Ready or Not – AMD Performance Guide

A guide for optimizing the performance of the game primarily targeted at AMD users, but also can be useful for Intel users. This includes some alleviation of stuttering and some performance concerns. Also includes a bit of random information I’ve decided to share.

Guide to AMD Performance

Сrеdit gоеs to Maevarienn!

AMD Performance Guide: Welcome

Hey you, yeah you! Are you tired of guides telling you to “update Windows” or “check for viruses” to solve all your performance woes?

Are you tired of looking up an issue just to see it’s the same copy-pasted crap posted all over?

Really frustrating, isn’t it?

Look no further this is the guide for you!

Anyway, I made this guide originally just to share my findings when it comes to achieving the best possible performance I can with my current system.

This guide is primarily for AMD users on Windows, but some of the information in here will likely be helpful to all users so stay tuned!

Preface: My PC Specs

Just so we are on the same page. My PC’s specifications are as follows.

• CPU: Threadripper 1950x @ 4.00Ghz OC
• RAM: 4x8GB @ 3600Mhz DDR4 CL16
• GPU: 5700XT @ 2010Mhz + 8GB VRAM @ 1800Mhz
• SSD: 500GB Samsung 970 EVO NVME

As you can see, my system isn’t brand new by any means, plus I am playing at 1440×2560 resolution.
The Threadripper doesn’t help either, more on that later.

Essentially what I am trying to say is that if you have a newer system, you’ll likely struggle less than I do.

Section I: Out of Game Settings

I know I know, I said this wouldn’t be like those other guides, but there are some things we need to do in Windows to ensure we all end up on the same page.

First, make sure your game is installed on a SSD. Ideally a proper (non-SATA) NVME SSD. If you’re using a HDD for gaming in 2023… Just stop it, get some help.

• The main problem I encounter while playing surprisingly isn’t average FPS. In fact, my average FPS is exactly where I want it for my monitor and system.
• The big problem is stuttering. Now, I will say, the stuttering can seemingly only be mitigated currently and will not totally go away.
• However, there is a huge difference from stuttering every 10 seconds to every few minutes.

In my experience, stuttering is caused by one of two things: Shader Compilation and running out of VRAM.

Like most UE4 games, shader compilation stutters are pretty common. Just Google “UE4 shader” stutters and you will see loads of posts on it.

Subsection: Overlays

Firstly, disable any overlays you may have enabled. Steam Overlay, Radeon Overlay, NVIDIA Overlay, Discord Overlay, etc.

Also disable Game Bar and any capture method you currently have enabled.

I don’t want to go over how to do these one by one since this guide is already really long, but it’s not too difficult to figure out.

Subsection: Exploit Protection

Specifically for this game, a Windows security setting called Control Flow Guard (CFG) was contributing to the issue. Disable security features at your own risk, but this isn’t as severe as disabling anti-virus.

Go to Windows Search > Type in “Exploit Protection” and press enter > under the heading “System Settings” change the Control Flow Guard setting to “Off by default”.

You will need to restart your PC to apply changes.

Subsection: Possible Snake Oil

Preface: I am not an Unreal developer. However, I figured it was better to address the Engine.ini tweaking than to ignore it entirely. I do not currently believe that tweaking the Engine.ini actually does anything beneficial in the game at all. Unreal Engine games should cache all shaders as they are loaded in the maps so the shader stuttering will be less over time. In my experience, tweaking the Engine.ini more often than not results in more performance and stuttering issues. However, you can try it and see if it works for you. Below is one tweak I found that may do something.

Go to C:\Users\YourUsername\AppData\Local\ReadyOrNot\Saved\Config\WindowsNoEditor and right-click edit the Engine.ini. Append to the bottom the following:

[/script/engine.renderersettings]
r.CreateShadersOnLoad=1

I cannot say if this helps, in theory, this should force the game to load shaders on initial start. I do notice longer load times, so it appears to do something, but I cannot say if this is beneficial or harmful in the long road. If the devs didn’t include it, it probably isn’t good to have. YMMV.

Subsection: VRAM

The next thing that can cause issues is running out of VRAM, like I mentioned previously. When you run out of dedicated VRAM the application must swap into either RAM (slow) or the SSD (super-slow). This causes lag/stuttering and is no good. If you have high VRAM (More than 8GB) then this section might not be relevant. However, for me, Ready or Not will happily eat my VRAM. I found that while idle my system was using a lot of VRAM as it was, the main culprits were Steam, Discord, and Firefox. So let’s optimize those.

• For Steam go to Settings > Interface > and toggle off “Enable GPU accelerated rendering in web views”. As it says, this requires Steam to restart.
• For Discord there are two sections. Go to Settings > Voice & Video > scroll down until you see the Advanced tab, under this disable Hardware Acceleration. Then back in settings go to Advanced > and disable Hardware Acceleration listed under Developer mode. This requires Discord to restart.
• For Firefox, simply close out of Firefox or any browser while playing Ready or Not 😛

There is also potential for other applications to use VRAM that I do not have on my system, my advice is to limit the number of programs running at any time you are playing the game.

