Huge differences in game play & Hogging concerns

Flipping between Multiplayer & SinglePlayer (MP & SP respectively) and noting some major issues with this.

Typically, I keep all of my crafting to the SP mode as that is really a one sided task anyway. Attempting to craft in MP and my rig just about squeals in pain. CPU temp skyrockets, fans whine under the strain of keeping system cool, and game gets all skippy-like.

Further, I've noticed the graphics for the crafting tables are... sorry... hideous!
Cropping of the image overlay (gump) is amateurish and the graphics overall are fuzzy. What happened?

I bounce back to SP mode, and game is not all skippy anymore. Am able to move without (sorry... meant WITHOUT) a constant jitter.

Go back to MP mode, and even the environment skips frames, people are popping in and out of the screen. Forget any dungeon crawling.

Not sure if the back end improvements included frame rate condensing, but this is silly.

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Overall, the lighting is wonderful. Love the colorful sunsets & sunrises even if improvements are needed for I do see some banding in the sky during the color transitions. Lighting source with the torch is "okay" but the shadow effects for it need help.

Blooms on smoke & fog are very nice, but shadows on the avatars themselves need work.

Some objects in dungeons that highlight as being interactive are not (I want that shield!) and mobs are respawning kinda fast. I thought the dungeons were instanced and basically if I killed something it was "dead" until I exit and re-enter the instance. Needless to say, I did a lot of dying this round.

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Final word, I see a whole lot of good coming out this release, but the wear on my system is a concern. I like to stream, have voice and text chat as well as a browser open to interact with social networks and post to the bug forum should I find anything. Granted, this is all pre-alpha and I should expect some resource hogging - but not THIS much. Right now, sitting AFK in SP mode, SotA (game only) is using 62.7% of my CPU and damned near 3GB of my RAM (I have threaded 4GB for the game, 1GB dedicated for video and the remainder for a stripped down OS & everything else). That's a bit much, eh?

 

While many of your findings are stuff, we experience too, please be aware, that the status of the preview releases is a very raw one, which you wouldn't see as a non developer, if not for the Kickstarter and website pledged nature of the game. Its directly taken out of development and thrown on the masses without too much optimization (and who knows, if not the latest and greatest change which made it into the build was the big resource hugger? And some serious brakes have been removed with the patches during that cycle (on Wednesday Dev+ preview even my overpowered gaming rig struggled in Owls Head, its so much better now ...)
4 years old laptops or 32 Bit OS with chipset graphics are not the hardware needed for performant and/or excellent game graphics ...

But independent from the individual outcome, these publishes help both: Us to get a feeling for the game and tell our likes and dislikes in time as feedback to the developers (or put some money for better hardware for Christmas aside), the developers to hear our echoes and find all the performance bottlenecks bothering us, if so many players are online.

*Salute*
Olahorand

 

I am aware. I'm a programmer myself and understand better than most, ayuh.

This is far worse than R5 though. Considering Starr mentioned having made performance tweaks I would expect better in R6 than R5. I found it almost impossible to stream for more than an hour without my system smoking - whereas in R4 I could stream for over 10 hours without system degredation (I didn't stream in R5). From R5 to R6, I've noticed more CPU and RAM usage as well - especially in multiplayer mode. in R5, my fans didn't kick into high gear or whine, they are this time. Granted, I don't expect a fully streamlined game (is why I limit what else I'm doing and thread my RAM accordingly) - I don't wanna kill my rig, know what I mean?

I'm logging my resource usage from this release forward now. I don't have the beefiest systems, but I am indeed better than most considering I do a whole lot of Java compiling on my rig.

(alienware i3 x64 with dual-duo core cpus mind you - I need a good machine for programming and gaming - i don't game on laptops)

 

Not quite sure I get your RAM setup... You've got 4GB total system memory, which you have given 1GB from that over to your onboard video card, and the rest of the memory(3GB) is used by your OS and the game inside the OS?

SotA is not hard on the CPU. Your issues for CPU are simply the fact that your dedicated onboard video card is trash and it is offloading processing to your i3 CPU which is not built for modern gaming.

What SotA is however, is a serious memory hog. I don't know if this is a leak or not in the early pre-alpha phases of the game or not, but they should certainly look at optimization of the game when it comes to memory.

