Hi SoE, What other big performance update can we expect? I know 64 bit client = good will it give a performance boost? and that DX11 (Another good thing that might be this year as well, can we expect certain other improvements as well? better multi-core support? SLi support?
I was wondering what we can actually expect from the 64 bit client. Does anyone know how this will influence the game?
How much optimization do you think is possible? They did tons of changes to the code, graphics, animation and maps. I'm pretty sure they did what's possible.
well for one, 64 bit clients enable the game to access more texture memory in modern graphics cards. most players might not notice this, but people playing on higher settings WILL. in addition it would remove the theoretical 32 bit limit that the game could send to a CPU. instead of sending 2 32 bit data packets of data to the processor, it would send 1 64 bit packet of info. now that may seem like a small improvement, but since each processor call (and every action) takes a discrete amount of time being able to do more with each call is advantageous. now. that's theory. how much performance we will ACTUALLY see? that depends. from the sound of it, the PTS is a mess at the moment. i haven't been able to get in to see for myself.
Hopefully no more as each time they do it the game is faster but looks worse for it - and when is PhysX coming back? It was like a big flagship thing on launch and its just been left on the shelf...
Actually, i think i noticed a decrease in graphics as well. Things as simple as sparks and textures on the warpgate floor make a large difference. To get what i am saying, go to Indar WG then go to Amerish WG. I think the amerish flooring looks a lot better
Part of the "optimization", was lowering texture resolutions. So there was an impact visually. And I think they will continue to optimize as they prep the game for PS4- just do not expect any massive leaps forward in FPS.
Would i need to download all the patches for the 64 bit? It'll be a drag if i have to download like 20GB, just to get that client and play on it.
They're one-the-same actually at this point.... It's all extremely technical, but the last optimization pass did almost everything that was basically possible to reduce the amount of redundant eye-candy & "CPU bound" cache level stress that was slowing things down the most in larger battles. Meaning the biggest bottleneck now (and it appears that Test Server results support this) remains the Bit-architecture, or rather how the bus handles the memory itself. Even SOE's programming staff commented several pages worth of explanations on this: Without the proper optimizations, just going from 32bit to 64 wouldn't automatically result in performance increases unless the whole enchilada was fixed to take proper advantage of it and pass that streamlined processing directly to the Graphics chip next. Most people should know whether it actually worked or not if they see that FPS message in-game change to indicating that their Graphics GPU is the final limiting factor (and if that's already the case, and you have a 3rd generation i5 or better, then it might be a BIOS underclock issue or clocking/GPU driver conflict which have been fairly common if you read the support forum)
