Sudden horrible performance in all experiences related to rendering

[PeZsmistic]

Reproduction Steps
When I join any experience, or load any experience in Studio that has a non-trivial number of parts or amount of terrain, I get ridiculous lag that was not present before this weekend. I noticed this happening today.

This has never happened before, and I did not change anything on my end.

Update: switching from D3D11 to Vulkan appears to have solved the problem. If I switch back though this still happens. The fact that this suddenly started happening though means this is still an issue.

These are my specs. I’m not throttling, my GPU has been more than sufficient for most experiences on Roblox, I have 5GB of free space on my C drive but plenty of memory. I can still run other high-end games just fine. I have reinstalled my graphics driver and rebooted. I am continuing to debug the possibility that this might be an issue on my part, but this occurred suddenly without any changes, so I am skeptical.

My game: Be an Alien: Renewal - Roblox
microprofile-20211102-231705.html (1,3 MB)
(Interesting to note that I have a shadowmap label despite using voxel lighting, and it’s huge…)

Robloxian High School: Robloxian High School - Roblox
microprofile-20211102-231532.html (6,2 MB)

Captures are from the client.

Expected Behavior
Roblox has never lagged like this and should not lag like this on a GTX 1070.

Actual Behavior

The more parts / terrain I have on-screen, the worse my FPS gets.

If I remove all lights, particles, terrain, transparent parts, and change everything to smooth plastic, In my game the best I can manage is 20 FPS up from 2 FPS.

17 FPS

2.8 FPS

anonymous

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If I open a baseplate in Studio and make a bit of terrain water, there is immediately a noticeable impact. If I so much as have the terrain editor’s cube select tool visible, or select a few parts, there is an impact.

anonymous

anonymous

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I have been unable to link this to anything more specific than “more on-screen is worse”. None of the profile captures appear to have any obvious offender that I can discern. It’s all just generally worse in vague ways.

Capture is from Studio.

microprofile-20211102-234455.html (3,8 MB)

Workaround
Roblox is completely unusable for me on D3D11.
I have to switch to Vulkan to use Roblox.

Issue Area: Engine
Issue Type: Performance
Impact: High
Frequency: Constantly
Date First Experienced: 2021-11-02 12:11:00 (-05:00)

[EnderLunar]

I hope Roblox solves this really soon. Problems after problems really aren’t a good look.

[HeraGagah (Hera)]

Happens to me as well. I can’t join a game without it lagging like crazy and GPU+CPU time being over 200 ms every few seconds.

[Scottifly]

Strange, no problems with Roblox or Studio for me.
I can play my Boat Obby game with lots of Terrain water and I have no issues with it lagging.

[PeZsmistic]

Here is a capture with edit quality at 1. Reducing this has almost no effect other than by reducing the number of parts on the screen.

microprofile-20211103-082709.html (2,0 MB)

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Update, switching from D3D11 to Vulkan appears to have solved the problem. If I switch back though this obviously still happens.

[Bloxxy213_DVL (Bloxxy)]

I have pretty bad frame rates on Direct3 11 and my iGPU isn’t supporting well Vulkan. Its a shame a block game runs 15 FPS while Fortnite with 10000x times the detail works 150 fps

[justinisepic12 (Justin)]

I am also lagging like this as well, I hope this is fixed soon.

[Cuyler]

I am also experiencing extreme performance regressions within the past 24 hours. I have an RTX 3090 and I cannot even get more than 50 FPS in a map where I used to get over 120 FPS (using an FPS unlocker). Many players are complaining of poor performance as well. This needs to be resolved ASAP.

[mer5000]

I can report this as well. Without me adjusting anything over the past few hours, the map I am currently working on has degraded in performance drastically (from 60 FPS rendering the entire map with Future lighting to 15 maximum with Compatibility lighting.)

Very odd change, my studio is up to date. I thought it was too many programs running or the like, but this thread confirms that it’s not my issue…I turned off all programs except Studio to confirm this, ran a virus check, restarted PC, restarted Studio, etc.

