Performance Issues

Just so the staff/dev team is aware, this is a major issue in-game currently. Not sure if you guys have been reviewing your steam reviews, mmorpg reviews, etc. but they are blasting the game and a lot of it is over performance issues. I am experiencing it firsthand as well as my friends I have brought along. Some are almost about to quit over it.

I think your most important goal with all of the money you are raising is to address these issues IMMEDIATELY.

You guys have a great game here with a lot of potential, but an MMORPG absolutely needs to run smooth. It shouldn't even be that hard considering the game is instanced and not completely open world. I have a boss build, not going to go into details, but I only get 40 fps on fastest, way better FPS on games with much better graphics. If a new player logs in, feels the clunkiness this game has for being a 2018 mmo release, they are definitely going to be turned off and have been already. It also affects PvP performance, PvE (monsters teleporting, moves not registering properly, etc.), and most importantly play-ability of the game.

I am not stating all of this to bash anyone, I am really enjoying the game. I just want to see this game thrive and survive in the long-term.

I hope this is taken serious.

 

Perf issues have been heavily worked on in the past 6 releases and its fundamentally better now. Yes, a lot of reviews before 6 months ago complained about it.

However, it really demands on your rig. I play Sota in 4K and have no perf issues and I zone areas in 10 seconds.

Check your video card and computer specs. You may have an issue with your computer.

This is how performance should look:

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/247229573

 

I wouldn't just make that up to say it, go to steam and look at recent reviews. Look at MMORPGs overall review of the game.

I get the game is "demanding" but it's "instanced" and the graphics are nothing to write home to mom about.

 

I think you should formulate your own opinions vs listening to reviews. For example, the graphics are actually some of the most advanced graphics in gaming today. They may not specifically look *pretty* at times (although take a close look at some the placibles in game), but name another game where you can log into a heavily used zone and run into 200,000 unique placibles in the zone. Most MMO's dont have any placible items which is why they can do purdy graphics.

 

Steam has always been negative towards SotA, I don't get it, I've played (been active) from before the beginning (2013) and I built my machine in Dec 2014, I've never had any performance issues... So, I still don't get it?

i7 4790, 32g RAM, nVidia gForce GTX 760 4g, RAID0 SSDs, 150 mbps internet, Win7 x64 Pro... Budget minded system...

This is 3 1/2 yo equipment set on Fantastic, high shadow distance and I'm now getting Great performance...

 

The game was running relatively smooth until a couple of days ago, but the hitching/lag is getting really bad, and it's frustrating to die because of it. I normally get around 70Mbps Down and 6.5 Up, for my internet connection and am on the East Coast. Areas with housing are not instanced. They are dynamic, as deco/houses can be moved and changed at will. I expect a lower framerate in these areas, but in areas where I hunt I expect things to run much smoother. I shouldn't be freezing up every few steps(hitching), and after looting a corpse, it shouldn't take 4-5s for the corspe to disappear(lag). I really thought this would be fixed before release, but it seems to keep poking it's ugly head back out. I know some have no issue with lag/hitching and I wonder if this has anything to do with their proximity to the server and latency is the issue. Also, it seems I have the problem more often, or at least it's more pronounced, when I am partied up with other players.

User Specs:
OS: Linux 4.13 Ubuntu 16.04 64bit
CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-6500 CPU @ 3.20GHz (4) System RAM: 15914
GPU: AMD Radeon (TM) RX 480 Graphics (AMD POLARIS10 / DRM 3.18.0 / 4.13.0-38-generic, LLVM 5.0.0) GPU RAM: 8132
SotA.Linux.64.760.Date.04.04.18

 

You will be very interested in my reply here :

https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/forum/index.php?threads/low-fps-with-gtx1080.117922/#post-991953

 

This has been one of my greatest issues with the game. It looks like something from 2015.

 

There are definitely some performance problems I've noticed on the Mac. And I have Kaby Lake, an RX 580 with 8GB GDDR5 and 40 GB of 2400 mhz RAM. So yeah. It's real.

I can play Battlefield 1 but Sota brings it to a crawl at times Still, It's to be expected for an indie team using unity in a way that it's probably never been used before.

*edit* I just looked at my processlist and there were a couple hung Sota processes in the background stuck at 50 percent CPU even tho the game appeared to be quit, so that was probably contributing.

So I recommend looking to see if you have sota processes hung in the background if it crashes and periodically just quitting the app, because it seems like sometimes that helps with issues in the game.

Also: Don't use antialiasing (no real point at 1440p) and don't use peripheral lighting unless you have a Razor keyboard.

And probably have a graphics card from the last couple generations will help. And play on Windows if possible

 

With a two year old PC, I don't see much of a performance issue. A heavy duty graphics card gets me 30 to 55 FPS in many adventure scenes now. POTs need work though. I get 25 to 35 in them, typically.

 

I see issues myself but don’t consider them as bad as I remember many other online games being as they were getting started. Eventually I hope things will polish out more as those games did.

I’m playing on an i7 based machine running win7 64bit with 8 gigs ram and magnetic hard disks.

My main gripes are the map being laggy and sometimes unresponsive a while.. as well as player generated areas making me lag really bad. Load times between areas are generally about 1 minute and I don’t really mind that too much.

I’m having a lot of fun with the game though so that might affect my opinion and patience a bit.

 

The framerate is worse this release for Linux.

 

The areas are "instanced" (up to ~60 players per instance), but the housing is not. (as in "instanced housing") The same housing and deco appears in every instance, and changes in one instance are synchronized with the others (if any) that are running.

Some people's idea of "bad performance" is "less than 60fps anywhere at max settings". Okay, whatever.

