Hero Engine: The cause for FPS issues?

[Limecake]

please don't read the Hero's engines notes and complain about SWTOR since the two engines are completely different. (you know since Bioware has been heavily modifying the engine). And while it's true it is only single threaded I believe they have a 'workaround' where you are running multiple .exes at the same time.

[Godsfear]

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.

 

You're making it sound as if BW knows something the ENTIRE industry does not? Should rage have been made a single threaded piece of software then?

 

By your logic Skyrim should have been single threaded as well?

 

How about Batman Arkham city? Single threaded as well right?

 

I wish RIFT was single threaded since it's obvious that every other single developer made the mistake of using multithreaded software.

[shanert]

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.

 

Threads are that mystic "thing" that are spread around the different cores, not whole processes. And right at this moment, the two swtor-processes created 38 threads here, that are spread around all 4 cores on my system.

[Soulaufein]

They run 2 .exe files to trick your computer into using 2 cores. You'll notice this in your task manager.

 

Precisely what I've noticed. IMO, Bioware realized they screwed up some months ago and are trying to "push with their bellies" until a real CORE fix comes.

 

In my line of work, I also use a supplier's engine. There is only so much you can do: you can stretch long to cover up some flaws as long as you want, but core capabilities changes HAVE to come from the original supplier.

[MagusZ]

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.

 

Which .exe files? Are they the same or are they different? Could one be the game itself and the other manage some other process? That statement is like saying "oh, I run Windows, but its tricking me into using multiple cores by these 8 .exe files". I honestly don't know, I'm running the game on a crap computer and can't open up the task manager while playing to test it.

[Godsfear]

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.

 

what's a"GPU"

 

Your telling me a guy who has been building gaming comps since I was 22 (Im 35 now btw) that it could be his GPU drivers?

 

Ty captain obvious. I'll get right on that.

[shanert]

In my line of work, I also use a supplier's engine. There is only so much you can do: you can stretch long to cover up some flaws as long as you want, but core capabilities changes HAVE to come from the original supplier.

 

You can do anything you wanna do, if you buy a license to modify the source-code ... and this is, what big developers do.

 

If you are such an expert, you should have noticed that you can open your task-manager, right click on a column and activate the threads-column. There you go ... now you can see how much threads a process has created and now what? These threads are spread around your cores ...

[ManOSteal]

I question whether or not anyone complaining in this thread actually understand what they are talking about when it comes to core usage and threads.

[shanert]

And to bring this to an end, read the part about the multicore-support: http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,767634/Star-Wars-The-Old-Republic-Bioware-considering-Direct-X-11-in-the-future/News/

[Godsfear]

I question whether or not anyone complaining in this thread actually understand what they are talking about when it comes to core usage and threads.

 

Yeah, your'e right man.

 

This thread here from the FRICKING OWNER OF THE HERO ENGINE............doesn't clear it up enough.

 

Oh, what's that? You didn't bother to read the thread the owner of the hero engine posted and then dev's discuss the fps problems?

 

Oh typical.

 

The thread on the hero engine website is all about the fps drop when going outdoors or indoors.

 

The engine is old, super old.

[Bigaus]

Tom's Hardware verified that SWTOR graphics scale and scale well with multi-core CPUs...

 

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/star-wars-gaming-tests-review,3087-8.html

[MagusZ]

If you guys are really going "fractured threads" well, there is a difference between a "thread" and parallelism. Windows XP, heck Windows 3.1 had multiple threads. They just weren't all active at the same time. Parallelism is preforming a single task in multiple threads to get the end result faster.

 

All the modern supercomputers do that. It's their job. But most of what they do is math intensive calculations. However, with end user software like games there is one major thing slowing the program down from preforming optimally and using all the power the the computer has...and its looking at the monitor. Yes, its the interactions with the user for the software to grind out the graphical calculations. Why do you think Pixar and Dreamworks have render farms? They storyboard, movements, and everything with code, then leave it to the farms to render out the graphics so it can do all the calculations it needs without waiting on slow users.

 

And if you really want to know what's going on, look up a Performance Monitor, not Task Manager. Task Manager views applications. Performance Monitors view what is actually happening on the hardware.

[wanderica]

You're making it sound as if BW knows something the ENTIRE industry does not? Should rage have been made a single threaded piece of software then?

 

By your logic Skyrim should have been single threaded as well?

 

How about Batman Arkham city? Single threaded as well right?

 

I wish RIFT was single threaded since it's obvious that every other single developer made the mistake of using multithreaded software.

 

 

That's not what he said. Calm down. He simply said that sometimes it makes sense to use multi-cores and sometimes it does not. That's it. No more, no less. To use your car example, that ferrari that goes 200 MPH counts for nothing if you're driving on a curvy dirt road.

[zerobounds]

I used to use all my CPU cores.... Then I took an arrow to the knee. Edited January 11, 2012 by zerobounds

[Vandrel-Blitz]

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?

 

 

I don't have a FPS issue

 

 

Generally people who experience issues have out-dated hardware or a poor mix of hardware on a system

 

(I run SWTOR on a ASUS G74SX BBK7 *laptop*, max settings)

[MagusZ]

what's a"GPU"

 

Your telling me a guy who has been building gaming comps since I was 22 (Im 35 now btw) that it could be his GPU drivers?

 

Ty captain obvious. I'll get right on that.

 

Trust me. Stranger things have happened. Unless you code the drivers yourself you don't know what its doing. And I never questioned you knowing what you were doing, it was just a suggestion. You have to take the whole beast of the computer in mind when you approach a problem.

[San-Holo]

You can do anything you wanna do, if you buy a license to modify the source-code ... and this is, what big developers do.

