Game performance is ABYSMAL.

Dear Grinding Gear devs.

Why is your game still single threaded?

Many PC gamers these days buy more powerful GPUs instead of CPUs because they expect games not to utilize the CPU so much.

And then come along people who purposely leave their games without multi-threading support. Path of Exile has gone the same way. Why?

On an AMD Phenom X6 1055T, Path of Exile uses 20% of the CPU, never falls below 80% usage, and because of the emphasis on multicore design, on stock clocks, one core of this CPU is not enough to feed PoE's engine the processing that it's demanding. Why is PoE so heavy on the CPU anyway? The year is 2012, we have quad core SMARTPHONES and CONSOLES, for gods' sake. Anybody who has bought a machine in the last 7 years has at least, a Core Duo in their machine. And yet we still see AAA games singlethreaded, like Skyrim, which result in piss poor performance on a three thousand dollar rig, that otherwise runs circles around CRYSIS.

Things that absolutely KILL framerate on Path of Exile:

-global chat
-outdoor areas
-clusters of enemies

A full global chat equals 20 frames dropped. Boom, just like that. Gone. Not happy.

Why? This is all in Act one, too, no doubt there will be even grander areas and more enemies on screen at the same time during higher levels of play, and that will make this issue even worse!

Is this ever going to get fixed? Or will my feedback go ignored, again?

Other things that bother me.

-Despite the ridiculously heavy burden on one CPU core, my GPU is utilized at roughly 30%. It's a GTX 580. And ingame shadows in outdoor areas look like the game was made on a Gamebryo engine. Please explain why the game looks like the shadowmaps are rendered at 128x128 size, and then also runs at 30 FPS.

-Terrain can block view of enemies or objects, evident the best in the Prison areas. Even in Diablo ONE, walls would fade out whenever the player got close to them. There is a reason that functionality is in there. If i can't see a mob, i will assume its' not there. On harder difficulties, this could easily get a player killed.

-Sword cleave has no indication of actually hitting things, it just wooshes through the air and i can never tell if it actually hit anything or not. And the animation frankly looks like you're just waving it gently, nothing meaty or sturdy about it at all. Very..inaccurate.

-Many things are still serverside, such as death animations and inventory sorting. With a lot of enemies around you, one would want to know if they're shooting their arrows or slashing at an enemy that is yet to be slain, or just into thin air. Sorting inventory gets really tedious at 200ms ping, too. This isn't gamebreaking, but it's certainly annoying.

-There is no indication of available quests. I don't mind going to town to start them, but it's awful that there's no indication of them AT ALL.

Despite my mostly negative tone, i have to say i enjoyed my experience during the beta weekend, despite the framerate issues, ugly shadows, and an awkwardly skewed boss/normal ratio, where a boss takes and gives 10x more damage than you'd expect.

I did also find that there was no way to trade with players. Very unlike a multiplayer game.

Well, that is all. I can only hope this thread is read by a dev, or representative of them, at least.

Multi/hyper threading is a serious problem for programmers to tackle. It is EXTREMELY difficult to program for, and the nature of how game engines works makes them hard to truly utilize several threads. When Valve made the source engine they made several different versions with many different techniques to utilize multi threading in different ways but they eventually found that the tradeoffs, workarounds, and the difficulty of programing it was not worth it, they barely saw any performance increase. With a small team like GGG i dont think its worth the time to spend much time on making the game multithreaded. But im not sure why your performance is so bad, i could run the game on near full settings on my 2 year old laptop without any problems.

I notice that you don't mention your video card.

No one makes multi-threaded applications. By the best video card you can buy, because that's the only thing that matters for 99% of games.

I have a Compaq POS $300 bare-bones machine I got from a Wal-Mart or something. Only 1 gig of Ram. It's horrible.

But, I have a good GeForce vid card in it. I have few issues with the game (and most that I do have results from having other programs running at the same time)

1. GGG reads all posts, so they haven't been ignoring any feedback. True, they may not be able to respond to every post, but that's expected. Also, you have only made 2 posts, including this one.

2. On multi-threading. I can't comment, I am not a programmer. I have a first gen i7 with 8gb ram and a 560 2gb card... no issues playing the game at all.

3. on latency, I never experience the kind of lag you are reporting. Neither do any of my friends, at least for the last few months. What are your full system specs?

4. On quests, you can check your quest at any time by hitting U, it brings up a map showing the location of the quests and along the bottom you can click on a description of the quests.

5. you can trade with other players. be in the same team, in the same zone, and drop the items on the ground (be sure you aren't in town). A proper trade window is coming.

