Rigs wrote on Oct 26, 2021, 10:37:
I cringe when I see some Youtubers that open their Chrome and they have tabs all the way off the right side of the screen! And then they preview games like that! It's painful to watch!

You'd probably gasp seeing my multiple windows of chrome with 100+ tabs in each window then! All I can say is thank goodness for 32gb of memory. Also that chrome has finally started not giving resources to tabs you aren't looking at, sleeping them etc.
I really should use my onetab extension more, where it collapses them all into a bookmarky list, which is really why I have so many open anyways.

Rigs wrote on Oct 26, 2021, 10:37:
Some of us are seriously old-school, guys. I, for one, hate having anything running that doesn't >have< to be. Having come from the DOS days of saving conventional memory by the kilobyte (which is why that comment about it down below was so damn funny), finding interesting ways of putting drivers into high memory or loading them down in the conventional hell, you had to work your config.sys and autoexec.bat skills to the max for every new game! I looked down on boot disks though some games just absolutely required them because you couldn't do it any other way. (Pacific Strike and F-15 Strike Eagle III were part of that group...I had to take an entire >weekend< to get F-15 Strike Eagle III to work with a cd-rom, mouse and sound. Until late Sunday afternoon, I could get one or two but not all three. I finally managed it just in time to see the intro cinematic and go to bed for school the next morning...lol) Windows 95 and 98 weren't much different. Hell, neither was XP for the most part. These days you really don't have to worry supposedly. I mean, I have 32gb of RAM and a Core i9-9900k but I still only have at max three tabs open in Chrome at any one time. I cringe when I see some Youtubers that open their Chrome and they have tabs all the way off the right side of the screen! And then they preview games like that! It's painful to watch!

=-Rigs-=

Happy you got the joke, this is the point I was tryin got make. My machine has 32gb of memory with 32 threads. I can run a 3d render that utilizes 10 cores and I won't have a noticable impact on my game's FPS. I used to run several game servers and VMs on my machine and RDR never dropped a frame. Lists like this just create FUD because they are not self serving apps Ubisoft can control.

The simple thing to do is just say "disable background applications when testing/debugging perf issues". No need to blacklist a bunch of critical apps that should otherwise work perfectly fine the majority of the time. We are not in the dark ages of single thread PC gaming.

Droniac wrote on Oct 26, 2021, 05:57:
They heavily promoted Corsair iCue lightshow nonsense integration for Division 2 and having Corsair iCue installed when playing Division 2 caused nothing but problems.

Ah, iCue. What a wretched P.O.S that is, aye! Did you know the icons for iCue and SteelSeries Engine are nearly identical? I constantly get them mixed up. While I would LOVE to kill both processes just for the sake of being thorough (I know what should be running and what shouldn't with just a peek at the details page of the Task Manager) it's just about impossible. Well, impossible if I want my system to look decent. If I kill iCue, my two DDR4/16gb/3600 Corsair Vengeance RGB RAM sticks will go to their default lighting config which makes it look like my system locked up! Trying to use that software for any meaningful endeavor is a fools errand. As for SteelSeries...

Quboid wrote on Oct 25, 2021, 23:25:
That's the one that surprises me most. Do we not need that to properly run our headphones, which are rather important for playing games? I've never actually checked, maybe stuff like surround sound works without running their software.

No, in fact, you will not get 5.1 or 7.1 surround sound with the app turned off. You can possibly get Windows own 'spatial' effects or if you get Dolby's software from the MS store, you could use that. But that's just trading one service for another.

Some of us are seriously old-school, guys. I, for one, hate having anything running that doesn't >have< to be. Having come from the DOS days of saving conventional memory by the kilobyte (which is why that comment about it down below was so damn funny), finding interesting ways of putting drivers into high memory or loading them down in the conventional hell, you had to work your config.sys and autoexec.bat skills to the max for every new game! I looked down on boot disks though some games just absolutely required them because you couldn't do it any other way. (Pacific Strike and F-15 Strike Eagle III were part of that group...I had to take an entire >weekend< to get F-15 Strike Eagle III to work with a cd-rom, mouse and sound. Until late Sunday afternoon, I could get one or two but not all three. I finally managed it just in time to see the intro cinematic and go to bed for school the next morning...lol) Windows 95 and 98 weren't much different. Hell, neither was XP for the most part. These days you really don't have to worry supposedly. I mean, I have 32gb of RAM and a Core i9-9900k but I still only have at max three tabs open in Chrome at any one time. I cringe when I see some Youtubers that open their Chrome and they have tabs all the way off the right side of the screen! And then they preview games like that! It's painful to watch!

=-Rigs-=

This comment was edited on Oct 26, 2021, 10:49.

