Working around the frame-rate slowdowns on West Coast USA

Sorry if this has already been mentioned before but I haven't seen it. For me the drastic drop in FPS now happens only when switching between vehicles or spawning a new vehicle in the downtown area (china town / industrial area). Outside of this area, farther from the buildings, it's usually fine now.

Also, going with NOT full screen but borderless appears to decrease the chance that the slowdown will happen, though it's not a guarantee. This is with a Geforce 950 card.

 

Sounds like you're running out of video memory. Try using medium texture detail and see if it persists.
Also, Reflections will likely tax the heck out of your card, please don't use them with a 950.
2GB of VRAM = medium detail, 4gb of VRAM = high detail (this is independent of reflections!).

Turn off SHADOWS if you have an older AMD FX or APU processor as these lack the performance-per-core that newer 2xxx~4xxx or better intel processors (and AMD Ryzen) have.

If this does nothing, if you're running from a hard drive, or have less than 8gb of RAM, it could be caching models to and from disk via page file. It's better to have a page file (virtual memory) than not, so don't disable your page file. This keeps your apps from crashing due to out of memory which can crash the whole PC at times.
Do a video of it if possible.

 

You may have misunderstood me. I have good performance on West Coast USA with pretty much all graphics settings maxed out, UNTIL I switch between vehicles near downtown. This is a known problem. It's better now in the 0.12 version, but still needs work.

 

Vehicles use a decent amount of system memory, but hardly any vram. That is not the issue here.


I wonder if this has anything to do with sound, there is plenty of effects downtown on westcoast.
Just out of curiosity, what do you have 'Sound Sources' set to ingame?

 

Not sure. I can check tonight. But I doubt it's sound related. The game does something when switching to another vehicle, and in a high polygon environment like the downtown area, the game doesn't like it.

 

West coast is hardly the highest poly map, I'd guess maps like jungle rock have way more polygons total. Or even the terrain on Utah has more polygons.
Big square flat buildings and roads with poles around does not equal tons of polygons. High poly counts only effect performance when on screen, like look at city and get less fps vs look away and get more. Not a permanent slowdown, if that was the case, there would be an issue with the culling of polygons off screen which would effect all maps. Especially maps with even more total polygons.

 

I checked the sound settings last night. It was set to high, and always has been. Anyway, I doubt it's related.

There must be some optimization issue with West Coast USA, as it's the only map that has this permanent slowdown problem (even though it's better now than in the 0.11 versions). Once I get the permanent slowdown, it appears nothing except going back to the main menu fixes it. Even deleting the vehicles & looking away in a low-detail direction usually doesn't fix it.

 

Last night I played some more on this map and surprisingly I found out if I wait long enough and/or go into the options and change something like the gamma, the slowdown will often (not always) stop. It seems that there's some queue or buffer in memory that fills up on this map sometimes, and the CPU isn't keeping up with it, but eventually it may get cleared.