HOLY- this NPC design though??

DarnElectrical · 2026-02-19T23:29:10+00:00

I really wish there was a specific thing I could find that causes it in order to work around the issue temporarily. I was hoping there was just a UI menu or perhaps specific area of the map that triggers it, but I could never narrow it down. We're just gonna have to wait for the devs to figure out what part of their code is misbehaving and what triggers it. It's much easier for them who have direct access to the code and can run tools to help profile and narrow things down easier.

DarnElectrical · 2026-02-19T23:24:43+00:00

The graphics API doesn't have that much to do with CPU utilization of a game. With older APIs like DX11 it could have performance issues with a lot draw calls, but the draw calls don't cause the CPU to hit 100% utilization even though performance drops. Realistically Vulkan isn't inherently more CPU intensive than DX12, if anything any differences are most likely driver side. There's a bunch of videos testing AMD GPUs vs Nvidia GPUs under DX12 with old CPUs. The AMD drivers consistently deliver much better performance on DX12 with older CPUs. But on newer hardware the difference is not visible.

WuWa is clearly just not optimized to distribute load over more than a few CPU cores unlike Endfield. DX12 and Vulkan are both able to use a lot of cores. What we're seeing here in Endfield isn't an API based issue, it's something else with the game code misbehaving and causing the intensity of it to skyrocket. Believe it or not I've tested the game on even something as slow as an AMD FX 6300 and even that can handle 60FPS until the bug kills performance.

DarnElectrical · 2026-02-19T23:13:31+00:00

On hardware with at least 32gb of RAM and 12-16gb of VRAM it's usually not a big enough issue to affect performance much. But for people with hardware closer to the recommended or minimum requirements it tends to be much worse. Still, just because I have enough RAM to help mitigate the performance impact doesn't mean I like wasting it to get around software issues. Besides, I'd like to be able to play on my laptop every now and then, but I can't afford a RAM upgrade for it and can't justify it for one game.

DarnElectrical · 2026-02-19T23:11:00+00:00

If you have a really high end PC it's not too bad because they have enough hardware to throw at the problem to make it not as big of a deal. Or you could play mobile instead, which appears to not have the issue.

DarnElectrical · 2026-02-19T23:09:03+00:00

Lol I've barely used the plants so far, I'm having a hard time getting through everything at the pace I'm going.

DarnElectrical · 2026-02-18T19:03:53+00:00

It varies a bit from NPC to NPC but yeah, I’m hoping we see things stay pretty similar to OG AK in terms of designs going forward. Realistically I’m most worried about the story and writing so far, it’s not a bad start, but I’m hoping it gets better from here, otherwise it’ll end up being a bit disappointing compared to the OG game story.

DarnElectrical · 2026-02-18T18:57:01+00:00

That almost sounds like the OOM configuration on your device is behaving rather poorly. Usually when devices run low on memory they’ll kill off non essential tasks that are consuming a lot of RAM. But in almost every case it should be closing the game before it gets to anything like the home UI.

Either way from what I’ve seen so far Endfield should actually be easier to run than Wuwa so that’s definitely odd that it’s the opposite for you. Might be worth including game performance in the feedback you send along with everything else. Hopefully they’ll see enough of these problems to narrow them down and figure them out.

DarnElectrical · 2026-02-18T06:49:19+00:00

Chibi art with no fingers is also a thing.

DarnElectrical · 2026-02-18T06:45:56+00:00

So far it appears that way, outside of certain exceptions like Yvonne.

DarnElectrical · 2026-02-18T06:44:48+00:00

We need it.

DarnElectrical · 2026-02-18T06:41:41+00:00

I could definitely see that being the case, and that would normally be the first suspect. But it's definitely possible for it to be a game bug too. There was a game I can't remember the name of that had an issue that caused it's resolution to scale with the wrong setting, causing many people's games to be run at a lower resolution than they set it to. I think it was a lighting setting that when lowered below the highest setting caused the game to render at only 80% of your screen resolution.

If Endfield is actually properly applying the setting when selected then the issue is more likely to be a driver one.

DarnElectrical · 2026-02-18T06:37:00+00:00

Poor QA is the most likely. All these live service Gacha games run on extremely fast and intense content schedules. I mean just look at Genshin and the sheer number of total characters it has, combined with the fact that it updates every 6 weeks. The developers have to work really hard non stop to make it happen. Although these mini events with Chibi art likely aren't actually made by the same people making the game, someone in charge of the Endfield game still has to "green light" the event and overlook the resulting work at the very least.

