PoE Performance Issues still present. Need a word harsher than abysmal.

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Chris wrote:

Thank you for the explanation - I'll discuss it with Jonathan tomorrow. We have fixed dozens, if not hundreds of issues like this over the last year.

Almost all of the persistent performance issues that people report are ones that we are unable to easily reproduce in our office. We're constantly purchasing additional hardware to try and strike it lucky with a combination that has such issues. If you have any suggestions, I'm keen to hear them.

First of all, thanks for finally taking note of this. It's good to see someone's on the job.

I would very much like to see a more in depth explanation as to what occurs in the engine when text or large UI elements are displayed, as that seems to be the main cause of this particular issue.

Take note that this does not appear to be an AMD specific issue, although there is a slight chance that it comes down to AMD CPUs, if 2D rendering is perhaps done on the processor, forcing the whole system to bottleneck if the CPU isn't quick enough for this. Just a guess, but CPU usage does spike up significantly when these elements are displayed.

And do consider adding multithreading support. I hear Intel is making headway with their compilers to add automatic threading support of some kind. Perhaps it can help.

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CharanJaydemyr wrote:

I just want to point out it's 9.30pm where Chris is, and that he's the boss in case some people weren't aware and don't read signatures.

On the job indeed.

fixed

Just opened up the public party tab and it somehow dropped my FPS from 60 to 30 while the chat window was open. This actually only happened while people were linking items in the chat - possible correlation?

OP, I notice in your screenshot you have a whole lot of items being linked, so this is most likely it. I even turned trade chat off and immediately got 60 FPS.

Intel 3570k, Radeon 7850, if it matters.

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Chris wrote:

We never push 3d rendering onto the CPU ourselves, but text rendering is handled by the CPU. What AMD CPU do you have? I apologise if you've already answered that in a prior post.

I was referring to 2D rendering, including fonts.

I have a Phenom II X6 1055T.

If font rendering is really only done on the CPU, it explains the drop due to global chat, the CPU is overloaded and the game slows down heavily. Adding UI elements, which of course, have text on them, such as the Character panel, is even harder taxing, then.

I wouldn't really call it abysmal, considering how bad it used to be. This game used to have massive graphic glitches that caused crashes every hour or two, idling in town would have your GPU sitting at 70 degrees, and firing poison arrows would ramp my GTX 570 to 85 degrees, which is absurd, and 25 degrees hotter than pretty much any other game was pushing.

I'm playing under Wine, and I don't necessarily have quite the same issue (I wouldn't call the performance abysmal, but then I'm also running the whole game out of a ram disk). However I do notice little spikes in frame time every time a new message comes in. The effect is only mildly annoying rather than game-destroying for me, but it's enough that I turn off global and trade chat altogether whenever I'm not actively trying to use them.

I get tons of horrible frame drops on my HD 7850. It can just happen when mobs show up, when I start casting spells, etc... any time really. Bad spikes. I run the game off of an SSD or ramdisk (I've tried both) with an i7 860 and 12GB of RAM.

I also noticed that if you alt tab out of full screen and alt tab back, the game seems very laggy until you zone.

Beyond that, the longer you play (client open, constant playing/zoning/etc) the longer it takes to load areas.