PC: Low framerate and weird performance behavior

First off, here are my specs: i5 6500 / GTX 1060 3G (with a stable overclock to 2113 MHz) / 16 Go of RAM / Game installed on a 7200 rpm HDD / 1080p 120Hz display.

So I know the 3 gigs of video memory are under the recommended 4 gigs by the game but I feel like this system should be getting much better performances, especially when I look online and see similar specs running the game much better than I do. One of the closest example I can find is this video with a i5 6400.

I already did a complete cleaning of my drivers with DDU and reinstalled the game. Here is what’s happening from the first time I launch the game:

The settings are obviously set to “recommended”. Menus are a little bit laggy. I touch no setting and launch a benchmark. It’s capped to 30fps but still goes lower from time to time, averaging to 28fps. I then change the settings to “medium” with everything still in dynamic except for the framerate which I uncap (tested with and without vsync) and then I get between 40 and 55 fps. Better but still disappointing. Out of curiosity, I set the game to “ultra” 1080p and then I get an average of 6 fps. And now things are weird. The menus are all slow as hell, when I press a button, it takes approximately half a second for it to register, moving through the UI is a chore. I set the game to “very low” and even 720p, launch a benchmark. I get 18 fps average. At that point, what the [Mod Edit - Abbreviated profanity, profanity and profanity that is disguised but still alludes to the words are not permitted - D] is happening.

I close the game and relaunch. It’s still in “very low” and 720p settings. It’s buttery smooth, the menus are much faster than the first launch, no lag at all. I launch a benchmark as is, and it averages at a 100fps. I then try to set the game to “medium” 1080p again, and get a solid 60fps, which is better than the 50fps mess I had earlier with the same setting. I go to “recommended”, I get between 40 and 60 fps. A bit unstable but playable. And then if set things to “ultra”, then it goes back to [Mod Edit - Abbreviated profanity, profanity and profanity that is disguised but still alludes to the words are not permitted - D] with 6 fps average and tanks the performance of the menus and UI. I have to start again, setting the game to very low and closing the game.

Since “recommended” then game me decent performance, I try it again. For the first race, I get a few frame drop but it goes from 45 to 60 and is enjoyable to play. Then, I let my buddy play the same race as we restarted it. The framerate slowly tanked during his race and was after the second lap going from 20 to 30 fps. Just like the very first time I launched the game… As the lap ended, performances were noticeably worse.

Going again from “very low” to “medium” after relaunching the game gave me the best playable experience but the framerate still has a tendency to gradually get worse with no way of getting it back up (changing the settings to a lower preset doesn’t do anything framerate-wise) outside of closing and reopening the game. I also tested to change all the settings myself, not using of the “dynamic” option, but it didn’t change anything in the end.

So here I am. Does anyone have any idea of what is happening here? On other places people told me they were getting much better performance than me with similar hardware, could you guys confirm or deny that? Is it -just- because my video card has 3 gigs of VRAM while the game asks for 4?

It’s the only Microsoft Store game I own, all those things happened to the Demo of Forza 7 too. I have not a single trouble with any other game I have on Steam and run pretty much any of them at the highest setting at 1080p (the exception would be GTA V, but it’s pretty close to the highest setting).

Hey guys, after the Microsoft support couldn’t help I have to ask this community for help.

I bought FM7 recently when it was on sale and I’m really not happy about how it’s performing on my rig. I have an i5 6500 with a GTX 1060 3G and 16GB of RAM and all this runs the game on a 1080p 120Hz display. The only thing “under” the recommended spec is the 3GB of VRAM that my 1060 has compared to the 4GB recommended with the 1050Ti. But a 1060 is still better than a 1050Ti, and by quite margin from what I understand.

If anybody has similar specs, I’d love to know at what settings you run the game and which performance you’re getting. Apparently, from what I’ve seen online, I should be able to run everything almost at ultra settings and get a smooth 60fps gameplay.

But in my case, the game runs horribly and very inconsistently. I won’t get the same framerate doing the same benchmark twice. Sometime it won’t reach 30fps at low settings, sometime it’ll reach 120fps at medium. But something is quite consistent and seems very weird to me: When I try and set the game to Ultra (everything dynamic, target fps unlocked, vsync doesn’t make any difference), the benchmark usually gives me around 7fps average. But after that, the performance of the whole game, including the UI becomes ultra slow. And setting the game to a lower preset doesn’t change that, if I put the game back on a setting that gave me 60fps before, it’ll now barely reach 20fps with huge spikes. Navigating in the menus becomes a chore, and there is a significant lag when pressing any button on my controller.

What is happening? If you guys want, I can try and film my screen (don’t want to introduce any software recording performance hit) to better see what I’m trying to describe.

