[Official High Resolution Textures Post] Can we get a clarification on this?

[PostalTwinkie]

Ad hominem attacks are not going to lend your argument more credibility.

 

Also, I like to think that I applied a lot of reason. But I guess it is female logic instead of testosterone fuelled logic?

 

My argument boiled down to: I am not experiencing any of the problems you describe. Have you checked the memory of your graphcis card as that is frequently a culprit in poor performance and random crashes.

 

 

 

Or, you know, they do actually know what they are talking about and can honestly say that they run the game at 1920x1200 in high resolution everything and rarely see the game plunge below 60fps? (I am running the game on a dual core E8500 and a HD6850 for your information. Hardly top of the line these days)

 

Of course I have to bow to -your- superior knowledge of how -my- system runs and accept that what I am seeing is just the figment of my imagination and that the game really crashes all the time and barely manages 3fps?

 

 

 

Yes, yes. The game does not run fine for you. It does, however, for me. So maybe I was making a rational point by saying that just maybe it is not -just- the game and its graphics engine, that is the cause of the problem.

 

 

 

And all of that means exactly nothing today, where you have problems. You can complain that Bioware should have made different design choices but that is really not helping you in any way or form. The harsh reality is that Bioware has, at this moment, a limited number of employees capable on working on this type of coding and a lot of issues they need to be working on. So, as Bioware already said, the high resolution textures will eventually make it back into the game once they can do so without impacting the performance of the game.

 

 

 

 

I agree that it is difficult to argue about the graphics. I do not mind them as to me they look just fine as is. I do not see much difference unless I move into close up range, which during gameplay I will do but rarely.

That does not mean I get to say it is a non-issue. But it also means you do not get to say it is a huge issue for lots of players. At the end of the day we can only speak for ourselves.

 

I will say to you what I have said to others that say their game runs fine and they don't have issues....

 

It isn't possible, everyone has hitches and frame rate issues, here is why!

 

For whatever reason, I am sure someone thought they had a good one, there are halt codes issued within the engine under certain circumstances. When these halt commands are executed the rendering engine is shut down, temporarily. The two proven and confirmed circumstances are when a player opens a menu and when new data comes into the field of view of the player. In both situations halt codes are executed on the rendering engine until the menu, or new player, data is retrieved. Rendering does not commence again until after the retrieval of data.

 

This is executed for everyone! This is coded into the game engine itself to happen! Because of this inherent flaw in design it is impossible for this game to run "fine" or "flawlessly" as a lot of people claim. When I open a menu and the game halts, even for 3ms, that isn't ok.

 

This is also why a lot of people have had decent improvement by creating a RAM Drive, because it GREATLY increases the rate at which data can be handled by the client.

 

So no, by design this game can't run fine.

Edited February 17, 2012 by PostalTwinkie

[Marctraider]

How can people expect this game to work properly anyway (Graphics wise) if their own Graphics preferences pane is half broken, stuff disappeared after beta, et cetera.

 

Anyone give me proof that the graphics preferences are not half-broken.

 

Anti aliasing Low and medium are both off here.

 

Anisotropic filtering is either off or 16x, medium doesn't have a single effect.

 

Shadow quality/distance slider gone after beta ended.

 

Lets not forget the texture quality setting was half broken and now they removed ONE entrance, why not fix the rest of the stuff I mentioned? It seems like they are not even AWARE of it. I wonder who is actually responsible for testing this stuff if it really works anyway.

 

So much inconsistencies here. Also, i have a feeling the 'presets' Low, medium and high are all messed up as well. And I have a feeling they change more then the manual quality settings that we can control.

[PostalTwinkie]

How can people expect this game to work properly anyway (Graphics wise) if their own Graphics preferences pane is half broken, stuff disappeared after beta, et cetera.

 

Anyone give me proof that the graphics preferences are not half-broken.

 

Anti aliasing Low and medium are both off here.

 

Anisotropic filtering is either off or 16x, medium doesn't have a single effect.

 

Shadow quality/distance slider gone after beta ended.

 

Lets not forget the texture quality setting was half broken and now they removed ONE entrance, why not fix the rest of the stuff I mentioned? It seems like they are not even AWARE of it. I wonder who is actually responsible for testing this stuff if it really works anyway.

 

So much inconsistencies here. Also, i have a feeling the 'presets' Low, medium and high are all messed up as well. And I have a feeling they change more then the manual quality settings that we can control.

 

Dude! That awesome Q & A today totally answ.......never mind, it didn't....

[Marctraider]

Dude! That awesome Q & A today totally answ.......never mind, it didn't....

