My experience on a "low-end" PC...

I really enjoy this game.

I've been playing since the single digit releases.

That being said, I haven't seen much improvement in performance or help to lower end machines.

I still freeze when in the game more than a minute - and loading takes more than 3 minutes... not sure how that works.

Lately, when even trying to load the game on Steam, I receive this error:

"Failed to initialize player:

Failed to initialize Direct3D.
Make sure you have at least DirectX 9.0c installed, have drivers for your
graphics card and have not disabled 3D acceleration
in display settings.
InitializeEngineGraphics failed"

I want to partake of the game, get into it, recommend it to friends... but why would someone pay $45+ to something that after being "out" for years isn't even stabilized? :-( And now I see launch is around the corner?

 

My work laptop has NVIDIA QUADRO 1000m for graphics, Dual core CPU, 16GB RAM. It's a 6 year old Lenovo. While the game sputters and slides around, I have never seen any of these long loads & freezes you are talking about. This laptop is fully capable of playing 90% of the game, besides really challenging things and PVP.

 

Hey Liquid,

I recently updated my graphics card driver and a lot of the issues are clearing up. I suppose even a month between updates has made a world of difference for me. I still have about a 15-20 second quit time out of the game, but the load times have vastly improved - so I am pleasantly surprised.

MASSIVE improvement over my previous 5+ minute loads into the game and 3+ minute scene change loads from R48.

 

@Lord Blackthorne and it would help the discussion if you post your hardware stats...

 

The last update focused on high-end GPU's, but they are working on performance and have definitely increased load times. I was recently running the game on my iGPU, and was getting decent framerates(15-20fps and higher in some areas) Granted, this was with all the whistles/bells(and shadows) turned off. You should recheck your video settings and see if there is something you can cut off to improve performance; remove shadows, lighting, cloth simulation, and lowering your resolution might help.

 

What @Sorthious posted is spot on, that it what I do with my Surface Pro (the new one maxed out with the i7 CPU not the i5 with 512 mb that Best Buy tries to push off on people. My performance mirrors @Lord Blackthorne's on my Surface Pro. I lowered the tablet's resolution to 1920x1080. I've got this Samsung curved widescreen and it is morally offended that I have it so low and the game kept switching itself to the full resolution that the monitor could support so I had to change all of windows to stop it from doing that. That reminds me I need to submit a bug about that, thanks!

 

News flash, we all do. The longer you play between quits, the longer it takes. The quit time is based on a lot of stuff that we don't see. I'm sure some of it may be freeing up memory leaks, but it may also be uploading stats or crash logs.

Loading takes a while for everyone, especially with spinny disks. Have you tried it on a less low-end PC yet? They are not finished with optimization, which is one of the last things they are working on.

Sounds like your computer may have other problems than just being "low end". Have you tried running it without Steam?

And you haven't provided any details of what is in your system, RAM, GPU, CPU, HD or SSD, etc., so it's hard for anyone to really help you out.

Performance is still supposed to be very dependent on resolution. My old Dell Latitude that would get 15fps back in R20 gets more like 5-8fps unless I lower the resolution to about 2/3 of 1920x1080, then it's merely tolerable. I can only go so low, however, because UI elements like the hotbar take up so much of the screen.

 

have you tried forcing the game to use opengl? put -force-opengl in your SotA shortcut... it was working before... I used it when SotA dropped DX9 support... I only stopped using it when I changed my videocard...

 

You dont need to run full screen at low res, btw, you can run windowed amd shrink your windows size. A lot easier to deal with than resolution switching imo.

 

use sizer... it works with win7... not sure with win10

 

Who makes that? It would be nice to run at full resolution while keeping SotA from bogarting all of my pixels. Sizer? I will look for that. Then I will be pestering Microsoft to give us windows profiles for when the tablet is docked vs. undocked. I do love telling people that I play this game on a tablet.

 

http://www.brianapps.net/sizer/

 

I find disabling shadows in game using my 1080ti brings my FPS in all situations up about 33%. But shadows are amazing, so I deal with it for now.... but damn it'd be nice to have shadows AND 30+ fps everywhere at all times

 

I have a 1070 and my frame-rate is typically 30 fps or more on "Fantastic". I'm on Linux though.

 

That isn't much to ask for a $45 game, seriously.

 

I think the issue regarding shadows is directly dependant on the number of uniquely placed items and the light sources. Most other $45 games don't have nearly as many as Shroud and yet folks are constantly begging for higher and higher limits of placable and interactive deco. Quite a conundrum it would seem, although I'm no programmer!

 

And of those 98% are static while sota has a ton of dynamic items.
Just for clarification.

 

Care to explain?

 

Sure. I am not going anywhere soon.
Maybe i got something wrong.

 

Oh gotcha anyway. Mind you i never said the game is running good nor that they should stop optimizing it.
There is still a load of optimization to do. We could need a general graphic overhaul as well in my opinion and so on.
Just wanted to point out that dynamic items have a much higher workload than static items.
Sure there are ways to fix that, but thats part of the ongoing optimization efford. Or at least i hope it is ^^