Various little performance tweaks
General recommendation: In the in-game graphics options, choose fullscreen mode (as opposed to windowed fullscreen), disable anti-aliasing and V-Sync. Ideally run the game at your monitor's native resolution. Go for a smaller resolution if you are struggling to get high enough a framerate on that native res (make sure to change the actual display resolution, leave the "Screen Resolution" setting at 100%). Anything at 60fps and above is playable, 120 obviously being the best, just keep in mind that framerate stability is almost equally as important as raw framerate. If you can't consistently maintain 120fps, I'd recommend either reducing resolution and graphics quality until you can, or capping the framerate at 90 or 60. FSR can theoretically also improve performance, but there's concerns about it potentially inducing latency due to the time taken to run its rescaling algorithm. If you aren't having framerate issues, it's probably best to keep this disabled.
Running DbD with high process priority: Open regedit.exe as admin, navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Image File Execution Options. Right-click Image File Execution Options -> create a new key, called DeadByDaylight-Win64-Shipping.exe. Right-click this DbD key -> create a key called PerfOptions. Right-click this new key -> create DWORD value called CpuPriorityClass. Set the value of this to 3.
Running DbD on DirectX 12: In your Steam library, go to DbD's properties and add -DX12 to its launch options. Mileage may vary, but modern systems should benefit from this, if not in terms of raw framerates at least in terms of frametimes. By the way: If you use ReShade, you will have to run the game in DX12 in order to prevent crashes in fullscreen mode.
Selectively adjusting graphics elements: In your GameUserSettings.ini (AppData\Local\DeadByDaylight\Saved\Config\WindowsClient), you can adjust advanced graphics options individually.
sg.ViewDistanceQuality=4 sg.AntiAliasingQuality=0 sg.ShadowQuality=4 sg.PostProcessQuality=0 sg.TextureQuality=0 sg.EffectsQuality=0 sg.FoliageQuality=0 sg.ShadingQuality=0 sg.AnimationQuality=0
0 = Low, 1 = Medium, 2 = High, 3 = Ultra, 4 = Cinematic. In my case, I am using Low on everything but shadow and view distance quality, which are on the highest setting. I don't think changing view distance quality actually does anything though.
Disabling framerate and mouse smoothing: These are legacy Unreal Engine options that BHVR has left enabled by default and that nobody needs. I'm not actually sure whether framerate smoothing does anything anymore, but mouse smoothing is confirmed to still have negative effects, particularly on fast mouse movements. To disable framerate smoothing, add the following variable to your Engine.ini (same folder the GameUserSettings.ini is located in):
[/Script/Engine.Engine] bSmoothFrameRate=False
To disable mouse smoothing, add this variable to the Input.ini (again, same folder):
[/Script/Engine.InputSettings] bEnableMouseSmoothing=False
NVIDIA settings: Some interesting settings include power management mode (prefer maximum performance), max framerate (if you want to cap the framerate at a value that DbD does not itself offer, such as 75 or 100fps), low latency mode (limits the ability of the CPU to pre-render frames, ultra meaning it will try never to pre-render; impacts framerate but reduces latency, so use this if you can still maintain your desired framerate when doing so). Make sure you apply these for deadbydaylight-win64-shipping.exe.
Core parking: Open the windows resource monitor, switch to the CPU tab and keep an eye on the utilization graphs on the right. If any of the cores say "parked" at any point, use a utility (like "ParkControl") to disable core parking. You might also want to disable CPU power saving mechanisms in your BIOS, such as SpeedStep, C1E or Cool 'n' Quiet. Although using Windows' high performance power plan should already suspend these techniques.
Windows graphics settings: You can try whether hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling benefits you, as well as set a "high performance" graphics performance preference for DbD. Again, make sure to select the win64-shipping.exe for this.
Feel free to ask or add anything!
Comments
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Fullscreen over windowed fullscreen makes the performance worse for me for some reason. EDIT : Nevermind looks like FSR is causing the problem.
Post edited by OrangeBear on0 -
As a consoler all of this sounds like a different language. Any of it apply to my Xbox and old ass TV? 🤔
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I know you've solved the problem by now, but just to note: Windowed fullscreen renders the game at whatever resolution your monitor is set to (usually its native resolution), and the only way to change this is with the resolution slider, somewhat misleadingly called "screen resolution" in the settings. What a setting below 100% does is render the game at a lower resolution (a percentage of your display resolution) and then scale it back up to your display resolution. I think it should always be set to 100%, if you are struggling with performance you should rather decrease your display resolution. In windowed fullscreen this means having to reduce your monitor's resolution, while in true fullscreen this is obviously being done automatically when you select a lower resolution in the settings.
Unfortunately none of this really applies to you. BHVR for some reason doesn't even give console players the in-game option to reduce the graphics quality or resolution scaling, even though they would improve performance tremendously. What I would definitely do if I were to play on console is enable FSR at 100% sharpness, as this can help with the performance a bit and the sharpness makes things slightly more crisp, emulating to an extent what people do with NVIDIA or ReShade filters on PC. You can also turn up the brightness and contrast on your TV to make things more discernible in the game. But I think that's about all you can do. Cleaning and upgrading your console is the only real thing that can otherwise help, I suppose.
