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

Eduard Khil · 2012-11-17, 09:39 AM

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 in their office.

Has anyone followed up on this?

Ritual · 2012-11-17, 10:04 AM

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 · 2012-11-17, 10:22 AM

Originally Posted by 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.

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 · 2012-11-17, 12:39 PM

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 · 2012-11-17, 12:43 PM

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 · 2012-11-17, 01:16 PM

Originally Posted by 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.

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 · 2012-11-17, 03:30 PM

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 · 2012-11-17, 09:08 PM

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

Eduard Khil · 2012-11-19, 01:15 PM

Originally Posted by 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?

I think it's exponential.

QuantumMechanic · 2012-11-19, 01:25 PM

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 · 2012-11-19, 01:31 PM

Originally Posted by Buggsy

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 · 2012-11-19, 01:46 PM

Originally Posted by 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.

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 · 2012-11-19, 01:59 PM

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 · 2012-11-19, 02:16 PM

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 · 2012-11-19, 02:21 PM

Originally Posted by Eduard Khil

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.