To the kind attention of developers # Re: Performance issue

[samich]

The whole arguement that this game has so much more depth then other games which is why it runs worse is ridiculous.

The flight model isn't drastically more complex then some other flight sims around at the moment and while it may be better/more accurate, it is horribly coded.

And arguing that map size and draw distance is a valid reason for it lagging is equally ridiculous. Yes there are games with as large a map, B17 II had as big a map and its like 10 years old, its not a new thing and graphically the game has nothing on shooters like Crysis II that run much more complex lighting solutions or the physics in the frostbite engine (used in the bad company series). Hell even wings of prey looks a lot better.

Don't get me wrong i like the game and im as hopeful as everyone else that things will be fixed but people really need to stop blinding making excuses for obvious failures in its development.

also: no company has ever or will ever release a game in 2011 that is only supposed to work in 2015. It doesn't happen.

[squidgyb]

There are so many entirely polar opinions here, I feel I need to fill some of the middle ground with some nice grey...

In response to "no games are released for the future" and/or "I can play any game on my PC" - there are plenty of games which are released with very high settings which eclipse what the PCs of the time are capable of. Crysis. GTA IV. FSX. Metro 2033. IL2. All these titles had settings, which (at the time of release) when set to the maximum, would cause severe performance issues. Some still do. I'd love to see someone play Metro 2033 at 1920x1200 with max settings on a single card system. Maybe a GTX 590 would scrape through... 2015 is hyperbole; he's just making a point.

I'm not excusing the performance issues on lower end machines - and it's true that the mid-range set will be the largest demographic, and they are working on, and have been working on performance issues and fixes. The game will continue improving as they work through bugfixes - I do think that a lot of development time has been spent on historical accuracy/modelling, and that more time could be spent on performance - but to a certain extent we've got to remember that the dev team's hand may well have been forced by powers higher up than themselves.

It's not like they've been doing "nothing" for the last 5 years, far from it. But for one reason or another, the devs have been given a shorter time frame and a reduced deadline which has resulted in them not being able to finish all the work they intended to do - we can wait, we can play the game as it is, or, erm, we can moan about it on the internet.

I just wish I wasn't drawn into these conversations quite so easily.

Damn my fence sitting, reasonable argument producing mind.

[HFC_Dolphin]

Originally Posted by squidgyb

There are so many entirely polar opinions here, I feel I need to fill some of the middle ground with some nice grey...

In response to "no games are released for the future" and/or "I can play any game on my PC" - there are plenty of games which are released with very high settings which eclipse what the PCs of the time are capable of. Crysis. GTA IV. FSX. Metro 2033. IL2. All these titles had settings, which (at the time of release) when set to the maximum, would cause severe performance issues. Some still do. I'd love to see someone play Metro 2033 at 1920x1200 with max settings on a single card system. Maybe a GTX 590 would scrape through... 2015 is hyperbole; he's just making a point.

I'm not excusing the performance issues on lower end machines - and it's true that the mid-range set will be the largest demographic, and they are working on, and have been working on performance issues and fixes. The game will continue improving as they work through bugfixes - I do think that a lot of development time has been spent on historical accuracy/modelling, and that more time could be spent on performance - but to a certain extent we've got to remember that the dev team's hand may well have been forced by powers higher up than themselves.

It's not like they've been doing "nothing" for the last 5 years, far from it. But for one reason or another, the devs have been given a shorter time frame and a reduced deadline which has resulted in them not being able to finish all the work they intended to do - we can wait, we can play the game as it is, or, erm, we can moan about it on the internet.

I just wish I wasn't drawn into these conversations quite so easily.

Damn my fence sitting, reasonable argument producing mind.

That's a reasonable post, but I think we all have to agree in a couple of points:

1) It's not acceptable to wait for a couple of years in order to get the game playable in decent settings.
2) Flying performance should be on top of every priority. This is not MS Flight Sim, where you take off, stroll and land. Here you're fighting in the air and every second, every frame, is important.
3) Its total performance (flying, graphics, sounds) must be better than IL-2's, otherwise what's the whole point?

Ending, I will have to make clear one thing: this game looks fantastic. Whenever I fly without stutters it's just marvelous. The graphics, the FM, the DM...almost everything!
But knowing that in the end we're all gonna meet in the air for some "fights", I know that bad performance can create huge problems, therefore (and keeping in mind one of Luthier's posts, where he mentioned that he doesn't think he can optiomize much more the buildings -can't find it now), I'm just saying that if this is the case, then alternative scenarios should be employed.

One last thing: I know, really know, that devs are doing their best and they're working really hard for the benefit of all of us. I do respect and admire their work and all of my posts are with good will and always keeping in mind how to make the game the best flight sim experience we ever had. I'm not yelling at them. I'm doing some reasonable conversation and I know that devs need and want this. In the end, it's only them who know what's best and what they can offer.

[Ataros]

Originally Posted by samich

Hell even wings of prey looks a lot better.

