Performance Issues

I'm a new player 3 days ago. Just my 2 cents worth on the experience I'm having.

I'm riding a
- Water cooled Alienware Area-51 R2 (i7-5930K @ 3.50 GHz
- 15+ Gb of Ram usable.
- 3 Nvidia GTX 1080's with 2 SLI'd together.
- 1 Tb SSD for my OS drive with 590GB available on it.
- 4 tb D drive for my programs and storage.

I built this rig for heavy VR gaming.

When the game runs smooth it is very smooth and nice. But these sudden pauses are nuts. In some places you can't walk to the end of a row of houses or across a field without it glitching and freezing you. The load screens take forever this is compounded by quests that require you to run back and fourth between towns. Now I know I've not installed it on my OS SSD so I cut it some slack for that but WOW is it slow zoning compared to my other games.
I went so far as to dump my graphics down to everything LOW, restarted the game completely and still hit freezing at the same level as with full graphics!

Despite my rig, the game is only using 27% of ONE of my GTX 1080's and I JUST updated the driver a few days ago to version 398.36 and did a clean install of it to eliminate known issues with a previous Nvidia driver component.
However, the game was showing as using 6.5 Gigs in task manager after loads with heavy disk usage.

I'm Brand new to this game (3 days old) but I'm a programmer since 1979 and a gamer almost as long. I noticed some comments about the special features of the game that is supposed to make the glitching OK. First of all, glitching is never OK but that aside, perhaps this will help put things into perspective.
- Star Wars Galaxies - July 2003 - CONTINUOUS MAPS - Place able housing and vendors that could all be decorated. You could race between the player houses on your land speeder or fly onto the roof of the PLACED guild halls in your jet pack. And they did that on 4 planets I think (Kashik didn't count cause it wasn't a free roaming map).

I've been debating doing a few play through videos for my Youtube channel but I'm having trouble with the idea of all the freezing. People will think the game is really laggy.

BTW, I have a slightly old Unity development studio installed, the latest Unreal 4.20 studio installed and neither is giving me issues.

I would point out one thing that keeps reminding me how this game cannot support heavy traffic. The way you slow players down when they get too close to an NPC! If you had high volumes of users, they would all be raving mad at the traffic jams that would occur around NPCs. Just a thought.

 

Whilst the game is still not terribly well optimised (they acknowledge this and are working on it but its a lot better than it used to be) - I've noticed that this game is very sensitive to the speed of the HDD its installed on - on my main PC I have the game installed on my Samsung NVMe M.2 SSD and the game runs not too badly with minimal hitching/freezing (unless its been running for several hours - it needs a restart every few hours). On my wife's PC its running on a standard SATA SSD and the load times / things popping in / freezing issues are noticeably worse - I hate to think what its like loading off a mechanical drive Have you tried moving the install to your SSD?

 

I have a pretty beefy machine (32gb ram, 8gb GPU, SSD), and I notice hitching/stutters. However, it's not a problem with the computer (CPU/GPU), or the game (it's not locking up due to code).
From what I've noticed, any time something spawns in, there's a slight delay as the gameobject is created and the data associated with it is transmitted from the server to the client.

For example, I walk into a camp full of elves and decimate them all. I loot the bodies, then run around gathering the wood, ore, cotton, animal hides, etc. I turn to leave to continue my travels, when my the scene freezes for a split second. That tells me something has spawned nearby (inside my "sphere of influence"). Usually, I turn and look around, an an elf or a wolf has respawned.

I don't know if Portalarium is pooling their gameojects (ie, deactivating them and setting them aside for re-use later), or destroying and then re-instantiating them. Object pooling is the better way to go, and would help (since the system doesn't need to create a whole new object, which does take a noticeable amount of time...especially in a network game). No matter which method is used, there will be some necessary data transfer to the new/re-used object to reset its location, stats, etc.