My dell laptop is a fine example of software kludge. Alienware Command Center performs like a tardigrade trapped in fossilized amber, that was one of the first things to be turned off.
Windows game mode is a joke, nuked it.
The Killer Wi-Fi Control Center ap has a feature that will shutdown a myriad of programs and stuff that is running in the background while continuously ranking and rating available waps, killed it.

There are at least 5 (stores, programs and drivers) that have game overlays, i disable all of them if possible.

Or... just play it on an Xbox Series X and enjoy the game with no bs.

roguebanshee wrote on Oct 26, 2021, 03:10:
With the list given, it seems far more plausible that uPlay and Ubisoft's games are very badly optimized and take up far more resources than they have any reason to.

Their list is basically saying: Don't be a normal gamer, only run our stuff.

You are forgetting Microsoft, or the hardware manufacturers. Or any of the myriad of different systems (such as out-dated firmware, or bad audio drivers) or combinations thereof that can and frequently DO cause issues. Seriously if you want a hassle free experience, go game on an Apple iMac, or a console or something, but declaring something from the rooftops does not make it so. Especially something as blatantly false as, oh I don't have issues, which means no one has them either. Ubisoft is obviously partly to blame for what is going wrong here, but there are a thousand other developers out there with similar and worse issues. Microsoft is the worst offender though. But I guess it's par for the course, if you want everything to work with everything else, you're gonna have to tinker a little bit to get it to work properly.

Droniac wrote on Oct 26, 2021, 05:57:
I'm surprised people here are trying to refute this list.

Yes, these applications aren't likely to impact performance under normal conditions. That's not what the support page is claiming either. It's saying they may interfere with your games if you're having problems, which is quite accurate. If anything the problem is this list is far from complete.

Many of the services listed are known to cause problems, ranging from instability, to stuttering, to instant crashes, to massive performance degradation in some games. Having Razer Synapse installed caused a lot of stuttering in Cyberpunk and issues in many other games (same for Steelseries, Logitech, Corsair drivers in other games). RTSS is one of the first things you turn off when you run into an issue, because it's incompatible with a lot of games and services, including the Origin overlay. The Discord overlay definitely causes instability and performance degradation in any game if you're in many servers. Skype is horrifically unstable garbage all-around even when you're not playing anything. Afterburner running in the background has been known to cause crashes in some games, even without an overclock or custom fan profiles or RTSS running. OBS and XSplit obviously do cause heavy performance degradation when they're hooking into your games and recording them, but can also cause instability very rarely. The Geforce Experience overlay is also known to cause stability problems in many cases.

As a troubleshooting list, this one works quite decently. Turning anything third-party off is a generally reliable first step to solve issues like crashes, general instability, stuttering, or unexpectedly poor performance. Because these problems very often do occur due to a game being incompatible with something, particularly a shitty driver or an overlay, running in the background.

Not surprised to see Ubisoft not bother listing the known problematic software for their games, unfortunately. They heavily promoted Corsair iCue lightshow nonsense integration for Division 2 and having Corsair iCue installed when playing Division 2 caused nothing but problems. Same for Dolby Atmos being heavily promoted, yet Dolby Atmos for Headphones offering the worst audio experience I've ever experienced, only playing half the audio and in terrible quality, again in Division 2. But they got paid by these companies I guess...

Sometimes posts like this make me wish that Blue some kind of +like or +upvote button.

So the problem seems to be with Ubi's currently implantation of it's current overlay for Uplay. For example in Far Cry 6, disabling it increases FPS noticeably.

To echo the sentiments of other developers in a outrage thread I saw discussing this:

Most of the replies here are thoroughly embarrassing.

Gamers please be aware we can't be arsed to code programs/games that are not hot house lillys that will break unless they are the only process running on your computer.

I'm surprised people here are trying to refute this list.

Yes, these applications aren't likely to impact performance under normal conditions. That's not what the support page is claiming either. It's saying they may interfere with your games if you're having problems, which is quite accurate. If anything the problem is this list is far from complete.

Many of the services listed are known to cause problems, ranging from instability, to stuttering, to instant crashes, to massive performance degradation in some games. Having Razer Synapse installed caused a lot of stuttering in Cyberpunk and issues in many other games (same for Steelseries, Logitech, Corsair drivers in other games). RTSS is one of the first things you turn off when you run into an issue, because it's incompatible with a lot of games and services, including the Origin overlay. The Discord overlay definitely causes instability and performance degradation in any game if you're in many servers. Skype is horrifically unstable garbage all-around even when you're not playing anything. Afterburner running in the background has been known to cause crashes in some games, even without an overclock or custom fan profiles or RTSS running. OBS and XSplit obviously do cause heavy performance degradation when they're hooking into your games and recording them, but can also cause instability very rarely. The Geforce Experience overlay is also known to cause stability problems in many cases.

