Arc A750 Low performance in Serious Sam 3 BFE

[vyrgozunqk]

Hello,

I want to report very low performance in Serious Sam 3 BFE. 

It's a game from 2012 DX9. 

At 2560x1440/ High/ Ultra settings I get 30-40 fps, although in some scenes it can go up to 120+, but very rarely. 

I am using the latest 31.0.101.5590 GPU driver.

I have just uploaded screen capture with visible FPS on youtube: https://youtu.be/YPTMOJUhRMk

I've noticed that the GPU is not fully utilized, the utilization in the video shows ~60-70%, although it's much lower when not screen capturing.

Edit: 

One thing I've noticed, if you change the texture size to "unlimited" the performance significantly increases. I have higher than the recorded FPS even on native 4K.

[Mike_Intel]

Hello vyrgozunqk,

Thank you for posting in Intel community Forum.

For us to further check this, please help provide the following details:

1. Are you using Intel brand Arc A750?
2. What is the wattage of your power supply?
3. What are the other troubleshooting steps that you already tried?

If you have questions, please let us know. Thank you.

Best regards,

Michael L.

Intel Customer Support Technician

[vyrgozunqk]

Hello,

1. I am using Sparkle Arc A750 ORC OC.

2. It's a 700W PSU. 

3. I have tried lowering the anti aliasing settings to x2, I was about to give up, because I thought the GPU should have plenty of power to run this game on maximum settings even at 1440p... However, i've noticed that the graphics were still looking bad for 1440p and checked the settings again, then saw that the texture size was "limited", decided to put it to "unlimited" and voila... Performance increased to playable levels and even at 4K.

Changing the texture resolution also leads to weird behaviour in Overwatch2, but there if you disable "dynamic resolution" the game still shows 80+ FPS, but the over feel is choppy like frames are skipped/ jumped, enabling "dynamic resolution" makes it smooth. I guess it's somehow driver related.

[Mike_Intel]

Hello vyrgozunqk,

Thank you for the quick reply.

Can you help send a video of the issue and other information that you can share that may help us if we try this issue in our lab?

If you have questions, please let us know. Thank you.

Best regards,

Michael L.

Intel Customer Support Technician

[vyrgozunqk · Accepted solution]

Hello Michael,

I was unable to reproduce the issue again. 

This leads me to believe that it could have been either due to shader cache being created initially or some background process in Windows, e.g. windows update choking the system. 

Anyway, Serious Sam 3 generally does not have great performance on DX9 and Ultra settings, however I have found that it has hidden DX11/experimental/ support and multithreaded rendering, which needs to be enabled manually through the console and works very well.

From enabling DX11 I've jumped from 55-80 fps to 78-110+ on the same graphics settings.

If anyone else from the community has interest, it can be enabled through the following commands:

ren_bMultiThreadedRendering=1

(enables multithreaded rendering)

DirectX11:
gfx_strAPI="D3D11"
gfxRestart()

Note: you can enabled D3D11 only in the main menu, if you do it in-game, it would crash.

This setting is permanent.

To get back to D3D9:

DirectX9:
gfx_strAPI="D3D9"
gfxRestart()