low" to "High" don't affect the framerate anymore at that point.

My hardware specs should be in my signature, but in case not:

Processor: Intel Core i5 3230M Dual Core Processor (2.60-3.20 GHz)
Graphics Processor: Nvidia Geforce GTX 660M
RAM: 8 GB DDR3
[Edit]Power Supply: 130Wh
(Resolution is set to 1920x1080p)

 

That's because increasing lightning quality enables the shadows for the foliage, and that is a huge FPS killer.

 

My game crashes when I set any setting to lowest - which is annoying because I'm having FPS issues also...

AMD FX-4170 (4.2 GHz)
GTX 650
8 GB DDR3
750W PSU
1360x768 VGA

 

Have a look at this topic.

Graphical-Performance-tweaks

 

I tried those but they really don't change performance much. Well, tbf turning off SSAO gives me about 5fps more, about 2fps for the AA but the other settings don't do anything... and in dense vegetation I get 30fps at the max.

 

If lowering the graphics doesn't give you a significant FPS boost then you have a CPU bottleneck.

 

Which doesn't make sense since lowering settings in other games does give me a significant boost. My CPU is up to my GPU, trust me..

 

I think a lot of this game depends on the CPU right now, so I'm hoping in future updates they'll be optimizing the engine and stuff to run more so on the GPU.

 

BeamNG.drive is a higly CPU dependent game, you might have a bottleneck in this game.

 

Well then let's hope it uses the GPU later on in the dev-cycle. Meanwhile, I'll try some overclocking. Normally causes a blue screen though.

- - - Updated - - -

Just OC'd from 4.2 to 4.4 and it gives me a *massive* performance increase! 50-60fps on Dry Rock Island (low-ish settings though).