Path of Exile Talent Competition Prizes Continued

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My Submission
Category: Game optimization

Spoiler

Inspired by unhappy users and "Shader cache fix" guides.
As a result of optimization, speed of the game data reading can be increased tens times, in some cases, even on SSD disks!

Preamble
For now, SSD higly recommended for POE, but this guide can help to improve game performance for users, that still have no SSD. (Big part of users)

Once upon a time, when i used simple HDD for POE, i had big freezes with opening strongboxes, so i find solution, and write guide for Russian-speaking players, this is it:

Spoiler

https://ru.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/10057
There is no violation of EULA, because This method simply moves the files and does not change them.
In few words - we just replace shader cache in our RAMdisk, which one get saved, when system is going to reboot, and starts when OS load.

Sometimes you can see posts like this one:

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Translated version:

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We not need 5 act untill we have wild lags

Original:

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Waphammer wrote:

Дорогие разрабы,вот нам ваш 5-ый акт совсем не нужен!Всё равно все игроки сидят на эндгейме и фармят карты.Лучше бы занялись оптимизацией игры,т.к. первые 30 мин играть вообще очень плохо и большая часть игроков уходит из игры из-за лагов!сделайте уже с этим этим что нибудь...надо какую то настройку,чтобы убрать эффекты от стихий и т.д.а 5-ый акт серьёзно потеря вашего вашего и нашего времени!

So, i decided to take part in the competition as one of developers, of this optimization, the second one, i hope will be GGG to realize this:

Main part

In start we must understand, why SSD much better for POE than HDD.
Watch this:

Spoiler

Look on this picture:

https://img-fotki.yandex.ru/get/58016/87826725.0/0_1ed5d3_2492e8b9_orig

For this test i used 1 Tb HDD (ST1000LM024 HN-M101MBB) and 60 Gb SSD (KingDian S180 )

Now, look for we have here:
In test Random r/w 4KiB fragments SSD at least in 42!!! times faster than HDD.
But with sequential r/w access scenario, the difference between SSD and HDD not so big. Indeed, the read and write speed is increased even in the SSD disk.
When many small files used, or when a large file is read out of sequence - we lose a very large part of the speed.

What can be done to fix it?
See next chapter:

Shader Cache optimization:
It's very easy to done:
In shadercache folder we have more than 3 thousand small files -
So save this cache into archive, like Content.ggpk
Second - load it from this file to RAM, when game starts.
It's done! After this, we can achieve big boost to work speed for both types of storages! (remember test results, between sequential and random access rate)

Content optimization
But unfortunately, even if we have one big file, its no garanteed sequential read from it.
There is much more work to be done:

First, you need to analyze the data reader to make it consistent.
Of course, each player will have a map of the use of resources.

Secondly, when you'll have to know what data and in what sequence load the game, you can break them into groups to speed up their read speed. Think about script, that works like defragment and optimizer to make data ready to sequential read of these groups.
It also can help to improve speed to game updating, if you split the file into parts. In this case, only files, in which changes were, will be changed.


If it can help to make POE better, you must consider this recommendations.