Performance

To make it short:
No big improvements to performance in general.
+ FPS in POT a little better
+ UI responses are smoother
- loading times between scenes long as always
- loading times of decorations in POTs long as always (2 Minutes until all the decorations of my house finally loaded while standing in front of it)
- memory footprint big as always

In my personal opinion perfomance must be a top priority for the developers in the future, because for me it's killing the fun of the game.
At the moment I am only logging in to get my gold from the oracle to pay my lot-taxes. I have only limited playtime each day and I don't want to spend it waiting for the game to load the decorations or looking on loading screens. I really want to like the game, but at the moment it is not possible.

 

Since R44, I have seen a massive improvement in FPS, but load times between scenes are simply awful. My loading goes from 0 to 50% quickly but that last 50% is brutal.

 

Every 15 - 30 secs I get a studdering effect that even effects the sounds and its really annoying.. this has not changed in the last several releases.. I spoke to "Morgoth Redbeard" about it and he gets that studdering issue as well.
I really hope they fix this soon as its driving me crazy..

I have high end graphics card and a six CPU. I tried lowing the graphics detail but that had no effect at all.

 

Many times, the game will just hang at 50% and I end up having to kill it.

 

Build 650 and above seems to be less performant then build 645.

First my system is below minimum specs. -> Dual Core @2,4 GHz and 4 GByte Ram.

With build 645 it takes 30-40 mins until Bloodriver Outskirt became loaded. After loading I have to wait a little bit, turn the character 360 degree (that objects nearby came to memory) and then I can play online. At this time a swap partition of 8 GByte was provided on HDD (raid 0, ~600 IOPs / ~100 MByte throughput).
After patching to >650 it wasn't possible to play online (also the Bloodriver Outskirt scene) loading increased to nearly an hour. Due to excessive swapping the network connection to game server was congested, and game server drops it. I added 8 GByte swap partition an SSD. Now the loading time is 30-40 mins, and network congestions are gone.

After loading (online or offline), now I have to wait longer until the character is "movable". Frame rate is lower than in build 645. Adding SSD swap, it was expected to decrease load time and at least have the same frame rate.
But there are things that are faster than before (with HDD swap): startscreen loads faster, main menu is faster and some in game menus / windows. And some textures looks nicer.

I don’t know if I am in luck that Bloodriver Outskirt wasn’t complete/polished (in 645) or there is a performance drawback with the new unity3d version.
With such a system loading times not really the problem, I do other things while waiting. But playing like in version 645 would be nice.

The stuttering effect is only seen when the system starts using HDD swap. That means the game allocate >11 GByte virtual memory (3,2 GByte physical memory (800 MB OS), 8 Gbyte SSD swap and the remains on HDD swap). The game starts with 10 GByte allocated. Max. allocation until now was 12,1 GByte.
Maybe the stuttering effect can be prevented when using fast swap space on another disk then the OS and game installed on. Have a look what the OS is swapping in and out while the game is running.
I guess that >= 16 GByte physical memory are needed to have a chance that no swapping occur.

For my system 8 GByte RAM is max. That should leads to 7 GByte physical memory used by game and 3 GByte stored in swap space (After scene start). Hopefully it is enough "fast memory" for a better play experience.

Is it possible to cache scenes on disk, so the next time when the scene is needed it loads faster?

 

Performance for me is much worse since R45. Before it was not too bad now the load screens are taking longer with music stutter.

Worse still is combat where I am getting huge amounts of lag/stutter and even freezing. Had to give up last night it was that aweful. Never had the problem before.

Did /debug. No reds but plenty of yellows. Can't remember the exact words but was something like "action more than four frames old - is probably a leak"

Drivers are up to date and as I said previously no problem. Outside of combat its still fine, in combat it terrible and seemed to get worsr the longer I played until I had to give up.

@Attenwood @DarkStarr

What is going on ?

 

Try disabling your sound outputs and re-running the game, then re-enable them and re-run... :-/

 

I've had noticeable improvements on my end but it's still far from ideal.

Dunno about freezing but does the lag look like this?

I've noticed this for the first time in R45 as well.

I noticed that when I tried the R45 client in Windows. Haven't experienced that in previous releases but I mainly run the game on Mac OS.

The quantity of your CPUs don't matter too much unless they've been coding for multi-threading... which, speaking from experience, isn't an easy task to do when building video games. It's more used for when you do computations where the user-inputs don't change or when the data can be split into smaller chunks... otherwise it's best to just go with a linear method.

The devs mentioned that they've managed to clean some materials so that would definitely help your GPU but most of the bottleneck is caused by the CPU... or, I should say, because the game was scripted in such a way that requires more of the CPU. Some things can't be helped (like decorations. Yes, they take CPU power as well as GPU; especially those that are interact-able), though... like you shouldn't expect the game to run like the new DOOM game does (not even talking about the visuals) because what's going on is that SotA has far more computations to do even if you factor out the MMO elements.

