Best performance settings in gzdoom and lzdoom?

[Old-Doomguy]

What are the best way to increase performance on slower machines?

 

Is software or opengl better for computers with Intel graphics?

 

Which display settings in-game increase performance for oder computers without or without dedicated graphics cards?

 

Give me your best tips to get these two running or low performance machines. 

[UndeadRyker]

For your first question, it depends if your graphics card is capable enough to handle the latest versions of OpenGL. If it is capable, then you actually get better performance with OpenGL over Software rendering. And I personally have never used LZDoom but I assume that you could probably translate some of the suggestions I give you for GZDoom over to LZDoom so here's how you can get better performance with GZDoom!:

Make sure you aren't loading any extra visuals such as lights or brightmaps. Those are mostly for loading times but if you have extra dynamic lights enabled then that is usually the reason that your game gets slowed down.

 

For Display Options > Hardware Rendering Options (for OpenGL), make sure your "Sector light mode" is anything but Software or Vanilla as I've heard that those two are usually costly on performance. In addition, Fog mode should be turned off as well. At the bottom, hopefully your Rendering quality is still set to "Speed". At the top of this menu, you'll also see Stereo 3D VR and Postprocessing. I think they should all be set to off already so don't worry about that.

 

For Display Options > Texture Options (OpenGL again), try to match my settings. Anisotropic filtering has minimal to no performance impact so I crank it up to high as it goes so the textures look a little nice from a distance. Otherwise, you can disable anisotropic filtering. If you want more performance at the cost of loading times, then you should enable "Precache GL textures".

 

For Display Options > Dynamic Lights, match my settings once again. Everything should be turned off. If you absolutely must have them enabled, make sure "Light shadowmaps" are turned off. However, if you must have "Light shadowmaps" enabled (some maps like to use it for visuals), make sure "Shadowmap quality" is set to the lowest (128). I don't think Shadowmap filter makes that much of a difference on performance so I just have mine set to "Nearest" which means no filter.

 

We're almost there! For Display Options, turn off "Rocket Trails", and crank the number of particles all the way down to the lowest they can go! 0 decals and only 100 particles onscreen. I also have "Classic Transparency" enabled so more things (like monster projectiles) are fully opaque and visible as a bunch of transparent things can slow the game down. I also have "Lost Soul translucency" set to 1.00 as well so they are no longer somewhat transparent.

 

For Video mode, try to set "Scale Factor" to as low as you can tolerate it. It's actually one of the best ways to increase performance as lower values put less stress on your GPU, and there's also some people that prefer a "Classic" look for their game.

 

If all else fails or you aren't getting the performance you're hoping for, you might be interested in another source port like PrBoom+ (GLBoom to be more specific) at the expense of having less fancy GZDoom mods. Happy Dooming!

[D4NUK1]

For the Intel integrated gpu question, if is a old version, it's better to have a version that runs on directx, as a open gl performance it's low on those pc. 

 

I know because I played with a Intel g41 chilset. Intel HD 4000 also works good but can lags on some wads and game play mods. 

[Old-Doomguy]

3 hours ago, UndeadRyker said:

For your first question, it depends if your graphics card is capable enough to handle the latest versions of OpenGL. If it is capable, then you actually get better performance with OpenGL over Software rendering. And I personally have never used LZDoom but I assume that you could probably translate some of the suggestions I give you for GZDoom over to LZDoom so here's how you can get better performance with GZDoom!:

Make sure you aren't loading any extra visuals such as lights or brightmaps. Those are mostly for loading times but if you have extra dynamic lights enabled then that is usually the reason that your game gets slowed down.

 

For Display Options > Hardware Rendering Options (for OpenGL), make sure your "Sector light mode" is anything but Software or Vanilla as I've heard that those two are usually costly on performance. In addition, Fog mode should be turned off as well. At the bottom, hopefully your Rendering quality is still set to "Speed". At the top of this menu, you'll also see Stereo 3D VR and Postprocessing. I think they should all be set to off already so don't worry about that.

 

For Display Options > Texture Options (OpenGL again), try to match my settings. Anisotropic filtering has minimal to no performance impact so I crank it up to high as it goes so the textures look a little nice from a distance. Otherwise, you can disable anisotropic filtering. If you want more performance at the cost of loading times, then you should enable "Precache GL textures".

 

For Display Options > Dynamic Lights, match my settings once again. Everything should be turned off. If you absolutely must have them enabled, make sure "Light shadowmaps" are turned off. However, if you must have "Light shadowmaps" enabled (some maps like to use it for visuals), make sure "Shadowmap quality" is set to the lowest (128). I don't think Shadowmap filter makes that much of a difference on performance so I just have mine set to "Nearest" which means no filter.

 

We're almost there! For Display Options, turn off "Rocket Trails", and crank the number of particles all the way down to the lowest they can go! 0 decals and only 100 particles onscreen. I also have "Classic Transparency" enabled so more things (like monster projectiles) are fully opaque and visible as a bunch of transparent things can slow the game down. I also have "Lost Soul translucency" set to 1.00 as well so they are no longer somewhat transparent.