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The devs said a couple of years back that changing the graphics settings would not improve game performance on any of the consoles (I think we're locked at "Good").
This they said is due to the resource bottlenecking problem with the games coding that prevents them from getting their game to run even at a stable 60fps on any of the older consoles, despite them being strong enough to do so. Our PC cousins see a little of this when they notice DBD is an unusually voracious eater of resources, far more than similarly-sized games that are far more demanding graphically etc.
As far as what I can do with my TV, every time I mess around with the contrast everything looks like nuclear winter! 🤣
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I remember them saying that the CPU is bottlenecking performance on consoles so much that graphics settings wouldn't make a difference, and their game code is definitely not well-optimized, but I honestly don't buy it. And even if it is true that the GPUs in consoles are not ever hitting 90+% load with the default graphics settings, the performance improvements I have seen with graphics quality set to Low on systems with good GPUs suggest the CPU also benefits from it, which would make sense because not all of these graphical enhancements are necessarily done exclusively on the GPU, and some are at least impacting the CPU at the pre-rendering stage. It also bears mentioning that apart from the raw framerate, there's framerate stability, and low graphics settings can improve things in that regard as well, having a more consistent framerate, less stuttering. And then there's also the fact that the game is brighter and less visually noisy on low quality.
TVs tend to have weird settings, and they are notorious for adding lots of latency and ghosting and whatnot, with their myriad of post-processing techniques. You can play on a gaming monitor instead, which will have lower latencies, higher refresh rates and more sensible settings. But yeah, for the time being, you can at least increase your brightness.
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DirectX 12 is an absolute blessing and should be immediately popped into the launch options if your GPU supports it. Probably the setting I recommend the most.
It's a shame that BHVR patched out the ability (whether intentionally or not) to upscale your resolution in the settings.ini file, FSR is a nice alternative to that but native upscaling still looked a lot better. It costed a ton of performance, but it looked damn incredible.
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TV's brightness has been at max for gaming since I first started playing DBD back in 2019. Still can't see squat on some of the upstairs rooms on Haddonfield. 😂
I think many of our PC cousins overestimate the set-up some of us consolers are running. The old TV seen from across the room on a couch using that TV's speakers is a real thing!
You're not the first one I've seen be very skeptical about their explanations of the bottlenecking issues. All I know is my Xbox1x had an awful time digesting their code, and my Series X has been getting more and more serious acid reflux as time passes. Just imagine what our precious Switch cousins deal with!
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Post-processing set to 0 is a must. The godawful bloom effect makes my eyes bleed, especially on bright maps like Eyrie.
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Not only did they (most likely unintentionally indeed) patch out the possibility of upscaling from the display resolution by going above 100% screen resolution scale, but they also patched out that of going below the 65% the in-game menu slider limits the scaling at.
I find their FSR implementation questionable. FSR is also a resolution scaling technique, the only difference being that it's supposedly doing the scaling more quickly and with less loss of quality. But they aren't even giving us rudimentary options on how "strong" we want the FSR to be, i. e. how low the render resolution it upscales from should be. Given that the image barely changes, I suspect it's rendering the game at almost the same resolution it is being displayed at, so the performance difference will be minimal to none.
Hey, if it's old enough a TV to be a tube one, you are actually getting minimal latency on the display end at least. 😉
To be honest, the game looks better to me with everything on 0. The low quality just fits DbD's cartoonish aesthetic more, ha. The only reason I have shadows on 4 is that it's objectively a disadvantage not to, since it allows you to see shadows you otherwise not always would.
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Im honestly surprised 120 fps isn't available on ps5 and series x. Its available on a bunch of other games and the console can support it.
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I'm not sure how ViewDistance affects the game now, but I remember that around 4-5 years ago the value would range from 0 to 100 meters. If you set your ViewDistance to 20, once you were in-game, it would only render 20 meters in a circle around you, and the rest would be a complete void, EXCEPT for important items such as gens, totems, traps, survivors and killers. So many people used to cheat like that back then lmao.
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The consoles are strong enough for those framerates sure, but it's the dang coding of this game they cannot deal with well.
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:^/
Oh wow, I didn't know that.
I think it just doesn't do anything anymore. I took comparison screenshots and I can't really see a difference.
BHVR wanted to rewrite DbD's basecode (or at least important elements thereof) from Unreal's own Blueprint "language" (basically building blocks for amateur devs or prototyping) into C++, which is much more computationally efficient. Whether that's ever happened I'm not too sure about.
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I am very far from an expert about such things, but from what I've ever read about it the original Blueprints are still the base coding, with C++ added in & on pretty much all over. Hence the meme of it all being a jangled unwieldy pile of unbelievable spaghetti goodness! 🍝
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