For your particular problem, I'm more inclined to believe that it's a driver issue. Not necessarily due to your end, mind you. It could just be something odd that the game is asking Windows to do when it shouldn't.

 

No was more like rubber banding, huge lag and freezing. Happy to report that last night seemed back to normal - whether it was the latest patches or me re-installing the graohics driver. Hopefully it will stay that way now. That said load screens are still painfully slow and the regular and annoying background music stutter still very much in evidence.

 

Sad to say that last night the same issues returned though not to the same extent.

 

I don't understand what is going on with my performance. I have an i7 @ 4.6ghz and 1080 gtx and no matter what settings I use I get the same horrible fps in game. The first area I get between 40-60, but the second I'm lucky to get 20 fps. Every other game I can run full tilt, but not this game. And like I said, regardless of what settings I use it's still very, very poor performance.

 

The performance issues has hardly anything to do with your computer. Unlike most game, this is very CPU heavy.

It's a very common (and recommended) practice to optimize a software after you're done with most (if not all) of the features. No sense in spending time and resources on optimizing something that will most likely change. I'm working on a project where the design philosophy is keeping a minimum of 60fps at all cost for every iteration and the development is slow, demanding, unstable and expensive.

Optimizing is about taking shortcuts. To do that reliably requires a deeper understanding of what is used and what you can afford to get rid of. Each time you add a feature to a script that wasn't designed to take it, you'd have to rework that script to make it fit... thus wasting the time you spent to optimize.

Say, for example, you create a list of objects. Table, chair and a bed. You don't know how many you'll need so you build a "List<Object>".

theList = new List<Object>();
theList.Add(Table);
theList.Add(Chair);
theList.Add(Bed);

Wait... what if I wanted two chairs. Okay just add again:
TheList.Add(Chair);

No no, three chairs and two tables. Add:
theList.Add(Chair);
theList.Add(Table);

Great... now you know exactly what you need but that's taking more memory than it should and is slower to process because it's taking 7 lines of code. Time to optimize. Instead of using the list I coded above, use:

theList = new Object[6];
theList = {Table, Chair, Bed, Chair, Chair, Table};

Voila! Not only you've taken less memory but you also use less lines of code so now it runs a lot faster. If you tell me, "no no, we don't need two tables!", then I got to go back and change:

theList = new Object[5]; //<-- made a change here.
theList = {Table, Chair, Bed, Chair, Chair __}; //<-- made a change here.

...and hope I don't make a typo. If I put a 4 instead of a 5, I'd get an error because the last chair won't fit in memory and if I use a higher number, I'm wasting memory that could be used for something else.

It's a silly example but the first attempt is slower yet more flexible (7 lines of code using a List<> variable which is slower) but the other is faster yet more rigid (2 lines of code using an array[] variable which is faster). Now imagine that with practically everything from algorithms, physics, graphics, textures, etc...

 

Last time I checked, it wasn't using a lot of CPU. The bottlenecks are elsewhere.

 

my cpu often seems to spike to 100% cpu or high 90s which then kills my fps

yet I dont seem to have a major bottle neck anywhere else

80/20mb link, 1080 nvidia graphics card with 8gb mem, ssd. 4 core 3.8ghz i7 and 32gb mem..

 

Interesting. I was running around and didn't see any processor saturate. I'll try again in a really heavy area.

 

I should point out thats win10

 

What happens if you force opengl on Windows?

 

I agree with OP. Performance must be a top priority. This close to release I'm really hoping they will start to improve oerformance. There is now way the game will have the success we all want it to have if performance doesn t massively improve. Really hope next release will see a huge bump in performance and loading times. I'm not familiar with game development, but as Gix said, this might be common practice to optimize software once it s mostly feature complete.

 

Yes, they know about it. The accepted name for it is "hitching", and if you watch a task manager graph, you will usually see one core shoot to 100% while all the others go to 0%, so something is apparently causing one thread to block others. It could be related to memory garbage collection (possibly made worse by memory leaks), or it could even be GPU related due to shaders. The audio stuttering is because the sound task is also getting blocked, and the audio pipeline gets starved.

But yeah, I hate it too. It is incredibly jarring for the game to suddenly freeze like that when you're in the middle of combat. I think it's even worse when you get hitching from panning your camera around.

 

I went to an area of Owl's Head where it seems people are in a decorating competition to see who can bring down the clients of those who try to shop at their vendors. At that location, I get around 3 FPS on a system with a 8 GB GTX 1070 and 32 GB of system ram. I stood in the middle of the chaos and spun around and still no processors became saturated (this is on Linux BTW).