Performance issues - Shadows & shaders

Hi,

I think I've found main performance issues in game.

1) Shadows + GI quality

Goin from high to low gives me only 20%, but in big fights impact of this setting rises astronomically high. I have like 40 fps at ultra, but around 90 fps on high and 120 on low.

I think it is most impactfull with fire effects. You can try same fire-heavy area like 1st map of Ogham interlude or using fire skills. This setting alone made game from barely playable to extremely smooth in this fights.

Maybe there are overused shadows for fires? Temporary solution could be have separate settings for effect shadow quality. Maybe you should focus on optimizing this.

It also seems to have impact on delirium and abyssal effect, which together with fire can usually make even beefiest computers to drop to single digit FPS.

2) Shaders

I did some thorough testing and biggest issue is that AMD/NVidia default cache size is too small for this game. You can easily have 20 gb of shaders if you set shader cache size limit in NVidia/AMD drivers to unlimited. It doesn't 100% fix issue with shaders and FPS drops because of them are still huge, but impact is like 30-60% lower fps drops just from this. Also it massively decreases CPU usage.

After some experimentation, I have also found that because this huge size of shaders, game FPS is scaling a lot with speed of SSD.

I gained a lot of fps, when I moved my shaders from my slower to faster SSD. Because I have so much RAM I today tried Primocache to use RAM for SSD read caching and again, my FPS jumped a lot and my FPS is much higher. I also tried something extreme, and that is using 24GB RAM as Ramdisk just for shaders. And ... it feels like FPS in fights scales almost linearly with read speeds.

Just as example how read spead impact game in juiced maps with low shadows quality. I usually have my fps stable, capped at 158 fps.

PCI 3.0: 2gbps - 10-20 fps
PCI 4.0: 5gbps - 30-50 fps
PCI 4.0 + 24GB RAM cache: 12gps - 70-100 fps
24GB Ramdisk (ssd mode): 20gps - 90-130 fps
24GB Ramdisk (native, treated as ram): 30gbps - 120-158 fps

This 2nd issue ... i think it can't be easily fixed because amount of shaders. But, maybe there is thing that can be done. Add aditional settings for aditional shader cache, (like none, 2gb, 4gb, 8gb) that will allow people use aditional RAM for storing shaders so we don't have to use RAMdisk. It is bad, but game really needs to use more RAM to run than it currently uses and I don't think it is possible to decrease size of shaders that easily without making game graphically more "simple".

My spec:
Ryzen 5800X3D
96GB RAM DDR4 3600
RTX 4070
WD Black SN810 2TB (PCI 4.0, NVME) + Gigabite Aorus 1TB (PCI 3.0)

I hope this helps you. Game is almost unplayble on my pc without tweaking, but... this solved my issues.