 

Oh wait. I must have missed that very very important show todaaaaaa. Nvm.

[Dextral]

All I can say is that if Bioware had taken the time needed to develop their own game engine we would have the high resolution textures at launch.

 

That launch may have been a few years later but at least that game would be up to the usual standards I am used to seeing in a Bioware game.

 

They decided to go with a third party game engine (Hero) and because of that the game can't really handle crowds or high res textures and many more things as well.

 

Seeing that almost the same way. Actually third party engines aren't bad, too. But instead of taking one that had already proven to be capable they chose one even the engines developers deemed not usable in production at that time. And BW even didn't update their version as the original engine grew more mature, instead they tried to do it themselves and well, we now see how that played out.

[MGriffith]

I will say to you what I have said to others that say their game runs fine and they don't have issues....

 

It isn't possible, everyone has hitches and frame rate issues, here is why!

 

You keep repeating that -everybody- must have problems with the graphics side of this game, despite the fact that I say that I don't. And it does not take that much of looking through the forums to find others who also say that they don't have problems, running 60fps pretty consistently, maybe dropping to 40 in a crowded fleet or on warzones.

 

So ... either you are not exactly right ... or you claim that everybody who disagrees with your statement is a liar without any evidence to back up that claim.

 

Either way I am done arguing with you.

[Mineria]

You keep repeating that -everybody- must have problems with the graphics side of this game, despite the fact that I say that I don't. And it does not take that much of looking through the forums to find others who also say that they don't have problems, running 60fps pretty consistently, maybe dropping to 40 in a crowded fleet or on warzones.

 

So ... either you are not exactly right ... or you claim that everybody who disagrees with your statement is a liar without any evidence to back up that claim.

 

Either way I am done arguing with you.

 

In some sense he is correct.

When I played on a low populated server I never had big impact on my FPS, but when I started to play on a heavy populated server I noticed a difference.

The main difference is on the Fleets.

With 60 players on a fleet, fps is still fine but as soon as the number goes over 200, it start to become an issue.

Now to the bad part of it, it is NOT a graphical issue, even BioWare knows about that.

See, thing is, when those 200+ players are on the Fleet, they are spread all over the place, so even when your character stares at a wall fps still gets hurt badly.

But the GPU load is pretty low and temperatures fine, it isn't even sweating.

What does sweat is one CPU core, which means that the engine is doing calculations for data that we most likely don't need here and now and neither in a few seconds.

So what is the engine trying to get?

All stats, gear, skills etc for all character on the Fleet at once or something else as insane?

 

I usually have the game up at 111fps (I suspect that it has a cap there too) while running around and questing etc.

So there is plenty of room for high resolution textures like we had during beta play.

[MGriffith]

In some sense he is correct.

With 60 players on a fleet, fps is still fine but as soon as the number goes over 200, it start to become an issue.

Now to the bad part of it, it is NOT a graphical issue, even BioWare knows about that.

See, thing is, when those 200+ players are on the Fleet, they are spread all over the place, so even when your character stares at a wall fps still gets hurt badly.

But the GPU load is pretty low and temperatures fine, it isn't even sweating.

What does sweat is one CPU core, which means that the engine is doing calculations for data that we most likely don't need here and now and neither in a few seconds.

So what is the engine trying to get?

All stats, gear, skills etc for all character on the Fleet at once or something else as insane?

 

From what you describe (and what can be seen of the game) it seems that the graphics engine is optimised for open world zone design. This does allow for more spectacular landscapes and scenery, but it does mean that the client computer (and the server) has to work harder to keep track of where everything is, and what is visible or not.

If my assumption is correct that would explain why the npcs and mobs in the game are fairly stationary (you can optimise away a lot of calculations by using interpolation if one of the objects you want to run visibility calculations for is staying put. Unfortunately other players are not so predictable and if there are 200 of them running around that involves a lot of occlustion calculations.

It would also explain the fairly low threshold after which the servers start spawning off instances of a world zone. Otherwise the servers would get swamped with handling too many data requests.

 

There is not much that can be done about it (if I am correct that is), since the characteristics of the game engine determine zone design and many of the game mechanics and even the networking code (games typically attempt to predict what a character is going to be doing so they can do pre-calculations and presend data on the assumption what the character is doing. It is even used to recognise bots and exploits). It may be possible to add sub zones that could not possibly see into each other to quickly cull npcs and characters from the calculations, but looking at the way the fleet zone is designed (especially the Z-shaped corridors between the various parts of the station) I would be quite surprised if that was not already the case. To verify though you would have to go to the corridor connecting the four ship hangers (the least crowded area of the station that is entirely separated from the rest) and see if fps recovers there.

