Ultimate FPS and Debugging Guide

Ultimate FPS and Debugging Guide

Latest Revision Date: 4/25/2016

Table of Contents

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A.I - Introduction

A.II - Dungeon Defenders 2 Minimum and Recommended Specifications

A.III - Optimizing your game 

A.III-1 - Optimizations for lower end hardware

A.III-2 - Optimizations for mid-tier hardware

A.III-3 - Optimizations for higher-end hardware

B.I - Debugging and Hardware Checking

B.II - Possible Performance Issues + Fixes (Hardware Related)

B.III - 

A.I - Introduction

Welcome to the Ultimate FPS and Debugging Guide! The purpose behind this guide to collectively put all the information gathered from various sources into one large forum post to assist as many others as possible. Any contributions are very much appreciated and will be added into the original postings.

A.II - Dungeon Defenders 2 Minimum and Recommended Specifications

A.III - Optimizing your game

Optimization plays a huge part in how your experience with Dungeon Defenders 2 ultimately is. The game is no fun when you're running it below 30 FPS. The goal here is to attempt to bring your frames per second as close to a stable 60 as we can, all while trying to keep the game looking as pretty as possible!

For 2 of the optimization categories, I have included 3 separate configurations. Each has a settings + display picture to show you what each optimization looks like. Also included is an FPS counter in the top left corner of the image. 

Please Note the following:

My PC's Specs

i5 3570k 3.2GHz

16GB DDR3 RAM

Radeon HD 7870 2GB Vram ~1GHz

And also

Please be aware that the FPS displayed is at IDLE, meaning no action is taking place. Expect your FPS to fluctuate depending on your given hardware. Also bear in mind that with VSync disabled your frames may jump and you may experience what's known as "screen tearing". Some people don't mind it, some don't notice it, and some people can't stand it. I myself cannot stand seeing screen tearing, so I always have Vsync enabled. However, in order to see the results I needed, I had to disable VSync to see what kind of performance hit each setting does. By no means are these optimizations the best for any one individual, and user experience may vary on a case by case basis. Feel free to tweak settings yourself to find what works best for you.

A.III-1 - Lower End hardware Optimizations

Settings: "Super Low"

Screen Resolution: 1280x720p

Screen Mode: Fullscreen Windowed

Texture Quality: Low

Antialiasing + Anistropic Filtering: None

Detail Mesh Draw: None

All Sub Options (Vsync, Dynamic Shadows, PostProcessing): Disabled

Setting: "Mid-low" 

Screen Resolution: 1920x1080p

Screen Mode: Fullscreen Windowed

Texture Quality: Low

Antialiasing + Anistropic Filtering: None

Detail Mesh Draw: None

All Sub Options (Vsync, Dynamic Shadows, PostProcessing): Disabled

Setting: "Low"

Screen Resolution: 1920x1080p

Screen Mode: Fullscreen Windowed

Texture Quality: Med

Antialiasing + Anistropic Filtering: None

Detail Mesh Draw: Near

All Sub Options (Vsync, Dynamic Shadows, PostProcessing): Disabled

A.III-2 - Mid-Tier hardware Optimizations

Setting: "Medium-Low"

Screen Resolution: 1920x1080p

Screen Mode: Fullscreen Windowed

Texture Quality: Med

Antialiasing + Anistropic Filtering: 2(AA),  0(AF)

Detail Mesh Draw: Medium

All Sub Options (Vsync, Dynamic Shadows, PostProcessing): Disabled

Setting: "Medium"

Screen Resolution: 1920x1080p

Screen Mode: Fullscreen Windowed

Texture Quality: Med

Antialiasing + Anistropic Filtering: 2(AA),  2(AF)

Detail Mesh Draw: Medium

Sub Options: Vsync (Off), Dynamic Shadows (On), PostProcessing (Off)

(Imgur is being dumb. I can't access any of my images right now to fix this link)

Setting: "Medium-High"

Screen Resolution: 1920x1080p

Screen Mode: Fullscreen Windowed

Texture Quality: High

Antialiasing + Anistropic Filtering: 2(AA),  2(AF)

Detail Mesh Draw: Medium

Sub Options: Vsync (Off), Dynamic Shadows (On), PostProcessing (On)

Note: Enabling post-processing took a decent chunk of performance, but it does make the game look better. I went from 170FPS to 102FPS

(Imgur is being dumb. I can't access any of my images right now to fix this link)

A.III-3 - High End hardware Optimizations

Setting: "High"

Screen Resolution: 1920x1080p

Screen Mode: Fullscreen Windowed

Texture Quality: High

Antialiasing + Anistropic Filtering: 8(AA),  8(AF)

Detail Mesh Draw: Far

Sub Options: Vsync (Off), Dynamic Shadows (On), PostProcessing (On)

Information: I'm assuming you have pretty decent hardware if you're running this "optimization". One thing to note is that even though the resolution can go up to the 3xxx by 2xxx mark, I couldn't get mine to stick at any mode (fullscreen, windowed, windowed fullscreen). I even went into the .ini file and forced it to read only with the proper 2560x1440p resolution. Now, I was using virtual super resolution, so that may have been the cause of it. If you have a different experience, please let me know below.

Reserved

Reserve 2

Pretty sure final reserve

X.I - Updates and other relevant post information

4/26/26 - Imgur is working again and I have access to all of my images. Going to be fixing and adding more information to the OP. Also going to be adding in the "B" sub-category