Performance Improvements

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Chris wrote:

Loading screens that appear before levels are best for assets that occur during that level, like environment tiles, monsters and the skills they use.

If an asset isn't loaded on one of these screens correctly, then it stalls the game client to load when it appears for the first time. For example, opening a Strongbox can generate a random Rogue Exile. If the effects or microtransactions that that Rogue Exile uses aren't already loaded, then the client stalls, potentially in a very dangerous way.

Preloading assets has a significant cost: Everything that is loaded at startup increases how long Path of Exile takes to load. It also increases memory usage. On 32 bit versions of Windows, processes are allowed to have 3gb of data loaded. On 64 bit versions of Windows, Path of Exile can load 4gb of data at once. If this is exceeded, the game crashes because it can't allocate more memory. It can even crash before this is exceeded, because of memory fragmentation issues (if there aren't holes large enough to fit the files in, due to a long game session).

On the other hand, if we opt to not preload assets, then there's significant stuttering that occurs during gameplay when assets are encountered for the first time. On slower hard drives, or when virus checkers or disk fragmentation are in play, the freezes related to synchronous loading can be quite long. This is unacceptable during combat, for obvious reasons.

For many years we've been maintaining a carefully curated list of assets to preload. We were trying to strike a perfect balance between loading the things that are needed, but not loading too much that we'd have slow load times or exceed our memory allowance. As our data size rose, we've had to develop more and more complex systems for managing which assets should be in memory at any time.

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We come to the end of a zone and go through transition/load screen at the same time.
I load in first, since I am using an SSD.
I start moving away from the entrance.
Then a couple of seconds into starting the new area, my friend loads in.
I get a 1 second freeze/fps drop.

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sklipnoty wrote:

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I like how you think that the only reason most people don't have windows 10 is because of the new privacy policy for windows 10 (and I also like how you think that everyone should not care about privacy because you don't care about it). Windows 7 is still more stable and I think it is better for doing work (don't tell me I haven't used it, I have Windows 10 on my laptop). Upgrading may also mean additional cost and there is some risk that the upgrade may cause problems (for example compatibility issues etc).

Finally not everyone is using their computer just for games. I prefer using Windows 7 for now as it is more suitable for my work at the time being.

I haven't watched the performance differences. From the other hand just because you use Dx12 doesn't mean you are automatically going to have a performance benefit, you have to exploit the new features efficiently to be able to get the performance benefit.

And of cource as I said Dx12 may improve performance, but it certainly won't initially improve stability because it is a new system that may have a lot of bugs.

In other words the problem wasn't inherently the operating system or DirectX, but that they have introduced new features that resulted in new bugs.

Again you are making the argument that just because most people (?) have a good computer the rest should give up on path of exile. Surely there is a line that they have to draw, but the line you are suggesting would be a really bad business decision.

As for the majority of players, you can look it up yourself but here are some links:

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems#Desktop_and_laptop_computers
http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

Surely many have upgraded to windows 10 and even more will in a year, perhaps I may be one of them too. But the amount of people that will have an OS below windows 10 will still be significant.

Upgrade to 10 was free.

Indeed the code they introduce in the latest patch caused alot of issues for me. And apperently for other people aswell otherwise this topic would be non-existent.

Second of half, nice bait on the usages links. But they are really meaningless. Since it's only a percentage of a percentage of a percentage of that, that plays PoE. In otherws words enless GGG is feeling like realing info about Most Used Os, GPU - Dx11 / Dx12 comp., Ram, CPU. There is no point. The point I was referring too is that all people that I know who have decent rigs, seem to have some sort of stability issue with the game. Obv. that is not everyone.

You know whats bad for business? Constant crashes, lag and disconnects.

W7 is not more stable than W10. Quantify this plz.

Obv. games need to implement certain Dx12 features in order for them to be useful, yes.

Anyway my point was simple, keep current business at Dx9 and prepare for Dx12 and be future proof.

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64-bit DirectX 11 Client
In the future we plan to release an alternate Path of Exile client that is compiled as a 64-bit executable and will use DirectX 11 rather than DirectX9. This client will require Windows Vista or above (and a 64-bit CPU). The old client will still work for Windows XP or 32 bit machines, but won't have the performance improvements that come with DirectX 11. This release is planned for 2017.

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gablona wrote:

thank you. anyone who says you dont care/ dont fix stuff is a fucking idiot. your free game will continue to get my financial support