System Requirements for PoE is a joke

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tackle70 wrote:

Like I said, 750ti requires settings to be turned down in parties > 3

But I played in a lot of 6 man parties, including summoners and CoC parties on the 780 / 7970 rigs and never had anything like the framerate problems you speak of.

Don't worry I'm not arguing with you I just want them to fix the badly optimized areas because I don't want this to be a part of what damages the game I want to succeed.



But check out the shocked ground mod on either the residence or palace maps while fighting dominus there and your going to be incredibly shocked how bad the engine falls apart, it was a absolute wakeup call for me to see how bad it got. Its a world of difference from the story areas and that is what I was basing my idea of minimal on.


edit - and if you really want to see bad, add in the double boss mod to those maps.... I would love to see people try to run that. Full team double boss palace shocked/chilled/burning ground map would be a insane framerate killer to the point I'm not sure that anyone can run it well.

poe graphic is like 90's game, yet the requirement is heavy

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Fusion_Power wrote:

No clue why GGG did not wrote the engine multi-thread right from the beginning.

Hi, I've shipped numerous professional games across many consoles.

Multi-threading is NON-TRIVIAL. It takes ~4x amount of programming work for proper engine architecture to do it. Asynchronous event/callbacks, race conditions, etc. complicate everything.

It is the same reason Minecraft is single-threaded. Indie devs just want their game out there with people playing it so they can be financially supported.

It costs a lot of money to hire an experience programmer who can basically rip-apart the engine and transform it to a good, clean, multi-threaded design. Probably about 1 to 2 years full-time work as you CAN NOT just bolt it into the engine after the fact.

I'm still investigating if the game is GPU or CPU bound. It it is GPU bound then multi-threading won't really bring anything to the table ... see my next post.

Also, see this reddit thread:



NOTE: The game is NOT geometry bound -- the poly count looks normal for a game in 2013.




Edit. Grammar
Edit. Added following post about CPU and GPU, frame rate issues, poly count.

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tackle70 wrote:

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Jiero wrote:

Something is wrong with your rig if you can make sub-30fps happen on a Titan. My Dual 780 / 2600k rig never went below 30fps even in the craziest of crazy times in 6 man parties. And I rarely see 99% GPU use on my 780.

I'm occasionally getting the same thing on myGTx Titan + AMD X4 955BE, 16 GB, 128 SSD with CoC builds. Thankfully frame rate is 60+ 95% of the time. :-)

With these two data points, your 2600K and SLI 780 clearly shows that the PoE is

a) majority of the time CPU bound,
b) GPU bound for the particle effects.

Regardless, there are 2 areas the PoE devs probably need to investigate IMHO

1. Font Rendering / Trade Chat
2. Particle Engine & fill-rate with alpha blending

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MaxTheLimit wrote:

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Jiero wrote:

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tackle70 wrote:

Like I said, 750ti requires settings to be turned down in parties > 3

But I played in a lot of 6 man parties, including summoners and CoC parties on the 780 / 7970 rigs and never had anything like the framerate problems you speak of.

Don't worry I'm not arguing with you I just want them to fix the badly optimized areas because I don't want this to be a part of what damages the game I want to succeed.



But check out the shocked ground mod on either the residence or palace maps while fighting dominus there and your going to be incredibly shocked how bad the engine falls apart, it was a absolute wakeup call for me to see how bad it got. Its a world of difference from the story areas and that is what I was basing my idea of minimal on.


edit - and if you really want to see bad, add in the double boss mod to those maps.... I would love to see people try to run that. Full team double boss palace shocked/chilled/burning ground map would be a insane framerate killer to the point I'm not sure that anyone can run it well.

I've played PoE on a huge number of machines, and I simply don't get these problems.
Even on my very modest laptop. Even the blood rain effect fighting Dominus in partied.
However, I have noticed some odd driver issues on certain cards. For example, my old Alienware laptop would run on the nvidia GPU just fine ( at first had trouble with it trying to use my intel chipset ) but noticed graphical stutter. I checked in GPUz and noticed that I wasn't seeing PoE put much in the way of load onto the GPU, and when it did, the load was in a largely fluctuating manor. However, when I ran the game in full screen windowed mode, the problem went away. This makes me think that the problem may be more GPU driver related.

One other thing is that you've pointed out a couple times that people with decent systems are stuck around 60FPS when they should see higher. This is probably caused by having vsync turned on while playing on a monitor with 60Hz. Just a bit of a heads up, that is how it is supposed to work...

It can be driver related but I also know I have higher then what is now considered normal standards on optimization (almost obsessive compulsive). I see the bare minimal as being the worst case scenario possible and still having enough fps to call the game playable, which is at least 15fps at the lowest to me on a arpg. To have a game drop from 180 fps average down to 8 even for just a moment is entirely unacceptable to me.

