The Continued Ignorance of Performance Issues Continues to Hamper Player Fun

Its a little better than before on XBOX , but not really fixed, which is ridiculous. 2500 hours played and I've already un-installed it. Really just a piece of junk game now.

I don’t know if this is a good place to post this and if this is even a general issue or just my finding, but as the console performance discussion was a lot about HDD issues lately, maybe it can give some additional information/insight.

I did some hard disk activity logging with Windows Process Monitor because I was interested what might cause the issues that could be related to the HDD/SSD issue, even I don’t really have this issue on PC.

As the findings in terms of performance were mixed with the 5.1.0 patch, I was not sure what to expect, but there was and still is a lot of situational hard disk activity during a match, which I find questionable because I believe these assets could also be load to memory during loading screen, but I don't want to speculate about how the game works.

However, what’s new with patch 5.1.0 for me is a lot of failed reading of HUD assets from the hard disk (and probably replaced the NAME INVALID errors I have seen in 5.0.2). E.g. the game permanently tries to load the icon for undetectable status (while playing Ghostface) and perk icons (even if they are still there visible) from hard disk, it can’t find on the hard disk.

Numbers (all from the same match):

filtered hard disc activity during the recorded trial: ~28000 log entries

including NAME NOT FOUND messages: ~46000 log entries

including PATH NOT FOUND messages: ~234000 log entries

I just thought the Steam update didn’t worked out well, so I freshly reinstalled DBD after this first finding, but nothing changed.

As I don’t experience significant performance issues with this, I don’t mind, but it’s still questionable.

Logged KYF match on PC (played vs myself, PC Ghostface, Stadia Nea):

Situational hard disk access:

scratch marks first time: 3:12

idk, just moving: 5:30

reveal + injured: 5:40

…

ProcessMonitor filter options:

excluded NAME NOT FOUND at 1:55

included PATH NOT FOUND at 8:30

excluded PATH NOT FOUND at 9:40

included PATH NOT FOUND at 9:55

excluded PATH NOT FOUND at 10:05

Just to make it clear: I don't want to proove or speculate about issues. I just wanted to share my findings. Maybe somebody else can confirm this, especially PC players that experience more stuttering/freezing issues with 5.1.0. I don’t know if PC is different to consoles in this aspect or even PC exclusive with 5.1.0 or just a finding with my installation.

BTW, it looks like Stadia has these stuttering/freezes many console players reported here (when finish gens and so on), but could be network related as well (didn’t Google said they use SSD on their Stadia server blades?).

Some other public match ProcessMonitor footage:

DBD 5.0.2. Game + Logs on SSD (NAME INVALID Messages at 0:20 and 5:25, related to HUD icons):

DBD 5.0.2 Game + Logs on HDD (feels less smooth than on SSD):

DBD 5.1.0. Game + Logs on SSD (with NAME/PATH NOT FOUND filtered):

@RandDBD Perks and status icons can't be deactivated in my installation, so I can't check this.

@Pulsar If I would have to make a guess, the current issues with HUD elements I have seen just amplify an underlying issue.

The game is obviously dynamically accessing assets in different situations ingame form the hard disc. This might be textures for blood pools, sound or texture files for attacks or dead hard animation or whatever - I don't know what this situational access to the *.pak files during the match really is. These assets are probably accessed in a blocking way during the render cylce. So the render cycle maybe has to wait until the asset is loaded to render it correctly or has to skip a frame.

I don't know if this is exactly the case, it's just guessing. In general, all of these situational assets could be loaded at the beginning of the match, but maybe it's not like this with DBD (or maybe it is the case and it just tries to load them by accident anyway) or at least let's assume this scenario. At the end, only the devs can tell.

On top of that you have additional hard disc activity from logging and at least on windows D3D/OpenGL library access (which both could be non-blocking but causing hard disc load anyway). And on top of this there is at the moment a constant hard disc activity because the game permanently tries to load icons.

On a fast hard disc like an SSD this might be not a problem, but on slower drives this might lead to situations where the render cycle maybe has to skip frames, because the assets are not ready. This would lead to freezes or stuttering when a lot of assets are requested from hard disc. So the underlying issue might not be the HUD icon hitches but the situational loading of assets.

purely hypothetical of course

Can't believe how far this thread has come. I remember back when it only had a few pages.

And it's utterly and completely disappointing how we haven't even gotten a proper response yet.

I will admit the fact this post has as many views and posts I'm surprised we haven't seen a DEV response.

For me on PS4, mostly playing survivor, it's better than it was AFTER the RE chapter but worse than it was BEFORE the RE chapter. I still have the same old triggers freezing the game from before the RE chapter as well as new ones that came in with RE chapter and there are random freezes that I haven't been able to pinpoint the cause. There are map/killer combos that on their own are bad but when they're together they cause worse freezes than I experienced before RE chapter.

It's surprising how many people are complaining about performance on PS5 as well after the last updates. It seems that argument of "DBD is a next gen game" was just a myth.