Path of Exile is going VULKAN. Most under-rated news out of Exilecon...

So what is this actually going to do for performance? I thought all the issues were due to netcode, not rendering.

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ViolateTheDead wrote:

So what is this actually going to do for performance? I thought all the issues were due to netcode, not rendering.

It's partially both, the PoE v2 announcement is them basically admitting that the current engine even after all the optimizations is not satisfactory enough, and it's something that they can actually fix.
Now netcode is something they cannot fix, it's most likely hardware limitation server-side than anything else. The amounts of calculations happening real-time are beyond imagination, and there is really only so much money you can throw at a server before you hit the wall of hardware limitations, and my guess is that that is what's happening, and until hardware tech catches up, the best they can do is perform the SRS treatment.

But in terms of your own hardware performance - within this and last generation, vulkan will provide slight performance increases in some cases as long as hardware is capable enough.
For those with potato computers, i really doubt it will improve anything at all.

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ViolateTheDead wrote:

So what is this actually going to do for performance? I thought all the issues were due to netcode, not rendering.

It´s hard to tell, the demo was quite slow and heavy on their systems. Still better than what many experience at Blight or Legion maps though.

POE suffers mostly from too many draw calls and that is where a low level API can help. Vulkan is cross platform, but not necessarly better than DX12.

Some games run better with Vulkan, I believe BF was one of those, it saw a 50% bump in FPS, while DX12 had less on AMD cards. In general, AMD does profit a bit more from Vulkan, while Nvidia from DX12. That being said, RDNA 2 is coming next year, so all this can change.


GGG´s netcode and overall file structure is amateurish and as more they add, as more it shows. The client has to go through a huge amount of information, which we notice mostly with Betrayel encounters. They need to rewrite a lot of code and work on their archive technology, one huge archive file is always bad in gaming.

I personally prefer Vulkan btw. less crash heavy and compatible with most hardware these days. DX12 can be pretty good, but hardly any game is truly DX12. Many are DX11 ports and they don´t manage to gain the full potential of DX12.

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xMustard wrote:

cross platform? you think path of exile has a chance at being cross platform? cause that would be incredible

I think you are mixing up the terms cross platform and cross play

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Ygidua wrote:

They need to rewrite a lot of code and work on their archive technology, one huge archive file is always bad in gaming.

Is content.ggpk an archive or rather a container? Amount of files used have zero impact on performance.

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Daiena wrote:

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ViolateTheDead wrote:

So what is this actually going to do for performance? I thought all the issues were due to netcode, not rendering.

It's partially both, the PoE v2 announcement is them basically admitting that the current engine even after all the optimizations is not satisfactory enough, and it's something that they can actually fix.
Now netcode is something they cannot fix, it's most likely hardware limitation server-side than anything else. The amounts of calculations happening real-time are beyond imagination, and there is really only so much money you can throw at a server before you hit the wall of hardware limitations, and my guess is that that is what's happening, and until hardware tech catches up, the best they can do is perform the SRS treatment.

But in terms of your own hardware performance - within this and last generation, vulkan will provide slight performance increases in some cases as long as hardware is capable enough.
For those with potato computers, i really doubt it will improve anything at all.

Vulkan definitely has less API overhead than DirectX and thus should be a performance improvement over what we have now. For example, I have a Geforce 1060 AMP! (6 GB version) and if I let too many Blight creatures through the portals at some point PoE stutters out badly (< 10 fps). I run a very lean (only 19 core Win 7 Pro OS services) and a low cpu overhead anti-virus utility on a Dell T3610 with a Xeon 1620 v2 cpu (3.7 GHz 4C8T), 16 GB of DDR3-1600 speed ram, and a 500 GB Samsung SSD, and even with this much horsepower PoE will stall out if too many creatures are on screen at one time. This also happens in breaches. So the PoE core game engine can't handle everything at once in these 2 instances. I also have known for several years that GGG, in choosing Softlayer to host PoE, made a big mistake as Softlayer uses Networklayer as the fiber backbone to their game realms (at least the US server centers) and Networklayer pretty much sucks a lot of the time for me in SW Florida to either WDC or Dallas with packet loss. So a Vulkan API instead of DirectX will be better but when Networklayer is overloaded and drops my PoE data packets nothing on my gaming rig can fix that problem. GGG will need to give us an alternate way to route around Networklayer fiber bottlenecks to get better QoP. I never have had this problem with any other multi-player arpg or any other game. Only PoE has the problem of poor QoP.

It used to run great on linux (before dx11 junk), hope it does again in the future.

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ViolateTheDead wrote:

So what is this actually going to do for performance? I thought all the issues were due to netcode, not rendering.

What's wrong with the performance? After a somewhat rough league start right now the game runs like a charm. I can't remember a time when the gameplay was as flawless as it is right now. Yes, still too many bugs left but they already did a really decent job by fixing most shit.

So what they gonna do with exra VRAM consumption that vulkan almost always does? For example in Dota2 test scene its around 60 mb vram (in area with almost no mobs/action). In World WarZ its around 500-600 mb extra VRAM usage. So old 2gb vram videocards will be pretty much have issues unless they keep DX11 for windows.

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DivineChampion wrote:

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Ygidua wrote:

They need to rewrite a lot of code and work on their archive technology, one huge archive file is always bad in gaming.

Is content.ggpk an archive or rather a container? Amount of files used have zero impact on performance.

Afair its container, but most of data in it compressed with brotli. Very fast to decompress onfly but still here is decompression.