Because it has veeeeeery low visibility range and simplified physics.

RoF has good visibility range but it does not have as complex engine physics calculation, radiators, heaters, etc and ground units AI, as many instruments on very detailed panel, etc, etc.

I did not try DCS personally but iirc it does not model many planes, ground units and landscape with the detail of CoD.

ArmA2 can be compared to CoD as a very complex milsim and it is extremely demanding even lacking detailed instrument panels and visibility limit of 10 km (however playable with decent fps only at 2 to 5 km visibility settings). Visibility distance has huge impact on performance. You can check it for yourself in ArmA2.

I do hope the game will be further optimized though.

[335th_GRAthos]

Look guys,

Clearly there are a lot of points there and I can not say that this is a great programming work and everything is smooth as silk, only the HW is the thing that is ready yet and we have to wait for intel, AMD/ATI and NVidia to develop the proper hardware for our flight-sim.

Despite that, we waited for many years and finaly we got our simulation, with an amazing number of things incorporated based on a lot of input from many of us. I even believe a lot of us are surprised seeing how many things got inside this flight sim...
It is a hard core sim and it is A M A Z I NG!
And we should be happy that 1C is giving us so much support and are online fixing things with such speed. Yes, I am happy to have the game as is (I have two versions), had I waited for all the things to get ready I would probably have been waiting for another year...

It is becoming clear that GPUs with less than 1,5Gb RAM are immediately seeing the limit.
Some people proved that there are quick fixes to lower the immense and somewhat uncessesary load of graphics and luckily, the last patch managed to incorporate all that making the game very much playable.

Still there is no SLI (which should considerably improve things) but people try to fly at res 1600x and have demands both in terms of graphics quality and fps!
Well you can not have it all guys, let's moderate a bit the level of demands...

I can fly this game at 3840x but I fly only at 1280x because I want to keep my fps over 50. And sometimes reading the posts here, I have the feeling I fly the smallest resolution anybody ever tried in this forum! (have two 570GTX on my PC...)
1280x and I see my GPU RAM reaching 1200MB (max is 1280MB) so I know there is no need trying to go for more.

To cut the very long story short: Patience is required, if you want to dogfight online, the buildings have to go!!!!!
We had it in the past, when in trouble dive to the buildings (and pray the other guy is running on a 6800GTS...) I do not think it will ever change so I do not see the reason to complain.

Happy Flying!

~S~

[HFC_Dolphin]

Originally Posted by 335th_GRAthos

...We had it in the past, when in trouble dive to the buildings (and pray the other guy is running on a 6800GTS...) I do not think it will ever change so I do not see the reason to complain.

Hi Athos!

I agree in what you're saying except from this small part.
Back in IL-2 it was only a few cities that would produce real problems with decent GPUs.
Here in all cities that I've flown over I had this problem - not only in London. This means that the extension of the problem is rather bigger.

And by the way, I do not test the game in high resolution

In any case, I'll test again later, setting SSAO off.
Maybe it'll make the difference.

[fireship4]

As someone suggested earlier, I've found "Land Shading" to be a big resource hog. Setting it to low basically got rid of stutters for me.

Here are the settings I'm currently using to get the game to run on my 4870 (512MB):

Resolution: 1920*1080@60
Full Screen: On
Model Detail: High
Buildings Detail: Very Low
Land Detail: Medium
Forest: Very Low/Low
Visual Effects: High
Texture Quality: Medium
AA: Off
Epilepsy: Off
SSAO: Off
Damage Decals: High
Buildings Amount: Unlimited
Land Shading: Low
Grass: Off
Shadows: On
Roads: On

Its not completely smooth (when low down for example) but it is acceptable. Finally able to use the game somewhat over england (havent experimented there much).

[335th_GRAthos]

Originally Posted by HFC_Dolphin

I'll test again later, setting SSAO off.
Maybe it'll make the difference.

I do not want to spoil your optimism but I am afraid it will not...


You are right Dolphin, we definitively had less cities in the online wars, but the job was done, same as when we were near those German flaks (Opel Blitz) and the AAA of the battleships, frame show.

In this game the graphic detail of the houses is amazing. Only problem is that for us flying dogfight full real, nobody will ever be so near to enjoy the artistic detail so it is a bad overkill and the biggest problem the programmers have seems to be how to sensibly remove it (or gradually present it).

Anyway, 1,5Gb is the magic number (the min RAM your GPU has to have nowadays...).


~S~

PS. @squidgyb: Good to hear that someone does fly smaller resolutions than me after all...

[squidgyb]

Originally Posted by 335th_GRAthos

I have the feeling I fly the smallest resolution anybody ever tried in this forum!

Don't know about this particular forum, but someone on simhq.com was flying at 400x200 or something similarly ridiculous, vids and all

I do agree on the main point though - performance does need to be improved, particulalry for low-mid end system. Whether this comes from optimisation of the code itself, or better tuning of the available graphics settings - I don't know.