Performance Improvements

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in_your_FACE wrote:

Thanks GGG, both informative and interesting to read. Keep up the good work over there, and keep on being a role model for the gaming industry.

+1 :)

Please fix the runtime errors which crash the client on a regular basis.

Excited for the DX 11 client.

If your loading assets is an issue then your file streaming tech is wrong. Sony for example forces users on the PS4 to comply with a streaming rule that says the game must launchable and playable within the first 500 MB of data. Further, the game must be able to play while streaming in assets beyond the 500 MB of data.

This can be done. You just have to work at it, and you have to implement modern, valid streaming.


Are you using AWS/Rackspace/Azure?

If you are or some other automated host provider to reduce costs and you have no control over the quality of their network.

This would mean your game is popular enough that you need to either get your own servers and network provider in a data center and you should probably switch to your own internet provider so you can prioritize network traffic and give users a better experience.

If 3 is also an issue it means you have no control over your server's resources and who you are being shared with. I gotta tell you being booted out while on the last form of Izaro on merciless (happened 2 days ago) is simply unacceptable.

If Dallas is your holy grail you need an arch and a system that has a active/passive failover where if the holy grail in Dallas goes down you either have a second cluster of holy grails in Dallas or in another provider completely independent of your DFW main holy grail.

You could either implement tech such as heartbeat which will alert your clusters as to which one is up and which one is down or stick a VIP in front of all the holy grails so your satellite servers only have one IP/host to talk to.

I really wish you'd consider using Vulkan or OpenGL instead of DirectX. I fear that the game will run even worse on Linux with a DX11 client, if it even runs at all.

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Rai_Grottpojken wrote:

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in_your_FACE wrote:

Thanks GGG, both informative and interesting to read. Keep up the good work over there, and keep on being a role model for the gaming industry.

+1 :)

+1

Great work GGG keep it up. I even started considering upgrade to Ascendancy Pack lol

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TheAshmaker wrote:

Excited for the DX 11 client.

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VarthDaver wrote:

Any chance you can let the client actually load the whole amount into RAM? Those of us with 16/32/64GB ram would likely trade initial load for removing lag.

Otherwise, glad to have the update!

Yeah I asked myself the same question quite often since PoE really is eating up ram like it's candy but still freezes long enough for me to die to a lockbox every now and then when the mobs spawn...
But I guess a 64bit version should adress this (no pun intended :D ).

Ugghh... DX11.. *sigh*
Yeah, guess I will eventually have to retire my good old gtx280 ^^

Very impressive plans! I look forward to the improvements - especially DX11 :)

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Chris wrote:

Draw Calls
Every object that has to be rendered in a scene is a Draw Call. Processing all of these consumes the CPU (in addition to whatever rendering later happens on the GPU). On Windows XP, this is especially slow. Reducing the number of Draw Calls helps improve performance in situations where the CPU is the bottleneck rather than the GPU.

We recently found a problem that affects certain types of lights in Path of Exile. It would dramatically increase the number of Draw Calls in the scene when those lights were present. We have already deployed a fix to this (which helped reduce Draw Calls) and have a Labyrinth-specific fix being tested for an upcoming patch.

Is that what's happening with Burning Ground dropping the FPS substantially?

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Chris wrote:

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.

YES! This. I am so willing to buy more supporter packs so that this comes to fruition.

Chris, so this will allow the whole ~8 GB of assets to be loaded into memory at once (assuming PC with 16+ GB of RAM) and get rid of loading times altogether?

An additional question: apart from performance improvements and memory management, will the 64-bit DirectX 11 client offer additional graphical improvements (thanks to, you know, DirectX 11)?