Build: 3060 ti, Ryzen 5600x @1440p, DLSS on Balanced, Low preset with Textures bumped to Medium and Bloom + DOF disabled.
While testing weapons in the Psykanium I’ve noticed that your distance to a clump of enemies will severely impact the framerate. 10-12 enemies are enough to cut your framerate in half if they are close enough, and the lower your FOV is the worse the effect is.
For example, I’ve measured a test by using the ‘Creature Spawner’ mod, spawning 12 Scab Stalkers side by side in an otherwise empty Psykanium and standing as close to them as the game lets me and looking at them, not moving either the camera or player at all. With the results showing the following:
117 FOV yields an average framerate of 114 FPS
90 FOV yields an average framerate of 85 FPS
73 FOV yields an average framerate of 72 FPS
And if I move about three meters away from the clump of enemies the framerate averages out to 160, 155, 150 respectively.
Keep in mind that all enemies are on screen at every part of these tests, including when I move away.
I don’t understand why the proximity to enemies heavily impacts the framerate so much. I remember some older games having issues with unoptimized VFX such as fires not having a limit on the amount of particles that can be rendered, so if your camera moves too close to the fire your framerate will chug but I don’t see why this would be an issue with character models. Maybe it’s an LOD thing and/or the models being too detailed? It’s not anything that stands out visually, at least.
I can perform the same test in Vermintide 2 and spawn a hundred rats without losing more than 20 fps at native res. A less intensive game, of course but that’s a whole hell of a lot more enemies.
On a more fair note, this is less perceivable and impactful in an actual match since the maps already lower the framerate by a lot but it’s still very noticeable when you get swarmed in melee, especially at lower FOVs. I can’t verify this but I would assume it also applies to Xbox players.
When using the “Perspectives” mod to enable third person in game I’ve noticed a significant increase in horde performance by playing in third person over first person at 90 fov. Third person is not the type of gameplay I want from a Tide game but I thought the results were interesting.
I don’t know if any of this is useful from the developer side of things but I think it’s worth reporting at least.