Poor performance with the new renderer with AMD GCN cards

[misslovesyoulots]

Hello,

I use an eGPU, & the 117HD client has always run flawlessly.

When the plugin updated to use the new renderer, it no longer runs off of my eGPU, but instead from my laptop's incredibly weak iGPU. I've gone from 80fps to 5fps.

Can confirm the eGPU / plugin still works as normal when the "Use legacy renderer" option is checked, but as I understand, the new renderer is required for Sailing which I'd like to not miss out on with 117HD.

Can also confirm the updated regular GPU plugin with Z-buffering works just fine too.

I'd be happy to provide more info. Thank-you!

[aHooder]

Hmm, that's very weird. The setup for which GPU gets chosen is completely identical. Could anything on your end have changed coincidentally?

[misslovesyoulots]

Hello! Nope, I actually left my PC setup on overnight; yesterday it was working as normal, & when I booted the game up today my framerate was locked to the single digits, which had me scratching my head. I restarted my computer of course but no change; that's when I realised the plugin must have updated sometime between yesterday afternoon & this morning.

I'm using the legacy renderer for now so everything is working fine, but I'm worried that when Sailing is accessible I'll have to turn the plugin off...

Like I said, I'd be happy to provide for info for anyone. I know this isn't much to go off of, just wanted to get a simple bug report submitted. I'll do more investigation on my end too; as I mentioned, Z-buffering itself isn't a problem as the standard GPU plugin is running just fine.

*Edit: I should note that no graphics drivers / anything were updated overnight. Nothing is updated without my consent on my setup :p

[aHooder]

Hmm, can you upload your client log? It's probably not going to show much of interest, but doesn't hurt to have it. Also, which eGPU do you have?

[misslovesyoulots]

client.log

Thank-you. I've uploaded my client log above.

& oh gosh. Please don't laugh (lol). My eGPU is a Radeon Series RX 580 (8GB VRAM). I know it's not exactly the top of the line anymore, but for what I play (OSRS with 117HD, Witcher 3 at Ultra, R6S, AC:Unity, Overwatch & other 2010s games; it runs them perfectly. I'm not so into modern 2020s games).

I know the above sidenote is somewhat unrelated, but not entirely as I do want to stress that the legacy renderer runs above 60fps very well with 4k shadows et cetera, so I find the steep performance drop with the new renderer puzzling.

Thank-you for your interest in this so far.

*Edit: I'm not super proficient with these things anymore, but based off the log it seems the plugin is using the RX 580? If so, that's good, I'm still confused at the fps loss though, it's more than significant.

[aHooder]

Hmm, it seems to be using your eGPU all times in this log, so perhaps the issue is that the new renderer is slow on your particular setup. Can you try turning off the legacy renderer once more and reupload your client log again? Thanks 🙂

[misslovesyoulots]

client.log

Here is the updated client log, I believe.

I've also attached 2 screenshots in a non-demanding scene (zoomed in, few npcs, simple geometry); the first being with the new renderer & the second being legacy. The fps is shown on the top right, I've included the rest of the scene to demonstrate being in the same spot / same settings otherwise.

New renderer (24fps):

Legacy (75fps):

You're right in that I think I was mistaken, I think it is using the eGPU. 75fps to 24 in this one simple scene though (no combat, zoomed in) is a lot I feel... it might be the issue is on my end but then I have no earthly idea what it could be.

*Edit: In busier places like the Grand Exchange (where I initially logged into) or my POH, the fps is in the single digits. Just wanted to clear up that I wasn't being totally hyperbolic.

[aHooder]

This is a bit of a shot in the dark, but can you see if enabling this option has any impact?

It'll pop up a warning, since it's only meant to be used on old Intel-based Macs, but check if it helps at all with performance on your system.

[misslovesyoulots]

Happy to do so; but first, I want to clarify that I am using Windows 10, not MacOS (not sure if the logs specify that).