 

If you are such an expert, you should have noticed that you can open your task-manager, right click on a column and activate the threads-column. There you go ... now you can see how much threads a process has created and now what? These threads are spread around your cores ...

 

You do realize that a process can spawn multiple child threads and still be "defacto" single threaded right?

It very depends on how you have designed the task scheduler to execute tasks, there could be multiple "tasks" running on individual async threads which are all running at the same time, and there also could be countless tasks which are "running" at the same time over multiple threads but due to synchronous design each "out of focus" thread is paused, or there are countless idle tasks waiting for orders of other tasks to finish.

 

I have a Core I7 4 Core with HT CPU, i have used several monitoring utilities including attaching a real time debugger to the process, besides finding some very alarming things like the fact that the ToR launcher reads allot of stuff like the contents of your main drive, you documents folders, and your URL cache, it does not seem to be a multi-threaded application, at least not an efficient one.

I have been trying t debug the performance issue i have with ToR, i do not know how heavily modified their version of hero is, it does seem to be an odd peace of work, what they call a "remote rendered" is the weirdest thing i've seen in a while now, too me it looks like there are 2 executable 1 in charge of the rendering, and one in charged of every thing else, also the whole alt-tab rending of the entire world is not something i've seen with the latest versions of hero.

[Kanharn]

Rubbish PC's cause FPS issues, not the Engine. If it was the Engine everyone would be effected by it.

[MagusZ]

Rubbish PC's cause FPS issues, not the Engine. If it was the Engine everyone would be effected by it.

 

Honestly, I support this. And I'm running the game, with expected delay and load time issues, on a computer below the minimum requirements of the game. But I'm still able to play.

[Drahkor]

Posted in another thread, gonna drop this here too.

 

Intel® Core™ i7 CPU 920 @ 2.67GHz (8 CPUs)

12288MB RAM DDR3-1066 (OCZ Gold XTC OCZ3G13332G)

ECS Black Series X58B-A

EVGA Geforce 590 GTX - Using the latest BETA drivers.

PSU Thermaltake 875-950W

Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit SP1

__________________________________________________________________________

Questing in Taris.

http://i1091.photobucket.com/albums/i388/ccespedes33/Screenshot_2012-01-11_07_39_59_797442.jpg

http://i1091.photobucket.com/albums/i388/ccespedes33/Screenshot_2012-01-11_11_43_14_054689.jpg

 

Voidstar*

 

http://i1091.photobucket.com/albums/i388/ccespedes33/Screenshot_2012-01-11_07_45_28_471241.jpg

http://i1091.photobucket.com/albums/i388/ccespedes33/Screenshot_2012-01-11_07_47_36_011536.jpg

 

Alderaan*

 

http://i1091.photobucket.com/albums/i388/ccespedes33/Screenshot_2012-01-11_12_29_24_099126.jpg

http://i1091.photobucket.com/albums/i388/ccespedes33/Screenshot_2012-01-11_12_22_55_641908.jpg

http://i1091.photobucket.com/albums/i388/ccespedes33/Screenshot_2012-01-11_12_25_33_000908.jpg

 

P.S - Can't wait for Ilum

__________________________________________________________________________

I don't know if I belong to the "5%" group or if its that 2004 engine or if Bioware is hiding something.

 

What I do know is that I will not be paying 15 bucks a month to watch a slideshow of my character getting pwnd.

Edited January 11, 2012 by Drahkor

[shanert]

... it does not seem to be a multi-threaded application ...

 

Then go to your task-manager and limit the two swtor.exe - processes to just 1 core and you will see, how well TOR uses all of your 4 cores.

 

I have all 4 cores around 40% and 60% if I limit swtor to 1 core, this 1 core is at 100% and the other 3 around 5% and 10%.

 

tomshardware is lying? And Matt Shaw and Bill Dalton are lying too?

 

Bad performance? Maybe ... because of a engine that don't support multi-core-CPUs? No, because it supports them.

Edited January 11, 2012 by shanert

[Your_dominus]

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.

 

It's not opinion, its a fact. Dated game engine, with bad optimization.

You can chose to be ignorant about it all you want, and the fact remains.

 

-Bad tiling

-Low res textures

-lol *** with the foliage rendering distance

-object, npc and player pop in beyond 100 yards or so

 

Playing the game on low settings doesn't stop the issue from existing, and playing it maxed out obliviously of the opinion it's " awesome" doesn't stop it from existing either.

 

Oh, and about the juttery and low min fps on the fleet. If you claim not to have it, you are lying.

Fact.

Edited January 11, 2012 by Your_dominus

[Your_dominus]

nvm** Edited January 11, 2012 by Your_dominus

[derkiederk]

Posted in another thread, gonna drop this here too.

 

Intel® Core™ i7 CPU 920 @ 2.67GHz (8 CPUs)

12288MB RAM DDR3-1066 (OCZ Gold XTC OCZ3G13332G)

ECS Black Series X58B-A

EVGA Geforce 590 GTX - Using the latest BETA drivers.

PSU Thermaltake 875-950W

Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit SP1

...

 

Wait, you seriously bought all that high end stuff and put it in an ECS mobo? Why on earth would you do that?

[MagusZ]

Intel® Core™ i7 CPU 920 @ 2.67GHz (8 CPUs)

12288MB RAM DDR3-1066 (OCZ Gold XTC OCZ3G13332G)

ECS Black Series X58B-A

EVGA Geforce 590 GTX - Using the latest BETA drivers.

PSU Thermaltake 875-950W

Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit SP1

 

Did you upgrade to beta drivers in response to it not working with the released drivers? Like games, BETA of any kind is not to be trusted, but could be bug ridden. If you had them before, I'd recommend flagging the issue with the NVIDIA, or see if they know of the issue already. SWTOR just came out and if there are any driver compatibility issues, they might not be resolved yet.