Performance Issues

Lately as I've been progressing into Act 3, I have noticed larger scale fights tend to cause my HDD to go into read/write spasms and my entire gameplay experience becomes laggy. It is especially bad the more spellcasters/flashy spells there are. My rig isn't the newest one out there so I'm inclined to blame video settings, although until this point they've worked fairly well. Any suggestions as to which ones to tweak that are having a hard time rendering spells?

It's kinda annoying when getting into a tense fight, where half the tension comes from the fact that the fight is becoming a slideshow so I can't properly target enemies or respond to low health in time by getting out of there/popping a flask.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions!

Up up up!

Well, this is an answer, of sorts. Any suggestions as to settings I can turn down to minimize the impact? As it stands, when this kicks in my framerate is like ... 0.5 a second which is a new frame every 2 seconds, which makes gameplay rather difficult. I like challenges, but not challenges that stem from being unable to see/react to my environment (unless it is stun/blind/etc other gameplay intended affects I can stack resists to).

No settings suggestions? Guess I'll just poke it with a stick and see if it improves.

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Rory wrote:

There are some effects we are unable to preload at the moment, and we'll improve this in future! As for general effects framerate loss, we're going to be optimizing a lot of this kind of thing later in development, but while everything is currently subject to change, this isn't a priority.

To be honest, this should be one of your top issues. Just look at how many people are complaining about FPS drops and poor performance, even on decent rigs. The frustration caused by this could seriously hamper your user base in the near future.

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Rory wrote:

this isn't a priority.

What?! Do you realise this issue absolutely ruins gameplay?

Just got to Act3 Merciless, and I am crashing at Docks or wherever too many spell affects from party and monsters are on the same screen.

First i start to lag, then the game crashes.

I have a pretty decent rig too, with a i72600k liquid cooled and turbo'd; 8gigs of RAM and a Radeon 7880 Super OC.

If I'm having problems, the majority of your player base is gonna have problems.

As others said b4 me, this was NOT a problem until ACT3 in Merciless.

I'm also from the crowd that believes this should be top priority. I die a lot from this problem, and from desync issues. It's really terrible and hinders gameplay tremendeously. I'm lvl 68 atm and I have 300+ deaths caused by those 2 problems combined.

What it does is general sense of frustration. Makes me not want to play Hardcore, ever. To top it off, I'm actually glad when I die because I was retarded because at least THEN i know i could have improved something to not have that happen.

Fixing frame lag and fixing desync issues are #1 priority. The gameplay is amazing, those problem ruin it to a ridiculous extent.

I don't think it's all client side. Off peak performance is significantly better than at peak. I think there are a variety of issues over and above the obvious loading skeletons the first time and straining over particle effects. For example my client wizzes along with a pretty decent framerate (EU daytime) however when the US comes online I start getting drops to zero (just for a split second). This is despite Internet latency remaining constant (and good). One day was particularly poor (just after the 10e patch). We where set to throw in the towel that day, fortunatley things improved (without a client patch). Of course that dosen't mean that there might not be client issues on some hardware but that is not what is causing my performance issues.