Birtram Posted September 22, 2015 Share Posted September 22, 2015 (edited) The game runs better and areas load faster, but it looks like draw distance has taken a significant hit to achieve it. Texture detail only comes out fully once you are really close to things and there's a lot more pop-in. I want the game to run better, but I want honest performance improvements. Destroying render distance is cheating. Maybe something's bugged right now, perhaps the problem is on my end and I'm judging prematurely. Either way this is quite disappointing. Edited September 22, 2015 by Birtram Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sindorin Posted September 22, 2015 Share Posted September 22, 2015 The game runs better and areas load faster, but it looks like draw distance has taken a significant hit to achieve it. Texture detail only comes out fully once you are really close to things and there's a lot more pop-in. I want the game to run better, but I want honest performance improvements. Destroying render distance is cheating. Sounds to me like you want your cake and eat it too. Things in life have draw backs and compromises. Something that does everything well, excels at nothing. Something that excels at something, does poorly or average at everything else. Make up your mind what you want, before you post. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Birtram Posted September 22, 2015 Author Share Posted September 22, 2015 (edited) Yeah, I am absolutely nuts. How can I expect a game to run well with these outdated graphics in 2015 without having to sacrifice render distance this much? And don't get me started on how stupid it is that we still have a 32 bit client that doesn't even take advantage of all the power in modern processors. I understand that this custom engine is a mess and that there's only so much they can do with it. But I actually think that we should be able to increase the render distance and take a performance hit if we prefer it that way. I know I do. But yeah, that's the internet for you... Criticism is often considered petty entitlement. Edited September 22, 2015 by Birtram Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Theeko Posted September 22, 2015 Share Posted September 22, 2015 I think thats how they do it with MGS too, sacrificing draw distance for better upclose performance I notice that alot of thigns in the distance are all blurry most of the time or not even there till you use your binocs to scan. Witcher 3 is the opposite has a better draw distance and can see things alot clearer but the performance is so much slower than MGS is. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pietrastor Posted September 22, 2015 Share Posted September 22, 2015 (edited) Many games use heavily downscaled models at greater distance to avoid such obvious pop-ins, mainy open world titles like Assassin's Creed, the buildings have multiple versions that get displayed depending on how close they are. TOR could do it too but change like this would be much bigger effort Edited September 22, 2015 by Pietrastor Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cooIbreeze Posted September 22, 2015 Share Posted September 22, 2015 Mine is updating right now. I wonder if this will fix my FPS problems in warzones. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Reyze Posted September 22, 2015 Share Posted September 22, 2015 I wonder if these will help my server lag issues my typical server lag is 40-50 though at times it'll stay there at other times jump high then back down. I checked tracert and highest I got with two of those was 92 only have had this issue since the start of the year when they fixed the ability lag problem. Before that RARELY went into the red and even more rarely did I get dced but now its typically a daily thing that I go into the red. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Eraan Posted September 22, 2015 Share Posted September 22, 2015 (edited) They added FXAA which blurs everything a bit. At the moment it looks like medium AA is FXAA, high and very high are MSAA+FXAA. I'd prefer to have separate setting for FXAA since I'd prefer NVIDIA driver FXAA to it (it's higher quality) or just plain MSAA. At least it's good to see that they didn't remove in game MSAA (which I will enhance to 8x through driver). IMO it doesn't looks like there's a difference in detail pop in compared to previous release. EDIT: So medium is FXAA, high is MSAA and very high is both. Edited September 22, 2015 by Eraan Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bonzenaattori Posted September 22, 2015 Share Posted September 22, 2015 (edited) Seems easier to just toss the Draw distance setting on, also Background quality, and Distance skill quality would be useful also. A function that hides/conceals players or their dynamic skill animation graphics when in a high populated environment would REALLY give an edge for sparing people their eyes and their steam processors from bleeding PS - As far as I know I dont think Nvidia FXAA works like that... I'm pretty sure you turn the function OFF in-game, and then change the quality settings on Nvidia control panel and let it do the work... I donno tho, maybe every game is different. Edited September 22, 2015 by Bonzenaattori Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Birtram Posted September 22, 2015 Author Share Posted September 22, 2015 (edited) Seems easier to just toss the Draw distance setting on, also Background quality, and Distance skill quality would be useful also. A function that hides/conceals players or their dynamic skill animation graphics when in a high populated environment would REALLY give an edge for sparing people their eyes and their steam processors from bleeding Something I've always wanted is the possibility to disable certain ability effects from other group members. There's many operations in which the screen get absolutely cluttered with so many shiny effects and AoE reticules from everyone else's skills. It's useful and important to see some of them, of course, but for the most part I don't really get any useful information and it just makes everything really stressful for the eyes. Edited September 22, 2015 by Birtram Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Arunas Posted September 22, 2015 Share Posted September 22, 2015 Mine is updating right now. I wonder if this will fix my FPS problems in warzones. Nope. Still drops from 100+ on fleet and everywhere else to sub-30. