Did they end up figuring out the reason for the poor performance on large battles?

[Eduard Khil]

Wasn't there talks about the HUD causing the performance problems? opening the map alone causes a nasty bottleneck everytime, yesterday I almost froze (the game slowed down for like 7 seconds) by pressing M while stealthed for some reason, not sure if it could be a bug. Why were they trying to keep optimizing render distance to trick the game into a steady performance?

Alot of people seem quite upset about extremely low frames even at low settings, perhaps they need this (http://software.intel.com/en-us/vcsource/tools/intel-gpa) in their office.

Has anyone followed up on this?

[Ritual]

Im sure the programmers are researching the cause, and they probably have profiles of the game engine that shows where it bottlenecks the PC and in what situations.

I would assume it takes awhile to rework some things or implement solutions. They probably had a bunch of other things on their to-do list for release. Maybe they just need to get a little breathing room in the workload until we see the biggest performance optimization attempts.

Making a MMOFPS is technically challenging I would imagine. I am impressed with what they have already.

[Dkamanus]

Im sure the programmers are researching the cause, and they probably have profiles of the game engine that shows where it bottlenecks the PC and in what situations.

I would assume it takes awhile to rework some things or implement solutions. They probably had a bunch of other things on their to-do list for release. Maybe they just need to get a little breathing room in the workload until we see the biggest performance optimization attempts.

Making a MMOFPS is technically challenging I would imagine. I am impressed with what they have already.

I do hope so. I don't have the UBER L33test PC in the world, but its a last year model Id say. Not being able to run it in Full HD on High settings with 60 fps while you can do so with the CryEngine is kind of a stupid thing. I understand that the PC must calculate a lot of stuff, but thats a CPU problem, and having an Sandy bridge i5-2500k shouldn't be a problem.

[Sifer2]

I'll go out on a limb an say it's probably cause your CPU is having to keep track of hundreds of people an vehicles. With no mission system in place there really is nothing to manage the flow. The few large battles on the continent tend to have nearly everyone there. Especially with Instant Action dumping even more people into it constantly. The fps checker always says i'm GPU limited until I get to the frontline fight, then its CPU.

[AThreatToYou]

There are also some pretty horrible LOD problems that make the game nigh unplayable at times.
As in, invisible people popping in and out of existence mere yards from you.

[Eduard Khil]

I'll go out on a limb an say it's probably cause your CPU is having to keep track of hundreds of people an vehicles. With no mission system in place there really is nothing to manage the flow. The few large battles on the continent tend to have nearly everyone there. Especially with Instant Action dumping even more people into it constantly. The fps checker always says i'm GPU limited until I get to the frontline fight, then its CPU.

Yes, I know their game is supposedly focused on CPU while leaving the GPU half touched for some reason, analysing the code should have given them an idea already, the game is extremely fast while the HUD is off, what is handling the HUD? - and I am pretty sure a whole lot of lines must be getting repeated for that to cause an impact, that is one thing that needs fine tuning. Another is the rendering as you approach extremely large facilities designed like Zurvan and the third is just player models (large numbers) and an extra one would be air flak explosions.

Let's not forget the massive ram leaks I have seen.

[Buggsy]

OK I'll ask it here since nobody answered it there.

Does each additional rendered player add a linear tax to your computer, or an exponential tax?

[Rockstone]

Problem: Performance sucks when I have more than 5 people around me
Reason: Your 286 is too old for this game.

[Eduard Khil]

OK I'll ask it here since nobody answered it there.

Does each additional rendered player add a linear tax to your computer, or an exponential tax?

I think it's exponential.

[QuantumMechanic]

Slow game client performance, locking etc all sound like issues related to your PC. I was playing beta on a new PC I built a couple months ago and never had issues like that (I did have a couple CTD issues that got fixed though). I'm not saying it's not SOE's problem - they still admit such problems exist and still are making new fixes for them.

My biggest large battle concern was all of the rubberbanding / warping / vanishing that happens in large battles. I kept seeing that happen until the very end of beta. And with potentially a bazillion more new players this week, I can only see that getting a lot worse.

[Rbstr]

Does each additional rendered player add a linear tax to your computer, or an exponential tax?

Your computer? Probably closer to linear. As long as your computer is only fed data on what happens to you and other players each dude is probably the same amount of processing or bandwidth.

The servers have something more like this problem:
2 people is 1 relationship, 3 is 3 relationships, 4 dudes is 6 relationships, 5 is 10 ect.

It's likely neither of these is the exact situation. It really depends on what each computer has to do, calculation wise.

[Eduard Khil]

Slow game client performance, locking etc all sound like issues related to your PC. I was playing beta on a new PC I built a couple months ago and never had issues like that (I did have a couple CTD issues that got fixed though). I'm not saying it's not SOE's problem - they still admit such problems exist and still are making new fixes for them.

My biggest large battle concern was all of the rubberbanding / warping / vanishing that happens in large battles. I kept seeing that happen until the very end of beta. And with potentially a bazillion more new players this week, I can only see that getting a lot worse.

My PC? rofl.

You mean to say you ran at 60 frames on average at any settings in large battles?

How about flying on zerged areas?

You can't get past 20 (maybe 30 tops) frames on large battles no matter the system, it's a problem with optimization.

[Bear]

Personally I'd like to see them tone down the amount of tracer fire a bit. Don't get me wrong, I love it but when you're in massive night battle it almost gets a little overwhelming. When you mix in the AA turrets it's a veritable crap ton!

[MrBloodworth]

Did they end up figuring out the reason for the poor performance on large battles?