I find this thread really really surprising and it makes me wonder if there is a bit of variance with different machines. I was just about to post in the forum (my first post) about how GOOD performance was?

I don't understand. I am running an Intel 2500k and ATI 6950. So far it is totally flawless on full settings.

Before being so critical (and rude, frankly) you might want to do even the tiniest bit of research to see if possibly it might be a bug that is affecting your type of system, that can maybe be fixed, before decrying that performance is bad.

I was really surprised at how well it all looks.

"

kmccaughey wrote:

I don't understand. I am running an Intel 2500k and ATI 6950. So far it is totally flawless on full settings.

Before being so critical (and rude, frankly) you might want to do even the tiniest bit of research to see if possibly it might be a bug that is affecting your type of system, that can maybe be fixed, before decrying that performance is bad.

Yeah i was rolling perfect FPS over here, i thought the game looked brilliantly good for how not-taxing it was on my system.

Sounds like a bug or a machine-side issue.

I would suggest opening process explorer and checking if it's actually using a full core, or if it's using memory/ect.

And to be honest, that little stint about gamers not buying a good CPU is pretty false, any hardware nerd knows you need to do more than just upgrade your ram to make things run faster.

I also have to say that the game ran completely smooth for me and the shadows look amazing.

Using an i7 920 and a AMD 5870

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Ither wrote:

Multi/hyper threading is a serious problem for programmers to tackle. It is EXTREMELY difficult to program for, and the nature of how game engines works makes them hard to truly utilize several threads. When Valve made the source engine they made several different versions with many different techniques to utilize multi threading in different ways but they eventually found that the tradeoffs, workarounds, and the difficulty of programing it was not worth it, they barely saw any performance increase. With a small team like GGG i dont think its worth the time to spend much time on making the game multithreaded. But im not sure why your performance is so bad, i could run the game on near full settings on my 2 year old laptop without any problems.

Back when VALVE was making the source engine, multicore CPUs barely existed. The tradeoff was indeed, minimal, and not worth the effort. Newer iterations of it, however, do.

In the current Portal 2 version of Source, multicore rendering is enabled, and also, all 6 of mine are used to compile the test chambers made with the editor.

I also recall TF2 and L4D having multithreaded capabilities.

Other games where multithreaded engines have made a big difference:

-Battlefield 3 ( CPU intensive )
-Company of Heroes
-Starcraft 2 ( VERY CPU intensive )
-TERA Online ( Uses core offloading techniques, very efficient )
-Anything made with CryEngine 2 or 3
-Skyrim ( But only to some extent, and their implementation is poor, because it's an ancient engine )

In today's market, where multiple cores have become standard, just like 64 Bit operating systems, developers should not leave those who chose more cores instead of GIGAHURTZ!111!!1, in the dark. This could limit their playerbase heavily because the game would just run like rubbish on any CPU that has low stock speeds.

I COULD bump my CPU up to 4GHz and all my problems would be solved, but overclocking is usually bad for CPU life expectancy, and i lack proper cooling solutions. Even so, there's plenty of CPU power, the game just isn't using 5/6th of it.

What CPU does your laptop have?

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notevenhere wrote:

I notice that you don't mention your video card.

No one makes multi-threaded applications. By the best video card you can buy, because that's the only thing that matters for 99% of games.

You couldn't be more wrong.

1. I did mention my card:

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logokas wrote:

-Despite the ridiculously heavy burden on one CPU core, my GPU is utilized at roughly 30%. It's a GTX 580.

2. A LOT of developers make multi-threaded applications:

-Folding@Home ( uses all CPU cores AND your GPU at the same time )
-Video encoders such as Handbrake ( turns a 6 hour process of transcoding a 2 hour movie file into a 45 minute lunchbreak )
-3D modeling programs such as Maya, Blender
-Many recent games, see above list

3. The best video card DOES NOT matter for 99% of the games, which is clearly evident for my rig, which, just to make sure you've read properly this time, is an AMD Phenom X6 1055T, 8GB G.Skill Ripjaws, GeForce GTX 580 Phantom 3.

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WippitGuud wrote:

I have a Compaq POS $300 bare-bones machine I got from a Wal-Mart or something. Only 1 gig of Ram. It's horrible. But i have a good GeForce vid card in it.

I think in your case, you have a Pentium 4 in that box.

