Optimization Problem

[demon123]

We love playing the game as a team. It's my girlfriend's favorite game as well, but experiencing low FPS in such an enjoyable game is incredibly frustrating. Please, solve this optimization issue already. Even though my computer isn't bad, I'm getting as low as 10 FPS while in the city or during battles. Instead of changing the gameplay style, the priority should definitely be optimizing the game. I'm sure many people, like myself, are getting frustrated because of this. Let's not lose a game with such potential just because of optimization issues. I believe the highest priority should be given to this.

[warmer]

Two things can really help.

If you aren't already using an SSD to store the world/game files, this is probably the biggest performance gain I have seen. Very often in big cities I would get low FPS, once I changed over. I notice a pretty big bump in FPS and much more consistent FPS overall.

 

The other is a bios setting to resize BAR it's a memory restriction in bios settings that is very outdated. If you can change that, it could also help.

[Riamus]

As mentioned, it's important to have the game and saves on SSD.  You also benefit by having more RAM, though it can be played okay at 8GB... just not great.  The game is CPU-bound, which means you need a decent CPU for the game.  This is different from most other games that are GPU-bound, meaning your graphics card is more important.  If you have a poor CPU, you may not have much you can do to improve the game.

 

As far as optimizations, they added some optimizations in A21 and will continue to add optimizations as they move towards gold.  Optimizations are mostly done at the end of development and not in the middle because anything new that you add will mean you have to optimize yet again, so having to redo the work over and over while adding new things to the game isn't a good choice.  But we are nearing the end of new things being added, so they are starting on some optimizing now.  But how much that helps you will depend a lot on your computer.

[demon123]

 

1 hour ago, Riamus said:

As mentioned, it's important to have the game and saves on SSD.  You also benefit by having more RAM, though it can be played okay at 8GB... just not great.  The game is CPU-bound, which means you need a decent CPU for the game.  This is different from most other games that are GPU-bound, meaning your graphics card is more important.  If you have a poor CPU, you may not have much you can do to improve the game.

 

As far as optimizations, they added some optimizations in A21 and will continue to add optimizations as they move towards gold.  Optimizations are mostly done at the end of development and not in the middle because anything new that you add will mean you have to optimize yet again, so having to redo the work over and over while adding new things to the game isn't a good choice.  But we are nearing the end of new things being added, so they are starting on some optimizing now.  But how much that helps you will depend a lot on your computer.

I hadn't considered the game development process, you're right. I had been so focused on this issue that I had stopped thinking logically. Thank you for your assistance.

1 hour ago, warmer said:

Two things can really help.

If you aren't already using an SSD to store the world/game files, this is probably the biggest performance gain I have seen. Very often in big cities I would get low FPS, once I changed over. I notice a pretty big bump in FPS and much more consistent FPS overall.

 

The other is a bios setting to resize BAR it's a memory restriction in bios settings that is very outdated. If you can change that, it could also help.

It was good that you provided this information; I hadn't installed it on an SSD because of it. Thank you.

[Riamus]

Yeah, SSD is very important with this game.  When I had it on my HDD, I could get a free every twenty makes when it did it's cleanup process that could last from a few seconds to a few minutes. That went away by moving the game to my SSD.  And that is just that one process in the game.  Other things also benefit from being on SSD and will make the game run better.  You may still have stuttering in towns, but it should be playable.

[Jugginator]

Dont forget when you see changes like added art or whatnot, the entire team doesn't work on one thing at a time, but performance is always something we're working on.

 

Besides an SSD (and BAR, which likely won't affect much for this game, but it should be turned on regardless as it's a stable change that only benefits or does nothing) like others said, it may also be worth hosting on a server, whether it's rented or on your own machine. My second/test machine has a quad core CPU with 16GB of ram and it runs game servers pretty well for me/the Mrs. and another friend/2/3. I can host on my machine too, but usually I'll run it on that. It offloads some of the CPU work to the server.

 

Also, there are some settings that may alleviate some CPU/memory bottlenecking (which sounds like your case): Dynamic Mesh, RARE cases where the Dynamic Music (although that shouldn't be bad anymore), View Distance, Object Quality, Particles, LOD Distance, Reflection Quality, Reflected Shadows.