Alan Wake 2 on RTX 4070Ti massive frame drops

[Laurijan]

Hello,

Like with the rig in my specs and a RTX 4070Ti I can play 60-70fps no problem in bright falls town but after entering the dinner and exiting it the game drops to 6 or 7fps. Only restating the game fixes this problem. Is this a known bug? I also somehow once found out the game had changed graphics settings on its own. I play 4K display with 1440p DLSS and frame generation and RT medium wihout ray reconstruction. Most other settings are not on high or anything like that. So game runs fine then all the sudden unplayable, whats happening?

Edit: Google Bard suggested I should not use MSI Afterburner overlay to track framerates and such. Will try that later in the evening.

 

[Beginner Macro Device]

12 GB VRAM is not enough for this game at these settings. Try loosening those.

 

[freeagent]

Looks like they are making games specifically to take advantage of different tiered cards now?

Welcome to the era of pay to play..

 

[Vya Domus]

Yep, probably running out of VRAM, just use msi afterburner or something to confirm.

Welcome to the era of pay to play..

It's always been pay to play, you buy the damn thing anyway. Nvidia always played this game of underequipping their cards with VRAM for as long as I can remember, that's why they've always had these weird configurations, 320mb, 768mb, 1.5GB, 3.5GB, etc.

 

[oxrufiioxo]

Looks like they are making games specifically to take advantage of different tiered cards now?

Welcome to the era of pay to play..

The concerning thing is this is happening faster with the 4070ti than it did with the 3070 likely why Nvidia is cooking up a 16GB varient.

Maybe I'm in the minority but Nvidia really should have given it 16GB to begin with if they than do a 16GB 450 usd card they can for damn sure have done an 800 usd one it just makes no sense especially with how hard they push RT.

I mean you have the card so you know better than me but my 3080ti was showing some vram issues at 4k in some games and it's technically the weaker card why it got demoted to 1440p.

 

[freeagent]

This hobby is getting pretty expensive.

 

[evernessince]

The concerning thing is this is happening faster with the 4070ti than it did with the 3070 likely why Nvidia is cooking up a 16GB varient.

Maybe I'm in the minority but Nvidia really should have given it 16GB to begin with if they than do a 16GB 450 usd card they can for damn sure have done an 800 usd one it just makes no sense especially with how hard they push RT.

I mean you have the card so you know better than me but my 3080ti was showing some vram issues at 4k in some games and it's technically the weaker card why it got demoted to 1440p.

Even crazier when you consider the 4070 Ti is $800+. If I had spent $800 on a graphics card on to run into issues like this so quickly after launch I'd be fuming.

It's bad for consumers and it's bad for PC as a gaming platform.

 

[Deleted member 185088]

Seems like vram issue like others suggested. One must avoid anything Alda except the 4090, hopefully the super versions will fix the vram/bandwidth issues.

 

[izy]

I was looking at upgrading to 3070 for cheap or to a new 4070 but the vram or vram/price didnt let me do it , 4070 too expensive for only 12G of vram and 3070 has only 8g, if they had 12g and 16g it would have been great (and 4070 100$ cheaper).

 

[Laurijan]

Even crazier when you consider the 4070 Ti is $800+. If I had spent $800 on a graphics card on to run into issues like this so quickly after launch I'd be fuming.

It's bad for consumers and it's bad for PC as a gaming platform.

Might be just a buggy game release with poor optimaziation ontop. Card was 999€ couple of month back but my CPU is getting old.

 

[evernessince]

Might be just a buggy game release with poor optimaziation ontop. Card was 999€ couple of month back but my CPU is getting old.

It is but there's also a clear trend at this point that VRAM requirements are increasing. The list of games pushing higher than 12GB has grown significantly over the last year alone.

 

[Laurijan]

It is but there's also a clear trend at this point that VRAM requirements are increasing. The list of games pushing higher than 12GB has grown significantly over the last year alone.

under a week after buying the GPU and trying out RE4 remake I already saw its scraping on the top of the 12GB VRAM

 

[evernessince]

under a week after buying the GPU and trying out RE4 remake I already saw its scraping on the top of the 12GB VRAM

RE4 utilizes texture swapping so it shouldn't exceed what you have but it will cause some textures to be blurry if you exceed your VRAM buffer (depending of course on how long you play and the VRAM deficiency with larger deficiencies requiring more texture swapping between RAM and VRAM and thus more and / or more frequent blurry textures). Ditto goes for Hogwarts legacy, the last of us, and Halo Infinite. It's important to know what to look for in regards to a lack of VRAM as it's not always going to be an obvious performance hit but still very detrimental.

 

[oxrufiioxo]

RE4 utilizes texture swapping so it shouldn't exceed what you have but it will cause some textures to be blurry if you exceed your VRAM buffer (depending of course on how long you play and the VRAM deficiency with larger deficiencies requiring more texture swapping between RAM and VRAM and thus more and / or more frequent blurry textures). Ditto goes for Hogwarts legacy, the last of us, and Halo Infinite. It's important to know what to look for in regards to a lack of VRAM as it's not always going to be an obvious performance hit but still very detrimental.

Not sure if it has been fixed I would guess it has but near launch it would straight up crash if you exceeded the Vram buffer tested this out on my 3080ti at 4k.

 

[evernessince]

Not sure if it has been fixed I would guess it has but near launch it would straight up crash if you exceeded the Vram buffer tested this out on my 3080ti at 4k.

Not sure either, haven't seen an update on that. I see a lot of people theorizing that ray tracing requires that all data be stored on the VRAM thus causing that crash but it's hard to validate if that's actually true.