[Bearaids]

Up

 

If this isnt fixed by the time my 60 day card is out i might consider not going for a new one...Srsly why did you realease a game that has SOO MANY problems?

[Schizman]

Sorry, I'm too full of myself to listen to others being full of themselves today.

 

Did my daily though

[cipher_nemo]

The main difference is on the Fleets.

With 60 players on a fleet, fps is still fine but as soon as the number goes over 200, it start to become an issue.

Now to the bad part of it, it is NOT a graphical issue, even BioWare knows about that.

See, thing is, when those 200+ players are on the Fleet, they are spread all over the place, so even when your character stares at a wall fps still gets hurt badly.

But the GPU load is pretty low and temperatures fine, it isn't even sweating.

What does sweat is one CPU core, which means that the engine is doing calculations for data that we most likely don't need here and now and neither in a few seconds.

So what is the engine trying to get?

All stats, gear, skills etc for all character on the Fleet at once or something else as insane?

 

Ditto. The lag when servers have even the slightest population in certain areas means that EA/Bioware either 1.) doesn't have enough bandwidth, 2.) doesn't have enough server processing power, or 3.) has very bloated, clunky networking code for the game. I would guess that the latter is the reason, but only Bioware knows this. At any rate we can test this on our own PCs because our local processing load for our GPUs does not increase while on our fleets vs. other areas. In fact, GPU processing power is much more intense on specific planets/areas, especially where we encounter particle effects such as fog, haze, smoke, or gusting dust/snow.

 

It's LONG OVERDUE that Bioware stop talking out of their you-know-whats and come clean on this.

Edited February 19, 2012 by cipher_nemo

[Toweleeeie]

You keep repeating that -everybody- must have problems with the graphics side of this game, despite the fact that I say that I don't. And it does not take that much of looking through the forums to find others who also say that they don't have problems, running 60fps pretty consistently, maybe dropping to 40 in a crowded fleet or on warzones.

 

So ... either you are not exactly right ... or you claim that everybody who disagrees with your statement is a liar without any evidence to back up that claim.

 

Either way I am done arguing with you.

 

This thread is not about frame rate, please use the correct thread.

 

This is about High Resolution Textures, I dont care if it lags me out. It is my right to do so. I does not effect anyone else. I would rather play at 30 fps with a good looking game then to play at 60 fps on trash.

Edited February 20, 2012 by Toweleeeie

[Fomby]

This thread is not about frame rate, please use the correct thread.

 

This is about High Resolution Textures, I dont care if it lags me out. It is my right to do so. I does not effect anyone else. I would rather play at 30 fps with a good looking game then to play at 60 fps on trash.

 

Well said. I too would rather play a pretty game at lower fps than the ugly one I have been tricked into playing.

[Jemfisto]

Well said. I too would rather play a pretty game at lower fps than the ugly one I have been tricked into playing.

 

Agreed. However most of us that have high end computers should be able to run this without a problem. Lag issues related to optimization are a seperate issue

[Schizman]

Not feeling the same as yesterday, but still not up to listen to some of your ego's blabbing.

 

Did my daily though

[Techronomicon]

Relatively new to the game, been playing for just over a week now. While I do love the game, sadly I am turned off by the muddied textures I have to look at while viewing my toon. In a game like this you should get excited to see what your new gear is going to look like, but each time I am disappointed due to the low textures. My free sub time ends in March and I can't see myself resubbing unless this issue is resolved. I keep hearing people tell me playablity over graphics......is it too much to ask for both?

[wifeaggro]

Relatively new to the game, been playing for just over a week now. While I do love the game, sadly I am turned off by the muddied textures I have to look at while viewing my toon. In a game like this you should get excited to see what your new gear is going to look like, but each time I am disappointed due to the low textures. My free sub time ends in March and I can't see myself resubbing unless this issue is resolved. I keep hearing people tell me playablity over graphics......is it too much to ask for both?

 

No its not Other games have done it and are doing it. EQ2 AOC Lotro Rift Aion. allof them have high resolution textures. have the same or lower Min reqs and perform far better in the FPS department. the issue is the engine not Performance over playablity its bad optimisation. High res textures were in beta for a day, they removed them because it was so poorly optimised people had severe issues playing.

 

then bioware tried to cover up the isuse by saying the medium options were actually the high res textures until the beta players spoke up and called them on it. do not anticpate it getting any better . they are no silent on the issue claiming the are going to polish it up a little. But i doubt we will see high res textures in this game unless the rip their engine apart and fix it.

