Describe the bug. Describe what is happening when the bug occurs. Describe what you would normally expect to occur.
When reducing the graphics quality to the lowest setting, rendering distance is not reduced as much as it used to anymore and a lot of geometry is rendered in high part density scenes. This can severely worsen performance on low-end machines.
How often does the bug happen (Everytime/sometimes/rarely)? What are the steps that reproduce the bug? Please list them in very high detail. Provide simple example places that exhibit the bug and provide description of what you believe should be the behavior.
This place is a pretty extreme example of a high part density scene, illustrating this difference well:
Note how a large amount of geometry (nearly 8M tris) is rendered even on the lowest quality setting(!).
Where does the bug happen (www, gametest, etc) Is it level-specific? Is it game specific? Please post a link to the place that exhibits the issue.
Above example is easy to test, but the complaints originate from this game.
Would a screenshot or video help describe it to someone? If so, post one.
See above
For graphics bugs, it is sometimes helpful to know your system specs, especially graphics card.
Complaints generally come from players with very low end hardware (EOL pentiums, iGPUs, …). I don’t have a machine that low end myself, but I do notice much larger draw distance on the lowest quality settings myself too.
When did the bug start happening? If we can tie it to a specific release that helps us figure out what we broke.
This started happening roughly since a week.
Anything else that you would want to know about the bug if it were your job to find and fix it.
Microprofiler seems to mostly show that it’s taking ages (~250 ms) to draw opaque things. The high draw distance likely simply severely negatively affects that.
No clue how fast rendering was for those users before this issue started popping up.
We’re having our own issues on our own side of things with this. But it seems that this is dependent on some clients. Some users are experiencing this issue whereas others are not.
There has been an instance where the render distance flickers in between states that comply with the graphics settings and doesn’t comply… Alternating between graphics settings sometimes replicates this buggy effect.
Please provide more details on what specific game this happens on, which platform, preferably a repro video, etc. For example, this change is currently live on main desktop clients (Windows & macOS) but isn’t live on mobile, consoles, or the Windows Store app - if it still happens in Windows Store app then this is expected, it will just take one more week to ship that version there.