YEP!

All the other people!


Sorry, could not help myself. :)

[QuantumMechanic]

My PC? rofl.

You mean to say you ran at 60 frames on average at any settings in large battles?

How about flying on zerged areas?

You can't get past 20 (maybe 30 tops) frames on large battles no matter the system, it's a problem with optimization.

I didn't always have my FPS display up, because performance wasn't bad enough for me to be interested in it. When I did have it up and was watching, I was getting probably 30-40 FPS during large battles. That includes flying in the middle of them. Rarely did it dip below that. I ran my graphics settings on high.

As far as performance issues go, server-side warping / vanishing / lag was always the one that affected me the most. Especially the first weekend they went without taking the servers down (when the character rollback happened). The game was simply not playable for me. I was in a heated bio lab fight and would find I got teleported back to where I was 30 seconds prior constantly.

And ever since then I don't think there was a single stretch when the servers were up for more than 48 consecutive hours.

[Buggsy]

"Did they end up figuring out the reason for the poor performance on large battles?"

Yeah each additional player has to have their position, orientation, what they are doing sent over the internet to your computer to be rendered; and it all adds up.

[Eduard Khil]

I didn't always have my FPS display up, because performance wasn't bad enough for me to be interested in it. When I did have it up and was watching, I was getting probably 30-40 FPS during large battles. That includes flying in the middle of them. Rarely did it dip below that. I ran my graphics settings on high.

As far as performance issues go, server-side warping / vanishing / lag was always the one that affected me the most. Especially the first weekend they went without taking the servers down (when the character rollback happened). The game was simply not playable for me. I was in a heated bio lab fight and would find I got teleported back to where I was 30 seconds prior constantly.

And ever since then I don't think there was a single stretch when the servers were up for more than 48 consecutive hours.

I have an I5 2500k, 16 gigs of ram and a gtx 680, I can't even get 40 frames on large battles setting graphics to low, while flying, the game takes dumps of bottlenecks everytime I get close to anything half zergy.

Seriously, it's not my system and yours suffers from the same problem, you just haven't seen the frames.

The last few days before they closed the beta I was even getting 20-30 frames, again, low settings.

Where did you buy your parts? Nasa?

[AThreatToYou]

To the above poster, lowering your settings won't increase your frames on a GTX 680. What's cutting your frames down is CPU usage, not GPU usage; so kick your settings back up so it at least looks pretty.

What's odd is, I get essentially the same frames running on High with a Phenom II X4 3.5 GHz and a GTX 460. I make sure to cut off all background programs and run the game from an SSD, though.

[Eduard Khil]

To the above poster, lowering your settings won't increase your frames on a GTX 680. What's cutting your frames down is CPU usage, not GPU usage; so kick your settings back up so it at least looks pretty.

What's odd is, I get essentially the same frames running on High with a Phenom II X4 3.5 GHz and a GTX 460.

I know, lowering the settings doesn't change much but shouldn't it? there is way too much focus on the CPU to run this game, the videocards barely do a thing.

This is what I meant by optimizing the game.

[QuantumMechanic]

Making CPU-heavy games seems to be SOE's way of doing things. When EQ2 came out it was the same story, maybe even worse. Your GPU had little effect on the game performance.

Right before tech test started I built my new machine, with the advice of the good folks here at the tech forum. I ended up building an i5 3570k with a GTX 670. Like I mentioned I ran on high settings the whole time, and never had any bothersome client-side performance issues.

I am glad that I stuck with Intel / Nvidia. A lot of people will argue against that, but as I suspected there seems to be a lot of AMD-related performance issues. And I know many games in general have ATI related graphics bugs.

[Rbstr]

I know, lowering the settings doesn't change much but shouldn't it? there is way too much focus on the CPU to run this game, the videocards barely do a thing.

This is what I meant by optimizing the game.

You can't just go "Oh I'll take this load and give it to the GPU".
GPUs aren't good at the same things CPUs are. When you start talking keeping track of players the GPU isn't in a situation to do much of anything.

Changing graphics settings has fairly little to do with the numbers the CPU has to crunsh. That's why, for many people, you end up with the same frame rate regardless of graphics settings.

[Knocky]

You can't just go "Oh I'll take this load and give it to the GPU".
GPUs aren't good at the same things CPUs are. When you start talking keeping track of players the GPU isn't in a situation to do much of anything.

Changing graphics settings has fairly little to do with the numbers the CPU has to crunsh. That's why, for many people, you end up with the same frame rate regardless of graphics settings.


Why can't people wrap their mind around the fact that a GPU doesn't keep track of the hundreds of people around you.

Eduard Khil, why do you running a GTX680 on a 2500 CPU? Your CPU is bottlenecking that card.

[Dkamanus]

Why can't people wrap their mind around the fact that a GPU doesn't keep track of the hundreds of people around you.

Eduard Khil, why do you running a GTX680 on a 2500 CPU? Your CPU is bottlenecking that card.

And does noone finds this statement an absurd? A middle-high end CPU to be causing bottlenecks? The problem is in the game engine itself, which needs a LOT of ironing still to make it what the devs want it to be.

[Knocky]

And does noone finds this statement an absurd? A middle-high end CPU to be causing bottlenecks? The problem is in the game engine itself, which needs a LOT of ironing still to make it what the devs want it to be.

I said the CPU from Jan 2011 is bottle-necking the GPU from March 2012.

This has nothing at all to do with this game.

If you are going to be running a GTX680, then you should have a i7-3820 CPU to go along with it. Not a i5-2500