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Huge performance drop after dying in Dark Souls 3

Open hzmaya opened this issue 1 month ago • 6 comments

After dying or changing graphics settings, performance drops significantly. After the performance drop, the only way to get normal performance is to restart the game. When the "incident" happens GPU utilization goes to 100% all the time, originally it goes down to around 70% in undemanding areas since the game is capped at 60fps. The problem does not exist in DXVK v2.4.1 and starts from v2.5 and onwards. And sorry for my terrible camera.

Software information

Name of the game, settings used etc. If using mods or addons, list them aswell. Game Name:Dark Souls 3

System information

  • GPU:RX 470 4GB
  • Driver:AMDGPU, RADV 25.3.1-2
  • Wine version: 10.20
  • DXVK version(s): 2.7.1, 2.5, 2.4.1

Apitrace file(s)

Game did crash when I tried to use apitrace.

logs

DarkSoulsIII_dxgi-dxvk2.4.1.log DarkSoulsIII_d3d11-dxvk2.4.1.log

DarkSoulsIII_d3d11-dxvk2.5.log DarkSoulsIII_dxgi-dxvk2.5.log

DarkSoulsIII_dxgi-dxvk2.7.1.log DarkSoulsIII_d3d11-dxvk2.7.1.log

DarkSoulsIII_dxgi-DXVK2.7.1-noDefrag.log DarkSoulsIII_d3d11-DXVK2.7.1-noDefrag.log

Videos

DXVK 2.4.1: https://youtu.be/ULLxTBmkI1s

DXVK 2.7.1: https://youtu.be/4tnmTLHCS2Q

hzmaya avatar Dec 06 '25 18:12 hzmaya

Does running with ~~RADV_PERFTEST=nospill~~ help?

Blisto91 avatar Dec 06 '25 18:12 Blisto91

Apologies i got the name wrong. I meant RADV_PERFTEST=nogttspill

Blisto91 avatar Dec 06 '25 19:12 Blisto91

Apologies i got the name wrong. I meant RADV_PERFTEST=nogttspill

After a few sanity checks, yes it did help. FPS was identical to original values.

hzmaya avatar Dec 06 '25 19:12 hzmaya

This is more of an amdgpu issue rather than ours, but it really doesn't help that the game is super janky with resource management (we've had more or less the same issue on 2GB cards years ago because of it).

That said, you're only really getting to use a bit over 2GB of your VRAM presumably because there's a million background apps running at the same time, you'll probably want to do something about that as well.

doitsujin avatar Dec 06 '25 22:12 doitsujin

I tried just launching the game via terminal, and it was enough to make the game work as intended. But even having only Steam in the background caused huge performance drops. Currently RADV_PERFTEST=nogttspill looks like the workaround. Also, I saw same behavior in GoW 2018 too. (Unlike DS3, only changing graphic settings caused the performance issue.) But this time only "the workaround" solved the issue. Should we close the issue?

hzmaya avatar Dec 08 '25 00:12 hzmaya

But even having only Steam in the background caused huge performance drops.

Make sure to disable "GPU accelerated rendering in web views" in the steam setting as it's a huge VRAM hog that you can't afford on low VRAM systems combined with the terrible management on amdgpu.

mbriar avatar Dec 08 '25 07:12 mbriar