ME1 Citadel FPS Drops
Hi, I started ME1 earlier and was having a blast...until I got to the Citadel. Now I'm just frustrated. Essentially, the game has been running pretty much perfectly at 144 FPS. However, if I walk o...
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@Claudio10M Makes sense. I suppose it could be a flaw in the fact that they are remastering an old game that wasn't actually designed to have 4K textures, advanced lighting and all that. The old engine and design is causing lag issues with the attempt to add advanced graphics.
What's odd is your setup sounds more advanced than mine but you're having worse problems. That doesn't make any sense. I've never been able to get over 100 fps on any game. But I can regularly get over 60 on High settings, just not ultra.
May want to look into something else as the issue. My ME1 and ME2 have been running beautifully. No lag at all. And I'm on high settings.
What's odd is your setup sounds more advanced than mine but you're having worse problems. That doesn't make any sense. I've never been able to get over 100 fps on any game. But I can regularly get over 60 on High settings, just not ultra.
May want to look into something else as the issue. My ME1 and ME2 have been running beautifully. No lag at all. And I'm on high settings.
Having massive stuttering problems in the Citadel in ME1. I have tried so many things including using different framepacing/limiting programs like SpecialK and Riviatuner Statistics Server and it's always bad in specific spots.
Check out this CapFrameX graph. This is moving the camera around a lot near the embassies. Absolutely awful framepacing.
Edit: I think I found the absolute worst spot in the Presidium.
Look at this graph, completely wild.
@PilotGW @Schachmatt123 and all others with NVIDIA hardware.
Did the new NVIDIA driver made any difference for you?
I use an nvidia GPU and just updated to the newest driver and it made no difference at all. Something is def jacked with the frame pacing, from the citadel to random worlds and who knows where else. Guess its back to modded Me1 2007 until this get sorted.
Latest Nvidia driver update didn't make a difference.
Latest graphics driver didn’t fix for me also. It just seems like at very specific locations with specific camera angles, performance takes a massive dip while cpu and gpu usage did not increase.
Unfortunately not!
I did a clean install of 466.47 this morning and the performance is identical. Still getting big FPS drops when looking out in certain directions on both the Citadel and Edolus, whilst the GPU and overall CPU usage are very low.
I haven't tried any other uncharted worlds yet as I've kinda put the game down because of this. ☹️
Thanks Guys!
Something I didn't think to check is if the problematic spots in the Citadel Peridium are CPU bound. Initial testing suggests those spots push your first core/thread way harder than the rest, though not constantly fully utilizing the core. Welp, guess this is a case of a game from around 2007 not having good multithread support and/or requiring a very high single thread clock speed. Doesn't seem like the Legendary Edition of ME1 fixed much under the hood in that regard. -_- (While I own the original PC port, unless I can port my save over I don't feel like messing with it to test.)
I have an i7-4790K OC'd at 4.6 GHz. Curious if anyone with a processor that can hit 5+ GHz are having better luck.As a test, I just reinstalled and tried the old 2007 ME1. Not exactly scientific as it's capped to 60 FPS out of the box, but I went to the same spot on Edolus that is giving me 50-ish FPS in the Legendary Edition. To my surprise, it also caused a drop below 60 FPS (40-50 FPS). Not remembering this ever being the case, I disabled the Origin overlay for the original ME1 and that fixed the FPS. 60 FPS solid in the same location.
Disabling the overlay for Legendary Edition does nothing to help, even when it's forced off globally and on a per-game basis. I'm wondering if it's not being completely disabled?
This is just a quick observation. Doesn't exactly prove anything aside from the fact that, yes, the original ran better when I last played it. And, again, while I appreciate ME:LE includes various upgrades, it's still the same game at its core and my hardware should be more than capable of running this without significant FPS drops.
- @PilotGW Good find🙂 Did it also dip on the citadel with the overlay enabled for 2007 me1?
And yea, mass effect 1 shouldn’t demand that much cpu processing power. Even if you up the textures, the cpu processing shouldn’t have changed that much coz it’s the same game at its core. It might require more graphics processing power due to 4K textures, shadows etc.. but that’s up to gpu. And my gpu is more than capable to even handle cyberpunk. So unless mass effect le is running ray tracing, something is definitely going on with the game optimisation. Yes, quite significant drops (20-30 FPS) on the Presidium / Citadel Tower / Wards which seemed to recover gradually as I walked towards the far side of the map. Worse than ME:LE it would appear, but similar-ish behaviour. Without the overlay it’s stable at 60 FPS.