The map usually runs very well for most devices.

Intel(R) Core™ i5-9300H CPU @ 2.40GHz 2.40 GHz
Windows 10
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050

Edit: similar performance change in-game as well as opposed to in-studio

[azimn (Chimera)]

I can confirm this as I’m experiencing crazy lag when I’m playing a game.

I have never experienced such lag and especially at those levels.

[TigerRabbit2]

We are looking into the issue, but we have problems reproducing the issue. Any more information that anyone can provide would be great.

Since it is multiple people reporting this, this is unlikely. But you didn’t force enable D3D11 debug mode in the DirectX control panel by any chance?

FWIW For people who have concerns about how this affects playability for Roblox players in general. We track average frame rate and that number has not changed, so this does not seem to be an issue that is affecting a lot of people (hence we were not aware of this issue yet)

[arts_davxy (Davy)]

Mhm, I hope roblox fixes this, it can seriously affect a player’s gameplay

[PeZsmistic]

I am running on a GTX 1070 with the “Game Ready Driver” version 496.49.

The executable I ran to install this driver was called 496.49-desktop-win10-win11-64bit-international-dch-whql.exe, I obtained it from Official Drivers | NVIDIA.

I do not have this issue on my laptop running the same driver but of version 441.37 with a GTX 1660 Ti. I will try to update this driver.

I have no idea how to turn on D3D11 debug mode so it’s unlikely I’ll have done so. I can double check if you explain how to do that.

See here for more private information: https://devforum.roblox.com/t/d3d11-slow-down/1535586

[TigerRabbit2]

Thank you for your detailed posts, they provide a lot of good information.

@PeZsmistic

I have no idea how to turn on D3D11 debug mode so it’s unlikely I’ll have done so. I can double check if you explain how to do that.

Ok then you haven’t done this, it is something that needs to be done very intentionally so it would not have happened by accident. No need to test this further.

[PeZsmistic]

FYI I can see performance impact in other games that use D3D11, such as Divinity: Original Sin 2, Rocket League, and especially Bioshock Remastered, and Cities Skylines.

Non-D3D11 games are not impacted.

Something appears to have changed in the last week to cause this but it may not be Roblox specific.

[PeZsmistic]

After some extensive troubleshooting with a friend we have traced this issue to being caused by Citrix Workspace version 2109. There is a recent surge of posts about this breaking performance in D3D11 games.

If you have this issue specifically, and you have Citrix Workspace, (or possibly other remote desktop software, or other software that creates another display device in this category in device manager), try uninstalling it. (Note that Remote Desktop is fine)

The reason why is speculation on part of our troubleshooting, but seems plausible.

DX11 has a software rasterizer called WARP that apparently can be used when no DX-compatible hardware is available. Citrix provides a display adapter so it can mirror a remote computer onto your screens. Because it looked like I was using my CPU to render instead of my hardware, a possibility was that the Citrix adapter was being used by the affected applications instead of my actual display device (although it was always reported as the GTX 1070 everywhere, and the Citrix adapter was never actually mentioned anywhere except in a few very obscure places), so it defaulted to WARP because the Citrix adapter obviously isn’t hardware that can run DX11.

[TigerRabbit2]

I am glad to hear that a solution to this problem was found. I want to thank you @PeZsmistic for the detailed information and for the willingness to test things as per private messages.

Even though it turned out not the be a Roblox specific issue, the level of detailed information and thinking about the problem really helps us a lot! We really appreciate you putting in so much effort in testing and reporting on this forum. The quality of the post is great!

Since some other people reported performance issues, if your performance issues remain, please provide additional details on how we can reproduce performance issues, so that we have a chance to reproduce and please file a new ticket.

[Laqotaa]

Studio lags, I’ve actually noticed 2 FPS in after the flash then the last 60 FPS.

SPECS

GPU: RTX 2060 OC
CPU: Ryzen 7 3700X

(Roblox shouldn’t be lagging. But it is and recently started happening and isn’t fixed.)