[Fallout 4] ENB .0487 Complex Parallax performance?

[Thanatos]

5600X @ 4.625GHz all core
DDR4 32GB 3800MHz CL14 DR
Vega 64 @ 1600Mhz/1050HBM 1v / 1920x1080
Windows 10 22H2 (Revision OS, install is only a week old)

Apologies if this has been brought up already, just looking for some clarity.

Latest FO4 ENB added complex parallax support. Decided to try Luxor's new Parallax Textures (https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/67706).
I immediately noticed that the performance hit was more severe than I expected. Granted, this effect is brand new to FO4, and I don't have any experience with complex parallax on Skyrim SE so I cant compare the two.
Nevertheless, the performance hit surprised me. So I decided to test it properly (to the best of my ability, anyway.)

Vanilla game + HD DLC, no mods except for Luxor's Parallax Textures. Everything disabled in ENB (useoriginalX effects are enabled).



As you can see, there's a 27% hit on my system in this scene. Its not the same everywhere, and the margin gets smaller when I enable all of my usual ENB effects. And this location seems to be a particularly bad spot.
All I want to know - is this hit expected? If so, I apologize for bringing it up!

[ENBSeries]

First of all, there are quality setting for it in the enbseries.ini. Second, you may have amd power management issue, to make sure that's not a reason (most likely no, cause fps drops usually twice), run any monitoring tool to see if gpu and vram frequencies didn't drop much when enable parallax effect. Another high chance reason that parallax applied on the terrain and you look at such terrain. Terrain uses 4 textures to compute parallax instead of 1 for all other objects, so performance of parallax there 4 times lower in perfect scenario, but on practice mostly happens cache misses and performance drops much more, like 10 times than it should. You may check this by removing parallax textures for terrain in that place. Or if not want to remove anything, check if parallax textures are compressed. If they are, then you can resize them, that also good to reduce cache misses, so increase performance.

[Thanatos]

Damn, I checked if there was a setting for it in the GUI the moment I got it. I must be blind. It was on Medium for those screenshots. Like you said, its nothing to do with power management. Forcing the GPU into max P-state changes nothing.

I have hwinfo open on my second monitor 24/7 and nothing is out of the ordinary, power usage and clocks look as they should for vanilla FO4. 150w+ is a high enough load for that voltage.
Disabling Luxor's Parallax Textures (but leaving parallax enabled) barely seems to affect performance at all in that spot either. Going from High -> Med -> Low also doesn't affect performance much for me, like 1-2fps.
Perhaps its just something about that location. But its enough to put me below 60 in a lot of areas. Granted, vega is OLD. Getting time for a new GPU at this point. Thanks for your hard work Boris!

[ENBSeries]

Disabling Luxor's Parallax Textures (but leaving parallax enabled) barely seems to affect performance at all in that spot either.

Do you mean disable textures (so dont see parallax) and frame rate STILL low there?

[Thanatos]

Disabling Luxor's Parallax Textures (but leaving parallax enabled) barely seems to affect performance at all in that spot either.

Do you mean disable textures (so dont see parallax) and frame rate STILL low there?

Thats correct. The parallax TEXTURES were disabled, but usecomplexparallax was still enabled in the ENB. Sorry if that wasn't clear.
I went and did the same thing with some other random spots in the game. Sanctuary, Bunker Hill, outside DC. All of those mentioned spots don't exhibit the same severe performance hit.
It seems that particular location I chose just so happened to be a particularly heavy one, for some reason.

[ENBSeries]

Maybe you have something like adaptive vsync? Because when parallax textures not used, parallax part of shaders not executed. But shaders replaced which costs cpu side performance loss, which often for amd leads to dropped frequencies of gpu/vram. Try Afterburner with monitoring frequencies there by graphic, maybe they drop in that place.

[Thanatos]

Maybe you have something like adaptive vsync? Because when parallax textures not used, parallax part of shaders not executed. But shaders replaced which costs cpu side performance loss, which often for amd leads to dropped frequencies of gpu/vram. Try Afterburner with monitoring frequencies there by graphic, maybe they drop in that place.

Heres some more data from that same spot, NO PARALLAX TEXTURES


usecomplexparallax disabled


usecomplexparallax enabled

GPU power draw drops, clocks get raised slightly as a result (this is expected).
CPU Utility drops quite a lot across ALL THREADS.
GPU outputting less frames = lower CPU Load?
Or CPU getting bound up = GPU waiting around?
Both? Neither?

[ENBSeries]

Then sounds like cpu bottleneck in that place. Hell knows why, i switch shaders but that should not cost that much, for me it's around 2 fps maximal cost. What is in the profiler tab of the mod in that place? Maybe that camera angle have higher draw calls count than others?

[Thanatos]

Then sounds like cpu bottleneck in that place. Hell knows why, i switch shaders but that should not cost that much, for me it's around 2 fps maximal cost. What is in the profiler tab of the mod in that place? Maybe that camera angle have higher draw calls count than others?

4500 Draw calls

[ENBSeries]

This is small number for this game, so cpu bottleneck is not a reason. There are many other places in the game which have 3-5 times more draw calls. You could find some different location with around the same number of draw calls and see if performance in percentage drops similar way or not. But most likely even if find what is wrong, can't fix anything as gpu/vram speeds are fine. Who knows, maybe it's something about thread management of cpu/os.
Here my results for 4500 and 8000 draw calls, performance difference between toggling is very low and difficult to measure cause fps fluctuate in the game +-2, but it's almost the same with on/off for my much slower cpu:
https://imgur.com/a/XEWVLvS