When you're dealing with dynamically placed objects (ie, deco), there's a lot being created while you're running through a town...so it can be expected to sometimes run into areas where you may see a stutter (especially in places that the player has REALLY decorated with a lot of objects).

 

Bingo! I figured this out long time ago and just gave up trying to tell people to update rigs (well, to be honest a lot of people cant). I have rarely had hitching in this game, especially over the past year and the one thing I have that most people dont is a Samsung Evo pro 950 (now actually a 960) m.2. I can run 3 clients at one time with obs streaming 2 of them to Twitch and 2 of the accounts in full 8 man Tears groups with near 0 hitching.

I dont see hitching having anything to do with CPU, RAM and GPU in my experience. The worst hitching I ever had was clearly related so sound and my bet is that the sound was a call to the drive to load the file which for me came about after the client had been open for many hours as if it were the memory leaks all catching up (but even this was a year ago, they fixed that).

Today I really only see it in the way the post right above me noted. Every once in a while when the full Tears group recycles (the human mobs starting it).

 

+1 This is exactly my experience also. On both Windows and GNU/Linux

 

Using an SSD helps, but I get hitching whether I play in online or offline modes.

It all started with the most recent Unity update.

 

Yup these drives are fabulous and are as much of a step up from SATA SSDs as they were from mechanical drives - love them

 

Don't do this. It is not the graphics settings which is causing the slowdowns, it's the game's design.

You are not going to speed much up and you're also going to make the game look ugly.

The game is fine unless you are in big cities (Ardoris, Aerie) with a ton of player housing.
Yes, it's not super fast at times, but what we have now is actually a lot better than how it was.

I don't really have a lot of hitching. I have experienced it some, but usually for me things are pretty good other than in those areas, but I also have a card with 8 GBs and 64 GBs of system ram. I can run between 15-25 FPS and up to 40 in some areas with everything maxed at 144o.

Plus a fusion drive which has a fast SSD component that SOTA is surely loaded into.

Also, make sure you don't have peripheral lighting turned on if you don't have keyboards and mice that light up. That is a known issue.

 

After 37 years of coding one can become addicted to problems. I can't let them lie, I have to investigate to understand what's going on. My wife hates it.

I ascertained it graphics did appear to have a ton to do with it so next I was going to try offline to see if networking played any role. However, I'm seeing a trend in your responses. While I have a machine that's optimized for graphics and disk access, you have enormous amounts of RAM. Each of you in this forum that don't seem to be seeing a lot of this have 32 Gigs or better of ram. But even with that your seeing some hitching.

Someone mentioned something about when things spawn. I've had that same thought. I mat farm in a place that's nothing but trees, skeletons and spiders. Its small and you can see the gates at both ends from the middle. No player housing at all, just a field with SOME trees and a ruin. I hitch there too but I really hitch hard around about the time you might expect a respawn and just before 3 or 4 spiders jump me but of course that would also impact memory and graphics so I noted it but it was of secondary meaning to me. Someone else noted it only happens in cities. As you can see, I get hitching in very small areas with NO housing. I even got it in Owl's Nest (Small place just east of Owl's Head) which is so small its surprising it even exists. If you could throw, you could hit the second exit while standing in the first.

I also noticed the graphics have what I can only describe as "glowing edges" which was a very common trait in games from the late 1990's (i.e. Star Trek Encyclopedia) and I noticed the developers had been using third party addon's that I could buy in the Unity asset store. This has had me thinking the issues might be related to someone elses very old crap that someone bought as an addon. But that's just supposition on my part.

 

This seems to be true for me also.

No software should become less performant over time/usage session.

It’s a sign that there may be orphaned processes/threads and/or memory leaks.

 

I believe there is a setting to reduce the glow effect to something you like.

This is an indie game developed on a shoe string budget for the type of game it is and yes the devs use asset store items (they pay a license fee for these even if they're free). Player Unknown Battlegrounds does the same thing, and yet Sota seems to get the brunt of the criticism of this practice. I'll just leave that one alone.

