Performance Issues

There's like network slowdown at Upper Tears, but that's not the hitching. The hitching is really annoying when it does occurs and it's happened to me in solo scenes.

 

Uh, every possibly way. There is nothing SOTA does or ever will do that's comparable.

 

I never leave my game rig on when I am not playing, electricity is pretty expensive in my country. So I always start up, play (hitching rollercoaster) and then when done, poweroff the PC.

 

Garbage collection: (Taken from the Unity3D site)
The most obvious problem is that the garbage collector can take a considerable amount of time to run. If the garbage collector has a lot of objects on the heap and/or a lot of object references to examine, the process of examining all of these objects can be slow. This can cause our game to stutter or run slowly.

Another problem is that the garbage collector may run at inconvenient times. If the CPU is already working hard in a performance-critical part of our game, even a small amount of additional overhead from garbage collection can cause our frame rate to drop and performance to noticeably change.

 

Factorio, minecraft...

Its not like those 200k items are visible at all the time, so why do those have effect, I dunno. I mean, items inside some house, inside room, with walls, should not be rendered nor updated at all, thus should not have effect on fps.

Cpu and gpu can handle a lot, it's the implementation that fails here.
My guess is, they use lots of monobehaviour objects instead of pure entity component system..

GC is the bane of c# games but it can be your ally or enemy. If you ignore it, it kicks you hard.

 

All the housing in ESO is instanced; you will never see a decorated town like in SotA.

 

Can we avoid taking yet another thread in a "we're frustrated with the game and want to lash out" direction ? It's so tiresome.

 

To add to the discussion, I've had a few experiences between myself and a friend that are related and might offer insight.

I'm running a i7-2600 with a GTX 980, with 16GB of RAm. A friend is running the same build except a 2600k and a 980 TI. I've noticed leaving the launcher up to seed appears to cause a memory leak, my computer becomes incredibly unresponsive after leaving for a few hours and coming back, something that never happens when I don't have the launcher open. When I got my friend to download the trial his game became choppy and literally unplayable, he uninstalled within 15 minutes and needed a complete reboot to get his computer back to normal.

 

I never leave the Launcher open for seeding, this was my experience in the past. But yeah, it also is choppy without the launcher open in the background.

 

I had an issue where the launcher was sucking up a lot of CPU and making the framerate slow in-game, so I set the launcher to close as soon as the client was launched. They have since fixed the CPU hogging issue.

 

Hmm I was just going through the DamienG.System code the DbTool.Shard code and noticed extensive use of string vars which are immutable in C#. Nothing like a yet another copy of the same string every time you modify the value of the base variable to suck up memory.
Love the console.writeline messages everywhere though. Telling.

 

string vars are always expensive, in any language. What is your point exactly?

 

Not having to draw objects doesn’t mean that your FPS will be high; it just means that your GPU has lighter workload. While that can translate into a higher frame-rate, if your CPU is working hard to determine which object should and shouldn’t be drawn (to save on GPU cycles), then you’re just transferring the bottleneck somewhere else.

Game engines have lightweight solutions for object culling but it only works if your map is baked (ie: static). While adventure scenes (in their current state) should be baked, towns are fully dynamic to the point where no one can predict which house would be placed where.... which requires a custom-built solution.

Towns in the Witcher 3, for example, were specifically designed with optimization in mind; placing a building knowing that they could cull objects behind it. SotA doesn't have that luxury. Granted, Portalarium designed the game to work this way, but that's essentially what a lot of us (including Richard Garriott) wanted.

So merely saying that some items shouldn't be rendered is ignoring three things:

• Someone has to come up with the logic which isn't as obvious as you make it sound.
• You're giving the CPU more work so you have to be mindful of the trade-off.
• The game is already culling a lot of objects.

Minecraft is far from being the most efficient game there is (primarily because it's written in Java) but, in the context of comparing what your computer does in Minecraft compared to SotA, I figured I'd shed some light:

• Minecraft works on a meter-cubic grid and the CPU recomputes geometry whenever there's a change on the grid (of a given chunk) to make it look like the world is made out of cubes... it doesn't actually render thousands of cubes.
• In Minecraft, the GPU has very little work to do aside from casting shadows on objects that essentially all share the same material and nearly everything (aside from characters) is on a texture atlas.

 

Get better hardware. I been playing everything on Max settings with 0 issues whatsoever. My load/zoning time is also within 10 seconds. But I am always running on 1080 with 32 gigabytes of ram most people don’t have 32 gigs nor is it required to have anywhere near that to run perfectly fine.

 

https://www.blurbusters.com/gsync/gsync101-input-lag-tests-and-settings/12/

 

lucky you, want a medal ?

I'm running a crappy radeon, windows 7 and a 7 years old computer... which is relevant for portalarium trying to make a game accessible to all. Our feedback is perfectly warranted... also it seems that some people with high end hardware also experience issues.

 

Easy guys. this is a great thread and SDs suggestions, as well as others have been huge for some of us.

Thulmor's comment is..well, a bit blunt, but its also not wrong. Those that broadly understand SOTAs issue seem to generally agree that a fast HD, more RAM and a better GPU and CPU will sort the issues, so a state of the art personal computer, of any faith should resolve the problem. The code may not be as efficient as it will end up being however.

It is easy to say 'get better hardware', it's also easy to comment on cost of doing so, but there has to be a point when it's not fair to criticise the game performance and developer code efficiency and instead plan to dip our hands in the piggy bank, or at least feed the piggy bank and plan ahead. I tend to change my PC every 4 to 5 years, closer to 5. The trigger is often I can't mount the latest generation of CPU, Graphics card or RAM type where such a change would be significantly beneficial. I would definitely not expect to run a new game with the latest graphics, rendering and quality on anything older than that. I would certainly expect issues and put up with them and not demand a great deal. I would try to optimise my settings and save up for a new unit.

 

no.

 

In fact I have no more issues, I am puzzled it only works on my and one of my friend's computer... It should at least improve framerate when you use the lowest settings...

 

But it IS wrong. Beyond the principle of a "general guideline", getting better hardware doesn't necessarily mean you'll get better performance as it's highly dependent on how the software (game and or drivers) was optimized.

My computer is a 5 years old (with no custom parts) and it's not suffering from hitching yet a computer with (better) more modern parts can suffer from hitching. It's not a reliable fix.

There's an issue with player perception that today's modern games have given us an impression as to how all games should look and perform... these people are wondering where all that power is going... or why it's being wasted. If it looks amazing, then they can understand that their computer isn't up to snuff, if it's perceived as ugly, they expect a high frame-rate.... that is without understanding the technical implications of getting a game like SotA to run.

So, yes, that needs to be communicated.

On the other side of the coin, it's up to the dev to design and build a game that'll actually run well on current gen machines... especially since today's gamers don't tolerate low frame-rates as much as they used to. Especially since today's gamers most likely have invested in a console instead of their PCs.