Metro Last Light G73JH unplayable?

Hey guys
I have Metro LL and thought I can play it on my old G73JH but seems it is not possible. I have 70-80 FPS in the menu, the benchmark gives me an avarage of 34 FPS (1920x1080, Medium, DX11), but in game it is not playable. At the very beginning when we are sitting by the fire until Artyom is lookign at the ground there is 70-80 FPS, but after he looks up, it drops down to 22 and when the mutants come and I shoot at them, it goes down to 10-14.

Why? Is the g73JH really that old that it can not play it? Metro 2033 went good. I tried lowering resolution, set it to run in DX9, disabling SSAA and lowering graphics to the lowest possible, but nothing helped. I also tried Catalyst 13.4 and 13.8 beta too. Nothing helped.

Am I doing this wrong or this is the first game that the G73JH can't handle? Even Crysis 3 can run on low settings @ FullHD resolution ...

WIthout that fancy hair effects, Tomb Raider runs with 40-60FPS 1920x1080 on the highest settings ...

 

Is the game patched? There is patch for fixing performance for AMD cards.

You should be able to play it that's for sure, i can even play it on my 6770m.

 

Are you monitoring your temps and hardware usage? You should be able to play it fine enough.

 

Something is not right. Last Light actually runs better than 2033 at the same settings.

 

As pointed out, Metro 2033 should run at a lower fps than last light. Did you install an mods at all? You said you lowered settings and the fps was the same? Maybe something else is running in the background conflicting? Try moving your saves, uninstalling, reinstalling, and start a new game. If that works, then move your saves back. Also, stay with directx 10, but lower settings within it.

 

I downloaded it from Steam, Steam updates the game with the latest patch autmatically, doesnt't it?

 

Yep, unless you've disabled automatic updates for the game, in which case it will only update when you launch the game if there is a patch available. It's a Steam-exclusive just like 2033. Have you tried verifying the integrity of the game cache files?

 

This might help, as it does mention some issues in special cases.

Metro: Last Light Performance Tweaking Guide | Game Front

 

Check your temps. Now I haven't played this game yet, but usually the first few scenes of Metro2033 and even Crysis 3 are the most taxing. You mentioned you only played a bit of the game and i am wondering if you are just at the most intense parts of the game and the rest could be playable. Is your GPU the 5870 mobility? That card should be able to run the game but I could see very intense scenes dropping the FPS to the teens. The average FPS on a 580m SLI in 2033 was 34ish on max. The open scene saw DISMAL FPS while most other scenes showed 70-80ish. Lowest settings and performance not improving shows you are CPU bound if this is not driver related. But again, play through more of the game or just clarify that you have as it appears you have only played the initial part of the game and many times those are the most taxing and not representative of the 'average' performance. Hope you figure it out.

 

Am I the only one who thinks it could be the i7-720QM? When you lower the settings, and framerate doesn't improve, that usually points to a CPU bottleneck.

edit: I see daveh98 is on the same page

 

I've made some screenshots of the GPU usage. The results are after Steam downloaded and installed a 413 MB patch.









Accordings to this, after Artyum looks up, the GPU usage drops to 0-35%...

 

Wow, something is really wrong here. I bet CPU is burning up...

 

More screenshots with cpu temp and usage:

 

Something funky is definitely going on with the CPU. Can you add CPU thread usage for all 8 threads as well? That would help a lot. You don't need all the other junk at the bottom. Something like this enough:


You have the i7-720QM right? It should be running at 1.73 GHz across all cores in a game like Metro which recommends a quad-core. That's what's happening in the first screenshot and your CPU usage, GPU usage, and FPS are also high. In the second and third screenshot the CPU clocks are all over the place and your CPU usage and especially GPU usage are lower. I can understand 30% GPU usage in certain bottleneck situations but 0% is just crazy. Once we can see your CPU threads usage it would paint a clearer picture. It could simply be one core/thread is getting maxed out which is creating a bottleneck and causing dropped frames but that still doesn't explain 0% GPU usage.

Also, did you make sure the really demanding settings like Advanced PhysX, tessellation, and SSAA are all turned off?

 

For the love of God, I have found the problem...it was that God damm Nvidia bullsh*t (physx), I had to manually turn off advanced PhysX (it was turned off in the menu).

I had to locate user.cfg and change "ph_advanced_physX 1" to "ph_advanced_physX 0". But there was 2 user.cfg, 1 in the Steam folder of Metro LL and 1 in the %appdata% folder on C: and modifying the one in %appdata% fixed it. Now I have 70FPS in DX11 normal (and 40-60 on "High" settings) where I previously had 8-22...

Thanks guys for the tips!

 

Hah, good to know.

 

Nice, your CPU was dying because it was trying to run PhysX.

I've never seen the PhysX bug before. For me when it's turned off in the menu it's always off in the .cfg file too. But great to hear that you got it all sorted out.

 

I guess you didn't see the link I pasted on page one, as the first thing they say is turn off physx. Maybe the other info will still be helpful.

Metro: Last Light Performance Tweaking Guide | Game Front

 

He had turned it off though, but it didnt stick in the cfg-files.

 

Strange. I saw a bunch of people that had problems with physx, they just turned it off in the game. They didn't have to edit the user.cgf. They did edit the user.cfg for things like fov and directx version. Maybe he had the file set to read only?

 

i got low fps but its not cause of overheating i checked temperature in this game and max was 81 for one of each four cores...could it be that advandced phsyx isnt disabled??in game menu it is but i checked now cfg file and it says advanced phsyx 1??and i saw suggestion on internet to put that 0 through notepad

 

i hate this game..on 1080p very high quality aa 4x tesselation off ssaa off motion blur low phsyx off its unplayable...too big drops in framerate i got..i got playable framerate only if i put quality high motion blur normal aa 16x and everything other off...i dont know why is it so demanding..its not best graphic game for sure but its has a addicting gameplay..i dont know how you guys play this game but im disappointed with its optimization

what do you suggest is better lowering native to 1050p?or 900p?i got better frames by 10fps in 1050p or staying at native resolution and reducing just quality to high with increased aa and motion blur to normal?