Thing is, Path of Exile does not actually have gigantic PC requirements. No doubt it would run perfectly fine on anything that's even seven years old, because the game engines design is better for singlecore CPUs, which have a much better speed-per-core ratio than the latest AMDs or i5/i3, which have a much better overall speed inclusive of all their cores.

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Wittgenstein wrote:

1. GGG reads all posts, so they haven't been ignoring any feedback. True, they may not be able to respond to every post, but that's expected. Also, you have only made 2 posts, including this one.

Fair enough.

"

2. On multi-threading. I can't comment, I am not a programmer. I have a first gen i7 with 8gb ram and a 560 2gb card... no issues playing the game at all.

First generation i7 CPUs have a fairly high clock speed per core. Likely enough to run the game without much issue, but you may run into a wall if you want to hit stable 120 FPS.
If you can, please make sure they are aware of this performance issue.

"

3. on latency, I never experience the kind of lag you are reporting. Neither do any of my friends, at least for the last few months. What are your full system specs?

You are likely nearby the server in either the U.S. or Europe. I am playing from Australia, where the average latency to USA is 200ms and 350ms to Europe on most ISP infrastructures. It is not an issue with the computer, but of the distance, which cannot be entirely remedied, but made more bearable by pushing resolving of certain events to local, or to simply fake it while the server resolves it, also known as using prediction.
Specs: AMD Phenom X6 1055T, 8GB G.Skill Ripjaws, GeForce GTX 580 Phantom 3.

"

4. On quests, you can check your quest at any time by hitting U, it brings up a map showing the location of the quests and along the bottom you can click on a description of the quests.

This is all fine, but the issue is that when you enter a new area, there is no indication of a quest being available there. For example, in Diablo 2, if you enter the Rogue Monastery without visiting town, you will get a notification about Charsi's hammer, and are able to recover it without having to return to town, and actually finish the quest immediately. While a bit immersion breaking, it streamlines the overall experience. A compromising fix would be to simply show a notification that there is a new quest available, and where ( i.e. enter Ship Graveyard the first time, message comes up in the corner 'New Quest available from Fairgraves in Ship Graveyard!' ). Without it, you are forced to return to town each time you enter a new area, instead of just roaming at your leisure and entering new areas without worry that you'll have to backtrack extensively just to finish a quest, because you didn't start it before.

"

5. you can trade with other players. be in the same team, in the same zone, and drop the items on the ground (be sure you aren't in town). A proper trade window is coming.

I was referring to the fact that there was no actual trade system in place, yes. I am glad that this will be fixed soon.

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kmccaughey wrote:

Before being so critical (and rude, frankly) you might want to do even the tiniest bit of research to see if possibly it might be a bug that is affecting your type of system, that can maybe be fixed, before decrying that performance is bad.

What i see is that the game is using 1/6th of the performance my CPU has to offer. That, to me, is bad, when i have to play with an average 30 FPS when my rig is capable of stable 120, and does so in numerous other, much more graphically intensive games. I'm not being rude, I'm being honest about my experience, which was dissapointing from a performance standpoint. I'm not here to say 10/10 gotyay, I'm here to give feedback on the game and its faults. Constructive criticism.

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mack1510 wrote:

I would suggest opening process explorer and checking if it's actually using a full core, or if it's using memory/ect.

My issue is not that the game is using all the performance that my rig is capable of, my issue is that it isn't using ALL of it. The game actively uses a single core out of six, and never less than 80% of utilization. That is the only bottleneck, not my memory, or my GPU. It is simply the lack of multithreading. Unless there is a severe waste of CPU cycles within the engine that's clogging things up, in which case yes, that would be a bug, and by making this thread i will have brought the issue into light with the Grinding Gear developers, and they can look into it.

Anyone who has a 2500k or other high end i5 and i7 CPUs, will likely not have any of these issues, ever, because those CPUs have a good performance-per-core ratio.

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Artophwar wrote:

shadows look amazing.

Do you have any screenshots of outdoor areas with plenty of shadows so i can confirm that i may have stumbled upon a shadow rendering issue?

I play on a late 2009 iMac: Core i5-750, 4GB, Windows 7 (running natively with Bootcamp), ATI Radeon 4850M (overclocked with MSI Afterburner so it's about the same as a 4850 HD).

The game runs silky smooth around 55-60 FPS at windowed 2240x1260, with Trilinear Filtering and Antialiasing off. The soft shadows are enabled.

Framerate is nearly the same in full native 2560x1440 I just found the windowed size enough and this provides for faster alt tabbing.

I'd say the game runs pretty darn well considering my graphics card has 512 MB VRAM and is three generations behind.