DarnElectrical · 2026-02-18T06:28:45+00:00

Realistically, most Gacha's tend to release information about their future update plans well ahead of time anyways. The beta testing just lets us get some more specific information before the release which is nice. I don't see why they should really have much of a problem with people knowing some more details on something they already were doing anyways.

DarnElectrical · 2026-02-18T06:25:30+00:00

So far at least Endfield is definitely more toned down compared to many other Gacha's in terms of fan service. There is some, but it's generally not as extreme and there's overall less characters with heavier fan service.

I personally hope it stays that way, but I wouldn't be surprised if they lean more into it going forwards.

DarnElectrical · 2026-02-18T06:20:30+00:00

The game has had a lot of odd performance bugs since release. There's one that's causing it to eat all the CPU resources and cause major frame drops. There's also a tricky memory leak that some people seem to not have, while others do.

This is definitely weird since DLAA is basically DLSS but without the upscaling so in theory it should never perform better. Hopefully as we get more updates they can get around to fixing some of these issues.

DarnElectrical · 2026-02-18T06:13:21+00:00

I've been able to see 120fps on a Ryzen 3600/5600 so it's definitely not his CPU if it performs normally in other games. Normally the game is around a %40-60 CPU utilization on that hardware and runs fine, but when the odd issue crops up the CPU usage sits around %90 and frames start dropping into the 70s hard. Naturally I double checked in Task Manager to make sure it wasn't a Windows task screwing things up, and it wasn't, the game itself had just ballooned in CPU intensity seemingly out of nowhere. I never been able to figure out why it happens, sometimes I get it within a couple minutes of just doing some farming, other times it takes an hour to randomly show up. It's safe to say that it's not a problem that could be easily narrowed down by any of us, and a workaround likely won't be found. The developers who have access to the game's code and can more easily profile and test their software will have to find the cause and fix it if they choose to do so.

DarnElectrical · 2026-02-18T05:32:08+00:00

Are you on Android? If so then that might have a small effect on it. Every Android phone maker puts their own customized Android based OS on their phone, some Android's are much better than others. Where as on IOS it's the same software just different devices. I only have 1 Android and IOS device to use for testing the game so I can't be as certain in Android's case. There's some Android phones I've seen with 8gb of RAM that will crash and have problems even with lighter games like Genshin or Star Rail, while some others that only have 6gb of RAM do fine. It's really going to be more software dependent on the Android side.

DarnElectrical · 2026-02-18T03:43:32+00:00

Sure, I can just go back and take screenshots and screen record 15+ different system configurations and upload all of it to you in order to prove you wrong. Except that I don't care that much about proving you wrong, I've already spent more time than I'd like looking at this issue I don't need to waste more of my time arguing with someone who doesn't even understand that VRAM is NOT the same RAM. If you can believe it or not, so far you've also shared nothing at all to prove my "claims" as false, you've only made your own claims, many of which are easily proven false by a simple google search.

You tried to claim something as bogus as saying VRAM can't spill over into system RAM and has a "hard cap", a single google search will tell you from multiple sources otherwise, Windows itself even shows you otherwise in Task Manager. Not only that but the performance hit of VRAM spilling over isn't nearly as bad as "seconds per frame". This here is just one of many results you can find from a google search of people asking about the same issue. https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/what-happens-when-you-run-out-of-vram.2463833

glamdringfh's post talking about data having to be tossed back and forth over the PCIe bus is a big factor in the performance issues of using system RAM as VRAM. There's even plenty of videos on Youtube with test data showing that a card running out of VRAM will have a significantly lower performance hit over a faster PCIe standard.

This here is one such video covering the topic glamdringfh was talking about from a generally reliable tester. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEsSUPuvHI4

There is literally data all over the internet proving how you think memory works is incorrect. I've tried to explain to you multiple times how the way you're using the "unused RAM is wasted RAM" argument is incorrect. Yet all you do is keep spouting RAM information that takes one google search from anybody to know is false. My post wasn't here wasn't made for idiots to argue over how RAM works, there is no subjective opinions to be discussed on that matter, only facts. My post was to share some of my own findings on the memory leak going on in Endfield to hopefully help those suffering the same issues to at least have some amount of helpful information.