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Malastare Posted September 22, 2015 Share Posted September 22, 2015 The game runs better and areas load faster, but it looks like draw distance has taken a significant hit to achieve it.... Yes, most "optimization" is about looking at trade-offs in code execution and tipping the scales from one side to the other: You trade CPU time for memory, code speed for extensibility, graphics performance vs quality vs flexibility, load times vs memory usage, game complexity vs modability.... It goes on and on. It's pretty rare that you come across a situation where you can make code changes that have no negatives. Even then, the trade-off is still somewhat paid in resource cost (but you were probably paying that already). A lot of the optimizations they've put into the game have had these sort of visible consequences, but most people simply don't care are aren't looking close enough to notice them. Texture atlasing was a great addition to the game in terms of display quality and texture performance, but it also added some mild weirdness in rendering at specific distances. They traded an overall improvement in appearance and performance for a limited degradation in behavior. Trade-Offs. Yeah, I am absolutely nuts. How can I expect a game to run well with these outdated graphics in 2015 without having to sacrifice render distance this much? The graphics are actually pretty good quality for an MMO. Comparing it to an FPS is simply apples and oranges. If you don't understand why, then some research is probably in order. The performance problems (in my sort-of professional opinion) mostly stem from the need to perform graphical updates in synchronization with a remote server. Limiting the amount of power required for rendering any given frame helps them manage the wide range of hardware being used to play the game. Giving users options for how much they want to use might be a nice thing to add, but remember that those sort of controls have a performance cost in themselves. And don't get me started on how stupid it is that we still have a 32 bit client that doesn't even take advantage of all the power in modern processors. There isn't much additional "power" available via x64. The major "power" upgrade in modern processors is the drastically improved IPC, integrated memory controllers, pipelined cache management, and better interfaces to the PCIe bus. You don't need an x64 client to take advantage of those things. The biggest improvement that 64bit compilation gives you is a bigger per-process memory limit. While SWTOR could benefit from that, the performance increase wouldn't be nearly what most armchair developers think it would be. If you're referring to a fully-multicore-capable client, then the potential is slightly higher. However, SWTOR doesn't really lend itself all that well to full multicore implementations. It's possible, of course, but server interactions still need to be primarily synchronous and unified, so even if the client could split out threads to handle other tasks, there would still be a main "game" thread that would need to handle authoritative game state. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AdamChattaway Posted September 22, 2015 Share Posted September 22, 2015 (edited) Sounds to me like you want your cake and eat it too. Things in life have draw backs and compromises. Something that does everything well, excels at nothing. Something that excels at something, does poorly or average at everything else. Make up your mind what you want, before you post. lol i swear to jebus every time i see your posts it says " you want your cake and eat it to " lol... i think you have cake on the brain. I don't hear anyone in England say that expression lol but in England we would buy a cake eat it and buy another lol or it would go stale. But aside a lot of games have smart LOD etc where they don't render things behind you or behind walls etc, this makes games alone run far better like ffxiv has, you cn toggle them on and off even to see the performance hit you get. swtor runs badly in dense areas or with lots of npcs such as the landing city on rishi but if they don't take the time to optimize it for each area it will just be a simple lower the render distance GG YOLO. So in some areas it looks the same because you can;t see past the objects in the way but others like open zones you see it much clearer as you see the long distance vistas Edited September 22, 2015 by AdamChattaway Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Uruare Posted September 22, 2015 Share Posted September 22, 2015 The criticism from the OP seems legit, though I'm forever biased and still think bioware made a crucial mistake in using this licensed engine rather than build their own. Its rather late in the game to be having leftover gripefests over that though, and I'm rather impressed by what they manage to continue to do within the limits set by a lot of people that probably don't even work there anymore. Hard to do anything but give a lot of thumbs up to the coders, in any case. They don't get to choose the software environment, but it's their job to with miracles in it all the same. