Client Performance (Updated June 16)

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Chris wrote:

Graphical performance of the game client is an ongoing area of improvement that is being tackled from many directions.

Please do something about shader compilation lag.
It's kinda infuriating to see the game pause while it creates dozens (occasionally hundreds!) of shader objects for certain spells/effects on their first use. Probably because some boss hits me. And it will of course hit me again, because I can't react.
And what's the reason for creating new shaders every few steps in the Scepter of God, even if nothing but scenery is around?

I can tell it's shader compilation or something closely related because WINEDEBUG. Also, mesa apparently has a reputation for performing badly there, and indeed those lag spikes are worse in wine than in windows. But they follow exactly the same pattern in windows, even if less severe. Intel HD 4000 here, and I expect this is the reason for all the "PoE sucks on non-nvidia cards" complaints. Because optimizing their shader compiler is exactly the kind of thing nvidia spends tons of effort on.

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Update June 16, 2014: The 1.2.0 mini-expansion will swap a lot of skills over to using trails, which will make them faster.

Thanks , let's hope that helps.

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Nicholas_Steel wrote:

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Oh and give us option to load ALL effects [...]

They can't, it's a 32bit game and I don't think they've enabled the Large Address Aware flag either so it's limited to using only 2GB of RAM even if you have more.

Yeah, that surprised me too. It doesn't matter for me, because linux caches stuff, and I have an SSD in any case, but providing a 64bit build for windows users with a HDD shouldn't be too much effort and could potentially help a lot. Or maybe it is a lot of effort? I have no idea how MS screwed up win64. Don't tell me unless it's particularly funny. ;)

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Chris wrote:

Please note that much larger improvements are underway but may not be listed here because they don't actively have a developer on them this week. I'll keep this document update as we progress on other optimisation tasks.

This week-

This is why i love PoE over other kinds of Hack n Slash

Poe : yeah we are working on this.... might be ready in 1week-1month

Blizzard Activision : Yeah we are working on this... no date (ready 3 years later)

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Khine wrote:

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Nicholas_Steel wrote:

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Oh and give us option to load ALL effects [...]

They can't, it's a 32bit game and I don't think they've enabled the Large Address Aware flag either so it's limited to using only 2GB of RAM even if you have more.

Yeah, that surprised me too. It doesn't matter for me, because linux caches stuff, and I have an SSD in any case, but providing a 64bit build for windows users with a HDD shouldn't be too much effort and could potentially help a lot. Or maybe it is a lot of effort? I have no idea how MS screwed up win64. Don't tell me unless it's particularly funny. ;)

I'm not entirely sure of this but I believe the development software plugins, compilers and dependencies all need to support 64bit Windows without introducing new bugs in the process. They may need to special case every instance of certain code they write for the 64bit version, to work around a bug, and if there are multiple bugs then they will need to be doing more and more things differently between both versions of the game and increasing the amount of work required to accomplish anything (They have to duplicate changes to the 32bit version, for the 64bit version but may need to change the code in the process/re-write the change from scratch).

It also naturally requires them to properly test it like they do with the 32bit version before releasing it to the general public (Unless they permanently label the 64bit version as a beta). This would result in notably longer periods of time spent testing updates to the game and/or splitting the test users between the versions which results in less resources to test either version.

It would be very awesome to see a 64bit version of the game, but the potential development time/man power required will render it unfeasible without some serious cash to hire more developers.

The best (And most feasible) we can currently expect from them is them flagging the executable as Large Address Aware and optimize the games memory budgets to take advantage of computers that have 3 or 4GB of RAM. They could completely ditch the 32bit version of the game and most of the Windows XP users and start exclusively releasing 64bit versions but I don't see this happening any time soon even though most hardware made these days is 64bit compatible and every version of Windows that isn't over 10 years old has decent 64bit versions available.

Alt-Tab from Fullscreen Exclusive Display Mode to the Desktop and then back to the game still renders the game unplayable due to various visual effects causing massive lag as the effects are generated. The only soloution is to quit the game to the desktop and then reload it.

Affects me and my friend.

