General frame loss after being in a scene for a while

I've been having a performance problem this release (Windows version) where after being in the same scene for a while, sometimes as little as five minutes, I will notice that my already low-frame-rate laptop (Nvidia 4200M graphics) is in slide-show mode where it gets hard to control my character just walking around. Doing an exit+resume restores it back to usability. I've tried to quantify it but can't. It doesn't help that the /debug fps number seems to be inaccurate below about 6fps or so, so I can't just watch for the number to go down.

And this is even in single-player scenes like mines. I can do as little as mine some ores (with monsters already lying around dead and unlooted, so no need for combat) for five or ten minutes and then have to exit and resume. And it happens again and again. I might spend a couple of hours in a mine scene and have to do it a three or four times.

I really wish I could quantify it, but I haven't been able to. But it is definitely a real thing, because I've been doing exit+resume a lot over the past two weeks. So I wanted to at least give you guys a heads-up that this is a problem, and reloading a scene quickly enough that the instance stays around fixes it, if only for a while.

The only thing I can think of to try is play for a while on my PC with a decent video card and see if I can notice the frame rate decaying with /debug.

 

I've been playing quite a bit today and it didn't get really bad until the past hour or so. Gut feeling tells me that this may be related to playing the game a long time without quitting out of it. It also seems to go along with the game freezing up for a couple of seconds with the sound stuttering. The other PC didn't help with diagnosing this because it was just too fast to have a noticeable frame rate problem.

I think the cause may be heap fragmentation or memory leaks. At least garbage collection is a likely explanation for the sound stuttering freezes. Exit and resume probably frees enough memory to let things run okay again for a few minutes before going bad again. I have 16GB of RAM in the system, but maybe the game client isn't allowed to allocate beyond some limit. I don't know a lot about C# and garbage collection, only that it is supposed to be more like Java in that regard, making memory leaks a lot less likely to happen.

I was playing around in Nightshade Pass exploring the tiered walls for a few hours while watching TV. After a while the frame rate would jump around from mostly 3.x to an occasional 9.x every now and then. Then I'd exit and resume and it would be okay for a couple of minutes before being crappy again. So then I quit and restarted the game. Luckily the same instance was still around and I could go back to where I had problems. The frame rate was better and it ran a lot better.

So it seems like this may be bad heap ju-ju after the client being left running for a long time without fully quitting out of the client. (Sometimes I'll even exit to the login screen when I stop playing, then start playing again the next day without ever quitting.) I might see if I can get the other PC to do it, now that I have an actual hypothesis to test.

I also wonder if this can explain why the /debug frame rate gets inaccurate. Perhaps whatever is causing the performance problem also fools the fps algorithm.

 

Errr... in the ten minutes or so while I was typing that in, things went to mud again while I was afk. So much for the "long term heap decay" idea. Quitting fully didn't help.

 

Sry to say, but your graphic card is far beyond being modern and has a performance below a Intel HD 4000. This is really really at the minimum requirement level as far as i have in my mind. Nevertheless, i also made the experience, that playing a while the framerate drops and the performance went down.

 

Thank you for reporting. We are investigating the issue.

 

Even if it's a bit below average, it still gave decent performance in late 2015 until more stuff got added to slow things down. I think it can be playable, and it's never bad to increase your potential market share. Not everybody cares to obsess over how shiny the graphics are, being playable and fun are much more important. (Never forget the lesson of FFXIV.)

But the really important thing is to have some canaries in the coal mine. Sure, that canary may not be good at swinging a pickaxe, but it can sure tell you when there is something wrong going on. The performance I get may be on the low end, but if it gets worse after nothing more than sitting around in the same area for 15 minutes, then something is wrong that will limit the potential audience. People shouldn't need to have a two-slot graphics card to play a game like this.

Actually, the biggest problem with low frame rate is that the event loop is kind of pessimal under those conditions and makes the UI hard to use. I'm confident that they'll get to looking at that too when the time is right. And I can still get 20fps in my basement, which makes crafting a lot less troublesome.