Poor Performance Since Update

Hi All,
I am wondering if you can help - since the latest update to Beam.Ng i have found the game runs incredibly slow, to the point of unable to play. It was fine before the update, however now, I am getting very low FPS. I have dropped the quality to Low but that hasn't made any difference.
the FPS ranges from 17 up to 31, and the waitforGPU fluctuates


I have a MSI gaming laptop, the spec is:
I7-6700HQ
Nvidia GTX970M - 3Gb Memory
16Gb RAM

I know it's not the greatest of spec, but I can't afford to replace at the moment!

I've closed all that I can that runs in the background, and have no other apps open. Any suggestions or is my Laptop past the spec now for playing this game?

Many Thanks
Andy

 

I think you could be more specific about your ingame settings and what you're doing (which map and cars you're using) when you get 30fps

I would say your laptop is far from being below the required specs, for example, I have a much worse laptop than yours:
i7-4510u
nVidia gt840m
8gb RAM

And yet I still can get up to 60fps in some ocasions like you can see on my attachments

My game settings is also attached so you can compare

I don't feel the game much slower with the new update, but I noticed a great increase on stutters, and also my UI is useless now, even with hardware accelerated UI, it's with a delay from 4 to 10 seconds to respond each input...

 

With those specs I think that with graphics set to normal, SSAO off and reflections off, you should be able to keep more than 60fps 1080p in pretty much all maps, except at Italy you might get slowdowns below 60fps, but I would think it still should run quite well.

With 17 to 31fps on low, that certainly means something is not working right.

It is worth to check if there is any dust clogging up cooling, with laptops such may happen.

Also is game using dedicated GPU?

Then there was some Windows 10 update that made performance slower, also GPU driver versions seem to matter quite a bit, also for some experimental GPU accelerated UI in graphics options makes game run better, for some it makes problems.

 

Many thanks for your replies.
It tends to be on any map that i am really struggling. I've loaded Gridmap and it's very slow too. For example, if I am driving the rev counter cluster is about 5 seconds out of sync. Breaking does nothing until it catch up, by that time, i've hit something, The menu takes several seconds to load. When launching the game, the background in the main menu stutters. It's basically unusable. I've put a pic below of my settings - I've turned shadows off, SSAO was already off and i've set everything else to normal.. Maybe something else is going on with my laptop.

I'll check the fans, however according to my monitoring software it isn't getting particular hot - GPU is around 60C

 

That really looks like performance of what integrated GPU would give, except there should not be that big delay still.

Your screenshot shows that GPU is causing the limit in performance.

If you take screenshot that shows performance monitor it can tell bit more (click icon with three vertical bars at bottom of that menu in your screenshot to open performance monitor).
Hover mouse over CPU graph and then over GPU graph so that numbers are shown for both, it can help to figure out what is going on there.

 

Thanks for this. The laptop is using dedicated GPU. Just to point, the screen shot below, i intentionally crashed and the car was fully stopped, note the speed..



I have noticed that if i am not running on full screen then performance is slightly improved!

 

ALT+U hides user interface, I wonder if that will give you any performance boost?

I think what you are experiencing might be what some others are seeing too, user interface is really slow for apparently no reason at all.
Disabling windows 10 game mode might help to that, but still your FPS are oddly low.

In worst case it might be that game update is what will fix the issue.

Now GTX 1050Ti desktop model should be pretty much exactly same as your GTX970M what comes to performance on Hirochi race track. Lucky for you, I have gtx 1050Ti in addition to gtx 1080, so with gtx 1050Ti I took screenshot that should give you some idea about performance what to except, I set my CPU to 2Ghz speed to mimic your laptop CPU bit better:


As we can see, others is not present, usually others can happen if having vsync on in game or nvidia driver or pretty much if anything else is slowing down drawing to screen. I usually set vsync off for testing as sometimes it can interfere, sometimes it can help too, so tricky option always.

Also GPU drivers have had lot of issue lately, testing different versions might sometimes helps, but not necessarily.

Not sure if issues with UI process, if something like game mode or some other overlay or 3rd party software could then cause others delay to increase and such fps decrease.

Currently I have no idea why UI slowdown happens or how to fix it, for some updating GPU drivers help, for some what helps is what is completely opposite for others, I haven't found a way to make UI slow yet, but I'm using customized Windows 8.1 with 416.34 Nvidia driver.

What I can tell is that your fps are way too low for that hardware and usually UI slowdown is not slowing the game, except for some cases, but why your fps is slow is again mystery, I would start with checking if Windows 10 game mode is enabled, if it is then it is worth to disable for this game.
Then I would try running game directly from folder while Steam is closed (%Steamdir%\steamapps\common\BeamNG.drive\Bin64\BeamNG.drive.x64.exe)

If car is not slowing down at all when pressing a key, that can also mean there is some hotkey application that has came with the computer, but also it can mean there is driver for keyboard (especially if it has leds) that can be outdated or interfering.

Windows accessibility functions can make odd things happen with keyboard too and they can be pretty automatic.

It can be also spyware, in which case scan with Malwarebytes Antimalware while having your current AV suspended, should reveal something.

But those are just some things that could help narrow down the actual cause, it is bit lot of work to test potential causes one by one, but sadly there might not be quicker way to find root of the cause.

If nothing helps or reveals anything, then it would require hitting more brick wall with my wooden head.

Oh and btw I'm using HWinfo with MSI Afterburner to check what hardware is doing, sometimes it can reveal new things, but just in case you find such useful, here is my setup of "finding out what is happening" on two monitors, I'm not keeping all sensors of hwinfo on as that can be trouble sometimes:

 

Hi fufsgfen. Thank you very much for your replies! Very helpful indeed!

Interesting point about the graphics driver. I am using the latest version, however i can't remember if the game slowed up after that installed or before - i shall try and roll it back to see if that helps.


With the car not stopping, I am using a PS3 controller, I always have used it with this game, the car does stop however but there is a long delay between pressing but button and it actually registering.

I am wondering if it's time i rebuilt the old girl - it hasn't been wiped since i've had it (over 2 years now). I do regular Bit-Defender scans for virus and malware, game mode is off - i've never really understood it anyway! but i will try running directly out of the folder path and also rolling back the GPU driver to see if that helps.

I will keep you posted! It's really annoying, i'm much happier playing this than watching the trash my wife wants to watch on TV!!

Again, I really appreciate you help with this!
Andy

 

There is input diagnostics in game, worth to test it from main menu options and also while driving to see if there is difference, you can access it from hardware tab on options > controls:


If there is slowness also one main menu, then worth to check windows control panel, but most likely controls are fast there.

Also there is DDU tool at internet, which removes GPU drivers completely, youtube had tutorials on it, which might help if issue is within GPU driver, but I'm not really sure if that is issue or something else just making GPU wait so much.

Either way inputs should be quite instant even if fps is low or if UI is super slow.

Oh and don't get me started about the TV

 

So I've tried rolling drivers back, and various other things and nothing seemed to fix the performance so I've spent the evening rebuilding my laptop - the first thing i did after the rebuild was install BeamNg - the performance is a bit better, however the speed/rev is still about 5 seconds behind, and the menu from within the game takes about 5-8 seconds to open! However the game does seem a bit more playable. I will keep fiddling and see if i can get to the bottom of it - I'm starting to wonder if i have a hardware fault somewhere..

Thanks
Andy