So yeah, I’m quite desperate. Yesterday I launched the solo player “campaign” (starting with the three “demo” races), the game was set to everything dynamic, unlocked framerate, medium settings and I got 90 to 120fps on Dubai. It was super smooth with a few slow downs but nothing major. Next race on Mugello, performance took a massive hit, never went above 60fps and the last race on Suzuka was super bad with the rain, framerate was between 30 and 40 with massive spikes. It seems that the framerate drops race after race. Sometime, restarting the game helps, sometime it doesn’t. It’s super weird.

Try locking the frame rate to 60. That videocard is not going to do more than that consistantly

Oh nice an answer. I didn’t get noticed that my post was approved by moderation (hence the double post, I wrote the second one nearly a week after the first one since it took ages for it to get approved for some reason)…

Anyway, capping the framerate is not the problem here because even with the game at very low, my performances drops into the single digit after a while. I’m so tired of this game honestly, I can’t play it fine. I’m so dissapointed that Microsoft or Turn 10 doesn’t have a proper ticket system for technical issue. I really should have asked for a refund when I got a chance. I feel so ripped off.

Don’t use dynamic settings, and try running without the overclock. Dynamic settings make my framerate dip, and an overclock i can use without issues in other games leads to FM crashing.

I already tried setting everything manually… As I said in the second post (but I don’t blame you for not reading both). Also tried with and without OC.

I just want to be able to speak to someone from their support team honestly.

My GPU can handle Doom at max detail easily, Battlefield 1, I saw several people with similar configs getting much better performance than I do. I mean, with a 1060 3G, I should get a solid 60fps at very low. I’m not even getting that consistently.

You can overclock and change what you want, the bottleneck is your 3G VRAM.

FM7 needs more than 3gb @ 1080p, no matter what quality settings.

Check the utilization on your machine to see it by yourself.

If you want solid 60 FPS you need to change something that really effects the VRAM (= lower resolution !!!).

Turn10 doesn’t say minimum of 4gb VRAM for 1080p for no reason.

just tested it (again) with

FM7 1.116.458.2
nVidia 390.77

Asus GTX 1070 Strix OC (stock)

1080p 60fps (everything on lowest)
VRAM: min 3100, max 3415, avg 3323

1080p 60fps (everything on ultra)
VRAM: min 3572, max 4448, avg 3700

click image for fullscreen view

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So basically, because of 300Mo of missing VRAM on my GPU, I’m doomed to run the game at piss poor performance and have to reboot every few races?

Also, wouldn’t it gives me poor performance always? I mean, right now I just tested everything set manually to the lowest setting at 1080p (nothing set to dynamic, framerate uncapped). Benchmark gave me a 111fps average. I run the same benchmark a second time. 102 fps average. I do a race. The fps counter never goes above 80fps there. I do the benchmark right after, 49fps average.

Would that align with the VRAM limitation? Something seems fishy. Also, 720p gives similar results. I haven’t tried in a while but I can try it and take screencaps along the way.

Also, how do you explain the video I posted then? The dude has the same GPU and nearly the same CPU as me, you can clearly see the settings. He’s getting significantly better performances.

Edit: I’m going to do what I said. Set the game to 720p. Reboot PC. Launch game, screencap settings, run three benchmarks in a row, screencap the results. Do a race. Then redo benchmarks.

So no, 720p doesn’t give similar results, I was wrong.

After the performance drops at 1080p it sticks to 720p. But if I keep the game at 720p, I keep similar performances during many races/benchmarks. Here, at very low the magic number was 111fps (which was the same as 1080p before). But it didn’t degrade over time…

So Noobertson, does the degrading performance at 1080p checks out with VRAM limitation? Why, and I just tried it, setting the game at Ultra dynamic 720p and launching a benchmark will give me 7 average fps, and then the menu stays at 6fps when it was 220 before? Is this how graphical performance behave when VRAM is eaten entirely?

I’ve pushed VRAM in GTA V and when I go overboard, I just get bad framerate all arround, it doesn’t degrade over time. It’s really the part that bugs me here.

But if I can get a decent looking and stable 720p experience I guess I’ll stick to that, it’s just sad that the recommended settings in the game don’t tell you that. Instead it capped me at 30fps and it degraded after a few races. It should really advertise more about VRAM. Because from the store page, when the minimum says 1050Ti 4G and I have a 1060 3G which is a superior card, you naturally assume you’re going to be fine. And knowing that for this game, a 1050Ti is actually better than a 1060 3G is mind blowing to me.

Read these posts.
https://forums.forza.net/turn10_postsm840637_CTD-Fix-for-me-after-increasing-PageFile-for-Windows-10.aspx#post_840637
https://forums.forza.net/turn10_postsm842272_CTD-Fix-for-me-after-increasing-PageFile-for-Windows-10.aspx#post_842272

Increase your pagefile. That should smooth things out for you a bit. Forza7 hits the pagefile harder then Ram.

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I am debunking pagefile right now for you.

I have 4gb 1050Ti, Ryzen 5 1600, 16Gb RAM and whooping 16GB pagefile.

After 4 races game gets sluggish, stuttery, system proccess starts using 10% cpu, making windows ui unresponsive, and culprit is dxgmms2.sys. game is unoptimised mess. It tends to use whooping 13GB OF PAGEFILE.