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AdamChattaway Posted September 22, 2015 Share Posted September 22, 2015 (edited) Yes, most "optimization" is about looking at trade-offs in code execution and tipping the scales from one side to the other: You trade CPU time for memory, code speed for extensibility, graphics performance vs quality vs flexibility, load times vs memory usage, game complexity vs modability.... It goes on and on. It's pretty rare that you come across a situation where you can make code changes that have no negatives. Even then, the trade-off is still somewhat paid in resource cost (but you were probably paying that already). A lot of the optimizations they've put into the game have had these sort of visible consequences, but most people simply don't care are aren't looking close enough to notice them. Texture atlasing was a great addition to the game in terms of display quality and texture performance, but it also added some mild weirdness in rendering at specific distances. They traded an overall improvement in appearance and performance for a limited degradation in behavior. Trade-Offs. The graphics are actually pretty good quality for an MMO. Comparing it to an FPS is simply apples and oranges. If you don't understand why, then some research is probably in order. The performance problems (in my sort-of professional opinion) mostly stem from the need to perform graphical updates in synchronization with a remote server. Limiting the amount of power required for rendering any given frame helps them manage the wide range of hardware being used to play the game. Giving users options for how much they want to use might be a nice thing to add, but remember that those sort of controls have a performance cost in themselves. There isn't much additional "power" available via x64. The major "power" upgrade in modern processors is the drastically improved IPC, integrated memory controllers, pipelined cache management, and better interfaces to the PCIe bus. You don't need an x64 client to take advantage of those things. The biggest improvement that 64bit compilation gives you is a bigger per-process memory limit. While SWTOR could benefit from that, the performance increase wouldn't be nearly what most armchair developers think it would be. If you're referring to a fully-multicore-capable client, then the potential is slightly higher. However, SWTOR doesn't really lend itself all that well to full multicore implementations. It's possible, of course, but server interactions still need to be primarily synchronous and unified, so even if the client could split out threads to handle other tasks, there would still be a main "game" thread that would need to handle authoritative game state. Interesting, but isn't SWTOR still a single threat engine? as for 64 bit a MMo called Mortal Online ran like crap with many people and when they upgraded to 64 bit they made a video showing 1000 bats on screen still with high fps as opposed to the crap fps on 32 bit, so it obviously does something. I remember making a video about FPS on coruscant i had like 97 fps facing a mob, soon as i started 1 v 1 combat with the mob and spell effects were flying the fps dropped by up to like 35 FOR 1V1! It's just that random in swtor. But like i said in my thread before i play ESO on ultra gfx with 100 people on screen and 90 ish fps, combat hardly at all reduces fps, and the gfx are prob the best of all mmo's. Even age of conan did not run this bad at launch when it only utilized 30% of an AMD GPU lol... Edited September 22, 2015 by AdamChattaway Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DethlaHadyn Posted September 22, 2015 Share Posted September 22, 2015 no improvements at all for me, in some instances it's actually way worse. example: arenas granted me 40-50 fps average... now after update, my average fps is 25fps. total freaking garbage.. this game can go to hell. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Malastare Posted September 22, 2015 Share Posted September 22, 2015 Interesting, but isn't SWTOR still a single threat engine? Technically, no. SWTOR runs in two processes, which implicitly means it has at least two threads. Within those two processes there are additional threads to do various things, however, the bulk of the work is indeed done in just two threads, with each process having one thread doing the majority of CPU work. Of that, the "main" process/thread does ~60-80% of the work, So, while it has multiple threads, there is still a single thread that does most of the work of actually performing game actions. The second process and its main thread seem to be focused on the loading and management of other resources, rather than game actions. as for 64 bit a MMo called Mortal Online ran like crap with many people and when they upgraded to 64 bit they made a video showing 1000 bats on screen still with high fps as opposed to the crap fps on 32 bit, so it obviously does something. No. It's not obvious. You just associated it with the 32bit-64bit change because it feels like it should be big. Do some research on what 64bit architectures really are before claiming that its a solution to all such problems. Again: the main difference between 32bit and 64bit compilation is per-process memory limits. That's not going to do a lot to improve fps. If you want to claim that it is, then please provide some technical description of what mechanism is at play. If you don't understand the topic, then at least research it before you start making claims about what it can do. I remember making a video about FPS on coruscant i had like 97 fps facing a mob, soon as i started 1 v 1 combat with the mob and spell effects were flying the fps dropped by up to like 35 FOR 1V1! It's just that random in swtor. Again, if you