Deus Ex 3 (PC)

I've got stuttering, but I'm pretty sure I know why.. it's called "Core 2 Duo", and it's a bottleneck on my current system. When the stuttering happens, it's usually right when it's loading new stuff, and I can see the CPU usage spike. Once the CPU goes back down below 80-90%, the stuttering stops, and the game plays smoothly. The reports of the game being CPU-intensive are very true.

 

I've seen two different kinds of stuttering.

1) Loading assets. It sort of "streams" in textures and such at various points. HDD light goes with the stutters here. Using an SSD will slightly improve this because loading is done quicker. It happens quite often though so I'd say they could use some more RAM on PC to cache this stuff better.
2) Some sort of performance problem. The frame rate will drop noticeably for awhile and then come back to top speed. I've seen this on both ATI and NV cards. I don't think it's CPU related, but maybe massive CPU power reduces the problem. One moment you're at 60 fps and then for no apparent reason you're at what looks like 15-20 fps. I've seen people report that FRAPS shows no frame rate change and so instead this seems to be a strange engine issue.

 

It is amazing. Too many games these days will run as well on the Xbox 360 CPU as they do on a massively more capable C2D. This is poor programming.

 

I don't think it's a performance issue exactly, but some sort of bug that occurs with some combination of hardware/software. The heterogeneous nature of the PC is a bitch to test.

http://forums.eidosgames.com/showthread.php?t=121236

 

Apparently it's not just steaming assets as it goes along but is compiling shaders on the fly too. That ENB series guy has produced a patch that's supposed to help the DX9 version somewhat and he's also claimed that the realtime compilation problem is compounded by the shaders being unnecessarily long.

 

I have some serious stuttering while walking around Detroit, or while entering a new area,
I tried some different things, Windows 7 and XP, lower settings and maximum settings, and the stuttering was always there, actually on windows XP it seemed even more noticeable than on 7 with the highest settings (DX11).
I have a modest CPU (wolfdale with 2mb l2 at 3.6GHz with 300MHz FSB), slow ram (3GB DDR2 800 Cas 6 running in flexmode), and a HD5750(750/1250)...

what I can say by looking at the resources monitor is that memory usage is very low, CPU usage is almost always full in one core and medium to low on the other, vram usage is normally around 400-600, GPU usage can go very low at times, the framerate in general is good (above 30-40), but there is the heavy stuttering...

but anyway, I already finished the game.

 

Well, the only way I'll know myself for sure is after my upgrade, which is still a month or so away.

If they miraculously patch it out in the next few weeks, so much the better. Seems there's a lot of people complaining about it around the 'net, so it might not be something specific to my system at all, and maybe they just didn't optimize it worth a crap for PCs. Which strikes me as silly, considering what game this is.. Deus Ex has always been a PC-centric title, even if they did release this one on consoles.

 

No Deus Ex game ran well on the PCs of the time or had revolutionary visuals. They are keeping with tradition.

Unreal Engine 1 was not so hot unless you ran Glide and it wasn't exactly visual splendor by then. IW was very demanding due to its per pixel lighting, stencil shadows and bump mapping even with tiny areas.

 

I remember dx1 running ok on my voodoo2
same with iw on my 4200ti, mouse lag made the framerate appear lower than it was but once you got rid of it everything was fine. I know it was one of the first games to require a dx8 compliant (rather than compatible) card and that caught out a lot of gf4mx users

 

I'm not exactly an expert but my suspicion would be that a three core in order processor is easier to optimise for than a two core out-of-order processor.

 

To be fair I think IW was demanding because its modified engine seemed to be a pile of ass. Doom 3, released nearly a year later, employed similar lighting techniques on larger areas yet ran, and looked, far better on my system at the time.

 

No doubt. But even though Doom3 looked much better, it still had the tiny areas that its techniques forced.

 

also iw has this horrible film gain type effect I would love to know how to turn it off

edit: the gain effect could be because nearly every object in the game seems to have the same detail texture applied to it

 

I remember the demo running and looking worse than Kingpin and Half-Life/Counter-Strike on my Voodoo 3, so I only played it for a few minutes before dismissing it and going back to back to the aforementioned games. It wasn't until around a year ago that I finally played it to see what all the fuss is about, and I'm glad I did.

 

That's what happened with me and System Shock 2, back in early 2007. This basically ruined Bioshock's chances with me because the two games are too similar and I preferred the hard sci-fi setting in SS2.

 

I was under the impression that the opposite is true, i.e. it is easier to program for a modern OoO CPU than the in-order trash found in the consoles.

 

My stuttering issue has nothing to do with loading assets. Even though my framerate is around 60 fps, it has one or two small hickups per second, which can be noticed especially when you are strafing or moving your view.

Besides that, wonderful game.

 

Has anyone tried one of the console versions? I wonder if they stutter in the same way...

I've read on here that Xenon is similar to a 2.0 GHz A64X2. Xenon is a product of the times though. There really weren't better cheap options in 2005 for a game console looking for screaming potential performance.

 

Not personally but video online with frame rate analysis seems to suggest that the PS3 version especially does have similar stutter in the hub levels. The big difference is that since the PS3 version may drop to 27fps from 30 while the PC may drop from 60fps to the low 30s, it is far more visible on the PC. My suspicion is that whatever is causing the stutter takes a pretty similar amount of time on most systems, so some people with the PC version who claim not to see a stutter simply aren't getting near 60fps to begin with. Perhaps the streaming engine simply isn't designed to cope with rendering at more than 30fps and without precaching can't get its stuff done fast enough to avoid frame drop.

 

Im not seeing stutter but I am playing at 5284x1050