1st
dxgmms2.sys <–is a driver related issue with Direct X12 in Windows 10. The OP didn’t state this in his created post in this thread. This is a problem you are having, Therefore, unrelated to OP problem. Even though your post is shady towards me I will still offer you help.

I would suggest using DDU in safe mode . Install the latest drivers which was released a few days ago. In one example this error could be the results of conflicting drivers caused by installing new ones from nvidia and windows also installing older nvidia drivers. DDU will stop windows from installing it’s own nvidia drivers overtop of the ones you installed from Nvidia. Which has been a problem for sometime now! Which, can cause a conflict of drivers between window’s version of nvidia driver vs the current nvidia drivers you’ve installed. If you do a “rollback” you fully accept windows version of nvidia driver and problem might go away…until you use DDU in safe mode to stop the windows behavior.

Here is something you need to know. Dxgmms2.sys is part of the operating system. Do a search on your hard drive for validation. C:\windows\System32\drivers
You aren’t having a problem with just Forza 7. You are having a problem with win10 as a whole!

2nd
By your own admission the game requires 13GB pagefile. I on the other hand, exampled in this post: https://forums.forza.net/turn10_postsm840637_CTD-Fix-for-me-after-increasing-PageFile-for-Windows-10.aspx#post_840637 or pagefile hosted at ImgBB — ImgBB <—the actual pic I took while racing…was using 12GB pagefile. The game simply has not played correctly in menus nor during races unless the pagefile was increased. As demonstrated 12+ GB pagefile is suggested.

Therefore, in the future, if you want to discredit someone I suggest that you take the time to research and fix you’re own, unstable, operating system before you attempt to throw shade at someone trying to offer a fellow gamer help.

Now, to the OP. Although this person’s response wasn’t clear. If you read the underline of his post alone with my prior posts in another thread it becomes clear that the suggestion to increasing the pagefile should help elevate your issue. It might not fix it but, working with what you have should provide you some assistance along with other’s suggestions in this thread. As to whether or not this is “intended” is unknown at this time. If you ask if a patch will “fix it”. It’s still unknown at this time.

I do know that a car pack should be released on the 19th of this month. Perhaps there will be bug fixes? Who knows…But for now try the suggested pagefile. If it’s not suited to your taste then you can always revert it back to window’s default setting.

I already did mention that I tried with and without the OC. Also, this OC is very stable and the power draw is stabled and it’s never going above 60°C even with furmark. This is not the issue.

Thanks for the input. I’ll try that, I don’t know if I’ll have time tonight but I’ll let you guys know.

Thanks for all the people helping me troubleshooting this.

So… Should I try it or not? So you have a 1050Ti, with 4G of VRAM which is apparently the required number. Since mine is below that, is it still worth it that I give this a shot?

There are a bunch of videos on YouTube running the demo of Forza 7 with the same GPU and similar system specs, getting 60fps with good looking settings.

Why can't I achieve the same level of smoothness even on the first try. And I'm talking about the demo, I too had horrible performances on the demo where even the menus were low-FPS from the get go.

Try removing that heavy overclock. If you’re running it too high it will throttle the GPU and cause bad performance. If you’re running it like that it’s likely overheating and dropping performance to compensate. MY 1070 runs at 2066Mhz stable. I can get it higher, but then things start happening. What make and model is your GPU, mine is EVGA and the cooling on it is brilliant, also has serious power system onboard with VRM and RAM getting cooled as well.

Well, I tried increasing the pagefile… The benchmark runned no better (111fps at low 1080p), but I could test consecutive benchmarks because after the first one, the game would just load infinitely on a black screen, I had to kill the process in order to rerun it…

Also, how is the “recommended” set? I mean, is it normal that using that setting just straight up can’t hold 30 fps during the benchmark? Even though there are no details of how each settings are, the game is clearly looking like something between intermediate and ultra. Wouldn’t it make sense just to target 60fps on a lower setting? That’s why it’s puzzling to me and that’s why I’m pretty sure I should be getting much better performances considering my system.

Especially when looking at YouTube videos with similar specs running the demo.

Ok… Update. Yesterday when I tried increasing the pagefile, I did it on both C and D (and I also have an E drive) because it’s what Windows did. So I just increased both.

But rereading how to increase pagefile through the thread linked above, I noticed that it said you could split if the drives were the same… And I realized that my C is an SSD and that D and E are HDD. So I put the pagefile only on my SSD, and increased it to 16Go.

It seemed to have worked. I’m getting 60 to 80 fps in Intermediate (dynamic, I still have to test manual settings) and it stayed that way for three races and a few benchmarks. No loss of framerate! I think it was it!

I’ll update the thread again if it seems to get funky again but I might have just been this. I’m now enjoying the game at a decent looking graphical setting at a very comfortable framerate! Thanks to those who told me about that issue and tried to find the solution.

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I am happy that it worked for you. Enjoy!