Performance Improvements

Well, I'm torn regarding the DX11 implementation so late into the game (Graphic API games, not PoE). Of course it'd enable x64 across all platforms starting with XP while the DX9 client will remain limited the way it is.

DX12 / Vulkan would naturally be the preferred choice. Vulkan, on top of it, would also make PoE cross compatible with Linux and Macs out of the box. DX 12 in contrast could make proper use of async calls and multiple CPU cores. DX11 is pretty limited in that regard as should know by now.

From a Linux perspective the DX9 client could potentially perform better than any DX11 implementation due to how well the DX9 blackbox seems to have been re-built.

64-bit DirectX 11 Client - whilst I would applaud this; I also believe it was one of the contributing reasons to the downfall of Flagship/Hellgate, i.e needing larger number of development resources to support multiple game-engines and platform. (one of many, really). But I'll trust you folk not to over-reach.

Steam/Vlave occasionally run platform surveys - do they share this information with organisations such as yourself to assist in your development analysis?

I was thinking about the rouge exile assets in strongboxes. People have suggested loading the assets for the MTX on the first click and then the second click would actually open the box, to avoid unfair deaths and such. Would this be feasible and would this mean people would be able to know which exile was in the box?

Good to hear.

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The rare crashes that occurred changing areas on 64-bit systems are now gone.

Not for my 64-bit system, as of yesterday. I'd love it if this were the case, makes lab really hard to complete because 8-10 zone changes and out. I'll keep a log of new occurrences.

Chris,
it is good to know your team is working on improving the game's performance.

As i have understood, you are working on reducing loading time, RAM usage and overall draw calls,
but the main and major problem with POE's engine is not beeing adressed: Particle Effects.

Loading times are not the biggest issue with an SSD, whilst RAM usage is also acceptable.
Even small stuttering when opening a strongbox due to runtime loading assets is okay.

But having NO particle management implemented to handle the performance issue seems to be the major bully of most player's GPUs.
Please tell me i misread your post and you are working on improving skill effects, aka particles, too.

Sincerely

Hey, awesome of you guys to be so transparent about everything as usual with the community, very interesting.

I'm having a different type of performance issue and was wondering if you/anyone could help me figure it out. While playing PoE, sometimes I will randomly get a black screen for a couple seconds. Both monitors will turn black, then... sometimes the game will crash, sometimes it'll go back to normal.

I'm using an EVGA GTX 980, i7 3930k 3.2GHz, 16gb memory, pretty good system all around. I think PoE is on my HDD, don't remember the speed, 7200Hz? or something?

Anyway, I might bring my whole system in to get looked at or reworked (swap mobo/case, add in another SSD for games) but I'm in a wheelchair and it is a massive hassle to take it in across the city. I want to do this upgrade anyway, but... procrastinating on it doesn't seem like a bad idea, especially since the weather is still pretty bad out here.

I don't really check these forums, so I'm not sure if I get a notification for a reply.... or not? But a PM would be easier to read if anyone replies. Anyway, thanks in advance.

PS - I did all the drivers things that happened with Nvidia lately, ver 364.xx and 365.xx were bad, reverted to 362.00.

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Meridin wrote:

What I wanna know is why the game will render skills and play audio sounds that are no longer there.

Like say I'm in Sarn arena, and there's this guy offscreen chain-casting some laggy skill like Ice Storm over and over again. I never see/hear it yet because I'm not near him, but if I revive over there, the game will suddenly try to load EVERYTHING that has happened in that area since I entered the instance. Sometimes it's tried to load so many things at once my game crashed.

Another example is in maps, if I'm following someone far ahead of me, I can still hear the leap slams/bladefall sounds as I walk through the area, even though those skills happened long ago. It's really wierd.

This was happening to one of my guild members yesterday as well. I was helping him through the merciless lab and he would wait outside while I killed Izaro and when he entered it would try to load all of the skills I had cast and crash his client. This happened several times consistently, so we ended up having him come inside during the fight and no issue after that.

You are going to change to FMOD? Well that is great and horrible. I'm looking forward to the game breaking audio glitches.

I got experience as a QA in projects that used FMOD and it was just chaotic at best, even when they had an experienced audio guy handling it. But once they got the major problems ironed out it actually worked really well, but when it breaks it breaks in a glorious manner.

Also... Could we get a decal limit or something like that? SOme fights where there is lots of adds and you kill lot of them it can start slowing down on certain not-so-powerful-computers-that-I-have-to-use-because-I-can't-afford-an-upgrade. Also... Rain effects, please keep working on them, they aren't that bad anymore but they are upthere in the permance killing effects.

Thanks GGG, both informative and interesting to read. Keep up the good work over there, and keep on being a role model for the gaming industry.

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Meridin wrote:

Another example is in maps, if I'm following someone far ahead of me, I can still hear the leap slams/bladefall sounds as I walk through the area, even though those skills happened long ago. It's really wierd.

Good that you mention it. I recently played a CoC Discharger and I noticed that even when solo playing I sometimes hear the discharge sound several seconds after I last discharged. It sounds like an echo far away.

It seems like somthing is queued and stays in memory way too long only to be played way after it actually happened. If something noticable like a sound sticks in a queue that long one might wonder what else sticks in memory / queue potentially slowing down the game while adding more and more.

Maybe even a noticable effect of whatever the reason is for discharge being as laggy as it is. Find the cause of it and maybe it solves a lot of performance issues with all skills ( maybe it even actually is the sound engine that causes these issues - after all there are dozens of simultaneous sound effects being played pretty often ) ?

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Chris wrote:

On slower hard drives, or when virus checkers or disk fragmentation are in play, the freezes related to synchronous loading can be quite long. This is unacceptable during combat, for obvious reasons.

I would like to add my personal experience. PoE is loaded into memory completely on my system ( i.e. when I start PoE a second time its being loaded from cache completely without any noticable harddisk activity ). It never loads anything from disk again after any asset has been loaded once and cached. But only loading the assets from ram / cache makes the game lag heavily. No SSD in the world could fix that issue. Your synchronous loading mechanism as it is right now even lags when the assets are being loaded directly from memory.