As a troubleshooting list, this one works quite decently. Turning anything third-party off is a generally reliable first step to solve issues like crashes, general instability, stuttering, or unexpectedly poor performance. Because these problems very often do occur due to a game being incompatible with something, particularly a shitty driver or an overlay, running in the background.

Not surprised to see Ubisoft not bother listing the known problematic software for their games, unfortunately. They heavily promoted Corsair iCue lightshow nonsense integration for Division 2 and having Corsair iCue installed when playing Division 2 caused nothing but problems. Same for Dolby Atmos being heavily promoted, yet Dolby Atmos for Headphones offering the worst audio experience I've ever experienced, only playing half the audio and in terrible quality, again in Division 2. But they got paid by these companies I guess...

They forgot to mention uPlay

And that's not a joke. The most broken of the launchers by FAR

Also I find it very VERY curious the Nexus Mod Launcher is mentioned but not Vortex but that's another matter

This comment was edited on Oct 26, 2021, 04:30.

VaranDragon wrote on Oct 26, 2021, 02:41:

Dev wrote on Oct 25, 2021, 19:09:
The resources most of those take nowadays is insignificant with multi core CPUs and people with 16gb or 32gb of RAM.
They are really reaching.
And they only highlighted vmware? Come on, I've had more problems with hyper V than anything else in games. Although only with one or two games, tabletop simulator will crash if hyper v is running in background.
Now, I have seen torrent software suck up a lot of resources, so that I can understand.
And streaming, are they really saying don't stream their stuff? I mean granted, if someone has a crappy system streaming can slow down games. Streamers should know this if they have half a clue.

You are assuming that these services and the system that runs them does so in an ideal way, separating the threads used and scheduling tasks in a way that doesn't interfere with or take away any resources from the main application (or in this case the game played). Unfortunately we don't live in an ideal world, nor do we game on ideal hardware/software.

With the list given, it seems far more plausible that uPlay and Ubisoft's games are very badly optimized and take up far more resources than they have any reason to.

Their list is basically saying: Don't be a normal gamer, only run our stuff.

Dev wrote on Oct 25, 2021, 19:09:
The resources most of those take nowadays is insignificant with multi core CPUs and people with 16gb or 32gb of RAM.
They are really reaching.
And they only highlighted vmware? Come on, I've had more problems with hyper V than anything else in games. Although only with one or two games, tabletop simulator will crash if hyper v is running in background.
Now, I have seen torrent software suck up a lot of resources, so that I can understand.
And streaming, are they really saying don't stream their stuff? I mean granted, if someone has a crappy system streaming can slow down games. Streamers should know this if they have half a clue.

You are assuming that these services and the system that runs them does so in an ideal way, separating the threads used and scheduling tasks in a way that doesn't interfere with or take away any resources from the main application (or in this case the game played). Unfortunately we don't live in an ideal world, nor do we game on ideal hardware/software.

Blurt wrote on Oct 25, 2021, 17:48:
Odd, I dont see Denuvo listed.

100%!

Blurt wrote on Oct 25, 2021, 17:48:
Odd, I dont see Denuvo listed.

This^^, also the fact that they blame Riva Tuner which is used to diagnose the performance issues in their games with zero performance impact ( has been tested extensively against camera capture of the screen + FCAT analysis ) is pretty telling...

*shrug*

This is Ubi. They have always blamed others for their flaws, and their support solution has always been to dedicated your PC completely to Ubisoft by stripping off every other piece of software. They've been pushing that crap for *years.*

Rigs wrote on Oct 25, 2021, 22:34:
I was surprised to see SteelSeries Engine in there. How ever will I live without my Arctis 5's lighting up my dark room?!

=-Rigs-=

That's the one that surprises me most. Do we not need that to properly run our headphones, which are rather important for playing games? I've never actually checked, maybe stuff like surround sound works without running their software.

BIGtrouble77 wrote on Oct 25, 2021, 19:08:
And make sure that mouse driver isn't using up too much conventional memory, you'll need at least 620k to play.

HA! Love it!

I'm sure they'd love for us to give up our torrenting software. Maybe when you pry it from my cold, dead hands, Ubisoft. (Wait long enough, you might get my hands with it as a bonus!)

I was surprised to see SteelSeries Engine in there. How ever will I live without my Arctis 5's lighting up my dark room?!

=-Rigs-=

Yeah, turning off/uninstalling all of these 3rd party programs isn't going to make Far Cry 6 not run like stuttery PoS...