Skylords doesnt like my new GPU (weird GPU noises, lags and random freezes)

[ulvfdfgtmk]

So I just upgraded my old GTX 1050 to a RX 6800 and jumped right into Skylords. The moment I launch it (even on the login screen) my GPU makes some weird crackling noises. I thought it might be coil whine but I ran a few benchmarks/stress tests and there was literally no noise aside from the fans spinning of course. I tested other games and so far this ONLY happens in skylords.

I also have random lags in the forge and in game, not only the image lags but also the SOUND?! Really weird...and yea freezes too sometimes.

Im honestly baffled, any ideas what I can try/what this might be?

Latest AMD Adrenaline and GPU drivers are installed.

 

EDIT: ALSO..sometimes the image freezes (nothing moves) for a loooong time (talking 10+ seconds) but I can still click cards in my deck and play them AND I HEAR THE SOUND OF THE CARDS BEING PLAYED?!? Idk this is really weird, never experienced something like this since Windows95 times.

I also tried toying around with the graphic settings but no success thus far..

Edited October 12, 2022 by ulvfdfgtmk

[Kubik]

About the noise, this game can easily be more demanding that modern benchmarks, can you check your FPS if it is trying to push some insane amount of frames for no good reason (can happen even with VSync on 😞 ). Also trying benchmarks from 10-20 years ago might be more representative.

About lags, there are multiple issues that being described like this 😞 TLDR is that your CPU is too busy, and not able to keep up with the game, unfortunately it is not that simple and two PCs with same CPU and (hopefully same settings) can have totally different results. It is fine on my PC, and so far did not find anyone who can reproduce it and profile the CPU usage to provide any insight into what the hell is this game doing. 😞

[ulvfdfgtmk]

37 minutes ago, Kubik said:

About the noise, this game can easily be more demanding that modern benchmarks, can you check your FPS if it is trying to push some insane amount of frames for no good reason (can happen even with VSync on 😞 ). Also trying benchmarks from 10-20 years ago might be more representative.

Do you mean its more demanding because its badly optimized?

Can you recommend a tool to meassure FPS? My monitor has one inbuilt but not sure if that can be trusted, if it is to be trusted it stays mostly at 165 FPS with the occassional dip to around 140 FPS.

Quote

About lags, there are multiple issues that being described like this  TLDR is that your CPU is too busy, and not able to keep up with the game, unfortunately it is not that simple and two PCs with same CPU and (hopefully same settings) can have totally different results. It is fine on my PC, and so far did not find anyone who can reproduce it and profile the CPU usage to provide any insight into what the hell is this game doing. 

Hmmm but I only changed my GPU, my CPU stayed the same 😕

And like whats weird is that both my CPU and GPU are apparently way less taxed than in other games. For example in New World my GPU is running at 100% workload (which I was worried about but read online that its fine), while in skylords it sits at around 50-70%. My CPU is almost idle and sits at 2% while running Skylords.

 

EDIT: Also for the longer lags they seem to be hard to reproduce. For checking the FPS I just started skylords and spammed a few Nether Warps in the forge. Sure enough it got the freeze where the game was still going on but my screen image wasnt changing. Later when it worked again I spammed WAAAAY more warps and nothing happened, in fact it ran completely fine.

Edited October 13, 2022 by ulvfdfgtmk

[Kubik]

Yes it is definitely badly optimized, but that is not the only issue. Over years features disappear from HW, once they are replaced by superior technology, but problem with that is that the old feature still needs to be supported, so at the point it is removed from HW drivers need to emulate that using CPU, or other feature on the GPU.
The game contains remnants of Direct X 8, and I am no expert on Direct X internals, or GPU architecture, so I can not say which of the features are no longer present and are emulated. Another issue that makes it practically impossible to pinpoint demanding settings, is the fact that not a single setting in UI is tight to only one thing, but all of them set many things, and what is worse many things depends on combinations of settings. For an recent example new Intel Arc GPUs support only DX 12 (and Vulcan), and the driver is doing translation from DX 9, DX 10, and DX 11 to DX 12 internally, so any game using these older, but still popular APIs is hit or miss on those cards.

I guess 165 is maximum your monitors allow, and I guess it can be trusted for how much frames the monitor is showing. I am using Geforce Experience from Nvidia to show rendered frames count (FPS), and I think AMD have such option too, or you can try Windows Game Bar.

1 hour ago, ulvfdfgtmk said:

Hmmm but I only changed my GPU, my CPU stayed the same 😕

Well that is the weird thing about, there is no good reason for the CPU to be that busy. You said 10+ seconds, some have issues of 3+ minutes, and very similar HW configuration is fine.

