CPU-bound to GPU-bound since updates?

[Palerion]

After the Game Updates of the past two months, as usual, I'm experiencing lower FPS than normal. It happens every time a new update comes out, my FPS takes a hit and becomes less consistent. But, lately, this is what has been surprising me:

I used to almost always be CPU-bound. I've stopped playing for a couple months, and when I come back after the latest updates, I'm going GPU-bound all over the place.

Mind you, I'm running a 660-ti with a 3570k processor, not necessarily Ailos's ultra build, but I'm going from 80 to 40 when I look from the distance to a battle. It's a bit odd. I've asked around, and people with lower machines claim that they've had increases in performance and can play on medium now, while people with machines such as mine have said they've had to switch to medium graphics.

Has anyone else experienced a change like this? Are the devs only optimizing for low end machines, and not those the higher end ones?

[luvthesnapper]

I know that I can no longer run the game on an i5-2500k, hd 6670, 4 gb ram, at the lowest settings. Before GU6, I ran it at about 30 fps. After that update, it's been non-playable, and claiming gpu bound.

It's certainly a lower end rig, so no, I don't think they are focusing on lower end pc's at all.

[Ailos]

I've had similar issues with my rig actually - after some updates, the game takes a big performance hit for me, while other folks report big performance increases. It's hard to say what exactly are they doing, but some changes are effective for them, others are not. My best advice is if it is bad enough, open a tech support ticket and submit your system information with it (dxdiag and msinfo32 files). In my experience, they've recently gotten better at not having that happen after every update.

Now, how to mitigate the issue until their next hotfix? (BTW, they're also fairly good at putting out hotfixes within a couple days of such a performance hit, if people report it, so do report it!) Turn your render distance down to 4000 or so - and it'll somewhat limit how much your CPU will be bothering you. If you're GPU-bound on a 660Ti, you could try turning Physix off (which will also make the game more stable).

On a different note though, this kind of performance really depends quite heavily on their server-side code and what continents you're on. I remember there was one update a couple months back where being on a heavily populated server gave me a CPU-bound 25 fps no matter which part of the continent I was on and whether I was actually near a fight or not. SOE frequently shoots itself in the foot with updates, so you gotta let them know if/when they do that. The more people report performance issues, the sooner they'll fix it.