Soulaufein Posted January 11, 2012 Share Posted January 11, 2012 (edited) Are you kidding me? Who the hell made the decision to support a game SINGLE THREADED game engine? This is 2012 and a good chunk of players runs multiple processors. What this means is that only one processor is being used for SW:TOR, basically. The devs keep trying to downplay the issue but I doubt is just a 5% minority that is having performance problems on high end machines. I know entire 50 members guild where EVERYONE gets 20 FPSs in WZs for instance. This may be the reason. Thank you Teziz for finding this: http://community.heroengine.com/forums/index.php/topic,889.msg4120.html#msg4120 If this is indeed an engine problem - and in the forum post the reply is from September and apparently in January no solution has been found - the supplier needs to get it fixed, not the client (Bioware). It may also explain why no High Res textures or AA, as it will probably degrade the game performance even more. So it seems its out of their hands. I can be very wrong about this, hopefully. What I do feel is that we need to keep the pressure up. These issues are NOT OK, even though BioWare keeps downplaying the situation, but along with the abysmal character response times and animation lag the word "Gamebreaking" is beginning to pop in many players' heads. Unfortunately, because we all want the game to succeed, but technical issues like these will kill it for many of us. EDIT: Also, further in that thread: "simulation and rendering run on a single shared core.". Rendering as in, TEXTURES? Or am I reading it wrong? Edited January 11, 2012 by Soulaufein Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Soulaufein Posted January 11, 2012 Author Share Posted January 11, 2012 I think the community needs to see the Hero Engines' creator statements on the single threaded optimization. Sorry for the bump. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zerobounds Posted January 11, 2012 Share Posted January 11, 2012 FYI 5% of the player base is roughly 18,000 people. I'm sure you can manage to find 20. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Soulaufein Posted January 11, 2012 Author Share Posted January 11, 2012 FYI 5% of the player base is roughly 18,000 people. I'm sure you can manage to find 20. The thing is mate, if the engine just can't use the multi cores, high res textures, AA etc will degrade the experience for everyone. Somehow, it just fits if you consider the very strange no AA or high res textures - that ARE in the game - at the moment. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zerobounds Posted January 11, 2012 Share Posted January 11, 2012 A technical 'handicap' it is but a majority of people have no performance issues and think the graphics are fine which makes this simply a matter of opinion. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Argolith Posted January 11, 2012 Share Posted January 11, 2012 The thing is mate, if the engine just can't use the multi cores, high res textures, AA etc will degrade the experience for everyone. Somehow, it just fits if you consider the very strange no AA or high res textures - that ARE in the game - at the moment. FYI, Just because the engine does not use multiple cores does not preclude SWTOR from using multiple cores. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Soulaufein Posted January 11, 2012 Author Share Posted January 11, 2012 The point is informing - via the Hero Engine own statement - that this engine doesnt use multiple processors, allocating ALL the load on one processor. Its not a matter of opinnion: its a fact. Its like having a Ferrari, but never going beyond 50 kilometres an hour. The result is that low end specs have a very similar performance to high end specs. Once again, this is a FACT no an opinion. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
shanert Posted January 11, 2012 Share Posted January 11, 2012 ... the engine just can't use the multi cores, high res textures, AA ... FYI: The engines supports all this. High-Res textures and AA are a feature of the engine and BioWere themselves modified the engine, so it's supporting multiple cores. This is getting old, really ... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
genesiser Posted January 11, 2012 Share Posted January 11, 2012 They need to hire people that actually know how to optimize an engine. Their current employees should be fired because they did an awful job of optimizing it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