However because the original is capped at 60 FPS and I’m only dropping to about 70 on the Citadel in ME:LE, I don’t think it’s a totally fair test in this case. For the uncharted worlds it’s more comparable as I’m dipping to 40-50 FPS in ME:LE.
Again there’s likely no correlation, just an observation. 🤔
- @PilotGW Thank you for that info. Feels like something wrong with overlay, or how the overlay is interacting with our systems,
Guess we just have to wait and see, and hope it gets fixed. For me I'm mostly running at around 100 fps but in specific areas on the citadel like right outside the embassy I'm dipping into the 40s. Its so stuttery, kinda killed my enoyment ☹️ Okay, I've just uncapped the FPS in the original ME1 through an .ini tweak, and in the same spot on the Presidium, outside the embassies and facing east, my FPS are rock solid (in the picture my FPS is showing as 141 as I've capped it just below my monitor refresh rate because I have a GSync monitor).
🤔
There are several different performance problems in Legendary Edition, gathered from my own experience or other topics on this board:
Citadel Presidium reflections are rendered at 30 FPS.
The "bitter spot" on uncharted worlds, when there is long line of sight from one site of the map to the other, while both CPU and GPU usage are very low.
Framedrops after rapid camera movements. Staying in a spot on an uncharted world and calmly moving the camera around with stable framerate, but one slightly faster movement and stuttering occurs along with huge framedrops, likely from 100+ down to 40 or even 30.
Other strange behaviours, like some people are stuck at 30 frames with potent hardware all the time, or peripheral hardware plugged in causing constant stuttering and poor overall performance.
Quests like Garrus mission, after killing Dr. Heart aka Dr. Saleon the framerate drops and never recovers, even after returning a few hours later and docking again, the frames are still very low on that freighter. Or killing the indoctrinated Salarians on Virmire causing a huge framedrop to less than 20 FPS, at least the framerate is getting back to normal after talking to Rana Thanoptis.
There is some work to do for Bioware, I hope they get it done.
@NaaMei Yes, without the overlay. With the overlay on, in that same spot and direction on the Presidium I get 25 FPS, so worse than ME:LE, where it drops to just 70. Turning around causes a rise but it's still overall lower than with the overlay off. If I turn it off, I get no drops at all in the old ME1.
Please test this inside the MELE:
- Make sure Origin is completely closed.
- Go to your ">Drive<:\Program Files (x86)\Origin" folder and rename the igo64.dll to Old_igo64.dll.
(This should disable the Origin overly completely.) - Test.
Thank you for that suggestion! Unfortunately it didn't change the performance in ME:LE...back to the drawing board. ☹️
To bad, but then it is most likely not the overlay. ☹️
I'm hearing that there are spots in ME 2 & 3 that are CPU bound which were not in the original PC ports. The hell?
Can confirm that this happens quite frequently! In ME2, approaching the Galaxy Map causes stuttering when turning the camera (Kasumi's mission drops to sub-60fps in the non-combat zones), and the ME3 Presidium Embassies + Commons + Docking Area all suffer from FPS drops no matter what settings you tweak. I'm on a 3070 + i7 10700k (with Origin overlay disabled) and GPU utilization remained around 30-40%, while memory usage never exceeded 40% - clearly not pushing my system as much as it can. Seems like the issue mostly happens in non-combat zones.
Sorry if I sound like I'm rambling... I've been trying to fix the fps issues across all three games these past few days while desperately hoping that the folks at Bioware take notice.
EDIT: Can confirm the FPS issues happen in heavily populated non-combat areas. Garneau's lab in ME3 does not have any issues, while every other place on the Citadel (Huerta, Purgatory, Presidium Commons / Embassies, Docking Area) all drop severely. I'm testing on a 1440p monitor locked to 120hz
I played a bit of the origin 2007 ME1. Pretty much the same places on the Citadel where fps drops in the legendary edition also happens in the original (e.g. outside the embassies looking west etc). EXCEPT in the original, this is a slight dip for like a couple seconds and goes straight back to normal (60fps in my case). Its almost behaving as expected in a normal game, like its loading some textures, hence the quick couple of fps dip, then it stabilizes straight away. Whereas in the Legendary it hard dips in those same places and never stabilizes unless you look in a different angle or move to a different location.
Just a wild guess, maybe the old engine is bottlenecking the 4k textures streaming.
This is just my observations, take that as you will.