 

For Video mode, try to set "Scale Factor" to as low as you can tolerate it. It's actually one of the best ways to increase performance as lower values put less stress on your GPU, and there's also some people that prefer a "Classic" look for their game.

 

If all else fails or you aren't getting the performance you're hoping for, you might be interested in another source port like PrBoom+ (GLBoom to be more specific) at the expense of having less fancy GZDoom mods. Happy Dooming!

 

That's really great and comprehensive. I'll try it out this evening.

Thanks a lot man, I appreciate it!

[drfrag]

LZDoom is already set for performance and most settings there will have very little impact (not dynamic lights). Resolution/scaling is important for software on OpenGL it would be only a bit faster. That said the default resolution is very low in LZDoom (same as in ZDoom) and scaling only works on OpenGL.

Edited September 6, 2020 by drfrag

[DefectiveByDesign]

I have a FX9800P laptop that gets poor performance in gzdoom. The system has a second GPU it can use for crossfire, but that depends on compatibility, and the GPU is not faster or slower than the APU. It supports vulkan, so that's not a problem. GCN 1.2 architecture.

 

The issue is that gzdoom barely performs better than Doom 2016, which gets around 30 FPS, while gzdoom gets a range of 35-50 top. I've tried disabling ambient occlusion, which helped, but other settings do not make a large difference. The hardware lights made a minor difference, but it's more likely the game itself is poorly optimized. Zandronum seems to run much better, for example.

 

If there is no way to fix gzdoom, I could try zandronum, but gzdoom has better mod compatibility, and I want to use mods like smooth doom with neural upscale.

[omx32x]

well since people is already telling you how to do it in gzdoom i will recomend zandronum to you runs better and it can run a lot of stuff that gzdoom runs like brutal doom complex doom and other mods out there

[DefectiveByDesign]

I got gzdoom to run a bit better, averages around 45 fps now. I will stick to zandronum for multiplayer though. I just don't get why they don't work on performance. For example, some ports are optimized enough to run nuts. Does gzdoom even have multi-core optimization? That would help with anything cpu limited, since you can only do so much on a single core. Anyways, I generally stick to gzdoom for most single player mods, since zandronum is based on older code and not everything is compatible. That said, even gzdoom has issues with loading orders.

[omx32x]

its not because its not optimized its because gzdoom is way more advanced compared to the other ports decorate especially is really heavy on the machine hell even zdoom is laggy on some maps and it runs way faster then today gzdoom

if you are gonna play single player without pk3 files then you should be using other ports 

Edited February 24, 2021 by omalefico32x

[DefectiveByDesign]

Update: LZDoom solves the problem. It works with the mods I want to play, and the software renderer looks better for the lighting effects.

[Karl515]

Switching to vulkan really helped my "Intel Celeron 1.6 ghz 4gb ram" piece of shit laptop run gzdoom. It even performs better than lzdoom. I'm running on linux though so that might be the case.

[DefectiveByDesign]

vulkan helps bypass the api and drivers, so that makes sense. On the other hand, there are many games that perform worse in vulkan and especially dx12, because the optimization isn't better than driver performance in dx11/opengl. That's the case for my laptop. It uses a FX9800 CPU, which is a derivative of bulldozer that has FPU sharing modules, while the APU has xbox 360 era specs. 8 ROPs, 32 TMU, 512 shaders. While vulkan+async compute is well known to boost AMD hardware like Vega/Fury that has ~4000 shaders, that is more because they have 4000 shaders, which can be API limited. Gzdoom isn't API limited for my laptop, it's optimization limited. The engine is too bloated for low spec mobile APUs. It's not that you even need high end hardware, because the graphics are colored lighting with sprites, it's that the engine is slow. The original Serious Sam could run on a pentium 2/3 + tnt2, with better visuals than gzdoom, so they're screwing something up. No idea what exactly. Gzdoom also removed options for texture compression, so they're either not doing it at all now, or found an acceptable default mode. If they're not doing it, that just points to further removal of optimization. There probably are improvements to gzdoom, but it seems to all be focused on high end hardware and modern features, and not low end or efficiency. Web browsers have similar issues, as firefox vastly outperforms chrome, while chrome can get better results on a desktop.

 

lzdoom gives me the same graphics as gzdoom with higher FPS, so they've done something to ruin performance in the newer version. Of course, mods contribute to this too, as nash's gore mod reduces fps a lot, but this is aside from the native engine performance.

 

As a side note, most ports I've tried are too dark under the pure "software" lighting model, and it can't be fixed via gamma, which would wash out the colors at higher levels, and still not raise brightness enough. I have only been able to fix this using gzdoom/lzdoom standard lighting mode. It doesn't look as good, but at least I can see. The "doom" lighting mode seems to be tolerable, but it highly depends on what map you're playing, and how poor the visibility is. It would be nice if there was a "standard" mode for software because it looks better, but it's better than nothing. This obviously is the fault of the laptop screen, but these things are designed for mobile and don't adhere to desktop standards.