Something you should know about the "32bit less than 4gb crash"

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Drakier wrote:

You still have issues with loading dynamic content on-demand and not preloaded at the loading screen. For one, the map doesn't necessarily know that there is a strongbox, rare mob, or corrupted area in the map when you first load it. Even if they wanted the map to detect the presence of those things, the loading of the assets can be caught and can give away secret information about the zone before hand.

This can give unfair advantage to certain types of people looking for specific things.

That brings up an aside issue I find a problem with... The fact that resources aren't loaded for strongboxes until they're opened is, on its own, incredibly problematic, and makes them largely unplayable as an element without relying on a specific, mandatory build-fix and mastering a specific technique that's absolutely useless anywhere else. It's a problem because a "well-fitted, balanced build and smart play" alone are never sufficient: you basically HAVE to master a timed Smoke Bomb or possibly extra-well-timed lightning warp, and, say, a pure STR class is SOL, while the others will often have to squeeze in a skill or tactic that serves zero purpose elsewhere.

To bring it to the rest of the subject: GGG still has a good deal to go before figuring out the right thing here with performance and "cheat-detection." Granted, I lean a bit more towards not feeling it's a big issue to keep things "secret." It wasn't quite the end of the world when people would scum Docks instances to find corrupt zones, and a timing attack like that can be pretty easily thwarted through padding. (which it was) Similarly, someone dumping RAM contents to try and peek to see what Rogue Exile is waiting in a strongbox is, as far as I've seen, a PURELY academic concern: the difficulty in deciphering that hasn't been broken yet AFAIK, and even if it was, precisely what benefit is gained?

On the RAM usage issue, GGG does perhaps need to work on making things more efficient; the audio subroutine's footprint is comparable to the ENTIRE SIZE of many modern AAA games that are juggling far more resources. Given the nature of F2P games, they should work to target a lower spec than $60 AAA titles, and with even, due to software and addressing issues, even 4GB often can't be enough... The game winds up having memory issues here for what appears to be close to half of PC gamers. (About 43% of PC gamers have 2-4GB of RAM, vs. only 31% with 8GB)

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ACGIFT wrote:

On the RAM usage issue, GGG does perhaps need to work on making things more efficient; the audio subroutine's footprint is comparable to the ENTIRE SIZE of many modern AAA games that are juggling far more resources. Given the nature of F2P games, they should work to target a lower spec than $60 AAA titles, and with even, due to software and addressing issues, even 4GB often can't be enough... The game winds up having memory issues here for what appears to be close to half of PC gamers. (About 43% of PC gamers have 2-4GB of RAM, vs. only 31% with 8GB)

I don't think amount of RAM is really issue here. It's 2015 and 4GB been standard for several years. Looking at steam user stats for windows only 24% of users have less than 4GB RAM. And 4GB RAM costs less than 60$ AAA game anyways. From memory point of view, bigger issue is people still using 32-bit OS, that can't really use the memory. And maybe really old laptops, with limited possibilities to upgrade RAM.

Even after 2.0 beta game is reported to use like 2.5 GB memory. Yes system will need some memory to stay functional on background. But still sys requirements aren't that high by 2015 standards.

I'd understand if we were arguing needing to buy like new 500$ GFX card to run the game. I build PC with 4 gigs RAM back in 2008... And even back in the day 4 GB RAM was pretty cheap component compared to CPU or GFX card. Heck even cell phones begin to have 4GB RAM novadays :D

However they should think about updating their minimum system requirements. Steam store page listing XP and 2GB RAM, which clearly doesn't work that well... It's one thing deciding to drop support for old OS that even MS stopped supporting. But if they keep telling it works on something that is broken, then they have to use resources to "fix it". Heck they could even hide it, by saying that the big changes in the new expansion requires them to drop support for the antique hardware/OS. It's quite normal to upgrade system requirements with new expansions anyways. And we are clearly pushing limits of 32-bit OS here (apart from trying /3GB switches that avarage users don't want to do).

Not sure if it's realistic to think, that they have resources to optimize the game to run under 2GB, while at the same time they need to push more content to keep rest (most) of the playerbase happy. This isn't EA with hundreds of employees, and optimizing few extra percent out of something is usually the hardest thing to do in software developing.



Just because its F2P game doesn't mean it should run with PC from 90s. Everyone is jumping into P2W bandwagon because it is making money. Even big publishers like EA has some P2W games. Some quality MMOs gone F2P route lately also. Sure you will need enough player base to buy micro-transactions. But at the same time you need enough quality, to keep rest of the player base happy. We are talking about 75% vs 25% here (in reality less than 25%, or there would be more crying in forums).


However I would love if they could optimize the game bit more without sacrifising quality. Especially the audio department could use some love. --softwareaudio user reporting in... But even with the audio, my issue isn't the memory footprint.

While they're updating the requirements, they should change the "Hard Drive: 5 GB available space".

When I only had 8GB RAM, I had 6GB reserved as fast storage, so my whole computer plus PoE was running in 2GB, and it worked well. The game has changed over the years, and I upgraded my RAM to 16GB, and began reserving 8GB for the game folder.

The game isn't the only thing which effects how much RAM is free. Perhaps people should strip some idle services and background processes which they don't need, and always close the web browser while playing PoE in less than 4GB RAM. All computer programs use RAM, and a lot of them can be disabled.

Getting a 64-bit OS allows the computer to use more RAM, and a lot of people just assume bigger operating systems means more available resources, but sometimes new computers come with heaps of memory hogging background software and we all know every version of Windows has a gigantic footprint.