Dishonored 2 is running so poorly

Here is the reason why Dishonored 2 is running so poorly

Prior to its launch, Dishonored 2 was hotly anticipated, which makes the serious performance issues at launch somewhat surprising. I realize we're right in the middle of the holiday shopping spree, but putting out a game that runs like crap, even on relatively powerful hardware, is never a good idea. AMD graphics cards in particular are having a tough go of things in the game, but there are many facets of what's going on.

Given Bethesda is already talking about a patch next week to help with framerates, digging too deeply here may be somewhat late, but I'll revisit the topic once we've seen what the patch can do, and I'll update this article accordingly. For now, let me cover some of the basics of what's going on and what you can do about it. This is an expansion to our previous article on performance and system requirements.

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All of the testing that follows uses a sequence set around the docks in the first major city, Karnaca. It's where the game opens up, and performance suddenly takes a dive.

First, there are six presets for graphics quality: very low, low, medium, high, very high, and ultra. The above gallery shows the six options (with Nvidia HBAO+ enabled on the 'ultra' setting). The biggest change you'll see is the presence or lack of reflection on the water at ultra compared to very high, and then going from high to medium there's a clear change that reduces the overall brightness/fog as well as some of the finer shadows. Antialiasing is also off at very low, and set to FXAA at low, whereas TXAA is used at all other settings, and TXAA produces a clearly better result.

Many of the individual settings match this six levels of granularity, so you'd probably expect there to be quite a few ways to improve performance if your system is struggling. Turns out, with the current version of the game at least, that's absolutely not the case. Yes, dropping from ultra to very low will help, but not as much as you might think. Let me call out two examples.

Using a GTX 1070, at ultra quality 1440p with Nvidia HBAO+, performance in this particularly complex scene is 47 fps. Now, take this same GTX 1070 and drop the quality from maximum to minimum, using the very low preset and turning off HBAO+ (which in this game is an Nvidia-only option). Performance improves to 69 fps, which is less than a 50 percent increase. Using AMD's top card, the R9 Fury X, the situation is similar. At 1080p ultra in the same scene, performance is 43 fps. Drop to very low and framerates improve to 71 fps. That's a bigger improvement than on the GTX 1070, but it's still only a 65 percent increase.

This is actually somewhat of a common issue for id Tech games, and the Void engine used for Dishonored 2 is based on id Tech 5 as far as I can tell (and not the newer id Tech 6 that's used in Doom). The engine has some good image quality, but scaling by dropping to lower settings is pretty poor. Other games (GTA5 for example) can triple or even quadruple their framerates by going from 'ultra' to 'low' quality—but the change in image quality for such games also tends to be more noticeable.

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There's another common complaint with id Tech games, and that's support—or more specifically, the lack thereof—for multiple GPUs. There are some hacks that you can use to try and get SLI running, but at present the game won't even start without taking such measures. CrossFire meanwhile didn't prevent the game from running, but the second GPU wasn't utilized at all. What seems weird about multi-GPU hacks is that, if they actually work properly, why wouldn't Nvidia incorporate them into their drivers? My guess is that they don't actually work properly, so they're left for enterprising (daring) gamers to use at their own risk.

The astute among you will notice that the 1070 at 1440p is basically equal to the Fury X at 1080p—yes, it's that bad for AMD right now. The fact that Nvidia's HBAO+ is hardware exclusive is also a bit odd. This was common several year ago, but newer engines usually make it available on AMD hardware. Maybe Arkane is using an older GameWorks library, or maybe they disabled it just so AMD users wouldn't have one more item that would tank performance even more. Maybe the patch will address this as well.

Regardless, these are a couple of high-end GPUs, struggling to run the game at acceptable framerates. There are many areas of the game (even looking in a different direction in the same scene) where performance is substantially better. In fact, variability in framerate depending on where you are and which direction you're facing is more pronounced in Dishonored 2 than any other game that immediately comes to mind—the difference between a low-fps outdoor region and a high-fps region can be way more than double. Indoor areas are a lot better as well, but seeing such variability in outdoor scenes (in the same area of the game) is unusual.

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