Steam Controller kills the Carmageddon performance

fiasko · Post by **fiasko** » Thu Jul 07, 2016 3:54 pm

I have major issue with the Game. I just bought a brand new GTX 1080 graphics card and wanted to try how well it performs with Carmageddon Reincarnation. However I was amazed when the game had 10 fps right in the first menus and also in the game. Then I found out that it had something to do with the Steam Controller. After that I found this video which had exactly the same issue. Any seetings in Carmageddon doesn't have any affect on this. Only the steam controller affects.

Is this bug in the game or what is it about? I want to be able to play the game. I love the Carmageddon :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oq319ALlcj0

tonrac · Post by **tonrac** » Thu Jul 07, 2016 6:51 pm

It's not game related there is a steam topic where guy said the issue appeared suddenly. But without any modification since the update 3 , it can only be a bug introduce in a driver update of the steam controller or a setting that have changed.

Steam controller seem to cause framedrop in Dark side 3, a guy seem to have found a fix.

Could you try what is explain in the last post and report here if it resolve your issue?
https://steamcommunity.com/app/374320/discussions/0/365163686081075647/

Touch menu feature seem to cause performance issue
https://steamcommunity.com/app/353370/discussions/0/458606877312914588/

Here a problem with Big picture mode and fallout 4
https://www.reddit.com/r/SteamController/comments/3tj4cc/support_suffering_noticeable_fps_drop_in_big/

Maybe some explanation
https://steamcommunity.com/app/353370/discussions/0/364041517005057956/

i will suggest to open a case on steam support

grigosback · Post by **grigosback** » Sun Aug 21, 2016 4:49 am

Could you solve it? I'm having the same problem :/

Trent · Post by **Trent** » Sun Aug 21, 2016 9:03 am

As I mentioned in Flykas' "Sudden Issues" thread, this is a problem introduced by a Steam client update in June, the game worked fine with the steam controller before that. The team have been made aware of the extent of the issue in the last week or so and is looking into what they can do rather urgently as it is an issue with every single game they make using their engine, not just Carmageddon Reincarnation.

There is currently no fix but hopefully Stainless will figure something out if Valve doesn't fix whatever it was they broke.

d3x0r · Post by **d3x0r** » Mon Aug 29, 2016 5:55 am

how long do we have to wait 'hopefully Stainless will figure something out if Valve doesn't fix whatever it was they broke.' before someone does something?

maybe stainless could identify the problem so steam can fix it?

Trent · Post by **Trent** » Thu Sep 08, 2016 2:11 pm

As I just posted over in the Steam Controller forum and Steam's C:R forum, I have discovered exactly what is causing the problem and it confirms my assumption about it being entirely Valve's fault:

I've been investigating what's happening with the game when the steam controller is plugged in some more today beginning with checking out CPU usage in Resource Monitor during an even with the controller not plugged, then plugged in, then again not plugged in: images/imgur-bckp/kleHxFY.gif

The game's CPU usage significantly drops when using the Steam Controller which implies something is causing a stall in the game's pipeline. I then used Visual Studio's debugger to poke around into the game's actual usage of the CPU and it turned out when the controller is plugged in the calls to GameOverlayRenderer.dll were using accounting for over 75% (!!!!!) of the game's CPU usage. It didn't take long to find the actual culprit for this problem: Steam is repeatedly and constantly writing the following messages to GameOverlayRenderer.log:

Thu Sep 08 13:44:03 2016 UTC - Creating CDirectInputRemoteGamepadA
Thu Sep 08 13:44:03 2016 UTC - CDirectInputRemoteGamepadBase::GetProperty(): Unsupported device property 14
Thu Sep 08 13:44:03 2016 UTC - CDirectInputRemoteGamepadBase::GetProperty(): Unsupported device property 15
Thu Sep 08 13:44:03 2016 UTC - CDirectInputRemoteGamepad 32316A50 deleting

As everyone with an ounce of computer knowledge knows, constantly writing text to an IO stream is a recipe for poor performance. What I guess has happened is in June's update Valve changed the property values accepted by CDirectInputRemoteGamepadBase::GetProperty and so when the game calls it each frame the DLL errors and prints to the log, which takes up the majority of the frame time, which tanks the game's performance.

I am sure Valve could fix this with little trouble.

EDIT: And just as I'm reporting my findings, a little birdie tells me Stainless have found out how to solve the issue on their end and has already been fixed in their current build of Max Damage. Great news!

flykas · Post by **flykas** » Fri Sep 09, 2016 9:07 am

Great news!! Haven't played carma for maybe 3 months :]

grigosback · Post by **grigosback** » Wed Sep 14, 2016 12:40 am

In my case, the problem still persists

Trent · Post by **Trent** » Wed Sep 14, 2016 9:30 am

grigosback wrote:In my case, the problem still persists

Yes, obviously the problem is still there in Reincarnation. Max Damage has not been released on Steam yet. When it comes out in the next couple of months it will be added to your steam library automatically. It is a heavily updated version of Reincarnation with tons of fixes, improvements and new content.

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