While I do use vsync (because honestly I don't really see much difference above 60fps on my lcd monitor or tv) when I was talking about the numbers it wasn't on. Which is why it averaged above 100 when I set my vsync to 60 (best refresh I could get a OLED LCD 50" tv when they launched).



And fracturing is one mod that also give people issues so there is actually more then one culprit here.


edit - its not gpu or cpu bound its both btw. GPU fillrate bound, cpu single threading bound that shows itself when loading assets on a slower hard drives or ram (cast a skeleton totem to see the micro freeze it causes). The cpu part gets hung up when waiting for assets to load from the client file.



edit 2 - I also posted a fix that helped me for those times when issues popped up. Rendering ahead on ati card (ati tools calls it flip queue size) that is also called max pre-rendered frames on nvidia cards. It helps the game immensely during those brief fps drops on certain problem issues by rendering the cpu several frames ahead and allowing frame skipping.

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Jiero wrote:

edit - its not gpu or cpu bound its both btw. GPU fillrate bound, cpu single threading bound that shows itself when loading assets on a slower hard drives or ram (cast a skeleton totem to see the micro freeze it causes). The cpu part gets hung up when waiting for assets to load from the client file.

Agreed! You can clearly see this in PoE with Wine on OSX. On my MBP i7 @ 2.6 GHz, 16 GB, 1 TB SSD, @1440p game runs 60+ until animation and there is a slight hiccup.

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DoomCloud wrote:

The word "Minimum" is key. You can play PoE so long as the minimum requirements are met.

*looks at 50% mob density fracture maps* , yeah those specs are full of shit.

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DoomCloud wrote:

The word "Minimum" is key. You can play PoE so long as the minimum requirements are met.

no u cant

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Michaelangel007 wrote:

Hi, I've shipped numerous professional games across many consoles.

Multi-threading is NON-TRIVIAL. It takes ~4x amount of programming work for proper engine architecture to do it. Asynchronous event/callbacks, race conditions, etc. complicate everything.

It is the same reason Minecraft is single-threaded. Indie devs just want their game out there with people playing it so they can be financially supported.

It costs a lot of money to hire an experience programmer who can basically rip-apart the engine and transform it to a good, clean, multi-threaded design. Probably about 1 to 2 years full-time work as you CAN NOT just bolt it into the engine after the fact.

I'm still investigating if the game is GPU or CPU bound. It it is GPU bound then multi-threading won't really bring anything to the table ... see my next post.

Also, see this reddit thread:

Spoiler

http://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/20qxs6/before_you_theorycraft_fixing_desync_and_frame/

NOTE: The game is NOT geometry bound -- the poly count looks normal for a game in 2013.

Spoiler

http://imgur.com/a/StbQp

Well, I'm sure it is easier to make an engine Multi-threaded right from the beginning than adding this stuff afterwards, if this is even possible. However, modern (complex) 3D games today should support more than one thread and many do so, Poe NEEDS multi threading desperately imho. I know it will not happen soon but maybe "PoE2" will use a different engine, who knows? It may be cheaper to buy one that can do it instead of developing something that complex from scratch (Unreal Engine maybe?).
Oh, when I check Minecraft at my PC, it supports multi threading by the way. ;) At least the chunk loading stuff with the well known Optifine, which did one guy (afaik) as plugin. Many people report performance issues with Minecraft, however, it runs in Full HD with constant 60 FPS at my 5 Year old PC, same PC that has so much trouble with PoE, and ONLY PoE. ;)

The Polygon Pics of PoE are looking interesting, not that much Polygons but still alot (I count every polygon when I do Modeling stuff in Blender, I'm somehow mad about optimizing things I know. I've spent over 1 year at making one single custom Duke 3D map back then, I can do that endlessly XD ). The Charas are very detailed, imagine a whole screen full of Mobs, it will melt every PC.
I have traumatic memories onto my first "Cowards Trial" Map run, where the Boss ressurected basicly the entire Room untill I had ~16 FPS or so. A huge Dia-Show at the end, scary. A Wonder I survived this. ^^"" Not sure if it was the polycount or the fact that these Fire Skelly corpses all had flame effects on but I will not run this map again without Corpse Explosion or a proper Infernal Blow Build.
Oh, the Picture:



One reason why I never play in Partys: the performance. Actualy the main reason. Which PC can handle a full 6 player party where everyone bombs the entire screen full of effects? I want that PC! :)
I play more Diablo 3 recently and what can I say, it's smooooooth, even with the entire Screen full of my Monk's Sweeping Wind Tornados (maybe because they are basicly just "2.5" D Sprites? ;) ) I love all the tricks, Blizzard did with Diablo 3. It may look to cartoonish but this way you can fake alot of things without loosing the overall appearence.

In POE, when you see a 3D rock, it is just, well, a 3D rock, how boring! ;) In 3D I can't see even the transition where 3D ends and 2D starts, these guys really have skills. I'm sure, GGG also has these skills but we know that comparing D3 and PoE is not good karma, so again sorry for that. ^^"