 

No I have total 6GB ram installed
4 is threaded just for the game
1 is threaded for vid
last gig is for everything else (stripped down OS with minimal resources)

Similar to when I am compiling code for projects.

 

Performance definitely took a hit this time around. I'm obviously not too worried about it in pre alpha but whatever changes they made may have to be revisited as far as how it's taxing systems. These are my system specs.

OS: Windows 8.1 x64 (fully updated)
CPU: Intel I5 2500
Ram: 16GB DDR3
GPU: Nvidia Geforce GTX 570 (latest drivers)

While not a complete power house, I would still consider it above average. SoTA is using an average of 52% of my processor, 2 GB of ram and in Owl's Head I'm getting an average of 20-25 FPS according to Fraps.

 

I have never played SP mode. But I've played a lot of MP in each of the releases and I found R5 to be far worse than R6. I see R6 as a major improvement performance wise.

 

Strange in the differences. What kind of hardware are you using? Any idea on your FPS?

 

I am not keen on making negative comments regarding performance, when Dark Starr made it clear that we are not to expect good performance optimization yet. In fact, in the list of R6 "what NOT to expect", it lists performance optimization. Why even be discussing this then?

Performance: We have only done rudimentary optimizations and we do not yet have a full suite of performance fallbacks (LODs, etc.). This means the game will be quite slow on older machines, and due to memory usage, might be unstable in certain conditions (like densely decorated areas). With each release we will be doing further optimizations and adding to our fallbacks to improve performance.

 

Information on how it's running in current state on different systems can aid with optimization when they start down that path. They can see what changes are having major effects. I'm not really complaining about it's current state, just stating an observation on my own PC in how it's performing. My pitchfork of "rabbling" is stashed neatly away in my closet for a future date.

 

Windows 8.1 64 bit
CPU AMD FX Six Core Processor 3.30 GHz
8 GB RAM
Nivida GT 610

Of course I'm not streaming anything in the background, not going to facebook or trying to shop online simultaneously. I don't know how many FPS I'm getting, it could be the same and I just don't mind it. Would I want to play Planetside II with this performance? No, but it looks great to me for this type of game.

 

Agreed. If the community doesn't give feedback, why test? If the community doesn't express negative comments, why have a forum?

Just because someone gives negative feedback doesn't mean that we should see that as a negative.

 

Absolutely.

AND, the game performance went BACKWARDS since R4 (AGAIN).

So, these are not complaints about anything that wasn't already taken care of in some way.

I dont have a laptop, I have a side of beef. I can run many, many applications, side by side, power and resource hungry, and this box is perfectly fine.

i7-4770k 3.5 GHz, 32 gig, 240 SSD (game is here) + 2x1.5 overflow drives, 2x GeForce GTX 770. Internet connection is a cool 15mbps.

Right now running: Maya, Zbrush, mIRC, Chrome with 28 tabs, World Machine, Photoshop, and was/am playing Warframe through steam (yes I am taking a break from working!). Chewing up 18 gigs of ram, and I have 4 flat CPUs, until I crank up warframe, which leaves 2 flat CPUs.

Running SOTA chugged. It only uses a single proc, chews up 3+ gigs at startup and never drops below that, just increases.

There is either some memory leak introduced, but I did leave it overnight to burn in and saw no dramatic increase.

The GC in Unity sucks, could be that, could also be any new net code they tweaked/added, as beefy and non-beefy systems experience the same issues (anecdotally proving it to be less GFX related), anything they changed in streaming content, someone leaving some logging messages on, etc...

The short point: Performance took a dive, they should know; it is not a complaint, it is what we are here to do for the project, and a privilage we actually PAID to do.

Cheers.

 

@Joviex...

I think it's the game architecture. It's a P2P. So if you have the best rig in the pool, guess who's carrying everyone else in the instance?

My guess would be that people with great rigs may be experiencing poor performance because so many people are depending on them to host the instance.

 

My performance was also bad, but today with the 102 was much better again for me. Am I the only one with this?

 

I think there should be some way of knowing if you're currently hosting the instance or not. That way people can say in their bug reports (I was hosting or I was not hosting the instance at the time this occurred).

 

I would agree with this to a degree. I noticed my system behave in a more predictable manner in SP, but when I hop on over to MP the threaded memory & cpu for the game skyrockets while all other resource metrics stay about the same.

okay, really done now - MUST work on projects! aloha!