My own idea of "decent performance" is 15fps or more everywhere at Fastest in 1080p. Below that the game is nearly unplayable, except for doing basic crafting and an alt on follow. I get 30fps or more everywhere (sometimes 20 in difficult towns) at 1080p on a 750Ti and a GT1030, so a $100-$150 graphics card should get you that on a budget. For CPU, I'm using an i5-2400 (Sandy Bridge) with 12GB RAM and the GT1030, so except for the graphics card, a good PC from 2012 runs SotA fine.

They've got the core of the game graphics already done, so I don't expect the requirements to go up any time soon.

I gave up trying, partly because there are so few models that can play it well, because Apple has been bad about putting good GPUs into their computers, and I still want to use my 2011 17" MBP. But if you upgrade to 10.11 or higher, Unity will use the new Metal subsystem, which is apparently the Mac equivalent to DirectX. I'll try that when I decide to upgrade from 10.9.

 

I've got a system that is right at the recommended specifications... I've more RAM, and my CPU is faster, but otherwise I'm right on the recommended configuration.

I don't have performance issues...

I was at the launch party while DarkStarr was spinning, with a hundred+ people on the roof... I didn't experience the "Slide Show" that he was talking about during the Livestream. I was just a few minutes ago Double Boxing, and the game was perfectly playable.

While I don't doubt that some are experiencing performance issues, and I know that the Linux Client leaves much to be desired, I just haven't experienced them. Scene Load Times (Other than heavily decorated POTs like mine) are on the order of 15 seconds... My frame rate is around 30 frames per second pretty universally, and I'm running Fantastic at 4K resolution on a 1070.

There has to be something specific about the hardware setups of those that are experiencing these problems, because over the last 4 or so months, as Chris turned his attention to performance, everything has gotten better.

If I'm wrong, and I'm somehow Special... I'd like to know why... perhaps that might be a clue too.

User Specs:
OS: Windows 10 (10.0.0) 64bit
CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-6600K CPU @ 3.50GHz (4) System RAM: 32683
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 GPU RAM: 8096

 

I dont think the state of the mac and linux gpu drivers are as good as windows. Windows is a games platform. Also what some may consider good performance is not good to others, especially if you’re used to 60fps on a ps4 pro for example.

Macs with decent gpus have 5k displays and the only options are to play 1440p pixel doubled or 5k, which is too slow. No 4k option.

 

And having said that, I can totally play SoTa with reasonable frame rates most of the time. Its just I think considering the graphics are what I’d call ‘average’ I think people are expecting it to be speedier. And I dont think graphics are bad or anything either. They are pretty nice for an MMO with the exception of certain animations and models which are biggest area of need. Items are starting to look real nice. But if you play AAA games that are well optimized like, say....Remastered version of Shadow of the Colossus on a Polaris chip on PS4 its not at that level. Which may be an unfair comparison but that is life.

 

I already have an RX480 w/8gigs of ram. I'm also using an i5-6500(Skylake) w/16gigs DDR4, and am using an SSD Drive. It's not top-of-the-line, but it's not the bottom of the heap either. My setup is above the recommended specs in every aspect. I generally get 60+ FPS in most places, at most times, but in towns that drops as low as 15FPS in places like Virtue Oasis. In Lost Vale, everyone in the scene(8 in my party, and 2 not partied with us), at a point I dropped to 2FPS and others in my group said that their screens just froze up altogether. Some of them had 1080's and late model i7's. So, upgrading isn't going to help me one bit. I don't need 60+FPS everywhere, but I do need about 30FPS for hunting. The FPS isn't the only issue, as I stated. It's the lag/hitching which is the issue. I don't know how many times I've died because the game freezes up from half a second to more than 2secs.

 

I'm not going to pay extra to get 100Mbps when there is absolutely no need for me to have it. I'm already getting around 78Mbps, even though I'm only paying for 60. I'm not sure how getting extra bandwidth is going to fix anything. If anything, it's a latency issue, and I'm not moving to Texas. Other than that it could be a problem in the network code.

 

It is both... code and mixing different functions in the same threads, which make them queue and slow down. I know, it shouldn't happen, but thats unity architecture, it would be expensive to change it, but possible.

You should not get a huge difference from 78 to 100 anyways, but most people will only have 15-20 mbps and that is going to cause problems with how the game is setup right now.

You can check the FPS difference easily with offline mode, its not only the deco. I tracked the packets and each time I get a bandwidth reduction, my game stutters on the GPU. That is because somehow, the game by default sends 95% of the computing to the GPU, no idea why, I asked questions about it and still awating an answer.

Then there is the motherboard, alot of people have good CPUs/GPUs, but noone talks about the rig that makes those upgrades work together, it is a big culprit. I have seen with my own eyes SOTA run on fantastic @ 80fps, and it looked more than fantastic, I was jealous. Sure my friend had a better GPU, but not immensely better, the only major difference was the motherboard and matching upgrades.

I am running at 15 FPS if I'm lucky with my I7/radeon HD 1gig/8gig RAM low end setup. I cannot afford more for a while, but if I control my internet traffic with a third party program I gain a solid 6-7 FPS, at that level it makes a big difference. My money would have been better spent on a motherboard than a SSD and expensive GPU.

I will agree that it shouldn't be necessary to have this much high end equipment, but for those who can afford it, it will make a massive difference. I gained 20% loading improvement and barely 2 FPS by switching to an SSD, which is the most common suggestion.

 

Today I finally got around to upgrading my RAM from my old 4x 2gb to new 2x 8gb and oh man.. what a huge difference! The overworld map is so much more responsive.. lag in general is greatly reduced. Keep in mind I'm still using magnetic drives! I've got a smaller HD running Windows and the 2nd one contains Shroud and other game data. I'm using a Gforce 750 ti video card. I7 cpu.