This game made me buy a 7800X3D, here's what it did for performance

[breeminator]

I had a 5800X3D, which this guy here says is all you need if gaming at 4k with a 4090, because you'll always be GPU limited:



I have a 4080, so I should be even more GPU limited.

However, FM, for all its faults, does have a good benchmark tool, which meant I could clearly see that the game was incredibly CPU limited, albeit only if you know that what it calls "GPU rendering" is actually "CPU rendering".

Here is how the benchmark looked with the 4080 and 5800X3D:

That's with Ultra quality settings, RT off, and DLSS enabled in Quality mode.

The thing to look at is the blue and yellow dots on the graph. The blue dots are almost always below the yellow dots, and this means the game is almost entirely CPU limited. We can also see this from the GPU limited percentage of 0.0.

Here is what it looks like with the 7800X3D:

The game is still heavily CPU limited, which is frankly insane, and I hope they can improve this in a future update, but the situation is massively improved. The game is at least now 21.5% GPU limited. You can see that the blue dots are centred above the yellow dots for most of the benchmark run.

With the 5800X3D, the benchmark was often dropping close to 60fps, as you can see from how often the purple dots are around 60fps. With the 7800X3D, it's mostly staying above 90fps, which is a huge subjective improvement when playing.

The CPU simulation figures are actually much worse with the 7800X3D. I have no idea what is going on there, but they're still higher than the other figures, so don't look to be the limiting factor.

I thought I'd post this in case anyone else is contemplating a hardware upgrade, so they can see how big a difference it makes. I was planning to wait for the next gen of CPUs before moving to AM5, but apparently the next gen of 3D CPUs is about a year away, and in the long run it doesn't cost that much more to upgrade now vs in a year, as you need the new motherboard and RAM at some point either way, and you can sell the 7800X3D when you buy the next gen CPU, so all you're losing in the long run is the depreciation on the CPU, interest on the money, and any future reduction in prices of motherboard and RAM. I saw a prediction recently that DDR5 prices are actually expected to increase this year.

I didn't buy the CPU just for FM, my testing has shown that FM isn't the only game that is CPU limited at least some of the time, even using a 4080 at 4k. FH5 is also CPU limited in places with the 5800X3D (but to nowhere near the same extent as FM), and AoE 2 DE is basically entirely CPU limited and gets a staggering approx 1/3rd increase in benchmark framerate with the 7800X3D.

 

[breeminator]

Having achieved a better framerate, the next obstacle to getting the game to run smoothly is the game's terrible built-in framerate limiting.

It's okay if you are getting below your monitor's refresh rate 100% of the time, and have a variable refresh rate monitor, as you can just set it to unlocked, and it will run fine. But now I have the better CPU, it's sometimes going above my monitor's refresh rate, which causes a noticeable glitch. You'd think the solution would be to use the game's "unlocked (vsync)" option, but that seems to lower the frame rate, even when unlocked would give a frame rate below the monitor's refresh rate.

What seems to work is using RivaTuner Statistics Server to limit the frame rate, while setting the game to unlocked. I used RTSS with Application detection level set to low, Framerate limit set to 138, and Scanline sync set to 0. The reason I chose 138, even though my monitor is 144hz, is that most games that have actual working framerate limiting, such as Rocket League and CS2, seem to run at a solid 138 fps if I run with vsync on, so I assume this is a feature of either variable refresh rate in general, or variable refresh rate on my specific monitor, whereby with vsync on it syncs at 138 rather than 144.

With that setup, I finally have the game running nice and smoothly. The variable refresh rate takes care of the times when it's not hitting 138, and RTSS capping at 138 means it never glitches due to exceeding that.

 

[Nacho Libre]

In my lowly PC, I'm content to run the game at high settings all-around at about 80 fps in the benchmark, but it goes faster in true racing conditions (80-100 in average.)
I also dabbled with AMD's fluid frames in my card which do take the frame rates at around my monitor's limit (144 Hz), and while they work as advertised, they seem to produce a slight warping of the image, very noticiable in the cockpit/dashboard views.

 

[breeminator]

In my lowly PC, I'm content to run the game at high settings all-around at about 80 fps in the benchmark, but it goes faster in true racing conditions (80-100 in average.)
I also dabbled with AMD's fluid frames in my card which do take the frame rates at around my monitor's limit (144 Hz), and while they work as advertised, they seem to produce a slight warping of the image, very noticiable in the cockpit/dashboard views.

I've also settled on RT off and High rather than Ultra. I can barely see any difference compared to maxed out settings most of the time, but the higher frame rate has a very noticeable positive impact. I don't feel like frame generation tech is really there yet, I haven't encountered a DLSS 3 game yet that makes me want to use it. I've tried it in games that support it, but it always seems to produce noticeable image defects.

 

[Nacho Libre]

Ok, these are some interesting findings on PC after update 5. I reset to the default settings of dynamic resolution quality (DRQ) to medium, all else set to auto. It went to 72 fps, which seemed odd since that number was higher in past updates... Then I found out that the performance target set to auto actually caps the frames (!), something that it didn't do before.

Anyways, after setting the performance target to unlocked (no v-sync) the game went to 103 fps on the benchmark with the above settings, and GPU usage up to 98%, as it should.

Now, the game set at a resolution scale of auto/100% for a full screen of 1080p has this somewhat soft/blurry look that loses detail at a distance (see the cars, wire fencing and signage): Maybe it's the DRQ setting, maybe it's an aggressive antialiasing method (TAA?) that you can't change, but for whatever the reason it is like that. So, I set the resolution scale to 150% and the sharpness of everything goes up: the interiors, the cars, the track and track details, draw distance, trees, etc.

They didn't lie when they said they would make changes to optimize the GPU usage, because in the past doing the above would bring the fps down, as expected, while upping the VRAM usage to nearly its limit (I only have 8GB). But now it's not the case and VRAM usage at that resolution scale stays well within reason, about 65GB on average, and my CPU is not bottlenecking the whole thing (well, not significantly).

So, my settings for 1080p are:
DRQ = Medium
Performance target = Unlocked
Resolution scale = 150%
Motion blur quality = Off
Anisotropic filtering = 8x, because at auto things like skid marks or rubber on the track look way to smeared.
No FSR.

I run the game from direct storage, and 16 MB of RAM.

 

[breeminator]

It's a bit of a mixed bag for what the update has done for performance on my system:

After the update, the blue dots (CPU rendering) are visibly generally higher relative to the yellow dots (GPU), and the period of time where the blue dots were down around the yellow dots in the graph before the update now has them above the yellow dots like everywhere else. But the purple dots (achieved fps) are now tracking a little below the yellow dots after the update, suggesting the game is actually a little more CPU limited after the update. There's also a lot more dots below 90fps after the update, and the game is reporting a high stutter count vs 0 before, though stutters weren't particularly visible when watching it during the benchmark.

That's with the same settings as in my original post - 4k resolution, RT off, Ultra quality, DLSS quality. In practice the game is still running okay at High rather than Ultra quality, though something seems to have changed relating to how vsync on and off are handled, as it used to work well running at unlocked with vsync off and limiting frame rate in RTSS, but playing like that is absolutely horrible now and I have to set it to unlocked with vsync on in the game to run smoothly.