understand how SWTOR and video games in general (or even just general software) works, you'll see that its not random at all. During the time that you are just looking at the mob, there is very little client-server interaction that is necessary. Your local client can easily fill in the gaps between server status updates with normal animations. The moment you start attacking, your client starts sending updates on your position, direction and abilities being used. The server responds with updates on your characters status (HP, resource levels), the mobs position and direction, its HP, the abilities (animations) its using and how far along it is... All those updates need to be synchronized and the local display needs to have that state reflected on a sub-second timescale. If any of those changes result in an animation difference, then that needs to be loaded, calculated and sent off for rendering. The more changes that need to be made, the lower your framerate is going to drop as the game spends more time calculating changes and waiting to render until they are done. But like i said in my thread before i play ESO on ultra gfx with 100 people on screen and 90 ish fps, combat hardly at all reduces fps. Understand: The graphics on ESO are not notably more detailed than SWTOR. They just have more detailed textures. The simplistic ("cartoonish") graphics of SWTOR are not a result of simple graphics, but of the designed art style. You like the art style of ESO better? That's fine, but the model complexity is not higher than SWTOR (from what I've seen at least). As for the number of players on a screen at a time, part of this is indeed due to the method with which SWTOR uses for managing multiple player actions and server synchronization, but its also just as much to do with the simpler rendering routines used in ESO. SWTOR ends up using a lot more reflection, bloom, particle effects, dynamic lighting and customized shaders than ESO appears to. That doesn't mean that SWTOR is super amazing, it just means they have a more complex rendering routine. Being honest, it's probably more than they should have used, but it was the way they designed it. ESO seems to handle multiple players better than SWTOR, but it also has simpler animations and I'm not convinced it would handle the level of effects used in SWTOR all that much better. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
raunotonts Posted September 22, 2015 Share Posted September 22, 2015 (edited) The game runs better and areas load faster, but it looks like draw distance has taken a significant hit to achieve it. Texture detail only comes out fully once you are really close to things and there's a lot more pop-in. I want the game to run better, but I want honest performance improvements. Destroying render distance is cheating. Maybe something's bugged right now, perhaps the problem is on my end and I'm judging prematurely. Either way this is quite disappointing. I'm taking forever to update for some reason but if that is the case - i'm more than thrilled. SWTOR always had a huge draw distance imo and the fact that we couldn't edit it was total bs. Apparently it was an option in beta? Sure it makes the game look better but honestly i don't need a detailed version of that building far-far there etc. I went from high-medium settings to ultra in WoW just by playing with draw distance. Edited September 22, 2015 by raunotonts Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Icestar Posted September 22, 2015 Share Posted September 22, 2015 I have faster loading times but I have noticed a drop in framerate. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lecaja Posted September 22, 2015 Share Posted September 22, 2015 Do benchmarks change? Do I need to worry that my computer can no longer run on what was the current setting yesterday? Basic questions I know but I don't know how these things work. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RickShan Posted September 22, 2015 Share Posted September 22, 2015 The patch also seems to have made the sound even louder... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BrintoSFJ Posted September 22, 2015 Share Posted September 22, 2015 . bla..bla ..bla..(I AM SUPER GAME DEVELOPER) SWTOR ends up using a lot more reflection, bloom, particle effects, dynamic lighting and customized shaders than ESO appears to. PFFTTT....FTTTT......bwahahahah...AHAHAHAHA....yeah man and i am king of england...hahahahah..ahahahah... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Glower Posted September 22, 2015 Share Posted September 22, 2015 (edited) After 3.3.2 everything is blurry for me even with disabled AA, not sure why. Many games use heavily downscaled models at greater distance to avoid such obvious pop-ins, mainy open world titles like Assassin's Creed, the buildings have multiple versions that get displayed depending on how close they are. TOR could do it too but change like this would be much bigger effort They already did it from release date, even animations are limited at the distance - they are more like old spites. Edited September 22, 2015 by Glower Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Apoll Posted September 22, 2015 Share Posted September 22, 2015 At 3.1mbit line, the patch has taken 3 hours to get from 70% to 83% I will stop it and go to let it download overnight. Off to WOT tonight it seems. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
branmakmuffin Posted September 22, 2015 Share Posted September 22, 2015 (edited) After 3.3.2 everything is blurry for me even with disabled AA, not sure why. If you disabled Alcoholics Anonymous, everything is blurry because you are drunk. Edited September 22, 2015 by branmakmuffin Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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