3.0.0 Beta Performance Improvements

I'm not entirely convinced this will fix the issue... And has me worried that GGG may even be missing what the issue is, to begin with.

Even with a weaker video card than what they shown, and even in huge-spam situations with ground effects, the GPU is rarely fully loaded; the drop in framerate comes almost entirely from CPU loading there. (I've tested this across a few different machines with different specs)

Ergo, I wonder if the result might be is that with ground effects, we'll still lag, but NOW we'll get to enjoy the visual quality becoming a blurry mess so we can't even make out what's going on EITHER.

Granted, particle handling by the CPU is probably a major factor, but most of my analysis shows that it's actually tied to simple overdraw... Which appears to load the CPU instead of the GPU; this appears to show when I can detect a slight dip in an already-low framerate by a change such as, say, showing a fullscreen transparent map vs. no map at all.

Such a change would be beyond the scope of mere "improvements;" it'd be indicative that a core part of the game's rendering engine needed to be redone. And it's not THAT rare an issue, either; even some AAA games in the past have had issues where the engine simply didn't offload enough onto the GPU, which is kind of the whole point of a graphics engine. After all, of the CPU and GPU shown... An i5 6500 can deliver up to 102.4 GFLOPS of performance, while that 1050 Ti? 2,918.4 GFLOPS. (even the highest possible you can get from a CPU, a Ryzen R9 1800X, only gets up to 256 GFLOPS)

And yeah, I must chastise GGG a little for their choice of a "regular user" machine; granted, it's far from the high end (that someone constantly buying $200-500 supporter packs every 3 months can readily justify buying) but still kinda high! Video-card wise, a 1050 Ti is a relatively inexpensive mid-range card to buy TODAY, but relying on it assumes that the typical PC running Path was built less than a year ago. (the 1050s came out back last October)

The most common video card used in gaming? Turns out its a weaker GTX 750 Ti*. (coincidentally, I also have one of these) But look further down; the top 10 also includes much weaker stuff, notably the 730 and, worse yet, the 720M, with a mere 96 stream processors! (for reference, the 1050 Ti has 768, AND a vastly higher clock rate)

Similar with the CPU choice; while an i5 is considered a "great pick" for gaming without spending thousands, it's far from universal from gamers. In fact, Barely more people have quad-cores than dual-cores*. (and that scale is being slightly tipped by the AMD-FX 4xxxx & A8/A10, as I recall Steam does count those as four-core, rather than two-module CPUs, in spite of those all being much weaker than an i5)

Similarly, until last month, the most common Intel CPU speed reported by Steam was in the 2.3-2.69 GHz range*. That's less than any desktop-power Skylake-gen i5 runs, and indicates that no, the "typical" gaming system is probably FAR WORSE than that. Hell, there's actually only one CPU between the i5s AND i3s that clock in under 2.7 GHz, 2009's i5 750. That means that a LOT of gamers are using either weaker laptop CPUs, or are using weaker cheaper ones, such as Intel Pentium and Celeron lines.

Long story short: while a lot of emphasis is given on the fancier, newer stuff, that's just because it's what makes manufacturers money; users of them are FAR from typical, and should not be considered the "bar" for this game's performance. Do remember this game is a free-to-play that doesn't actually have bleeding-edge graphics, so it'd only be reasonable to expect it to run on old (or even ancient) hardware. I don't think GGG has much room to expand amongst the high-end users, and further growth kinda relies on spreading the base, to get others excited about a highly-involved and non-easy RPG. I mean, isn't that the whole reason to expand over onto the Xbox One?




*Yes, these are all sourced from Steam. But given Steam is so ubiquitous, it's safe to say it's representative of gamers. Even if you're not running PoE *through* Steam, chances are much better than 50/50 you still have it; it basically covers a MAJORITY of PC gaming.

I can foresee many a stream having to up their bitrate to compensate for the ridiculous number of effects on screen.

"

In Wave 3 we have also added a new feature called Dynamic Resolution. This is a feature that allows us to maintain high frame rates even as the amount of particles increase by decreasing the resolution of the 3d scene temporarily.

Because scenes that have a lot of particles on-screen are typically very fast-moving anyway, we have found that in practice it is fairly hard to tell that the resolution was lowered.

I'm sure it's true it's hard to tell but still, could it be a option that can be turned off?

it lowers resolution based on the amount of particles right? so even if your computer can handle it fine at full resolution, it will still lower it right?

I'm not saying it's a bad idea but I'm REALLY turned off by it, out of personal taste I remove a lot of effects in games and generally my settings are kinda low but resolution is never something I want to reduce ever

Edit:

"

monkuar wrote:

can be disabled

make sure you read reddit, as some devs think that community is more important than their official forums

thanks for letting me know

Yes thank you.

Normal computer? Guess my potatoe pc will still lag when entering a new zone or opening a box with Rogues or killing an essence monster or or or... :(

Best PoE news I have read in years.

The performance boosts are real, and I am very grateful for them. Best news about the game in a long time.

But....

Tested it on an i5?

(Disappointing.)

Can you *please* address the gigantic performance gap between AMD and Intel CPUs?

Comment on it?

Tell us your working on it?

Assure us you're not just making your game for Intel and (cough Xbox?) rigs?

Are you working on optimizing the game for Ryzen, for example?


I had to quit 3 leagues because of performance issues, where my guild mates and I with AMD CPU's had freezes/stuttering so bad we died all the time or e-logged out 20x a day when the screen locked up.

While my Intel guildmates said "what lag? Why did you log?"

Would appreciate any comments or assurances on this matter.

Nice work. My HTPC has an i5 6500, 8gb of DDR4-2133 and GTX 750 ti and runs PoE fine in most situations already. There are some fringe cases that can bring that setup to it's knees. My main system I use to play in my bedroom has an R7 1700 @ 3718mhz, 16gb of DDR4-2666, and an RX 470 4gb and there is nothing that can bring my FPS down, so I don't think I'll see much change where I usually play.

Morning

It does not help us much while lagging at 200ms.

The closest servers we can log on is EU servers.

We are on the Southern tip of Africa. (Called South-Africa)

Hope we will get our own server soon. GGG please take not we need one urgently.

To enjoy the game to the fullest.