Texture Streaming in Echoes of the Atlas

why just not keep me in loading screen for 2 more seconds?

Anyone else having Vulkan almost unplayable ? Like permanent stuttering, lags, slow/bad texture loading. My specs AMD R5 1600AF (6/12core)/GTX 1070Ti/16GB 3200MHz RAM. DX11 is runnig much much better. Other games and stress tests are also running just fine.

Or do we have to bruteforce this game like streamers do with 2000$+ PCs to make it run somehow acceptable ?

You did this to make it less stuttery. well the game wasn't stuttery for me since vulkan. Now instead I have to deal with textures taking LONGER to load overall compared to before. as others have mentioned, the background world UNLOADS when opening the passive tree or atlas. going through maps at a medium pace, you get blank tiles pop up at the edge of the screen because the textures seemingly can't keep up.

None of this was an issue previously. All there was was a little bit of load time on textures when first booting up the game into town, then everything loaded perfectly from then on. Now the game looks like crap because you can see the assets loading in all areas, and maps are jarring because the world doesn't stay constant as you move through it.

So in short, I now have to deal with slow loading textures cause they are loaded twice, to solve a stuttering issue that didn't exist with vulcan for me in the first place.

DX11 isn't even an option because I refuse to deal with the random frame drops from 120fps to 10fps ( yes this still happens despite this "new tech")

Just let my run the game on Vulcan in the way it ran before 3.13. It's far better than the jarring experience it is now.

I get worse stutters now than last league. Everytime I use a skill the first time it stutters. Everytime a boss uses a a new skill the game stutters. This gets better on Vulkan, but on Vulkan the game crashes every other hour. Not very HC friendly.

Nice to understand how the tech works.

Just my experience:I have a nvme ssd with mid tier up-to-date cpu and gpu, and I have no problem at all.

I mean, I have a 1-3 sec shader effect when entering a new area, and the later aspects are flawless, nothing my eyes can catch (except a few invisible mobs in ritual, but sure it's a bug).

And the fps has never been better (Vulkan on). My point is : I read a lot of disappointed people, new players that might not get the game would crash or be 20 fps with the density of new leagues, without this tech on their pc.

Also I feel nvme is a must, so maybe GGG should update his minimum specs, and communicate about it. Or make the game work 'ok' with sata/hdd drives with low graphic options. So state that you can't get best/better settings with those machines.

Finally, it's sick to see how people need to complain constantly, reddit is mostly a pain with every game, you did a wonderful work on this league. Gossips and spoiled kids 🤫 so ggggg

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So our compromise was to generate a pack of blurry low-resolution versions of all the textures in the game, make sure it's preloaded right when you launch the client, and then use these stand-in textures while the full ones are loaded.

So why not load the all the real Textures on Game Launch? I gladly have more loading times than this blurry mess.

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DrHaferflocke wrote:

Hey,
Well... the problem that you now "render" the scene twice, once for the low textures and once for the high textures is completely forgotten, the stuttering doesnt occur because the scene is a bitmap drawn with a size 50 brush when it is first loaded....

ps: im a programmer and software architect in c++ working as Tech Lead...

There's no additional rendering going on with multiple sets of textures to choose from. Whenever you need a texture bound, you either use the proxy or the full texture; just swap out the ShaderResourceView pointer when preparing your draw.

The choice is done on a more granular basis, you can see that it's not uniformly low-res or high-res if you're in an area that tends to load incrementally like Oriath.

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Hans_Rudi wrote:

"

So our compromise was to generate a pack of blurry low-resolution versions of all the textures in the game, make sure it's preloaded right when you launch the client, and then use these stand-in textures while the full ones are loaded.

So why not load the all the real Textures on Game Launch? I gladly have more loading times than this blurry mess.

There's almost 78 thousand real texture files. They currently take 34.4 gigabytes of storage when decompressed. Not even a 3090 is going to fit all that, even if you ignore all the models you also need to load, buffer storage, and whatever other programs and your OS wants to use.

On pushing more things to load screens, there is a lot of information that may not be made available to the client until the player encounters it in a map for cheating reasons.

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While it's acceptable for assets to briefly be drawn with blurry-textures during gameplay when they first appear

No it isn't.

This is good news.