Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night - Quick performance analysis

[AnotherGills 25]

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night has finally launched, powered by Unreal Engine 4. With support for unlimited frame rates, I decided to quickly test performance differences between the game’s multiple graphics settings at full screen, with a resolution of 2560x1440.

Hardware Used:

CPU: Intel Core i5-4690k 3.7 GHz
RAM: 16 GB
HDD: 1 TB
SSD (OS): 500 GB
GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080
OS: Windows 10 64-bit

(Note: I have not encountered much foliage, and when it was encountered, the setting had no noticeable impact on performance or quality of foliage, and elected to not include in this current report. If I encounter more, this article will be updated.)

First, a comparison of the game at it's highest setting levels vs its lowest setting levels

Turning down all of settings from their highest level (referred to in-game as “Cinematic”) to their lowest level (referred to in-game simply as “Low”) produced a massive bump of 20 frames per second, measured using a program called “RivaTuner Statistics Server”

After achieving this result, I sought to analyze the impact each setting had on performance. For each setting, I would set it to it’s lowest level, while leaving the other settings at their highest.

 

The Anti-Aliasing setting at its lowest has minimal difference in performance as well as visual.

Post Processing had a major impact on performance, providing an average of 18 frames more at its lowest level. However, this has a major impact on the game’s visual style, removing the depth of it’s moody darkness.

Shadow Quality had nearly no impact on performance, yet at its lowest setting, requested around 100MB of VRAM less than at its highest level. This effect does not impact the actual quality of the shadows, instead the presence of certain shadows, such as on the molding at the room's entrance.

Texture Quality’s lowest and highest level had little-to-no impact on performance or VRAM usage, but had a notable impact on quality of specific surfaces in the environment, such as the steps in front of Miriam.

Effect Quality at it’s lowest provided an average of 9 frames per second more than it’s highest, yet had very little noticeable visual impact.

 

As shown above, on a high-end PC, Bloodstained will run with ease.

After seeing how well the game performed on a high-end PC, I performed a similar analysis with the same method on a much lower-end PC (lacking a discrete graphics processor), with an accompanying resolution of 1280x720.

Hardware Used: 

CPU: AMD Ryzen 3 2200G 3.5GHz
RAM: 8 GB
SSD: 120 GB
iGPU: Radeon Vega 8
OS: Windows 10 64-bit

Again, I started this analysis by comparing performance between the game at it's highest settings and lowest settings, with an increase of only 5-7 frames per second with settings at its lowest.

After further testing, I found that the settings had an impact of 1-3 frames of performance at low resolutions (sans Anti-Aliasing, which resulted in no change in overall performance.)

Next, I tested the impact that resolution would have on performance. The lowest in-game resolution setting is 1280x720.

1280x720 – 1600x900 – 1920x1080 at the highest settings

1280x720 – 1600x900 – 1920x1080 at the lowest

settings

 

To fully verify how much of an impact resolution played on performance, I edited Bloodstained's user settings configuration file, allowing me to set the resolution below 1280x720.

[The configuration file can be located at: %LOCALAPPDATA%\BloodstainedRotN\Saved\Config\WindowsNoEditor\GameUserSettings.ini]

 

In this instance, I set the resolution to 960x544.
While the game looks washed out, this drop in resolution provided a MASSIVE boost in performance, doubling the frame rate. With all settings maxed out, the overall frame rate ranged from 120-150 frames per second.

As previously stated, Bloodstained's most intensive setting is its resolution. For those on low-end PCs, cranking down this "hidden" resolution setting can make the difference between the game's performance chugging, or being exceptionally smooth.

Bloodstained's minimum system requirements included a note, stating "If you have a potato PC or above, you're ok."

I believe this statement is arguably misleading due to a lack of "potato-friendly" resolution settings. However, the fact that high frame rates are attainable on low-end PCs at all makes up for this.

 

 

[SirYodaJedi 14]

Interesting. I'd probably recommend setting the r.ScreenPercentage to a value under 100 instead of changing the output resolution. 

What frame rates did you achieve on the high-end rig with all settings maxed out? This would help me a better judge how well it would perform for my system. 

[Marioysikax 89]

1 hour ago, SirYodaJedi said:

What frame rates did you achieve on the high-end rig with all settings maxed out? This would help me a better judge how well it would perform for my system. 

I'm hitting 500-600 FPS with all settings maxed out with i9-9900K+RTX2070, 2560x1440, so I'm using r.ScreenPrecentage 200 to get almost constant over 100 FPS. 

[Andytizer 269]

If you were on a low end machine like a GPD Win 2 - you could run at 960x544, but could you also lower the r.ScreenPercentage to get better performance? On this guy's video he's on about 30-50 FPS but theoretically could be higher? 

 

[AnotherGills 25]

12 hours ago, SirYodaJedi said:

Interesting. I'd probably recommend setting the r.ScreenPercentage to a value under 100 instead of changing the output resolution. 

What frame rates did you achieve on the high-end rig with all settings maxed out? This would help me a better judge how well it would perform for my system. 

With all settings maxed out at 1440p, I am achieving frame rates ranging from around 130-200 frames per second.

And I do agree that setting the r.ScreenPercentage under 100 is a better idea than changing the output resolution, I was interested in showing a clean-cut way to quickly increase frame rates without calculating resolution percentage.

10 hours ago, Andytizer said:

If you were on a low end machine like a GPD Win 2 - you could run at 960x544, but could you also lower the r.ScreenPercentage to get better performance? On this guy's video he's on about 30-50 FPS but theoretically could be higher?

I'm sure you can get even higher frame rates, but since the game seems to be designed with a 16:9 aspect ratio, I didn't want to go much lower than 960x544 (which admittedly is fairly close to, but not quite 16:9).

[SirYodaJedi 14]

17 hours ago, AnotherGills said:

960x544 (which admittedly is fairly close to, but not quite 16:9).

960x540 would be the actual 16:9 resolution. I doubt the letterboxing would be that distracting, regardless.

[rlsprite 0]

Well my PC is quite old (i7 3770, GTX 580) and Bloodstained runs at a constant 60fps with everything max out at 1080p. The game barely uses GPU to be honest, my 580 sits between 40-50% load nearly all the time but I've notice small slow downs in two specific cases. One is in the gambling boss, when he does the big chips attack my fps tanks hard for at least 3 seconds and when the big flying demons who cast a variety of elemental spells do their lightning skill the game also drops a few frames, other than that is pretty much flawless in the performance department.