--- Mine ---
Windows 7 x64
Intel i7 920 @ 2.66GHZ
ASUS P6T Motherboard
Geforce 560Ti 2GB (340.43 beta and older drivers)
6GB DDR3 1600MHZ RAM (X.M.P enabled)
All power saving functions in the BIOS and in Windows are disabled. This includes C1E and various other power saving features in the BIOS like C-State as well as configuring Windows to use the High Performance Power Profile. The video card is configured to never, ever downclock and GPU-Z and Everest confirm that it never downclocks or that the PCI-E slot never switches from PCI-E 2 performance mode to PCI-E 1 performance mode.


--- Friends ---
Windows 7 x64
Intel i7 920 @ 2.66GHZ
ASUS P6T Motherboard
Geforce 285 (340.43 beta and older drivers)
6GB DDR3 1600MHZ RAM (X.M.P enabled, different brand to mine)

Hi Chris,

Any plans on reworking the "GPU kiling" environment effect like poisoned ground/desacreated ground? This is the worst for me, it takes framerate to 1/3.

More fearfull is that each new location/environment effect is much more GPU hungry than before.

Sarik

Hey guys was away from this game for some months (january 201 to now). Back then the game was known to perform noticeably worse on AMD cards than on nvidia ones, as some effects made systems struggle to maintain high fps which definetely shouldnt. Has something been done in that regard in the meantime, was this acknowleged (maybe i am even wrong here, but im pretty sure this was a widespread notion)?

Can't wait to see the result of this:

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Update June 16, 2014: The 1.2.0 mini-expansion will swap a lot of skills over to using trails, which will make them faster.

This is a straight copy-paste crosspost from what I said in the client performance thread over in general discussion.

Framerates in PoE were always pretty smooth for me until 1.2 hit. There's substantially more hitching, and sometimes I wondered if it was just me. Obviously this thread exploding to 22 pages in two days should say something about how common issues like these are. I'm on the border of just never opening a strongbox with "Guarded by a Rogue Exile" despite the extra loot and XP because I know the game will freeze for a good second or two and I've got to pray my defenses hold that long. This is something that I feel is getting worse, not better.

I'm reminded of Anarchy Online, a game I dearly love(d), whose developers announced a new, modern, faster, prettier engine sometime in what, 2006? 2007? Here we are in 2014, many years too late, and the game is sinking with the new engine just now hitting test servers. You cannot afford to go that route, GGG. PoE is still young, and it just doesn't leverage modern computing architecture when it should be years before that's a concern. I'd be totally happy with an entire "content" expansion being devoted to performance and desync. Do it now before it's too late.

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ConsPark wrote:

I'd be totally happy with an entire "content" expansion being devoted to performance and desync. Do it now before it's too late.

There is a small speck of hope in me left.

Not entirely related but it bothers me enough to ask so here it goes:

Why is it that user input polling rates seem to be aversely affected in purely GPU limited scenarios?

I'm currently forced to play on a retired business laptop with an ok cpu but basically no gpu to speak of (intel gm45E, a miracle it even runs) on linux through wine. Cpu load never exceeds 30% on either core but the GPU prevents me from getting >10fps most of the time for obvious reasons.

"Playing" like that, I noticed that the higher the framerate, the more mana I burn and damage I deal when using a 13casts/s incinerate.

My suspicion that the framerate must somehow limit my cast speed was substantiated when I was asked after a pvp match why I was "casting in short bursts instead of continuously".

Needless to say I was actually holding down the mouse button the entire time. Turns out my cast speed cannot exceed 167% (spell echo, otherwise <100%) of my FPS because the game will only detect keystrokes at the rate the GPU can render, which limits the spells DPS to a fraction of its potential on this particular device.

This is obviously a very extreme case and I have no issue with the fact that this laptop is generally unfit-for-purpose when it comes to playing POE.

What concerns is how the GPU not keeping up with the game can prevent the CPU from polling my keystrokes in realtime in the first place, seeing as there is nothing a CPU could possibly have to wait on the GPU for to handle game logic. POE is, after all, a massively GPU intensive game and it's well known that large, spammy parties dip even recent mid range GPUs deep into sub 20fps on a regular basis, where I suspect this phenomenon becomes relevant for many faster builds.