Dxvk: [D3D9] - Tomb Raider: Legend (7000) - Low performance

[aqxa1]

Okay, so another game with a performance issue compared to WineD3D. Possibly related to #1682.

Early on in the game, performance mostly reaches my refresh rate of 144hz, however about an hour in, fps drops significantly.

These screenshots are with RADV ACO and RadeonSI, although I also tested LLVM and AMDGPU-PRO with little difference in performance.

DXVK (52 fps):

DXVK with full hud:

WineD3D (132 fps)

EDIT: I also tried dgVoodoo2 as a workaround like in #1675, but it didn't improve things in this case.

Software information

Tomb Raider: Legend (7000), 1440p, maximum settings except "next-gen effects" and "Anti-aliasing" were disabled.

System information

• GPU: Radeon RX 5700 XT
• Driver: Mesa-git (ACO and LLVM)
• Wine version: Proton-GE-5.9-ST-3
• DXVK version: 1.7-git (today)

Apitrace file(s)

• Windows apitrace

Log files

• d3d9.log:
  trl_d3d9.log

[doitsujin]

Can you enable DXVK_HUD=full and post a screenshot of that? It's obvious that the GPU doesn't get utilized at all, but we'd need more info on why that is, and the apitrace doesn't show any issue.

In general, low performance is not a bug, but this seems fishy.

[aqxa1]

I've added a screenshot with full HUD.

[doitsujin]

Hm, nothing suspicious there either.

You sure you don't have Vulkan validation layers enabled or compiled Mesa in debug mode or anything?

[aqxa1]

Not to my knowledge, and most of my games perform well. I did test AMDGPU-PRO, which should perform better if it's something strictly to do with Mesa (but it doesn't).

That does give me an idea to test DXVK on Windows to see if it's some issue on the Linux side of things, which I will try and get to a bit later.

[aqxa1]

So I tested on Windows, this time with the 1.7 binary.

DXVK Windows (61 fps)

Native Windows (176 fps)

[K0bin]

Looks like it's locking a POOL_DEFAULT | DYNAMIC texture every frame and needs to synchronize the GPU to do that.

[K0bin]

I tried it with DXVK on Windows and it works fine.

What graphics settings are you using?

Can you test if the PR linked above improves things?
Here's a build if you can't build it yourself.

EDIT: turned the game to the lowest graphics settings and now it's running poorly.

[aqxa1]

It's "Next Generation Content" that works around the issues; it's not recommended because it breaks water effects and the like, but presumably it changes the way rendering works such that it doesn't trigger the bug.

The PR doesn't seem to be helping, but I'm pretty tired so I may have made a mistake. I'll test it again tomorrow with fresh eyes.

[K0bin]

I think I found the issue. The updated PR should fix it.

^ that scene was 70 FPS before

[aqxa1]

Thanks, the new PR fixes the issue completely :+1:. Game now hitting 155 fps, as opposed to 55fps before, so it's now running faster than WineD3D and approaches Windows performance.

Not only that, it also fixes the issue with The Walking Dead, increasing the performance from 41 fps to >144fps (VSync enabled).

[seanmacky]

I tried it with DXVK on Windows and it works fine.

What graphics settings are you using?

Can you test if the PR linked above improves things?
Here's a build if you can't build it yourself.

EDIT: turned the game to the lowest graphics settings and now it's running poorly.

@K0bin . I was having the same issue. Are you able to link a 64 bit build as that one comes at as x86 instead of x64.

Thank you for your help good Sir 👍 👍 🥇

[K0bin]

The changes will hopefully get merged soon. After that the build bot will give you a 64bit dll.

[seanmacky]

@K0bin hi! I saw the merge test was cancelled. Any chance of getting the 64 bit build for me to test? Pretty please 🙏

[seanmacky]

I can't work out how to build the dll myself sorry

[seanmacky]

@K0bin @Joshua-Ashton

Hi, Any chance of getting the 64 bit build with these fixes for me to test as i have the same issues on the same games. I saw the test was cancelled for pipeline # 1231 so the build bot didn't generate the 64bit dll's.

I'm not tech savvy enough to build this myself.

I'm happy to donate $10 to you via paypal for your time doing this !

Thank you

[K0bin]

FYI the game should be even faster now.

[aqxa1]

Just tested the change, and looks to be quite a massive improvement.

I have a new CPU and I couldn't find my old save game. And I tested Proton 5.0-9 compared to Proton Experimental (so there might have been other changes than the PR) so none of this is quite like-for-like, nevertheless:

Both tests with a 5900x and 5700 XT, mesa-git, 5.9.15 kernel:

Proton 5.0-9 (DXVK 1.7.0):

Proton Experimental:

So from 246 fps to 445 fps, an 80% performance improvement.

[K0bin]

The recent changes aren't even in Proton experimental.

[aqxa1]

Interesting, I thought that at first but assumed the performance increase wouldn't have been so large without it. Will retest. EDIT: Presumably Proton 5.0 was still using a DXVK that still had the original bug, which would explain the difference. Weirdly, I can't even get Proton to honour any DXVK replacements I make, at least according to mangohud and DXVK_HUD. Will just test on Windows later I think.