DavidGraham
Veteran
Recently I fired up some of the old but gold games, and I was sad to discover that several of them were CPU limited beyond hope, even on a top of the line CPU and GPU. And I don't mean CPU limited as in they can't reach 500fps, I mean they can't even reach 60fps in complex scenes no matter what GPU or CPU you use, it was all due to one single factor: Draw Distance.
This was clearly obvious in ArmA 3 and ArmA 2, you set the draw distance to the max in these games, and you watch your fps fall along with your GPU usage. They are called Visibility settings for Objects and Shadows, and they extend draw distance to thousands of kilometers. Operation Flashpoint suffered the same problem too.
Flight Simulator X 2010 and Flight Simulator 2020 are like the poster children of this, these games can't run reliably using any CPU if you set the draw distance settings to the max, and they will constantly drop below 60fps.
This problem was present in the original Crysis as well, you can set the draw distance to beyond max through console commands, after which you watch your fps and GPU usage plummet. Crysis Remastered suffered the same fate, but Crytek improved the CPU usage with a subsequent patch, and managed to moderately improve the situation. But still, scenes with large extended views, don't run as well as other regular scenes.
The original Dying Light had the same problem too, but the developer intervened and cut the draw distance in half with a patch to get rid of the problem altogether! But you can restore it and still suffer low fps/low GPU usage in outdoor areas with extended draw distance.
RTS games with advanced graphics suffer that problem too, in the original Company of Heroes and Company of Heroes 2, if you go down with the camera to the third person view to follow a soldier or a tank, your fps/GPU usage plummet hard, as the game renders the whole map in front of you, essentially making the game a third person action game with max draw distance. You can do the same in the Total War games and get the same result especially with their huge number of units. Total War Warhammer games got the same problem too. Essentially any RTS game where you have a free control of the camera, can net you the same result, max draw distance tanks your fps and GPU usage.
Watch Dogs 2, Watch Dogs Legion and Ark Survival Evolved suffer the same problem but to a lesser extent. In fact, any game that can be modded to offer greater draw distances than the default will suffer the same fate.
The problem is not limited to any single game or engine, or API, they all suffer, huge draw distance/object count limit the CPU performance to a single thread, CPU utilization falls, GPU follows, and fps tank, the problem is compounded further by how little advances we made in single core CPU performance since the early 2000s, that two decades later, we have no hope of resolving the issue with faster hardware, and it doesn't seem to be resolvable soon either, not even in the next 5 years. Unless the developers intervene and patch these games with extensive multi core optimizations. Also, most of these examples are PC exclusive titles, so consoles development had no effect on them.
As a result, massive draw distances are a rarity in modern titles, very few titles offer them on PC, as developers don't seem to have figured out a way to make them performant enough. Worse yet, in 2022, we seem to be getting a much worse new problem, ray traced games with CPU limitations due to the Ray Tracing code itself, which is CPU limited even in GPU limited scenes! We've seen this in games such as Gotham Knights (now fixed), The Callisto Protocol, and Hogwarts Legacy, and others. It seems to be a recurring theme in 2023, problems in the past rearing their head again in a different manner. We are once again being restricted by CPUs, whether view distance or Ray Tracing, there doesn't seem to be a solution soon on the horizon, and we don't know when things are going to change for the better, we don't even have a plan for that, DX12 seemed to offer some hope in the beginning, but it now backfired.
I am hoping this thread will document CPU limited cases in PC titles, in the hopes that this will put pressure on developers to seek out new solutions.
This was clearly obvious in ArmA 3 and ArmA 2, you set the draw distance to the max in these games, and you watch your fps fall along with your GPU usage. They are called Visibility settings for Objects and Shadows, and they extend draw distance to thousands of kilometers. Operation Flashpoint suffered the same problem too.
Flight Simulator X 2010 and Flight Simulator 2020 are like the poster children of this, these games can't run reliably using any CPU if you set the draw distance settings to the max, and they will constantly drop below 60fps.
This problem was present in the original Crysis as well, you can set the draw distance to beyond max through console commands, after which you watch your fps and GPU usage plummet. Crysis Remastered suffered the same fate, but Crytek improved the CPU usage with a subsequent patch, and managed to moderately improve the situation. But still, scenes with large extended views, don't run as well as other regular scenes.
The original Dying Light had the same problem too, but the developer intervened and cut the draw distance in half with a patch to get rid of the problem altogether! But you can restore it and still suffer low fps/low GPU usage in outdoor areas with extended draw distance.
RTS games with advanced graphics suffer that problem too, in the original Company of Heroes and Company of Heroes 2, if you go down with the camera to the third person view to follow a soldier or a tank, your fps/GPU usage plummet hard, as the game renders the whole map in front of you, essentially making the game a third person action game with max draw distance. You can do the same in the Total War games and get the same result especially with their huge number of units. Total War Warhammer games got the same problem too. Essentially any RTS game where you have a free control of the camera, can net you the same result, max draw distance tanks your fps and GPU usage.
Watch Dogs 2, Watch Dogs Legion and Ark Survival Evolved suffer the same problem but to a lesser extent. In fact, any game that can be modded to offer greater draw distances than the default will suffer the same fate.
The problem is not limited to any single game or engine, or API, they all suffer, huge draw distance/object count limit the CPU performance to a single thread, CPU utilization falls, GPU follows, and fps tank, the problem is compounded further by how little advances we made in single core CPU performance since the early 2000s, that two decades later, we have no hope of resolving the issue with faster hardware, and it doesn't seem to be resolvable soon either, not even in the next 5 years. Unless the developers intervene and patch these games with extensive multi core optimizations. Also, most of these examples are PC exclusive titles, so consoles development had no effect on them.
As a result, massive draw distances are a rarity in modern titles, very few titles offer them on PC, as developers don't seem to have figured out a way to make them performant enough. Worse yet, in 2022, we seem to be getting a much worse new problem, ray traced games with CPU limitations due to the Ray Tracing code itself, which is CPU limited even in GPU limited scenes! We've seen this in games such as Gotham Knights (now fixed), The Callisto Protocol, and Hogwarts Legacy, and others. It seems to be a recurring theme in 2023, problems in the past rearing their head again in a different manner. We are once again being restricted by CPUs, whether view distance or Ray Tracing, there doesn't seem to be a solution soon on the horizon, and we don't know when things are going to change for the better, we don't even have a plan for that, DX12 seemed to offer some hope in the beginning, but it now backfired.
I am hoping this thread will document CPU limited cases in PC titles, in the hopes that this will put pressure on developers to seek out new solutions.
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