Huge performance drop after upgrade to Windows 10 1803

[Couchy]

This is probably a Windows issue, but thought it should be tracked here due to its severity and as a warning to others. I was in the middle of playing Persona 5 on Windows 10 1709, and was getting very much playable framerates around 30 FPS. "Upgrading" to 1803 caused it to become totally unplayable with extreme stuttering and drops to about 10 FPS. Rolling back to 1709 restored the performance.

Specs: i5 4670k @ 4Ghz, AMD RX 470, 8GB RAM rpcs3-v0.0.5-6692-98b715d8_win64

[TigiHof]

Go to Windows 10 safe mode and execute "Display Driver Uninstaller" (https://www.wagnardsoft.com) to completely remove your graphics driver. Then restart Windows and install the driver afresh. That should resolve the problem for 1803.

[pauls-gh]

I saw similar performance drop with Tales of Vesperia on Windows 10, 1803 update.

Performance fell from 45 to 25 fps (sleeping dog) and 17 to 14 fps (town). To confirm the 1803 update was responsible, I uninstalled the 1803 update, and performance is restored.

I'll try the display driver uninstall.

[pauls-gh]

I tried Display Driver Uninstaller. Performance is still poor. I also tried to disable the new transparent UI in the Windows 10 1803 update (Personalization/Colors/Transparency Effects). No difference.

Tales of Vesperia is very much CPU dependent. I don't think this is GPU related.

[DarKotE]

Try rightclick on rpcs3.exe - properties - compability - tick [ ] disable fullscreen optimizations. Not sure if it will help though.

[pauls-gh]

disable fullscreen optimizations - didn't help.

[isshininu]

Looks like your issue is similar to mine https://github.com/RPCS3/rpcs3/issues/4130 You can try switching to W7 or W8.1 to avoid perfomance loss.

[Couchy]

Well this is bizarre - I reupgraded to 1803 and it's seemingly back to normal. I didn't really do anything besides toggle Win 7 compatibility mode and the new game mode on and off.

[Zm0n]

Have the same issue. Reported it the first day on the forum (https://forums.rpcs3.net/thread-198672.html), nobody replied unfortunately. Asked in Discord, just got useless responses. Even tried a brand new install of 1803 (so GPU drivers shouldn't of been an issue at this point) and I still get the same results, so I'm thinking it obviously has something to do with 1803. In Vesperia, I was getting about 23-25 consistent in towns, now it's just about halved to 12-13 FPS with an 8700k OC'd to 4.7, and a GTX 1070.

Tried disabling fullscreen optimizations, no improvement. Tried running in Win7 compatibility mode, no improvement. Admin mode, no improvement. Disabling/Enabling game mode, no improvement. Even tried a brand new copy of RPCS3, no improvement. Tried various combinations of these options, no improvement. Not sure what else I can try at this point.

[Kravickas]

U need to install gpu drivers from nvidia/amd site again after win big updates

[Zm0n]

Unfortunately, I did fresh installs of GPU drivers from Nvidia using DDU to remove the old ones. Even on a brand new fresh copy of 1803 to remove the preinstalled drivers. Issue still persists, even after yesterdays latest driver release from Nvidia.

[GoaLitiuM]

I had this problem initially when I upgraded to Windows Insider builds few weeks back but the performance got restored back after reinstalling the drivers and restarting the PC couple times. Again today the performance dropped back to those numbers but few other games are also affected, not just RPCS3.

Edit: I installed the latest Insider build (17666), ran DDU and installed the latest GeForce drivers and the performance is once again fixed.

[gandalfthewhite19890404]

Seems native Win10 driver has some issues.

[Zm0n]

Guess I'll give the Insider builds a try and see what happens seeing as nothing I do on a fresh copy of 1803 (even DDUing and reinstalling Nvidia drivers) does nothing for me.

Edit: Installed 17666, DDU'd Nvidia drivers and reinstalled. Seeing worse FPS in 17666, fluctuating between 6-12 instead of staying at 12 like it did on 1803. Maximum performance is checked in power settings for Windows, and maximum performance is selected for RPCS3 in the Nvidia CP program settings.

[pauls-gh]

I tried 17666 also. I initially saw 6 fps at the Vesperia Start Menu (should be 30+), much worse than 1803. I reinstalled the graphics driver a few times, freed hard drive space, downloaded the latest RPCS3 and magically it started to get decent performance again. Not sure exactly why this occurred.

Tales of Vesperia performance with 17666 is the same as 1803 i.e. less than before 1803.

For reference, performance in Tales of Vesperia when using 17666

Performance fell from 45 to 25 fps (sleeping dog) and 17 to 14 fps (town).

My system Alienware R7, Intel i7 8700, Nvidia 1070ti

@allstar319 - not sure if you have an Alienware machine, but there is a new BIOS update for 8700K to fix an overclocking issue. http://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/04/drivers/driversdetails?driverId=5805W

[Zm0n]

Nah, I built it myself. The only thing I haven't done yet is update my BIOS for the Spectre update, but I doubt that's the problem unless Windows is purposely gimping performance (which makes no sense considering all benchmarks on 1803 are the same as 1709, game performance is the same, and from running InSpectre when I was using 17666, Windows was forcing a Spectre fix oddly enough). I'm gonna play around with uninstalling drivers again tonight.

Unrelated, but changed my username to match Discord/RPCS3 forums.

edit 5/13/18: still nothing unfortunately. Did a DDU about 3 times now, still only getting 13. Not sure what else it could be at this point.

[ShadedSelf]

Rolling back to .5-6675 fixed it for me

[pauls-gh]

I figured out the Tales of Vesperia performance issue with Windows 10 update 1803.

It appears to be related to the Windows timer resolution. https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/dd757633(v=vs.85).aspx

By default, timers have a 15 msec resolution in Windows. Multimedia applications can set the timer resolution lower if needed (e.g. for animation).

RPCS3 sets the timer to 1 msec.

If I force the timer resolution to the minimum (0.5 msec), then the Vesperia frame rates return to normal.

Sleeping dog 25 fps => 45 fps Town 14 -15 fps => 18-19 fps

You can get/set the timer resolution by using this small app. https://vvvv.org/contribution/windows-system-timer-tool

I'm guessing prior to Win10 1803, there was an OS component or possibly another app that was setting a 0.5 msec timer resolution. Note that the timer resolution is system wide.

I'd recommend that we change RPCS3 to use a 0.5 msec timer resolution. Also, we'd probably need to look at removing any dependencies on these timers (if possible) as it is definitely affecting multiprocessor performance.

[pauls-gh]

I'm going to create a separate issue for the timer resolution / Tales of Vesperia problem as it appears its not truly related to the 1803 update.

New issue - https://github.com/RPCS3/rpcs3/issues/4569

[kd-11]

Can anyone confirm this issue still happens even with timer resolution fixed?

[Zm0n]

After testing the latest nightly, it's now fixed. Timer goes to it's appropriate setting (0.5ms) and FPS is back to where it was prior to Win10 build 1803.

[kd-11]

Closing as fixed via https://github.com/RPCS3/rpcs3/pull/4579