Yes, the games performance is not good, it's known, that's just how it is.

Reagents and other items do at times glow because people either couldnt' find them or couldn't see the thing in the quest they needed to do.

Also if you get enchanted armor eventually, it will also do a pulsing glow effect. this is a throwback to the old ultima SP titles where magic armor did this.

I would also suggest increasing the games saturation, it makes the art style which is not super realistic pop a bit more.

Can I ask your system specs ? This game does benefit from having a modern (ie, from the last couple of years) setup.

*edit* Ah I see you have an SLI setup with 2 1080s. So your system should be quite good, but SLI has a bad history and you have a lot of GPUs in your machine. Have you considered not running with SLI to see if that's your issue ?

If you see twitch videos for shroud you can see how it performs on others setups and compare it to yours.

32 GB of system ram I wouldn't consider a large amount of ram anymore in 2018. I mean in 2011 I had 16 GB of ram and it's 7 years later. 64 GB is still alot.

Also graphics cards are always problematic. There's always one good performing card each gen, usually the one with a 256-bit memory interface or better,

and with a decent amount of ram, 8 GB is normal now for games for high resolutions, and the GPU companies make a bunch of hobbled knockoffs with worse performance

but similar sounding names. They've been doing this shady practice for 10 years and nobody has called them out yet.

You always need the "good" version of their latest cards, in most cases, but not everyone can afford that.

 

For sure - its not a terrible one but client memory usage grows over time. It seems to take a lengthy weekend play session lasting many hours for it to visibly affect performance in my experience (I have 16Gb and its never got to the point of getting close to running out before I've done a restart of the client - I have been running the client for around 4 hours now and its only on 3Gb usage and still fine).

I'm sure I saw a dev comment somewhere recently that this was a Unity problem that they couldn't fix themselves but were working with Unity to get resolved.

 

That's definately an issue too. One thing you can do to mitigate it is restart the program every 4 hours or so if you're concerned about leaks.

 

Has anyone gotten catastrophic crashes/failures while playing?

By “catastrophic crashes/failures” I mean the computer freezes with a screen split mostly solid blue, speaker blares a weird glitch sounding tone non-stop? (mouse, keyboard has no effect — so basically the only recourse is to turn computer power off)

I’ve been getting this lately.. since the past 2 releases.. I didn’t get it when I first joined the game about a month and half ago.

But basically I noticed it may be related to watching MLB.tv in the browser while playing SotA in another window. Also noticed huge performance lagging and problems when I tried to watch Netflix and play at the same time.

Has anyone experienced similar issues when playing SotA and watching other streaming media services?

Edit: Typo

 

I had a crash yesterday that locked up my entire mac with a beachball effect. That's the first time it happened to me in a couple years and I had to power cycle the box.

That was in R56. Up until that point it had been pretty stable and performance had gotten a bit better over the last few releases..... but I might have Stockholm Syndrome with the game at this point too.

The devs are trying to get the game to Unity 2018.2 which has a bunch of features that will help make SoTA more attractive. So I am sure there are some hiccups moving the Unity versions lately.

 

Been back about a month and the game hasn't crashed once - and some lengthy sessions in there (I was off work for 2 weeks )

 

Maybe it’s specific to my setup. I’m playing on a late 2015 27” Retina 5k iMac, on Windows 10 64-bit installed on bootcamp?

 

I'm on a mac. But it's a 2017 Retina 5k. And I play via Steam natively. Shroud uses Metal so it's not so bad.

 

Yeah i was debating whether to play natively on Mac OSX or not.. I decided to use Windows since my impression was that Windows seemed to be the best client among the 3 (Win/Mac/Linux).

 

Core i7 7700k, 8Gb GTX1070, 960 NVMe M.2 SSD, 16Gb RAM, Win10 - runs the game just fine on 'best' at 1920 x 1080 without maxing GPU or CPU. (in our POT where usage seems highest I'm seeing about 50% usage on both CPU and GPU)