How in the world can a chat window be so unoptimized?

I play on a 3 yearold Dell laptop so any increase in performance is helpfull. Can someone list the steps needed to get these framerate bumps you guys are talking about. Post it or PM me please.

Youris@Antonia Bayle wrote:

No and no and no. Only visible things affect your frame rate. If you want to streamline your UI, just hide or don't show things that you don't need. The increase in frame rate may be pretty small, but it depends on your computer and graphics card and how many polygons it's trying to draw. For example, you can look at the ground, sky, or a wall to see a big frame rate increase.

Othesus - Dirge - Lucan DLere
Vaspar - Fury - Lucan DLere

Anyone remember the Morrowind engine that rendered everything in front of you even if you were staring at a blank wall? If you put wireframe up you could see all the NPC's, bowls of fruit, tables and such rendered on the other side of the wall. You would get single digit frame rates simply staring at a blank wall.
Atrociously badly designed engine.
I had to laugh when you still couldnt see out of windows in Oblivion as well. Engines...gotta love em...

This is probably why the default for the chat windows is to fade in to nothing.
Very interesting. I will be turning off my chat shadows and restoring the fade out to my chat windows!

Excuse my semi necro.

Has this been looked at recently?

I believe that Autenil or Rothgar may want to look at this and possibly improve peoples FPS dramatically with just redesigning the interface.

Since i read this thread, simple solution is just having tabs instead of multiple windows. Works like a charm for me. Easier to pay attention to as well.

Tabs mean that the data still has to travel from the server to the client.

This may cause additional server lag for everyone on the server. Esp if your not using that data in anyway.

Would be nice be able to opt out of all that damage input/output in the chat window. Currently, I have all that in it's own tabbed section and rarely ever switch to it.

Also and I'm probably just being naive but, why not make the text's shadows pre-rendered or does EQ2 use the OS's fonts exclusively (as apposed to using it's own set of fonts)?

Transen wrote:

You can.

http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/...topic_id=409155

Anything that you filter from your chat windows will not be sent to you from the server and will actually cut down on bandwidth. Make sure its gone from all chat windows and not just in another tab, or the server will still send it to you.

Rothgar wrote:

Rothgar,

From reading that if I don't have combat messages for anyone other then myself showing up in any window then you are saying the server doesn't send any of that info to my system?

If thats the case.... how come my parser still works for everyone in the raid?

Chat Information isn't sent from the server to the client. But most other information is sent to the client. =)

I was running a good 90 FPS when i did some ui tweaking. I believe if the UI was redone to be not such a hog, this may solve many peoples problems.

Devastatin@Unrest wrote:

FOLLOWED BY

Transen wrote:

You can.

http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/...topic_id=409155

Anything that you filter from your chat windows will not be sent to you from the server and will actually cut down on bandwidth. Make sure its gone from all chat windows and not just in another tab, or the server will still send it to you.

Ok I'm not going to be ultra negative here but how come you answer the easy question and appear to completely disregard the question above it which is the more relevant? I have trialled this myself and find the Ui to be a major hit on FPS. With a permanent non moving background I had a fps of 61-62, with no Ui this went to over 110 Fps. Even by just clearing chat window it improves my FPS by over 10%? As you can see I have never entered anything on forums but I just wish that sometimes you wouldn't (appear to) ignore peoples posts and then quickly answer anothers. I am fully aware that this isn't a quick fix but whilst answering the second quoted question above it would have been nice to add that this problem is being looked into. Or indeed isn't as the case may be. This year I have made numerous major changes in hardware only to see a marginal increase in FPS. It would appear that this is due to the UI meaning I might aswell have saved my money. I am honestly not having a go but sometimes I think that a quick recognition of an obvious problem would help quell a lot of situations. I don't want instant fixes but would like to know that confirmed problems are being looked into. If fixing the problem is technically/financially impossible, fine. But I would like to know.

You've got a UI problem with Extreme Performance mode running.
I bet SoE loves us in the same way a lion likes zebra.

Mezza wrote:

I answer the questions that I have the answers for.

When I read this post, the first thing I did was try to reproduce it on my dev machine and I could not. I was getting about 90 FPS with a full chat window and smooth fonts on. Disabling smooth fonts and clearing my chat window did not increase my FPS. So with that simple test, I was not able to confirm a problem specific to chat text. I'm not saying it doesn't exist, I just couldn't confirm it with a simple test.

We're aware that the UI eats up some FPS and this is one area we will look at for performance improvements.


Regarding the chat filters and why parsers still work...
Whenever damage or healing happens, this comes down via a different type of message. The text for these messages are built and displayed on the client. So shutting off combat spam will not reduce bandwidth, sorry if my original post was misleading. Any of the other messages where the chat text is actually sent form the server will reduce bandwidth if you turn them off. This includes any of the chat channels and spell flavor text.

Rothgar wrote:

Perhaps you have v-sync enabled with a refresh rate of 90? That would artificially cap your frame rate at 90 . . .

I'd have to agree with that - a system achieving 90 FPS is clearly not capped by UI performance issues but by something else. Try with a real world setup rather than your monster rig Recently our guildies have been trying to improve their performance on raids, and everyone noticed an FPS improvement by disabling smooth fonts. The increase ranged from 4 FPS up to 10 FPS for some (the people testing this had between 25 and 40 FPS on average).

Need me to ship my computer for testing so you can reproduce the bug?

I'm positive that on my system, I get a benefit from dropping shadows from the letters and making it so windows that i don't need active information from fade away if no text is being actively displayed. I also only have 2 chat windows being displayed (

I didn't notice a huge difference on smooth fonts off, I'll have to test that out in raids.

Also, the newest Nvidia drivers dropped my eq2 memory usage A LOT. from 1.4Gig to 800-900 MB. I believe they fixed something in there or eq2 is treating the new drivers differently.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/winvis...75.16_beta.html

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Rothgar wrote:

I have definitely noticed a similar spike up in frame rate implementing just the smooth font issue. Rothgar, not everyone starts at a baseline of 90fps.

Having dabbled in web design, I never published a web page looking at it only on my computer with the fancy 1900 res. I tested it in all browsers, monitors and bandwidths. I would offer that it is shortsighted, perhaps, to conclude there is no UI significant performance hit, solely by testing it on your optimized dev machine.

Rothgar wrote:

First of all thanks for the polite reply. I can honestly say that I editted my post several times so as to not appear like a ranting loon I do, however find it very surprising that you noticed no increase. There must be a reason for this because when I first read this post and found my fps rate increase I also made other guildies do the same and we all found the same thing happened. I notice someone mentioned that 90fps was a cap if v-sync was enabled so is this a possibility? Part of my original point though was that you showed no recognition at all, simply saying (as you now have) that you have checked and could not reproduce the same symptoms keeps me happy as its confirmation that things are being looked at and tested.

Rothgar wrote:

Rothgar, despite the apparent fact that you got overperforming dev machines it is still common knowledge that UI performance is proportional to the number of UI polygons that are displayed (among some other factors like textures). The most polygon intensive UI element is Text, and if it's text with shadows, due to how they are implemented in EQ2, that number will multiply (some shadow styles will increase it 22-fold, chat window is 5-fold). And yes, smooth fonts make it much worse, they probably work like shadows.

All that is with respect to "normal" machines of course, certainly with an fps capped system it might not matter.

PS: Might as well mention it here as well: Hiding your mouse cursor in windowed mode by pressing a mouse button will improve your fps. On my system it doubles. Might want to double check how you render that cursor...