 

[oxrufiioxo]

Not sure either, haven't seen an update on that. I see a lot of people theorizing that ray tracing requires that all data be stored on the VRAM thus causing that crash but it's hard to validate if that's actually true.

For me it was definitely max settings with RT which did not happen on my 4090. Some people theorized shadows could also be the culprit but if I turned off RT no crashes..... Although in that game the RT sucks so bad that isn't really a L lol.

 

[AvrageGamr]

I have been playing the game in 4k max settings including path tracing, dlss on performance, and frame gen with my 4070. My framerate doesn't go below 30fps, except some cut scenes, which I skip, or when I take a screenshot. Use dlss performance instead. If I use dlss quality, the framerate can drop to the mid-twenties, and it's never crashed for me. I also use Afterburner and a sharpening filter on Geforce Experience.

 

[gffermari]

I've started playing 2 days ago.
No issues so far - I think I'm playing it after the first patch has released.

Pretty demanding in VRAM but we have to realize that the 4070Ti and 4080 are 1440p and UW 1440p cards. Not 4K ones.
It doesn't matter if both can perform in 4K, even 8K, in typical raster games etc.
The performance matters only on next gen games like Alan Wake 2.
So it's safe to say that my 4080 is a UW 1440p card.

 

[Jamie John]

Hello,

Like with the rig in my specs and a RTX 4070Ti I can play 60-70fps no problem in bright falls town but after entering the dinner and exiting it the game drops to 6 or 7fps. Only restating the game fixes this problem. Is this a known bug? I also somehow once found out the game had changed graphics settings on its own. I play 4K display with 1440p DLSS and frame generation and RT medium wihout ray reconstruction. Most other settings are not on high or anything like that. So game runs fine then all the sudden unplayable, whats happening?

Edit: Google Bard suggested I should not use MSI Afterburner overlay to track framerates and such. Will try that later in the evening.

I've registered on this forum after Googling and this post came up.

I'm having almost exactly the same problem that you describe: playing AW2 on my 4070ti and FPS are absolutely fine, in the mid 80s, then suddenly I get these massive, crippling frame drops down to literally 1-3FPS for a few seconds before the game recovers, although even after that performance is still choppy until I restart the game. This happens regardless of what settings or resolution I use. I can be playing the game at 150fps+ at 1080p on DLSS Ultra Performance and still experience it. Normally I'm playing at 1440p with DLSS set to Balanced and settings on medium-high, RT set to low, and still getting the abovementioned 80+ frames.

Bit of a long shot as your post is a few months old, but did you find a fix? I've troubleshot everything I can think of and am currently reinstalling the game in the hope of solving it. It's driving me mad! I can't seem to find anything else similar apart from your experience here.

I've made a Reddit post with some more info here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/nvidia/comments/1ag42h0/_/ks4sh0p
Thanks

 

[Laurijan]

I've registered on this forum after Googling and this post came up.

I'm having almost exactly the same problem that you describe: playing AW2 on my 4070ti and FPS are absolutely fine, in the mid 80s, then suddenly I get these massive, crippling frame drops down to literally 1-3FPS for a few seconds before the game recovers, although even after that performance is still choppy until I restart the game. This happens regardless of what settings or resolution I use. I can be playing the game at 150fps+ at 1080p on DLSS Ultra Performance and still experience it. Normally I'm playing at 1440p with DLSS set to Balanced and settings on medium-high, RT set to low, and still getting the abovementioned 80+ frames.

Bit of a long shot as your post is a few months old, but did you find a fix? I've troubleshot everything I can think of and am currently reinstalling the game in the hope of solving it. It's driving me mad! I can't seem to find anything else similar apart from your experience here.

I've made a Reddit post with some more info here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/nvidia/comments/1ag42h0/_/ks4sh0p
Thanks

Try diabling any overlays like msi afterburner that show fps. As far as i remember I had to play AW2 in 1080p back then to get it working smoothly. Its really is or was the new crisis game for pc. Dont know if they patched it to work better

 

[Jamie John]

Try diabling any overlays like msi afterburner that show fps. As far as i remember I had to play AW2 in 1080p back then to get it working smoothly. Its really is or was the new crisis game for pc. Dont know if they patched it to work better

Cheers. I'll give it a go as I've got the Xbox Game Bar one and Nvidia's one enabled.

 

[Laurijan]

Cheers. I'll give it a go as I've got the Xbox Game Bar one and Nvidia's one enabled.

Also I did an system upgrade to Ryzen 7800x3d while i was playing AW2 and after that at least I had no problems anymore. Still had to hold me back with the game settings but no breakdown to unplayable anymore.

What are your system specs?

 

[Jamie John]

Also I did an system upgrade to Ryzen 7800x3d while i was playing AW2 and after that at least I had no problems anymore. Still had to hold me back with the game settings but no breakdown to unplayable anymore.

What are your system specs?

I've got a 5800X3D and 16GB of Ram, 750W Gold PSU. Game is installed on an NVMe. I really don't think it's a processor issue as the processor utilisation rarely goes above 50%.

I can't try anything at the moment as I'm at work, but once I'm home I'm going to use DDU to completely clean out all the graphics drivers and then reinstall the latest one, as well as disabling the overlays like you mentioned above.

I haven't experienced anything like it in any other game, including other graphics intensive ones, like Cyberpunk, Dead Space and Resi 4 Remake.

 

[Vayra86]

As predicted. Nuff said.

 

[Jamie John]

As predicted. Nuff said.

Could you explain what you mean, please?