Elementalism, an ambitious GZDoom mapset, Phase 1 out now!

[axredneck]

Also AMD has not good OpenGL drivers on Windows (unlike Linux), so use Vulkan.

[Nems]

CPU: AMD FX-8300 8-core
GPU: AMD Radeon R9 200 Series 3gb (CPU-Z won't tell me precisely which model it is and my memory won't either, sorry)

Old hardware that I need to get around to replacing, I know, lol.

That CPU, along with the rest of the FX line, is notorious for having terrible single threaded performance. Rachael's suggestion of enabling Vulkan over OpenGL is very valid. It should give you a relative performance boost.

What would be some decent/good single threaded CPUs that you'd recommend for running GZDoom? Asking as a total tech dum-dum who's interested in upgrading my PC in the future.

[ActionAlligator]

Beat the water episode, moving on to fire episode now. The game still lags and hitches a tiny bit here and there, but Vulkan did indeed make a huge difference! It's not as bad as it was on OpenGL =D Thanks again guys! Will report back with my thoughts when I beat the game.

[axredneck]

What would be some decent/good single threaded CPUs that you'd recommend for running GZDoom? Asking as a total tech dum-dum who's interested in upgrading my PC in the future.

Any modern Intel/AMD CPU except cheap ones.

[Rachael]

The thing that matters the most is clock speed. But having something somewhat modern is important too.

Anything above 3 GHz should be fairly decent.

[Graf Zahl]

These days clock speed does not mean much anymore. More recent CPU generations have mainly boosted performance by increasing instructions per clock count.
My current i7-12700 has a base clock speed of 3.6 GHz, that's only 200 MHz more than my old i7-3770, but it's nearly twice as fast.

So having something more modern definitely counts. Modern mid range CPUs are still faster than 10 year old high end CPUs, despite the lower clock speed.

[pagb666]

Which is the cvar for the lightmaps? I'd like to bind myself a key for toggling dynamic lights and use it whenever performance sucks. I'm on a R5 3600 and got as low as 30fps in E4, not fun when trying to snipe archviles among the crowd. Disabling dynamic lights brought me to a decent framerate.

[IvanDobrovski]

I've beaten the whole thing and here is my overall feedback so far:

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- UV is pretty balanced, ammo, health etc. nothing is stingy. I could even say maybe it's a little too plenty, but that's just me. I beat the entire thing with pistol start. I think it'd be even more forgiving without it in terms of ammo.
- The teleport in your face thing really needs to change, I think you guys can definitely be more creative than that. I see a lot of other maps in the pack with different presentation for their monster encounters than just putting things literally right in front of me.
- Bridgeburner's first fire map surprisingly did not lag me at all, that's very good! That could be a good target to aim for when making the map not lag for users. I was on 1920x1080 on OpenGL with Nvidia2070 Super, if it helps.
- Then the final map lagged me to shit... sadly. The boss arena itself was tolerable but the way to there is intolerable. Sub 30 fps, by a large margin too, I'm talking 10-15 range. But it looks good... I guess.
- I think the final boss of fire realm could use better looking projectiles. Every other boss so far used something of their own and this boss used the Mancubus projectile. This is a tiny nitpick but it would none the less add to it IMO.
- An additional consideration for later could be a new difficulty mode where the BFG is not provided for boss fights. Even though the fire boss is hard to use it with it's still making some bosses pretty cheesable, mostly the Herald of Apocalypse.
- On BFG, I think it'd be cool if the Pale Eyed King slapped you around with its tail if you got too close to it to do some damage to you. It pushes you around at the moment, which is cool, but I can still BFG it with certain angles making it pretty trivial.

A tiny issue I found with a screenshot here in that one Water map with giant staircase

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[m1lk]

WOW! this is amazing! playing it with brutaldoom platinumm

[Bauul]

Just a quick note to say RC2 has been released! Bunch of bug fixes, QOL improvements and some small FPS optimizations.

