Topic on Talk:Saints Row 2

I tried using DXVK as recommended to improve performance, and "Causes graphical issues," is the understatement of a lifetime. It sometimes caused extremely rapid and bright flashing that definitely falls within the "could cause an epileptic seizure" category, not to mention causing constant crashes. In my opinion, this section should be removed from the page, but at the very least, it needs a big, bold warning about maybe killing the player.

I've already added the warning, as it would be negligent for me not to, but I still believe it should be removed outright.

To be honest i have always been really skeptical about DXVK on Windows in general. The "improves performance" claims people make are questionable most (all?) of the time and the promblems it causes (crashes on launch, random crashes during gameplay, graphics glitches, etc) make DXVK even less worth it. I think it should be used only for its intended purpose, on Linux with Wine.

I profiled several games to figure out why DXVK imporves performance on some games, and finally found the reason.

Games which reach CPU bottleneck rather than GPU bottleneck can get performance improvement from DXVK. This is due to DXVK activates Vulkan pipeline cache which do not need to compile again and again when load shaders, which reduces CPU usage. When more spare CPU can be used by the logic processing, the performance gains. This can be verified with games which eat all CPU such as Watch Dogs 2, with a really weak or throttled CPU. DXVK on these games can dramatically reduce CPU usage and increase GPU usage to gain more FPS.

However, when GPU bottleneck is reached, DXVK provides negative improvement on performance on most circumstances since API converting needs resources. Special cases exist, such as Intel's poorly optimized DX9 driver comes with more overhead than API converting.

Actually, SR2 is a single-thread game and needs high frequency CPU (for my own estimate, >4.0Ghz is the minimum requirement to ensure 60 FPS for 99% time) as it was first released on XBOX 360 which has a 3.2Ghz CPU. SR2 always reaches CPU bottleneck on mobile CPU which has a lower frequency. This is why some players report that DXVK improved performance. However, for those who have a really powerful CPU such as 14900K, there is no need to use DXVK.

TLDR: DXVK should only be used on games with CPU bottleneck on devices with weak CPU. It is suggested for users with a CPU lower than 4.0Ghz to use DXVK for SR2.

> The "improves performance" claims people make are questionable most (all?) of the time

Occasionally, sure, but not all the time since both I and Kaldaien have actually confirmed such claims in the past. So the claims can very much be real, but as always with all third-party stuff YMMV.

I can't speak of this game, but in general crashes, graphical glitches, etc that's caused by DXVK are quite rare in my experience. That tool is in many cases more stable than dgVoodoo 2 on Windows, to the point where I often recommend it over dgVoodoo 2. But as always, YMMV.

Some issues might be caused by the fact that DXVK by default fakes being an Nvidia card towards the game, if I remember it right, which depending on the game and underlying AMD hardware might not be the best option. It can, as with many other things, be disabled in DXVK's configuration file.

>Some issues might be caused by the fact that DXVK by default fakes being an Nvidia card towards the game

According to the config file, it's the opposite.

"Report Nvidia GPUs as AMD GPUs by default. This is enabled by default to work around issues with NVAPI, but may cause issues in some games."

In which case, it shouldn't be doing anything since I have an AMD GPU.

Ah, right, my mistake.