Well CPU usage, or GPU usage are more and more meaningless numbers over last decade or two. When I create a load that will cause 100% CPU usage depending on the load that CPU can easily do 10 times more. Simple example CPU can compute sum of 2 numbers, if you give it a lot of numbers it can compute the total sum (so far EASY), but if you tell it to do more things it easily can, because each CPU core have much more HW, that just addition (by the way any Intel or AMD CPU from last 5 years can do at least 4 addition per CPU core). So 100% means all cores doing something, but usually they can easily do much more.
And there is even bigger issue with CPU usage, I guess you are talking about total CPU usage percentage, and your CPU have a lot of cores. BF have some small load offloaded to other cores, but everything is limited by single core (as in most modern games, they just often hide it). With 32 cores, 1 active 100% of the time, and rest doing nothing the total number will be just 3.125% and windows do not show decimal places so it will show just 3% so if I want to have any idea if BF is actually doing something, I need to look at detailed charts of CPU usage and hope to spot a core, that happens to have some significant load, while total percentage is practically unchanged.
Finding bottlenecks in systems is getting harder and harder with every generation of HW, because it is less and less transparent what it is actually doing. 😞

As I said next step is finding someone who can reproduce the issue on his PC, and have some performance debugging tools and knowledge to figure out why the game is hold down by a CPU in some unknown circumstances.
As for what you can do, nothing specific really 😞 you can try randomly changing options, until you find combination, which works for you. If you pick a community map, and find a way to reproduce it quickly, you will have replay, and these are usually (should be 100% but they are not 😢) repeatable.

[ulvfdfgtmk]

Interesting. I also thought about DirectX but couldnt come up with a reason as to why that might be a problem. If it´s emulated though as you said that might explain it.

Thus far Im not able to reproduce the issue consistently, however one thing I noticed is that the freezes where the image freezes but the game continues does get fixed if I switch to desktop and then back in game. It continues along fine after that.

Also..do you think there is any chance that this might damage hardware? I normally wouldn´t ask this since it´s just a game and all but the noises my graphics card sometimes make when Skylords is running do sound very concerning..

[Kubik]

To be clear I did not say that on your configuration anything is emulated, AMD and especially NVidia are not so open about how they implement Direct X. For the NVidia side, there is strong evidence to suggest that, from 8XX to 10XX that something was changed, to a level of performance degradation, but with limited resources, no clue what architectural changes NVidia did. RDNA is quite different from GCN, and no clue how that is hurting performance in older games.
In that regard BattleForge is in kind of weird spot, it is kind of old to have HW features removed, but at the same time still kind of new to be relatively demanding. It was between the first games to use at least some DX 11 features.

Consistency is the key to finding a pattern, but if Alt+Tab help I would suspect it might also have something to do with Windows.

If you run your GPU with the manufacturer recommended settings (no overclocking, etc.) then it should be build to survive any load. These days it is quite unlikely to kill HW with just load, no matter how hard. And as far as I can tell the issue is always on both sides, bad game behavior, and HW issue. You can try capping the frame rate at 165 in the drivers.

[ulvfdfgtmk]

Ahhh I see. Are there any newer GPUs that are confirmed to work with BF or is it really a case by case basis? Im currently thinking about returning mine because it has coil whine and Im still in the time frame to return it without problems.

Im unlikely to base my buying decision on whether the GPU works without fault with Skylords but if there is a tie and one is known to work while the other isnt it might become a factor.

 

Well the Alt-Tabbing helps with the very long freezes but theres still also the short pags that also lag sound. Also I didnt modify my Windows installation in any way before or after switching GPUs.

If I remember when I get home Ill try to limit the FPS and see if that changes things.

Thank you for your help btw ❤️

[Kubik]

There is not big enough sample size to see any pattern with these issues 😞 and the only companies that would have know how and resources to investigate (AMD / Intel / NVidia) will just does not see such small game as good enough reason to spend their resources on it 😞
I would recommend first trying to limit the frame rate, or change your GPU core frequency slightly, these are the only two frequencies that you can easily control on most GPUs, if neither help, and BF is important enough for you to return your GPU you can try same model with different cooler (ideally different PCB layout).

As I said before there is no way for us to investigate, building 100 or 1000 computers and testing each of them with 100s of settings combinations, would still cover only a very tiny fraction of all possible combinations, and is impossible for us to do anyway.

Did you fore removed the NVidia drivers? It is know to cause some issues, but never heard about it causing this exact one 😞

[ulvfdfgtmk]

Id be returning the GPU for coil whine mainly. But I did eye one from another brand anyway. Im assuming different brand means different PCB? (Would switch from an Asus RX 6800 TUF Gaming OC to a ASRock Phantom Gaming).

 

Yea I did remove Nvidia drivers.

Sure, these companies dont have the ressources to support such a small game. Luckily the game is still playable for me so its not THAT big a deal. I guess Id have to cut PvP out if it stays this way and that would be a bummer but oh well.

[ulvfdfgtmk]

I dont want to get my hopes up tooooo much as I didnt had enough time to test yet, but from a quick test it does appear that limiting the FPS to 60 has helped. No more coil whine while starting the game and at least in a short test I couldnt replicate the lags. This miiiiiight actually have done it.

Ill test more when I get time in the following days but really interesting that it might actually be performance related. Wouldnt have thought that such an old game could give such a new card trouble 😄

[Lans]

Yeah, glad is just new card/driver not knowing is pushing pixels/frames way faster than is needed. As far as I know, actual HW for older features do end up on chopping block but the idea is to emulate it (by driver translation or what not) because newer HW is that much faster and that gives flexibility to change/hopefully improve HW architecture (best case is emulation is X% slower but newer HW is Y% faster and X <= Y). However if a feature does end up on CPU... depending on resolution that could easily tax CPU (e.g. ~124 million pixels/sec at 1080p 60fps).

Although as said, I don't think there is much we could do if things do accidentally (best case) break in a driver release or two...