Download link here

Full change-log from RC1:

General:

• Earth Wand has had it's damaged buffed and a small AOE effect added, but re-fire speed has been slowed down
  Boss health bars have been made shorter, transparent, and can be now moved between the top and bottom of the screen with the Elementalism Options menu. This way they don't interfere with the boss battles as much
  Opening story-text now stays on screen for longer, but can be skipped with 'Use' button
  Fire Episode skybox has been optimized, resulting in a ~10% FPS increase in F1 and F4
  Subtitles added to [REDACTED] dialogue
  Wand of Elements has a proper name when displayed on the Hud
  Automap is disabled during intermission screens
  Shaders have been updated to modern syntax
  Updated Elementalism Options menu to make it clearer how to display the new Elementalism Hud
  In-game description of the new difficulty settings updated to make it clearer what level of challenge they represent
  Numerous minor visual improvements across all the maps

Earth episode:

• Earth 2: Switch near plasma rifle made more obvious
  Earth 4: First lift can be recalled so it's not a one-way drop anymore
  Earth 4: Some early fights made slightly easier to help with the difficulty curve
  Earth 4: Lightmode set correctly so everyone has a consistent visual experience
  Earth 4: Teleporter redirect means falling off at the end of the map no longer requires extensive backtracking
  Earth 5: Boss made slightly less resistant to the Earth Wand

Water episode:

• Water 2: Fixed potential soft-lock in final fight
  Water 3: Blue Key now works (fixed in RC1 1.01)
  Water 4: Corrected comp-level setting allows for correct enemy jumping behavior
  Water 4: Final Cybbie encounter made a little less brutal
  Water 5: First wave of fight sped up to be a little less tedious
  Water 5: Boss made more resistant to BFG tracers

Fire episode:

• Fire 1: Potential soft-lock near big main door fixed
  Fire 2: Added message to double doors to confirm they are locked
  Fire 2: Added heath and cell ammo to Yellow Key fight
  Fire 4: Fixed decorations incorrectly flagged as secrets
  Fire 4: Fixed skybox issue when backtracking from end of the level
  Fire 4: Added escape teleporters to all inescapable lava pits
  Fire 5: Prevented early access to central arena

[AvzinElkein]

I haven't played this fully, but a playthrough I watched implies that whatever the wand does is based purely off which realm you're in, and you lose that ability when you return to the hub (even if you beat its boss).

[squidink7]

In regards to the performance talk earlier, I found something interesting while tinkering.
I doubt that the largest fps killer is the large open maps, as I've personally found that other large open maps in GZDoom (e.g. the island) works fine, and so does this map as long as the game is in its freeze state. I wandered around the maps for a while and compared them normally to them frozen. For instance I was getting around 10fps at the start of palace of tears, but when I froze the game and walked around for a bit I got an average of 30-40.
This is on the Vulkan renderer on a laptop with a recent Ryzen 5 CPU.
I'm no expert in the doom engine but I imagine it's not doing much in the way of only calculating AI for nearby enemies, which on a large map like this with tons of monsters all around would really hurt performance.

[Gez]

Well, consider line of sight checks on a large open map...

[SaveTheDoomer]

Just out of curiosity, what video card should be the minimum requirement for this not becoming a powerpoint? Just to have an idea...

[DefectiveByDesign]

Just out of curiosity, what video card should be the minimum requirement for this not becoming a powerpoint? Just to have an idea...

Anything that can run GL or Vulkan. It's not the GPU slowing the game, it's the CPU, and the engine is causing the bottleneck. If gzdoom is going to lift technical restrictions from the original game, the least they could have done is improve efficiency in rendering such abomination, but no.

The original Crysis had framerate issues because they coded the game for a mythical 6 Ghz CPU instead of multi-threading, and terrible unfixable performance was the result. Gzdoom is the same. At some point, modders will completely break gzdoom, if they aren't already pushing it now.

The engine is going to have to implement better culling and multithreading to continue supporting all these high end mods. That or modders will have to quit making them, or use performance workaround hacks. It's not feasible to continue pushing the envelope any further with such limitations.

Hell, if they can't multithread, maybe do the reverse like that TempleOS guy did, where he combined multiple cores to compute a single task. I dunno, anything is better than the current way of ignoring performance optimization while increasing features that tax the engine.