Also some users have a process called “dwm.exe” (all users have this process on Windows) using a high amount of VRAM. This is a Windows process and is used for rendering in Windows. You cannot disable this system but you can refresh it. A quick way to do so is to open a Administrator CMD and type:

taskkill /f /im dwm.exe

This will temporarily flash a black screen, maybe crash some open apps, and then immediately return.

You can also kill explorer.exe which is not strictly necessary to running applications. This probably isn’t going to help much but if you are really trying to max your VRAM savings, here you go. To do this, in the same CMD window, type:

taskkill /f /im explorer.exe

Explorer.exe does not enable itself so if you want to re-enable it you have three ways.

1. In the same CMD window, type:

start explorer.exe

2. If the CMD window was closed, press Control+Alt+Delete and press open Task Manager. At the top left of taskman, press “file” and then “run new task”.

In the resulting window type:

explorer.exe

Then press “OK”.

3. You can also simply restart your computer and the process will return on boot.

Subsection: Low Hanging Fruit

This wouldn’t be a guide without the following:

• Turn on Game Mode in Windows settings.
• Turn on Hardware Accelerated GPU Scheduling.
• Set ReadyOrNot-Win64-Shipping.exe to “high” priority in Task Manager (Might help some in CPU limited scenarios, like mine).

Since these are already written about in like every guide ever, it should be pretty easy to do and most users already have this done anyway. Just to cover bases they are included here.

Conclusion

At this point everyone should be on the same page and have optimized their system as much as possible (aside from BIOS, more on that later).

So you should be sitting at less VRAM in idle, no overlays in-game, disabled CFG, and possibly changed a few Windows settings.

Section II: In-Game Settings

Next on the list is getting the in-game settings down. Having good frames and low VRAM usage will help with performance issues (who knew?).

When you launch the game you have options of DX11 or DX12. Try both, one might work better for you than the other. For me DX11 is the most performant and stable and the visual difference is negligible at best.

In game there are a few settings we should look at:

• In the Graphics Tab > Basic Graphics Options:
• Switch to Fullscreen.
• You can also lower the Resolution and Rendering Scale of course, but I recommend doing that only as a last resort.

In the Graphics Tab > Advanced Graphics:

• You can turn down Texture Quality, but I do not notice any savings with this (may be a bug, may need more testing). Theoretically lower quality here should save VRAM so you can turn it down then run a restart and see if you notice any difference as I do not.
• Turn Down Shadow Quality to Medium (low kinda looks too bad to be worth it).
• Turn down Post Processing to Low.
• Keep Anti-Aliasing Quality as high as you can since the game looks really bad without it, but if need be, lower it.
• Turn VFX Quality to low.
• Turn down View Distance to medium (should not impact much but can help with VRAM).
• Turn off Frame Limit, Motion Blur, VSYNC, and Bounce Light.
• Keep World Decals on but lower the Decal Distance Fade to 50 (the lowest it can go).

The Opti-Wand may lag some users so turning the resolution down and FPS limit on may help, I personally do not have issues with the Opti-Wand so I will leave it as is.

For AMD you can use FSR2 to grab some frames, leave it on Quality so your game isn’t too blurry.

For NVIDIA DLSS Quality would be my recommendation.

Also for NVIDIA the Reflex mode is something you can play with. I do not have NVIDIA so I cannot say what it does. YMMV.

Subsection: Picture-in-Picture

You may have heard the term Picture-in-Picture or PIP if you have played ARMA. Picture-in-Picture presents itself in Ready Or Not as the helmet cam. To save some frames, do not use the helmet cam feature. Currently some issues arise when toggling the helmet cam mode on. If you are experiencing frame drops even after turning it off, toggle it a few times until the performance comes back. Otherwise, restart your game and just don’t use it at all.

Subsection: Other

Alright that about does it for in-game settings. For me I do not notice any crazy visual downgrade from these. If you can afford it, you can pump those numbers up, but for me these helped to alleviate my issues.

Something else to consider is limiting the games FPS. “But Maevarienn, you told me to turn off the FPS limit.” Well yes, from my experience it does not work very well and causes it’s own issues. So to limit the in-game FPS you can use Radeon Chill or whatever the limiter is called in NVIDIA. Set the limit to -1 FPS of you monitor’s refresh rate or whatever FPS you can maintain on average. There are other programs that can limit your FPS but I’ve not tried them. YMMV.

Section III: BIOS Settings

You remember how I said a few times I’d comment on something later? Well here it is. There are a few things you may want to do in BIOS depending on your system. For Threadripper specifically you will also need Ryzen Master installed. I have an ASUS motherboard so these settings may be called something different if you have say a MSI board.

Disclaimer: I am not responsible for any damage you incur while messing around in bios. These options are safe but if you are not comfortable in bios then just skip this!

In BIOS you will want to enable DOCP for AMD or XMP for the Intel equivalent. Most people already have this enabled but just in case, check. This will set your RAM speed to the appropriate amount, usually higher than it will be out of the box.