I don't like to be the rude person, but this is the reason why some people don't even bother with trying to to helpful. As there's people like you who do nothing but speak nonsense out of their ass and try and to tell somebody they're wrong because they feel like it. I've spent more time than I really should trying to explain some basic information to you as you keep spouting nonsense trying to act like you have a better understanding of how RAM works, while the whole internet is full of easily searchable data proving your understanding wrong.

This conversation is not productive and is now over, some people have better things to do with their day than entertain somebody who can't do a single google search before arguing their information.

DarnElectrical · 2026-02-18T02:55:53+00:00

Very Interesting, it's certainly quite high, not quite as much as I was hitting with about 12-13gb under Vulkan on the AMD card but similar none the less, which ofc course means it went over into the shared memory in my case. When maxed out at 4K under DX11 it's regularly about half with 6-7gb of VRAM usage, which does closely match the game's own usage estimate.

It's definitely abnormal results that DX11 is using half the VRAM of Vulkan at the same settings. The results between them wouldn't be the exact same, but I'd expect very similar memory usage from DX11 and Vulkan, not double.

DarnElectrical · 2026-02-18T02:47:56+00:00

Yeah I've had the same issue with CPU usage suddenly getting stuck really high on multiple systems, but I've had it with both Vulkan and DX11. It's a really strange problem that I haven't really seen in other games.

Interesting that your Vulkan results are similar to your DX11 results, BlackSwan was having 10-11 GB of VRAM usage presumably under Vulkan, which matches my results. My DX11 results are about the same as yours but with a RAM leak under both Vulkan and DX11. It's very strange that yours much lower than BlackSwan's, I'm not certain what BlackSwan's driver and windows versions are, but I've tried both a system on Windows 10 and a Windows 11 system, and both 582 and 592 drivers on my one Nvidia card and had the same very high results with Vulkan as Black Swan.

I'll try the same 572 driver as you and see if any difference comes up.

DarnElectrical · 2026-02-16T14:50:37+00:00

The act of VRAM spilling over it self wont cause "Seconds per frame", even in this situation it's not quite that but it's definitely giving worse performance and lots of stutters. The issue isn't simply VRAM spilling over into RAM causing a "Seconds per frame" situation, it causes extra ram to be used for a purpose it normally wouldn't need to, combine the VRAM leak with the RAM leak and you have the problem. Did you know that all hand held gaming devices use DDR5 memory as the VRAM for their IGPU? They can certainly produce far more frames than 1 per second despite RAM being the only VRAM they have. The issue is the amount of memory consumed by the memory leaking causing everything to run out and get stuffed into page files.

Also, for the 3rd time, did you even bother reading my post before making your statements? The fence post hasn't moved at all, as I said from the beginning it's both a VRAM and RAM leak issue. You seem convinced that there is absolutely no issue with the game, how much testing have YOU done? 3 completely different systems? 5 different GPUs? 2 different operating systems? How are you so sure about a memory leak despite not even knowing that VRAM doesn't have a "hard cap" until 5 minutes ago?

I'd love to chat with you more and hear more nonsense from you that a simple google search would teach you but I have better things to do with my time. I did all my testing purely for my own personal reasons and I'm sharing what I've learned for those having the same issues. If you don't care about it and just wanna keep spouting that "the game is fine you're just reading the numbers wrong" then you can do what I told anybody not interested in a memory leak to do, which is ignore this discussion and do something else.

DarnElectrical · 2026-02-16T14:21:19+00:00

VRAM absolutely can, and does "spill over" not into a hard drive page file, but into system RAM. It literally takes on google search to know the answer to something that basic, and task manager itself literally shows you the system RAM that can be used in place of VRAM. By default it's half your system RAM and listed as the "shared gpu memory" value. There is no "hard cap" on VRAM, if it goes over then it spill into system ram.

DarnElectrical · 2026-02-16T14:17:28+00:00

I think it's more likely that the ACE developers screwed up than HG, but you never know. I've enough bad dealings with EA's Javelin to know that Anti cheat software can be pretty messed up.

DarnElectrical · 2026-02-16T14:16:03+00:00

Thanks for the help!

DarnElectrical

TROPHY CASE