3.18.1c Hotfix 2

Thank you!
Game is playable now as it was before.

May we have a moment of silence for console players?

"

Soulsucka wrote:

Wow I didn't think you guys would ever do a revert like this. Thank you for being real dudes, and not just forcing these changes on us. I'm sure this will not be the end of your fixes for Graphics going forward, but this gives me hope that whatever you do, you won't just force it on us. I really appreciate your decision here, and it helps my sanity to know you're paying attention.

The only thing I ask is a little more transparency. I still have no idea why you did this, what you were hoping to fix with this patch, what went wrong, and why it only seemed to affect certain computers. I want a computer that runs this game good, but I have no idea how to get it. I mean I bought a computer earlier this year and my performance has gotten worse in the last 2 years, not better. That boggles my brain.

And when I say transparency, I mean here, on your official forums, not on some other website where you seem to post more actual information.

If I had to guess the fix was trying to lower vram footprint for people with low-end graphics cards (or anything with sub-3G of dedicated vram) as well as people with "shared memory" video cards. The problem (again, huge guess) is that the fix was (probably) aggressively obliterating or limiting the (LRU) vram page size; thereby this would have caused constant cache refresh, shader rebuilds, and re-loads into vram all incurring their full resource cost (disk, memory, network, etc) way more than was expected or intended.

A problem I see a lot on the forums is "my vram is being used and keeps growing!" without understanding of how VRAM works (which can be very complex and situational). Using vram by a game that's doing GPU operations, is great. You want textures loaded in vram for the GPU to consume, anything else is often and typically far slower and prone to several points of contention (i/o bottlenecks). It gets a little complex because like normal memory allocation: Just because VRAM shows allocated or requested, doesn't mean it's actually getting used. An app can request some large allocation of memory, even larger than the dedicated VRAM, but doesn't mean it's going to -use- that allocation. This footprint shrinks and grows over time due to many, many factors. In most "normal" cases where assets are loaded into VRAM, the VRAM operates like an LRU cache: the oldest and least used articles are the first to be thrown out to make use for new articles. Likewise, depending on several factors, GPU usage can bleed over into system memory and in low-system memory cases, over into paging (swap). Both of the latter can be a significant bottleneck when it comes to addressing "active" textures..

In a nutshell, I don't think they were trying to ruin anything but instead are iterating on making the game more accessible to more hardware choices. Ultra speculation: Given the focus on console support, especially with the recent controller updates (just in time for the Steam Deck's launch!), I would not be surprised to see a Switch version of the game coming in the next year.. possibly just after another popular ARPG game gets released.

When this will be done to xbox? Last night I was playing then suddenly the textures bug, the game freezes, and even after trying to quit and come back I die. You devs know how Hard and time consuming is to level up past level 96? I accept get killed by the mechanics of the game [Removed by Support]. Give me back my 10% XP or I'm not playing this crap again. I'm tired of all this.

[Removed by Support]

I was absent for the weekend and when i came back everything was miraculously fixed! Your response was immediate, you quickly recognized the problem and offered a solution, great job. Everything now loads up lightning fast and performance is as good as ever!!!
Please dont look down on performance on future updates, its a very crucial factor to how good the game feels!
Thank you for the hard wotk GGG

The game is still in a really terrible state.
I have suffered more disconnects over the last 4 or 5 days than I have in the whole of the previous 3 years.
Common triggers are starting a blight encounter in a map, or doing a Jun research mission in map, such that I now automatically drop a portal before starting either of these, but I have also had it just drop out when doing nothing in my hideout.
Really notable was 5 DCs in a 5 way a couple of days ago - we won't touch them anymore until the game is fixed as too big a waste.
Checked antivirus and firewall and both are configured correctly, checked internet connection and I have a steady 90mb download, 4mb upload, and a ping of 13.
Please just sort your damn servers out, this is getting unplayable.
I am running on an older machine with low settings, but I have never had this juch trouble before with the game.

So far running total of DCs is around 6 over less than an hour today.

And another 5 disconnects in the hour after that.

Wait.. so the changes were reverted back? Then how come I am experiencing the issues that people were initially having with 3.18.1c? I can't even handle the graphics of everything I have in my hideout now.. whereas before 3.18.1c everything was fine for me.

Playing in maps is now jittery for me. I have hardly felt like playing this league do to all the nuanced changes to monsters and everything surrounding that. I'm really done for now. Maybe 3.19 will be better? Can't do this beta testing anymore.

3.18.1c has me questioning whether my PC is to blame. Considering the only issues I've noticed while using my PC have come from playing this game in 3.18.1c I would assume it's not my computer. Either way I have no more interest in trouble shooting all these issues when any other game doesn't require this. I want to play, not work.

Im cant play the game, loading screen is infinite