any chances on a tick box to switch on and off post processed anti aliasing? like how people did by editing files in the beta release.
To answer concerns over the visibility system improperly culling an object (in the earlier example, a sunderer), the visibility system always errs on the side of rendering an object. It won't cull something unless it feels positive it shouldn't render it (though bugs happen... primarily, the dreaded "flicker bug"). So basically, you're far more likely to render too many things, than too few. And yes, the reason why it is a TEMPORAL caching system is that it tries to guess your movements and assumes you're always "on the go"... which it's right about far more than it's wrong (you're average odds of changing directions or speeds completely within a given 1/30th of a second is actually pretty small, except of course in the "swinging the camera" state.. but try doing that for several minutes straight and you'll see that you can't really do it that much..hehe). As far as questions on how we optimize. Well, we have a half dozen tools, such as VTune from Intel and AMD CodeAnalyst, just to name a couple that I highly recommend any coder have on hand. We also have logging, data mining, personal experiences, and a dog that sniffs out slow code. Or, at least, I think he sniffs out slow code. He may just smell the beef jerky that is a typical late night snack around here. Regardless, and despite any theories to the contrary, we have multiple engineers constantly looking at all manner of machine specs and scenarios. We have the ability to create scenes with any number of pseudo-players doing worst-case scenarios to emulate battlefield conditions. We have prolonged arguments about gates and semaphores and all manner of geeky technospeak. It really isn't so much that we're not optimizing the game, we are, it's just that it really, honestly, is hard to do everything we're doing and make it fast on every machine. There seriously is a reason that most people aren't doing this. Luckily, I've been blessed to find a team of slightly demented masochists who love a challenge as much as they love FPSs!
Ohh no I totally get it. I was just commenting on first impression. On a side note, could rendering/culling and all that business have any relation to why sometimes none of my guns/nades/or mines do damage? Almost like duds. The nade will just lay there. I can empty a clip in a guy's skull 3 feet away and nothing. I can shoot at a Sunderer and no damage registered. This is usually fixed by reloading the game but it gets quite annoying...
Well sadly, it's what I expected. Yet another update that makes performance worse. Now it drops to 20 fps and under in heavy fights, where it was ~25-30 before GU3 and probably 30-35 before GU2. I don't think I can turn down any more CPU dependent settings. Once again I will post my specs in case anyone at SOE is remotely interested. Surprisingly it is now using a more even amount of all eight cores, just still <50%. FX8350 @4.8ghz 8gb 2133Mhz CL9 HD7970 @1.2ghz Really thought that 'should' be enough for playable fps even at reduced settings, clearly not. I mean seriously, is eight cores of 4.8ghz really not enough? Please SOE just tell me the answer, because if it's not then I'll stop wasting my time and go play something else. Sigh. Ah well Crysis3 is out now and that runs like a dream on lots of cores. I guess I shall be DLing that tonight.. Maybe you can explain to us why even a single player game is able to heavily tax a modern CPU, yet you can't do it with PS2. People keep saying that PS2 is CPU bottlenecked, well how the hell can the CPU be the bottleneck at 45% usage!!!!!!????? When the GPU is the bottleneck, it's at or very close to 100% usage. Well we know the answer though don't we. Forgelight is pants, it must be. Either that or you're using Physx for ALL of PS2s physics work and that's bogging the game down because it's pants when running on the CPU. Such a massive shame.
This is the kind of detail we want and love, thanks for taking a few mins to update us and yes I personally may moan more than congratulate on the forums but I'm impressed with what you guys have managed to do, apart from the occasional bug kicking in and those couple of days after GU02 I love playing this game and I forget what an achievement this game actually is and I bet it can be a nightmare at times to have it run, looking like it does and doing what it does and the size of it, on a vast amount of different spec machines. GU03 is great personally for me, better FPS and better rendering, nice one. Now that's way too much flattery for one post so I'll end with, hurry up and give us new pistols, maps and the VR training Area, you guys are so slow!
SOE is working on fix? Month ago PS2 on my rig run smoothly on mid/high settings (mostly high). Now even with low settings I have low framerate. Not even in larger battles. Problems comes when I fight against few or single soldier alone too.
I can say I always can get back my FPS, after every update. Just remember, always delete the UserOptions.ini after the update/you has change the setting too much times.
That sounds great. If there's one game that sorely needed an in-game benchmark test (similar to GTA:IV's benchmark), this is it.
Me having - i7 2600K - Gainward GTX 570 - Win 7 HP (64 bit) - 6 GB RAM (upgraded from 4 GB, although had no issues with 4 GB) - 2 TB HDD And in the current version of the game I have sometimes micro-lags (sound also like "BRRRR" hanging), cannot cloak (infiltrator) and sometimes even shooting won't work. Average 40 fps, all on high settings, GPU PhysX off of course... PLS fix the compatability for 4 core/8 thread - CPUs and GTX 570 with current NVidia drivers... -.- Also my HDD should be more than fast enough, can't be that PS2 forces me to buy SSD. Anything to do with Skype phoning while playing PS2 and port issue? No clue...
Ive also noticed some weird stuff going on with the level geometry, especially at the Warpgate. When the textures load slowly on initial spawn, I can see the terminals extend though the floor and to the ground. There is also a large cutout around it, resulting in several more textured surfaces that have to render. Not to mention vertices/polygons. Im sure cleaning up a lot of that funky geometry would help things out. i used to have a lot of sloppy work like that in my Source Mods and after cleaning them up, there was a noticeable change in performance. I realize these are two very different engines, but its still work the CPU and/or GPU shouldnt have to do.
Yes, I set TerrainQuality=1 can always see through building when just start the game, but no more at TerrainQuality=4. When just start the game, you will see the FPS loss until it loading/rendering finish.
the game does use physx 3. no game uses an opencl physics engine, let alone one that supports amd and nvidia graphics cards.
I have higher FPS in most places, though sometimes I have lower FPS than normal such as at towers, amp stations and tech plants. Specs: CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo P8600 @ 2.4 GHz GPU: NVIDIA GeForce 320M with 256 MB RAM: 8 GB
Well I'm glad they cleared that up but it confirms in my mind (b/c serverside wasn't specified) what I've been worrying about all along that their Eye-candy hierarchies along with prediction, rigging transforms, ray traces & Vectors "Vectoring off of 100 other Vectors" are 100% client driven & blocked into the whole stack of crucial MUST-RENDER FIRST stuff like solids/UVW and basic client handled occlusion & sound. Again, great if you like giving Intel $300-$500 every couple years plus all the other "Guts" that hook in around it. ...but not so good if you live on a more realistic budget
I think You should have positive feedback too, so - my FPS actually seems to be a bit higher after GU3 (or hotfix). It might be because less players were playing, I am not sure - but it seems to be consistent. My FPS are back to pre-GU2 state (what is not perfectly comfortable, but playable). Also, my FPS when in tank, that was totally ruined by GU2 is fine again. Thanks.
i would love it if the code monkeys got a coding blog for posts like this. i almost certainly wouldn't understand the full on tech speak, but i do appreciate the higher level description of what the code is trying to do.
