Night performance bad?

I would guess it's a combination of the newer tracks having far more reflective objects than the older tracks and the recent extension/brightening of the cars' headlights (that we all demanded), which now means more objects are affected by the lights (and more of the other cars' lights affect us).

Let's hope there is some way to optimize all this because otherwise we will be stuck with night being limited to hot lapping unless we own a gaming supercomputer.

 

I never asked for brighter headlights

 

Just want to bring this matter up again. Had a fun session with friends yesterday on Adelaide with time progression. As soon as it was getting dark performance was crushed very badly.

 

Your GPU is computing multiple light sources at night time instead of just one in they daytime. It's normal and predictable for night performance to be worse because it's having to compute all these different lighting sources, shadows, and reflections.

 

Exactly this, nigtht time is expensive. You need a sufficient amount of overhead. If your framerate is boderline during daytime, you'll struggle in any other scenario. Dialing in graphics settings for the most demanding conditions possible is a good idea. Nighttime + Rain with as many cars as possible.

You don't have to use them all the time, but you should know what gives you the best experience for a given scenario.

 

I find it's the transition time between day to night that gives the biggest hit! After turning grass off I run solid and smooth fps until sunset but only for a specific sun /shadows angle then as the sun sets my performance comes back and night seems fine now.
I'm not going to race at night because imo it looks bad (shimmer on cars) but I think I can do it now performance wise.

 

That's true sunset is often a worst case scenario as you'll have a period of transition where both headlights and track lighting are on along with daylight being calculated.

 

Looks like room for optimization, a RTX 3090 shouldn't suffer that much from a certain lighting situation.

 

when you say crushed, what do you mean exactly? what resolution are you running at and what framerate are you getting during daytime vs night?

For example I'm just running a 5600 xt at the moment while I wait for stockgate to be over, gpu shame...
For example though I ran a full grid of P3s at Cascais
2560 x 1440 max settings + smaa ultra + SS low
Average 90fps in traffic, in clear conditions @ 11am that average drops to 65fps at 2am.

That's about a 27ish% difference which although substantial seems pretty standard. There's an extra cost to all those lights. Honestly as far as graphical performance I think AMS 2 is right up there.

 

What I get is over one third headroom in the day time for minimum 80 fps for Valve Index, and it bombs under that at night time at Hockenheim 21 car grid. This is with RTX-3090 and Intel i9-9900K.

Just comparing PCARS2 night time performance (same engine) and AMS2 I think it is pretty clear that especially the new tracks in AMS2 are in the need of optimizations for light sources and their visibility around the track. PCARS2 has good looking tracks too and night time cost is quite minimal on it.

I could set the details to absolutely lowest, and I did just for a test when I had RTX-2080ti. The gains from the settings were minimal even at the very lowest settings, so I haven't bothered with night time racing since then, except for testing with RTX-3090 how much it helped (not much).

But I trust those optimizations will come in time when most of the track content has been released. It is just polishing that can wait.

 

Yep. If these kind of performance drops happen on the best available hardware, something needs to be done on the software side. Didn't have the time to compare yet, but i also suspect the new tracks to be more unpolished than the tracks that came from PC2.