myrmexaw Posted January 11, 2012 Share Posted January 11, 2012 makes you wonder if their 5% estimate on MEDIUM graphic wouldn't jump to 50% if they released high res graphics ... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zerobounds Posted January 11, 2012 Share Posted January 11, 2012 :facepalm: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gerandar Posted January 11, 2012 Share Posted January 11, 2012 anyone else notice we dont have the in game models on our computers? hmm kinda makes me think Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DannyInternets Posted January 11, 2012 Share Posted January 11, 2012 (edited) A technical 'handicap' it is but a majority of people have no performance issues and think the graphics are fine which makes this simply a matter of opinion. The majority of players don't even understand the difference between framerate and lag and probably don't even realize graphics settings exist. The fact that this game targets the casual player demographic skews the player base towards low-end machines. Many of these players probably expect poor performance because they get poor performance in every game they attempt to play. It should come as no surprise that the vast majority of complaints about performance on this forum are coming from people who have high-end machines. Edited January 11, 2012 by DannyInternets Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Androvis Posted January 11, 2012 Share Posted January 11, 2012 Greetings- Just a heads-up so you don't look foolish. BioWare bought the Hero Engine when it was essentially still in Beta/late Alpha stages and built on top of the barebones shown in 2004. BioWare finished the engine themselves. They're using a version of Hero, but no the currently commercially available Hero. Regards, Androvis Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MagusZ Posted January 11, 2012 Share Posted January 11, 2012 Have you ever tried to program parallelism? Multithreading? Hyperthreading? There are dozens of additional complications that come along with those issues beyond just getting the system to run at all. You have to take into a count adapting to the user's number of cores, which code needs to run in serial and which can run in parallel. Is it optimal to use multiple cores for some processes (sometimes, its less effective). Creating threads is expensive, if there is an efficiency loss, there is no real reason to create them. Simply having a computer with multiple cores isn't as amazing as everyone is led to believe if the software has no need to use them. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DannyInternets Posted January 11, 2012 Share Posted January 11, 2012 (edited) Creating threads is expensive, if there is an efficiency loss, there is no real reason to create them. Simply having a computer with multiple cores isn't as amazing as everyone is led to believe if the software has no need to use them. Oh hey, welcome to 2012. Multi-core processors have been mainstream for more than half a decade (and hyperthreading has been around even longer than that). The rest of the industry got with the program a long time ago and has allowed for their software to take advantage of multi-thread processing--why hasn't Bioware? Edited January 11, 2012 by DannyInternets Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Godsfear Posted January 11, 2012 Share Posted January 11, 2012 Are you kidding me? Who the hell made the decision to support a game SINGLE THREADED game engine? This is 2012 and a good chunk of players runs multiple processors. What this means is that only one processor is being used for SW:TOR, basically. The devs keep trying to downplay the issue but I doubt is just a 5% minority that is having performance problems on high end machines. I know entire 50 members guild where EVERYONE gets 20 FPSs in WZs for instance. This may be the reason. Thank you Teziz for finding this: http://community.heroengine.com/forums/index.php/topic,889.msg4120.html#msg4120 If this is indeed an engine problem - and in the forum post the reply is from September and apparently in January no solution has been found - the supplier needs to get it fixed, not the client (Bioware). It may also explain why no High Res textures or AA, as it will probably degrade the game performance even more. So it seems its out of their hands. I can be very wrong about this, hopefully. What I do feel is that we need to keep the pressure up. These issues are NOT OK, even though BioWare keeps downplaying the situation, but along with the abysmal character response times and animation lag the word "Gamebreaking" is beginning to pop in many players' heads. Unfortunately, because we all want the game to succeed, but technical issues like these will kill it for many of us. Great post op. I read through the thread you linked and yes, it confirms what I already suspected. The game simply is old tech. How long have multi core cpus been out now? Let's see, I bought my first quad core 5 years ago? Before that it was dual cores for a couple years. so, a game that's been in develpement after dual cores were fairly popular decided to use a single threaded engine with absolutely no forsight to the fact that all cpu's are multi-core, multi-threaded now days. So now 4 core cpu's are the norm and 6 cores cpu's will be the norm in 2 years. That pretty much sums it up. The engine simply can't handle good performance. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ManOSteal Posted January 11, 2012 Share Posted January 11, 2012 the minimum specs require a multi core processor...why the heck would they do that if their software made no use of multiple core processors. Also AA is coming in patch 1.1 yet again read the dev tracker daily. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zerobounds Posted January 11, 2012 Share Posted January 11, 2012 Don't be jelly, i run everything on max and get great FPS. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DarrkLore Posted January 11, 2012 Share Posted January 11, 2012 (edited) the minimum specs require a multi core processor...why the heck would they do that if their software made no use of multiple core processors. Also AA is coming in patch 1.1 yet again read the dev tracker daily. Yeah I thought of that too. It should be noted that Bioware made a lot of changes to the engine to modify for TOR. For all we know getting it to be multi-threaded could've been one of those changes. If not, it's definitely in future plans from the devs of the engine itself. As a side note, I have a pretty decent computer and I haven't had any issues running the game smoothly on all max settings. Edited January 11, 2012 by DarrkLore Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Godsfear Posted January 11, 2012 Share Posted January 11, 2012 Don't be jelly, i run everything on max and get great FPS. I also run the game pretty well but I've noticed enough problems now with the game and dealt enough with guildies problems to know there is something going on with this game. for instance when you close the game out after a long play session and the amount of lag a computer experiences is over the top. For how bad the graphics are everyone should be getting more consistent fps. The graphics are barely a step up from WOW yet too many people are getting fps spikes even on highend machines. Our guild leader has a i7 and he has been having the fps drop issues in WF's. I'm sorry but any I7 should blow this game out of the water. I7's are more than enough for SWTOR's level of graphics. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MagusZ Posted January 11, 2012 Share Posted January 11, 2012 Oh hey, welcome to 2012. Multi-core processors have been mainstream for more than half a decade (and hyperthreading has been around even longer than that). The rest of the industry got with the program a long time ago and has allowed for their software to take advantage of multi-thread processing--why hasn't Bioware? I don't think I effectively got my point across. For the development of an engine, it's easier to code it for use on one core, one thread, mark potential locations for threading then once the code works, not optimally but works, go back and see where you can use parallelism to improve performance and where it just doesn't make sense. And yes, while we have had multi-core processors for 10 years (first one was the Intel POWER4 released in '01) parallelism has been around for far longer (ever heard of Beowulf clusters?). The concepts of parallelism are older and more important than flashing your processors specs saying "I have 8 million cores, why am I getting lag?). If it just isn't possible or efficient to do, why waste the resources to add it in if it won't actually "optimize" the code? Oh, not to mention the fact that debugging muti-threadded processes sucks hardcore. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Godsfear Posted January 11, 2012 Share Posted January 11, 2012 Yeah I thought of that too. It should be noted that Bioware made a lot of changes to the engine to modify for TOR. For all we know getting it to be multi-threaded could've been one of those changes. If not, it's definitely in future plans from the devs of the engine itself. As a side note, I have a pretty decent computer and I haven't had any issues running the game smoothly on all max settings. They run 2 .exe files to trick your computer into using 2 cores. You'll notice this in your task manager. Pretty weird work around, makes me wonder what the game would have been if they had used a real engine. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HerrFett Posted January 11, 2012 Share Posted January 11, 2012 (edited) They need to hire people that actually know how to optimize an engine. Their current employees should be fired because they did an awful job of optimizing it. ^This. Fire these noobs or give them a job at your useless CS Bioware.The ruin the game.SWTOR is technically the worst MMO ever coded.Even Warhammer Online is better than this POS.Hell,most F2P MMO's run better than this AAA title.What a joke and Bioware should be ashamed. Edited January 11, 2012 by HerrFett Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MagusZ Posted January 11, 2012 Share Posted January 11, 2012 Our guild leader has a i7 and he has been having the fps drop issues in WF's. I'm sorry but any I7 should blow this game out of the water. I7's are more than enough for SWTOR's level of graphics. That could likely be more of an issue with bad/unoptimized code for his video drivers. With the dawn of GPUs, FPS and graphics is more of a GPU issue than a processor issue. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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