For me, disabling Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT), helps with single-core performance. As most games are rendered on a single thread, single-core performance is huge. You may try this on your normal Ryzen or Intel CPU. Sometimes it seems to help, sometimes not. For early Threadripper it is good to disable it.

Again, for Threadripper you will want to make sure your Memory Access mode is set to Local over Distributed. The reasons for this are out of the scope of the guide, but basically it lowers RAM latency, which for gaming you want.

To do this first make sure Memory Interleaving is set to Auto or Channel in BIOS (I had to set mine to Auto for Ryzen Master to behave so keep it on Auto for now).

You can find this in Advanced > AMD CBS > DF Common Options > Memory Interleaving. Set this to Auto.

In Ryzen Master now, go to Profile 1 and uncheck all the little green dots on the left, Speed (MHz), Cores Disabled, Voltage Control (V), (Leave on Additional Control), Memory Voltage Control, and Memory Control. Then in Additional Control flip off Simultaneous Multithreading and Legacy Compatibility Mode. Then toggle Memory Access Mode to “Local” from “Distributed”.

Up at the top right, hit apply and carefully read what Ryzen Master says. Sometimes it just restarts the system and auto-launches, and sometimes it needs you to manually start the system after it shuts it off and then manually start Ryzen Master. Again, read!

Subsection: Overclocking

Disclaimer: I am not an expert, and am not responsible for any damage you cause to your system while overclocking. In fact, overclocking may void your warranty. Only proceed if you know what you are doing and for the love of god look up a reputable guide.

This is not a OC guide. However, if you are CPU limited, overclocking may help.

There are plenty of guides on how to do this, and honestly it’s not as scary as most people think. For the most part, I recommend overclocking. Modern CPUs however do not need such manual overclocking as they are already tweaked fairly well. If you decide to OC a new or older CPU just make sure your cooler is good enough (don’t OC on a stock cooler please) and that you have changed the thermal paste (and dusted) in the last decade!

I use OCCT to test my overclocks for stability. Some people swear by Prime95, but I find it to be way too unrealistic and often an otherwise stable OC in normal gaming will fail in Prime95.

Some general tips:

• When you load a system 100 percent in OCCT, the voltage will drop (called VDROOP), you could increase the voltage in BIOS to compensate. However, a better way would be to increase Load Line Calibration (LLC) until the system no longer experiences insane VDROOP. Just don’t put it too high as you may overshoot your voltage target on idle.
• In the US manufacturers have a target of how much electromagnetic emissions a device is allowed to produce as interference. This sometimes shows up in motherboards as the inclusion of Spread Spectrum. This technology allows the motherboard to send power at slightly different frequencies in order to eliminate a huge EM spike on one frequency when there is lots of watts flowing through the board. In practice, this is rubbish and the end user will never have any problems turning it off. So when overclocking, this setting should be off. Same for VRM Spread Spectrum.
• I wouldn’t mess with “C-states” as overclocking in most situations already excludes certain C-states. For example, sometimes I read to disable C6. However, in my experience, my CPU never enters C6 with an overclock so disabling it is unnecessary and anything that is not necessary to change in BIOS shouldn’t be changed.

Section IV: Other Things

This section has some other things I felt might be helpful, may expand later.

Subsection: PTT

As you know, PTT does not currently have a way to toggle in-game. I find this super frustrating as Ready or Not already has a lot of things to do with your hands. Additionally, some gamers with disabilities may have issues holding down certain keys for long periods of time. So I wrote a AutoHotkey script that simply holds down “V” so you can toggle on and off PTT! First install AutoHotkey from the website, then in the AutoHotkey Dash, create a new script. Name it whatever you want and then press edit. Copy and paste the code below:

; any AutoHotkey version
F8::
toggle := !toggle
if toggle
Send {v down}
else
Send {v up}
return

Make sure to save it in notepad. The script will save to “Documents” by default. To use, double click to run the script and while in-game, press F8 to toggle PTT on or off. You can edit this key in the script, by changing the “F8” to the name of the key you want to use to toggle. You can also change the “v” in the script to another key if you need to rebind PTT in-game. Just make sure the toggle key and the PTT key are different. Otherwise the script will… misbehave.

Subsection: Old Data

If you had a previous version of the game installed before the 1.0 update, I would recommend a clean install. To do this, first go to the game install. This can be done easily by right-clicking the game on Steam and in the menu, hover over manage and hit “Browse Local Files”. Delete everything in there and then uninstall the game. Then navigate to AppData by typing in %appdata% in Windows search. Press alt+up arrow to go up a level and click on Local. Find the ReadyOrNot folder and delete it. Then reinstall the game through Steam. Some users reported that old saves and what not were causing slow-downs and other issues with the new version. If you cannot afford to completely reinstall the game, just delete the folder in AppData and re-launch the game. It should re-generate.

There is a way to remove cached shaders by removing and reinstalling your graphics driver. This may also help if there is some weirdness with old shaders being cached.