[purrcatnip]

Hallarious.

 

200-300M dollar game doesnt have high res textures?

 

Rift has them. No one even heard of Trion, yet they released and within a month had LFG, a great set of PvE/PvP content with logical rewards and -gasp- and end game.

 

Tera is coming out state side pretty soon and from what I see in the beta, the game knocks the socks off SWTOR. Get this..the combat is actually fun. It is not a complete rip off the classic WoW mechanics and talent trees.

 

And even if Tera somehow dissapoints, GW2 is around the corner.

 

Good job BW in 'innovating' a remake of 2007 WoW, complete with low res textures, talent trees, borring PvE Design, but yet somehow missing other features it had at that time (like viable PvP, Arenas, LFG, etc).

[Urko]

Relatively new to the game, been playing for just over a week now. While I do love the game, sadly I am turned off by the muddied textures I have to look at while viewing my toon. In a game like this you should get excited to see what your new gear is going to look like, but each time I am disappointed due to the low textures. My free sub time ends in March and I can't see myself resubbing unless this issue is resolved. I keep hearing people tell me playablity over graphics......is it too much to ask for both?

 

I agree exactly, and end of March is for me too.

 

Playability over graphics to a degree , but in an MMO you want the best textures possible for the gear, its all part of an MMO to show off the gear.

 

As much as the general game is fun when i zoom in on my latest gear or another players it makes me think when i see the awful textures, why am i playing this.

Edited February 20, 2012 by Urko

[Gravestrike]

I agree exactly, and end of March is for me too.

 

Playability over graphics to a degree , but in an MMO you want the best textures possible for the gear, its all part of an MMO to show off the gear.

 

As much as the general game is fun when i zoom in on my latest gear or another players it makes me think when i see the awful textures, why am i playing this.

 

I know.. I just watched the Guild Wars 2 beta footage of the character creator with preset armors... and I was like why am I putting up with the lack of dev competency to create the high-res textures game that a game launched in 2012 should offer...

[Techronomicon]

I'm truely disappointed, I can really see myself being a long time sub. I haven't really felt this great about an MMO since SWG pre NGE. It's sad that these textures detract from what is a fun and what could be a gorgeous game.

 

I do notice one business trend on BWs part that I do not like however. Their inclination to decide what is acceptable playablilty and what isn't. For example AA is unenabled on ATI 6900 series cards according to BW patch notes and posts because they say it causes unacceptable frame loss. Well I have forced it thru CCC and it plays just fine, in fact it plays just as well with it as it does w/o.

 

Bioware let me decide what is acceptable and what is not, please do not decide for me. If high res textures cause unaccpetable frames I will be the judge of that, it shouldn't be you. If it doesn't play well then I will lower it, that is what options are for. Afterall we are not hamstrung like consoles are, so don't treat it as such.

Edited February 20, 2012 by Techronomicon

[Fomby]

I'm truely disappointed, I can really see myself being a long time sub. I haven't really felt this great about an MMO since SWG pre NGE. It's sad that these textures detract from what is a fun and what could be a gorgeous game.

 

I do notice one business trend on BWs part that I do not like however. Their inclination to decide what is acceptable playablilty and what isn't. For example AA is unenabled on ATI 6900 series cards according to BW patch notes and posts because they say it causes unacceptable frame loss. Well I have forced it thru CCC and it plays just fine, in fact it plays just as well with it as it does w/o.

 

Bioware let me decide what is acceptable and what is not, please do not decide for me. If high res textures cause unaccpetable frames I will be the judge of that, it shouldn't be you. If it doesn't play well then I will lower it, that is what options are for. Afterall we are not hamstrung like consoles are, so don't treat it as such.

 

 

Agreed, let me decide if something isn't worth the graphics upgrade. If the game starts to lag ill do the intelligent thing and lower some settings.

[Toweleeeie]

So I read a post today where someone said that Stephen Reid posted High Res Textures are no longer coming with 1.2 in March.

 

Is this true?

[Loendar]

So I read a post today where someone said that Stephen Reid posted High Res Textures are no longer coming with 1.2 in March.

 

Is this true?

 

They never were to my knowledge. There has been no confirmation that they are making any texture adjustments beyond what they have in place now anywhere since they stated that low/high (no med) option change - anything else is just conjecture.

[Sky_walkerPL]

And even if they'll make any improvement - it won't go beyond allowing game to use same quality of textures as it uses in cutscenes.

Which still isn't nowhere near "good enough".