Dark Souls (Original): Steam Deck Performance issues

[K0bin]

Leaving this here as a reminder for myself to look into this.

[16:08]Managor: Man, Dark souls 1 has stutters on the Deck [19:42]Managor: Demon ruins for example slows the framerate to a crispy 15 FPS

[doitsujin]

I mean it's dark souls 1 presumably without mods, working as intended?

[K0bin]

It's locked to 30 without mods. I'd expect it to hold that on the Steam Deck, even without mods but I also have no idea what kind of cursed stuff its doing.

[pchome]

All sorts of cursed stuff + 1024x720 anamorphic rendering.

Certain areas of the game are more demanding on your hardware causing slowdown in-game. It seems that the engine, when faced with an area where it struggles to render 30 FPS, will cut down to 15FPS. The most famous is Blighttown, but large animated characters can also produce this slowdown.

[ViNi-Arco]

Dark Souls PTDE, with the experience I had on it with the Q9650 and Wine version 5.6 and 6.4 at the time, it only ran well with DXVK winelib so much so that I kept DXVK built with Wine until DXVK 1.9. 2 locally, and DSfix with unlockFPS 1, without both my fps dropped frequently, in Windows 10 only unlockFPS 1 was enough, releasing the fps with DSfix FPSlimit 60 even reached 47~59 fps. It will be interesting to follow what the bottleneck is here that DXVK-winelib was solving for whatever reason

DSfix with unlockFPS 1

# Enable variable framerate (up to 60) # NOTE: # - this requires in-memory modification of game code, and may get you banned from GFWL # - there may be unintended side-effects in terms of gameplay # - you need a very powerful system (especially CPU) in order to maintain 60 FPS # - in some instances, collision detection may fail. Avoid sliding down ladders # Use this at your own risk! # 0 = no changes to game code # 1 = unlock the frame rate unlockFPS 0

[pchome]

@ViNi-Arco

It will be interesting to follow what the bottleneck is here that DXVK-winelib was solving for whatever reason

Less CPU overhead for example, so CPU-bound games had more room to torture your CPU.

https://github.com/PeterTh/dsfix/blob/master/FPS.cpp (?) -- they creating such mods because they have no access to lower level functions, but I guess you can achieve the same either with dxvk (setting present interval to 0 and force fps limit) or with third-party limiter which also forcing immediate presentation.

Note: afaik dxvk limiter adds a little CPU overhead too.

[wantija]

Have some performance issues with Dark Souls PTDE, they're really noticable in Demon Ruins, when Seath the Scaless uses his crystal attack and in Chasm of the Abyss where the framerate will drop down to 44 fps with DSFix. Not sure if this is a mesa or dxvk bug, hardware is RX 6800 XT, R7 5800X 32GB RAM running at 1440p, mesa 26.0-git and kernel 6.18-rc7 on Arch Linux. Link to apitrace: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TkL3ceU3wgD4ZfEetcJE_k3AuI6L0O3T/view?usp=sharing