Benchmarking CPU/GPU Load

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ZL0J wrote:

I came to the same conlusion. Even though by modern standards my gaming station is absolute junk (4G DDR3 RAM, nVIDIA 820m with DDR 2G), I remain convinced that there are some serious optimization issues with PoE. No matter how you look at it, a hack&slash diablo like game should absolutely never ever exceed the GPU requirement specs of any full blown open world RPG (that's only my opinion though). Yet all of recent ones run quite fine on my system.


One logical explanation I have is that GGG prioritize faster development of any ideas of any graphic improvements to draw more casual MTX heavy people into the game - that seems like a good way to profit. Since they would want people with $ to play the game so that they can afford MTX - they can assume that people who will pay for the game will have also enough disposable income to afford a top notch gaming rig. So their load testing is performed towards this kind of hardware. Anything short of that is bound to suffer.

Sticking to above, I can't really see myself spending days of research to setup some top end gaming rin. I'm also a fan of laptops, which are at a significant disadvantages compared to your regular PCs. I also don't like the idea of running through the upgrade process every year just to keep up with GGG dishing out 2% smoother particle effects at the cost of 30% more load on GPU(I just pulled this out of my ass tbh, but I think this is pretty much what actually happens).

I think that it would be good if GGG actually took their time and made really good settings customization which would actually affect your FPS at least somewhat significantly. In the current state, the difference between potato (like full retard 800x600 no shadows monochrome rectangular body parts potato) and max settings gives you 50% frame time which indicates that the issue lies somewhere in the resource utilization and optimization towards that.

I'm totally fine running the game with some mediocre graphics. After all, PoE is for the most part about grinding, planning, testing, number crunching and hacking&slashing and not about how pretty something looks. Most of the time there's too many flying bones, body parts, loot and other colorful diarrhea to be able to admire the pink glowing shade of your sword being reflected by water onto the nearby tree.

p.s.: please, anyone who is talking about FPS drops due to server side load - stop. It doesn't work like that. If anything, you would at most see freezes (in lockstep mode) or latency spikes (predictive) due to that, but FPS on client has nothing to do with server load since all the processes that affect display should always be on client side.

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Finkster06 wrote:

Final update

I upgraded my PC:

From:
i5-3570k 4C/4T @ 4.3 GHz
8 GB DDR3 @ 1600 MHz

To:
Ryzen 5 1600 6C/12T @ 3.875 GHz
16 GB DDR4 @ 2933 MHz

PoE performs similarly to what was seen before in my initial video with the initial hardware. FPS still drops down to 30s in worst case scenario and CPU usage never really goes above 40%. Performance in PoE is therefore unchanged, however, this could differ slightly depending on the background tasks you have in addition to PoE (listening to a twitch stream for example).

This conclusion seems to suggest the issue is on GGG's side and not local hardware, which is disappointing.

Thanks.

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Unlike when we usually record video, we recorded this on a normal computer in order to demonstrate the difference that a regular user might be able to expect. Here are the specs:
Intel i5-6500
GeForce 1050 Ti
8 GB of RAM

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I guess we should buy those.

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Finkster06 wrote:

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Arrowneous wrote:

Spoiler

The conclusion I draw from your testing is proof of what we have all known about for a long time. That the client side is not where the performance slowdowns (and thus our framerate drops) are occurring. In high density mob packs or areas with lot's of cold/fire/shock ground effects the performance slowdowns are all because of server calculation overload. GGG has known about this for over a year and Chris even commented briefly about this problem last fall in a State of Exile podcast. Further proof of this is knowing that just 1 necromancer can kill frame rates but quick if there are very many dead that can be resurrected.

We have no way of knowing just how many game sessions that GGG is assigning to each realm server (I'm assuming GGG uses servers with dual Intel Xeon 10+ core cpus in some kind of blade configuration but we'll never know what SoftLayer is providing for hosting PoE) and thus there could easily be dozens of game sessions assigned to each cpu thread in the server. No surprise there and we can know this from observations of slower performance (more latency) at the start of a new league than after 3 months when there are physically fewer players on at any given time of the day. More game sessions assigned to a finite number of server cores = more sessions per core. When GGG tries to force more sessions per server core than it can handle then something has to give and that something is a longer time for the server simulation to go through it's next calculation iteration and send the results back to our client PoE to use and update the next frame on our screen.

So as long as you have above the minimum specs needed to run PoE anything else is just not needed so there is not going to be much more of a local CPU or GPU % load increase just because you have agro'd more mob packs together before killing them. However, the server simulation is now dealing with a much larger number of individual creatures that must be damage calculated for and thus that will take more processing time. We must all remember that GGG intentionally does all this server side to minimize cheating. If the client isn't performing these (and all other) important calculations then there is nothing to hack and cheat.

Chris and company knows that the only solution beyond a few design and/or coding changes (such as limiting the total number of minions we can have) is to add more game servers and he stated last fall that GGG will be doing that but it is expensive and takes time so we can't expect a quick fix overnight. I just hope that GGG is ramping up the realm server quantity fast enough so that by the time PoE 3.0.0 launches next month we don't have total realm overload collapse or end up waiting in the queue forever like we got with D3 back in 2012. Hopefully GGG can avoid a disaster like that.

I would be surprised to hear that server side operation is limiting my frame rate. I can understand slow server side operation to cause latency lag and longer delays between updating NPC and player positions, states, effects, etc. I am not an industry expert, but it does not seem right that my hardware must wait for a server update before outputting the next frame.