Why does my simple indie game hammer my graphics cards so much?

[qubit]

Why does my simple indie game Gone Home absolutely hammer my GTX 580s so much? It heats them right up causing the fan to spin up high as if I was running Furmark, making the noise very annoying and putting me off playing it.

While the graphics are nicely drawn, they are no Call of Duty 3 or Battlefield 3 / GRID quality, either. Those games don't spin up the fan as much either and they're doing a lot more on screen. In Gone Home, you just walk around a big house searching for clues to solve the mystery, picking certain objects up or opening doors. That's it. No fancy smoke effects or anything and no other animations.

You can set the graphics quality to various preset levels, but the noise from the graphics card fan is about the same, really loud. The only thing that changes is the framerate - and incredibly, it's actually CPU bound not GPU bound (checked by lowering the resolution right down to 1024x768 and seeing no improvement). I've got a 2700K, so I'm surprised to see this.

It's running the Unity engine which is likely the reason, but I'd really like to know what a simple game like this could be doing to be so graphics intensive?

EDIT

Sorry guys, it was late and I for got to clarify: vsync was on the whole time and I tried it with SLI off and also with my reference GTX 580 as the only card in the system for good measure - the noise profile of that card is actually better than the MSI Twin Frozrs when the fan is being run fast. The monitor refresh was initially 120Hz. Setting the monitor to 60Hz barely improved the situation.

It does look like the game needs some debugging, doesn't it? It's quite new, but still it's not really an acceptable excuse.

 

[Fourstaff]

Did you limit framerates? Also, have you considered that the game might have a graphics bug which makes it hog up as much resources as it can get?

 

[remixedcat]

Does it got any wierd shaders?

 

[newtekie1]

Force V-Sync in nVidia control panel and see if it fixes the problem. If the game has no framerate limit it will use all the resources it can to render 1000FPS. Minecraft did this even though it looks like crap until they implemented a framerate limiter.

Edit: I just installed the game and it doesn't seem to support SLI, so it is only using one of my 670s, so that is part of the issue. Plus it seems like it is keeping the GPU usage of that 670 at ~70-80%, even with the in game v-sync option enabled. So it seems like the game is just not very well optimized.

 

[qubit]

Sorry guys, it was late and I for got to clarify: vsync was on the whole time and I tried it with SLI off and also with my reference GTX 580 as the only card in the system for good measure - the noise profile of that card is actually better than the MSI Twin Frozrs when the fan is being run fast. The monitor refresh was initially 120Hz. Setting the monitor to 60Hz barely improved the situation.

It does look like the game needs some debugging, doesn't it? It's quite new, but still it's not really an acceptable excuse.

 

[remixedcat]

Some shaders can be very wonky. Hubby had a Minecraft mod that had a wierd shader that triggered behavior like your card. He had an Nvidia GeForce 9800GT. it did the same for a Radeon 3870 x 2 as well.

 

[BiggieShady]

From a video of a game it's obvious that game uses some form of heavy Screen Space Ambient Occlusion, and by the look of it in high quality too ... that can get very demanding for the GPU.

 

[qubit]

From a video of a game it's obvious that game uses some form of heavy Screen Space Ambient Occlusion, and by the look of it in high quality too ... that can get very demanding for the GPU.

It does it even with ambient occlusion switched off. It's possible that the checkbox isn't working though and it's stuck on.

 

[BiggieShady]

It does it even with ambient occlusion switched off.

Damn ... maybe look at detailed performance analysis using https://developer.nvidia.com/nvidia-perfhud

 

[rtwjunkie]

It's not just you, qubit. I played it a month ago on a pc with a 650ti Boost OC, and for the first time I actually heard THAT graphics card too. I just figured the high quality of the graphics and richness of the textures was the cause. Didn't even think about poor optimization.

Still...I really enjoyed the game!

 

[qubit]

Damn ... maybe look at detailed performance analysis using https://developer.nvidia.com/nvidia-perfhud

Thanks, never heard of this. Gonna try it.

It's not just you, qubit. I played it a month ago on a pc with a 650ti Boost OC, and for the first time I actually heard THAT graphics card too. I just figured the high quality of the graphics and richness of the textures was the cause. Didn't even think about poor optimization.

Still...I really enjoyed the game!

I might just put in my old 8800 Ultra and play with that, lol. Framerate will suffer of course, but that card doesn't get too loud even with 100% fan. It's certainly an intriguing story, so I don't want to be put off playing it because of a silly thing like ramped up fan.

 

[BiggieShady]

Thanks, never heard of this. Gonna try it.

In fact they have a new version for DX11, http://www.nvidia.com/object/nsight.html

and yes it works without visual studio (https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/topic/529458/nvidia-perfhud-dx11-support-/)

 

[Ghost]

Because Unity.

 

[newtekie1]

I might just put in my old 8800 Ultra and play with that, lol. Framerate will suffer of course, but that card doesn't get too loud even with 100% fan. It's certainly an intriguing story, so I don't want to be put off playing it because of a silly thing like ramped up fan.

Just undervolt and underclock the GTX580 when you play it, that should help with the heat and the fan should stay quieter.

Edit: This game is definitely odd with graphics cards. Even though my GPU usage on my 670 is only in the 70% range, it pushes the powerlimit of the card to 90-100% sometimes hitting 110%.

 

[qubit]

Just undervolt and underclock the GTX580 when you play it, that should help with the heat and the fan should stay quieter.

Edit: This game is definitely odd with graphics cards. Even though my GPU usage on my 670 is only in the 70% range, it pushes the powerlimit of the card to 90-100% sometimes hitting 110%.

I could, but I want the simple nerdy pleasures of using my old gear.

Now I have the tough choice of choosing between my two 8800 Ultras: do I use the nearly new one that actually looks like an Ultra with the offset fan, or do I use the one that looks like a regular 8800 GTX and has been used quite a bit? Decisions decisions...

 

[Frag_Maniac]

Maybe it's just that indie devs are often much less skilled than seasoned teams that are very good at optimizing their games. Have you checked to see if others are having this problem with that title?

A lot of times optimization where SLI and Crossfire are concerned has to be a concerted effort with Nvidia and AMD on the driver end, and smaller indie titles probably don't get the attention in that regard that bigger titles do.

 

[newtekie1]

I could, but I want the simple nerdy pleasures of using my old gear.

I understand that entirely!

 

[qubit]

Maybe it's just that indie devs are often much less skilled than seasoned teams that are very good at optimizing their games. Have you checked to see if others are having this problem with that title?

A lot of times optimization where SLI and Crossfire are concerned has to be a concerted effort with Nvidia and AMD on the driver end, and smaller indie titles probably don't get the attention in that regard that bigger titles do.

It could be this, but I suspect that it's quite likely the Unity game engine in some way rather than the devs themselves. I have no hard facts to back this up though, lol. Perhaps if they'd gone with something with a track record like Unreal Engine then the game would have run properly.

I was thinking of looking at the Steam forum about it and perhaps on the developer website. Just haven't got around to it, yet. So far, I've just posted about it on TPU as it's such a great place for answers and fast ones, too. Great members, basically. Thanks to everyone.