Is it still safe to do so?

[aHooder]

Yep, it'll be slow to compile, and maybe it might not even compile, but it should still be safe. The warning is just to tell people this setting is probably not what they want, unless they know they want it. Behind the scenes it does some really very not normal stuff haha, in order to work around a bug in macOS.

[misslovesyoulots]

It compiled without crashing, but unfortunately there's no change in framerate. I was even able to turn it on & off without restarting the client (though I tried that as well) using both the legacy & new renderer without any sort of issues, but the fps was virtually identical.

I'm just leaving the setting off for the time being then if there is no difference on my system.

So it does seem the issue with the new renderer is on my end somehow, so that's good, sorry for the trouble. I'm really not sure why my framerate is anywhere from 1/3rd to 1/8th the fps as compared to the legacy renderer. I wonder how Sailing will hold up using the legacy renderer, whether it's just some artifacting / visual glitches or completely unplayable. Time will tell soon enough I suppose.

[aHooder]

Yep, definitely leave it off. It was just to see if it was maybe related to some new shader behavior. Unfortunately we'll probably have to gather more technical data to figure out why it's slow, but I'm not aware of any accessible tool which makes this particularly easy on your system.

One thing you can do for the time being is type ::117hd timers in the in-game chat with the plugin on, which will enable our frame timer overlay. Keep the camera steady and grab a couple of screenshots of that for us, one with the legacy renderer enabled and one with the new renderer enabled. Maybe that can shed some more light on what's going wrong.

[misslovesyoulots]

I've done so, with details below, just wanted to touch on one unrelated thing; I can't remember the exact warning message for the White colour fix on Macs setting, but I believe it mentioned potentially breaking the RuneLite installation. Is there any way to test that? Do you suspect I'll have issues with future RuneLite updates now?

Back to the topic; I've taken 3 screenshots each from the Legacy renderer (first) & the New (second).

I do play on fixed mode so I think the overlay might be cut off. If you'd like I can do so again in resizable though that mode performs worse than fixed across the board, of course.

Legacy:

New:

My CPU's not the greatest. Is it related? Noticed that in the New renderer screenshots.

(longest farm run ever, LOL)

[aHooder]

... it mentioned potentially breaking the RuneLite installation. Is there any way to test that? Do you suspect I'll have issues with future RuneLite updates now?

No, this mostly has to do with it technically being able to crash RuneLite on Apple M1 systems, which means you might struggle to disable it again since RuneLite will just continue to crash when the plugin turns on. You didn't run into that issue though (as expected), so no harm done.

I do play on fixed mode so I think the overlay might be cut off. If you'd like I can do so again in resizable though that mode performs worse than fixed across the board, of course.

The overlay is indeed cut off, but tbh it probably gives a good enough idea, since the output for the new renderer wasn't cut off that badly.

My CPU's not the greatest. Is it related? Noticed that in the New renderer screenshots.

Hmm, it very well may be, but it's unfortunately hard to say. We don't have super detailed timers atm for the new renderer, so this doesn't give quite the full picture. Thanks for posting them nontheless.

I would suspect it's doing something like unnecessarily copying everything between the CPU & GPU, but it's hard to say for sure. The simplest way to track this down would be if one of our developers had access to your particular GPU and could reproduce the problem, so they could try a bunch of stuff rapidly. Unfortunately I don't think we have any similar GPUs to test on atm.

[aHooder]

If you want to try to dig into it further, you might be able to gather some useful info using this old tool from AMD:
https://gpuopen.com/archived/previous-version-features-release-notes/

Here is the download link you'd probably want to use: https://gpuopen.com/download/AMD_GPUPerfStudio3.3.29.0.msi

I'm not sure how easy it is to get it to capture RuneLite though. If we're lucky, it might let you attach to an already running RuneLite process. If not, it might be significantly more complicated to collect this info.

The tool you want to use in there specifically I think is the one called API Trace, btw.