Ongoing massive performance problems

Hi,

i am Fina Mondklinge and i am a so called hardcore gamer playing from Germany.

The trigger of this post are the massive performance/quality problems in SotA, because it has reached
a new negative quality in the Airship scenario in Lamechs Bazar.

Here are a the infos.

Memory reached today (15. Jan. 2022) over 13MB RAM, which i have never seen before in the last years.
It seems its going proportional or at least almost proportional to the lags/hitching in the Game
which makes em not playable.

Means: 2 seconds are playable at around 20-25FPS, then the SotA clients is hitching for 2 seconds
and so on when using some RAM.

The FPS drop from around 50-60FPS at the beginning to 25FPS or less.
I have often seen low FPS down to 1 FPS.
The lowest was in Breach, while doing the event with a couple of grouped players,
but this very low FPS happens only 2 or 3 times some weeks ago.

This happend after a fresh restarted client in around 30-40 mins Airship gameplay.

Last but not least... this is one of the primary reasons SotA dont have more players and
conti. loosing more and more long time players.

Some of my old compnians already left and im still only here for two reasons.
Its running under linux and second noone ever was able to develop a great MMORPG.

I have no problem paying 20 bucks per month for an MMO, but NOT when the quaity is
still too low after all those years of development especially on core stuff like performance,
non working pet AI, and much more.


Off Topic

PS: The average conclusion out of all forum posts and in game comments since back in the 80th is:
"SH.. GAME QUALITY" and a lightning shall struck me down if these are no facts !!!

 

What video card and driver version are you using?

 

I used 2 systems over the years to test performance.

Intel Xeon 1231 V3
Nvidia GTX 1050 Ti 4 GB
16 MB RAM

Ryzen 5 3600
ATI RX 5500XT 8 GB
32MB RAM

...and SSD of course

OS's
Linux Manjaro OpenGL and in later years Vulkan (always up to date)
Win10

Its not the system or the drivers, its the code.

 

It's also been crashing on me, which hasn't happened in a number of years.

 

Are you explicitly telling SotA to use Vulkan? If so then I recommend to not do that as it's too problematic.

 

No, its up on everyone which driver someone is using.

But here are a few subbjective impressions since im playing SotA.

- Some years ago i used Windows as operating system. SotA client is running VERY STABLE. I think i got only 1 or 2 crashes in around 5 years, BUT its not clear if those crashes were coming from the client.

- A few years ago i switched to linux, because the FPS were the same as under Windows and i have never seen a difference. Means: its running VERY STABLE under Linux. No problems at all. (Good work Mr. Spears !)

- Im only using Vulkan driver since a few years and never had any problems with it, Never had any problems with OpenGL as well. Vulkan seems to increase the FPS a bit probably more than only a bit.

- I made only a few quick comparisons between Vulkan and OPenGL in single/group player/mode in Deep Ravenwood while not grouped.


In general i can notice a smaller performance increase in some zones bases on the ongoing optimisation process.
On the other side performance is getting more and more worse since... i think a few months now.

 

From my own observations and what I've heard from others the Linux client starts using farm more RAM than the Windows client. There are times I topped 20GB on Linux, on Windows I never bother to check anymore, since it's rarely above 8GB and usually less.

Out of curiosity, have you turned off the "Show party members effects icon" setting in Interface? Do you have shadows turned on?

 

The Linux kernel will grow the heap for a process and not cleanup and shrink it unless another process needs the memory. It makes it look as though SotA is using a buttload of ram but it's probably not.

 

Tried diffenent settings in the Menu, incl. GRP Buff deakt., but nothing is able to solve this hitching framrate drop problem.

StoA client uses a bit more than 7 GB on Linux when just logged in and growing each time zoning to a zone. or moving around i think as well.
RAM usage also increases when people zoning out and in while in group and ends up in massive hitching till the game isnt playable anymore.
This issue exists long before Upper Tears came out as well under Windows.

I have seen PPls relogging every few mins while doing East Reach Gap not too long in the past, and all player which have to relog often says the same: "Hey guys, gonna relog; got slideshow"

A good example for hitching is elysium mine. when starting SotA client (not grouped) FPS higher than 60 and moving in a few meters then the first hitching appears, what has nothing to do with a to weak hardware.
I have checked some videos streams and they all have this same hitching problem. And no, i dont mean the standard hitching coming from youtube, thats an other topic.

An other interesting thing is which i noticed yesterday in Airship group (up to 12 PPLs) that the FPS dropped for around 4-5 FPS when someone rezoned in while group was on break standing in the corner like usual.

Ok guys, i will stop here, have something to do in Breach hehe

 

on winders 7 id have a similar issue of moar ram, winders 10, less but weird hiccups after multiple zone hops ends with more anyway, and during a fetid fish spree, id get hitches/hiccups during fishing... how much code is running for just fishing?

and why does music keep cutting off and switching songs(not when im playing fat beats on lute)

 

I discovered today that having Load Time Baking and GPU Occlusion causes lag and crashing on Linux. I recommend not using those settings if you are.

 

GPU occlusion would make the mobs disappear. Thought it was not enough video ram on my old 6GB 980 card. Got a new PC for the holidays, with the latest I9 Alderlake and RTX3080 FTW3 and it was still doing it. Turning off GPU occlusion fixes it. The game runs like a dream. The only hitching and fps slowing is in towns before everything loads. I'm gonna try turning off the pre-baked stuff see what happens in towns.

This is on Windows 11. Upgraded the PC for flight sims and VR but my SOTA has benefitted greatly!

 

@schraubendreher Make sure you have "Peripheral Lighting" disabled in Video Options. That option doesn't improve graphics and is misleading, people often enable it (despite a warning not to from the game).

Also, try turning off Full Screen mode -- someone recently had severe performance issues when using multiple monitors of different specifications, and this fixed his issue.