Hi fellow quakers,

as a Christmas gift, I managed to get all my tests done on the new December patch and here I am sharing the results with ya, let's get to the DATA !!

NOTE/PSA: when I first booted the game after the patch, I was experiencing bad performance and horrible stutters like most of other people seems to be getting. While it would have been interesting to run some tests in that scenario to dig deeper into the game performance issues, simply deleting the AppData/idSoftware folder and resetting all my graphics settings was enough to fix the problems I had. If you're still having performance issues and haven't tried this yet, I heavily suggest you do so.

Testing methodology is same as usual (using Slash, play a full 8 player FFA match on Ruins of Sarnath, recording frametimes using Fraps and then process the data using a piece of simple software that I wrote and also plotting the data with Excel). In this month's post you can find:

The usual VSync, 125 FPS cap and Uncapped frametimes testing, to compare with the previous patch results

A test run alone in a custom match, just standing still or running around the map shooting like crazy, or trying specific things (more details below) to see how the engine behaves. This can also be directly compared to last patch since I'm repeating the same tests I did before, to see if anything changed

[NEW] A test ran in the new CTF mode on the new Citadel map, to see if the new content suffers from any specific performance issues

PC Specs and Settings:

CPU: AMD Ryzen 1500X 4C/8T @ 3.8GHz

MOBO: ASRock Fatal1ty X370 Gaming K4

RAM: 16Gb TridentZ DDR4 3200Mhz Dual Channel

GPU: MSI Gaming RX470 OC @ 1300/1750MHz

Game is installed on an hard drive and not on SSD





PLEASE NOTE:



even if the settings are basically the same as with previous tests (only raised texture quality from Low to Medium), on paper the results shouldn't be directly comparable due to the changes they made in how settings affect the game graphics. (e.g. Texture and Effects quality in-game is much lower than what I had before).

RESULTS (discussion below) : the format of this table and the following graphs is the same as usual, sadly I'm still not able to provide histograms of the frametime distribution to better visualize how one patch stacks up against the other... I may update this post in the next days if I manage to work around the issues I got.





On the left you can see the graphs referring to the old October patch, on the right the updated tests of the December patch, so you can compare them directly

1a. OCTOBER patch running with VSync 1b. DECEMBER patch running with VSync 2a. OCTOBER patch running with framerate capped at 125 2b. DECEMBER patch running with a 125 FPS cap in place 3a. OCTOBER patch played with an uncapped framerate 3b. DECEMBER patch running uncapped 4a. Custom match tests ran on the OCTOBER patch, specific parts highlighted 4b. Tests ran in a solo custom match with the DECEMBER patch, specific parts highlighted

5. Playing a CTF match in the new Citadel map (DECEMBER patch)

DISCUSSION OF RESULTS : and comparison with results of the last patch

Let's start by the positive things, it's Christmas after all !! By looking at the 125FPS and Uncapped frametime graphs, I noticed that a lot of the medium-sized spikes (1-5 ms) have been smoothed out, which is a good thing. Sadly enough, it's the only good thing revealed by those graphs... While the game's performance stayed basically the same with the 125 FPS cap in place, the average framerate in the Uncapped tests has gone down since October by 5~10 FPS in the regular modes and by over 10 FPS with me running around alone in a custom match. If VSync's big input lag wasn't enough for you to steer away from it, iD/Saber provided another good reason to not use it in your game, by making it's frametime more messy and unstable than before. Frametimes spikes caused by the player going through teleporters, opening the scoreboard or simply at every death/respawn have NOT been fixed or even improved ; aside from that, by testing in a custom match all by myself I think that I can say item pickups are causing frametime spikes as well. The Citadel CTF test graph is extremely bad to look at, please note that the server which the game was played on was having stability/connection issues so some of the spikes may have been caused by that, but in general frametimes are extremely unstable and spiky in the biggest map of the game where half of the time I didn' t even have another player on screen. Devs please look into optimizing this map/mode further.

CONCLUSIONS (TL:DR) : as usual, for every step forward in this game' s performance there have to be atleast 2 steps back... the "game hardening" phase that supposedly started in September until now, not only it didn't improve the overall framerates/frametimes of the game, but in some cases it even made them worse. D evelopers should understand that it's not the graphics which need to be optimized, because even with lower settings I'm not getting any higher FPS than before, it's the CPU code (and possibly server code as well) which needs to be profiled and worked on to avoid the choppiness that many of us are experiencing .

Thanks to anyone who actually took the time to read all of this, let me know your opinions and feedback in the comments down below!

See you in the arena,

- JackaL