Performance on AMD systems is unacceptable; requesting an update on Optimizations

[Screwge]

Not gonna defend anyone or argue that Rift runs like **** on every single setup known to man.
How ever...... "and definitely over the playability minimum of 60" *Is a very ignorant statement.

It's well agreed upon in the industry that 60 fps is the standard playable framerate target for highly interactive PC games. It's not ignorant at all. There's a reason even Carmack made the decision to aim for 60 fps in his engine instead of trying to make the game look prettier but get only 30 fps (which is generally standard for console engines). Many games make the tradeoff to get better visual effects from limited hardware (in consoles) by making rendering each frame up to twice as expensive. Responsiveness is generally more important than the pretty-factor in PC gaming, but the benefit of PC gaming is that your hardware can be so extremely over the top for the engine that you can achieve > 60 fps even with all of those settings enabled.

The reasoning from the man himself is quite explicitly for usability: "It's more responsive. It's crisper. It's smoother."

That's why enthusiasts care about top-end hardware getting 60 fps in benchmarks with max settings at exotic resolutions (2560x1600, for example, and soon to become the standard 4K resolution of 4096x2160 as of Dell's introduction of a nearly affordable $1300 model into the market). It means they will get the all the benefits of seeing a game as it was meant to be seen and all the playability they expect. That's why some people are willing to shell out $3000-5000 on a PC. However, that requires that the engine can actually scale with hardware. That's something Rift cannot do.

There is a bit of truth in this for me. Cutting edge graphics is not my number one priority. I play video games on two aging systems. I just use the low renderer and turn up the important stuff. I don't raid so most of this free game is fine. World events with 100+ players? I switch to a ranged role and do what I can.

The engine in Rift is somewhere around 10 years old. It's not "cutting edge." Every feature in Rift has been standard in engines since about 2005 or 2006, and all of those engines pull 300-500 fps on modern hardware, which makes them CPU bottlenecked. The performance we see is really inexcusable.

So with all these other games out, why do players continue to log in to Rift? The reality is that Rift was made with a crappy engine. Short of starting from scratch, what are the Devs gunna do to dramatically improve performance? If you enjoy the game, deal with it's Achilles heel. I don't see major changes coming. I would wager that Daglar cusses (daily) the decision to go cheap when the game was being first built. Water under the bridge now.

Because the game is good in spite of its flaws. It has always had enormous potential. It's not my fault or anyone else's fault here except Trion's that it doesn't live up to that potential. Between failing miserably to fix the performance issues the game has and failing to listen to the community, Trion has driven its golden goose into the ground. And those decisions aren't impossible or even expensive to fix. It's just the fact that management chooses not to fix them. That's the crux of the problem here, and that's a well known problem within Trion, both from devs and from the obvious apathy with which they treat all of their customers.

I've heard from no less than 5 people in the last week, and from every person who has ever played Rift that I've talked to for more than a few minutes, that they would enjoy playing Rift so much more, and many would even recommend it to friends, if it wasn't such a terribly performing game. The fun parts of it force you to get 10-20 fps. I won't even recommend that to my friends, not even if it costs them $0.

[Morgaith]

*snip*

Well put, i agree 100%

[DriftinARift]

It's well agreed upon in the industry that 60 fps is the standard playable framerate target for highly interactive PC games. It's not ignorant at all. There's a reason even Carmack made the decision to aim for 60 fps in his engine instead of trying to make the game look prettier but get only 30 fps (which is generally standard for console engines). Many games make the tradeoff to get better visual effects from limited hardware (in consoles) by making rendering each frame up to twice as expensive. Responsiveness is generally more important than the pretty-factor in PC gaming, but the benefit of PC gaming is that your hardware can be so extremely over the top for the engine that you can achieve > 60 fps even with all of those settings enabled.

The reasoning from the man himself is quite explicitly for usability: "It's more responsive. It's crisper. It's smoother."

That's why enthusiasts care about top-end hardware getting 60 fps in benchmarks with max settings at exotic resolutions (2560x1600, for example, and soon to become the standard 4K resolution of 4096x2160 as of Dell's introduction of a nearly affordable $1300 model into the market). It means they will get the all the benefits of seeing a game as it was meant to be seen and all the playability they expect. That's why some people are willing to shell out $3000-5000 on a PC. However, that requires that the engine can actually scale with hardware. That's something Rift cannot do.



The engine in Rift is somewhere around 10 years old. It's not "cutting edge." Every feature in Rift has been standard in engines since about 2005 or 2006, and all of those engines pull 300-500 fps on modern hardware, which makes them CPU bottlenecked. The performance we see is really inexcusable.



Because the game is good in spite of its flaws. It has always had enormous potential. It's not my fault or anyone else's fault here except Trion's that it doesn't live up to that potential. Between failing miserably to fix the performance issues the game has and failing to listen to the community, Trion has driven its golden goose into the ground. And those decisions aren't impossible or even expensive to fix. It's just the fact that management chooses not to fix them. That's the crux of the problem here, and that's a well known problem within Trion, both from devs and from the obvious apathy with which they treat all of their customers.

I've heard from no less than 5 people in the last week, and from every person who has ever played Rift that I've talked to for more than a few minutes, that they would enjoy playing Rift so much more, and many would even recommend it to friends, if it wasn't such a terribly performing game. The fun parts of it force you to get 10-20 fps. I won't even recommend that to my friends, not even if it costs them $0.

This, Trion at the highest level is to blame, they are the ones cutting corners, cutting cost, doing the things the most cheap and crappy way possible aka the outdated engine they choose for a game made in 2010, the engine is like 2004/2005 hardware as others have said in this thread, Rift's engine wont support or scale with technology, its just embarrassing the way Trion went about it.

Only thing that really sold Rift was the potential it had with the good set of developers and people involved in rift at the start/launch, majority of those good people are no longer working on rift, so we have the biased devs, and very few techs we have now due to the downsize of Trion in the past year.

Most companies will update their software and engine, like Blizzard has for WoW over the years to work great with new technology that expands ever so quickly in this day and age.

[Galibier]

That's a strange argument. Most of our systems can run every other modern game on max settings at framerates of over 100 (and definitely over the playability minimum of 60). And these games look *much* better and are running much more complex engines.

There's no real excuse for the game running so poorly on such an outdated engine with such a minimal list of features. It's also not the real problem, because even on the minimum possible settings, you get unplayable framerates during many raid encounters and in PvP. This detracts so much from the game overall that it should be the highest priority for Trion at the moment.

The first issue is that the game being locked to a single CPU requires at least 8mb of L2/L3 cache with an Intel system. Then you look at how AMD and Intel are configured . AMD seems to hate having things shoved onto one core more than Intel. Both are good CPUs BUT for some reason the gaming industry tends to build stuff using just Intel and NVIDIA so quirks with AMD can cause issues.

As for unplayable frame rates... This I have never seen...though I can end up in the 20 fps range at times. That is annoying and needs to be fixed but it is not unplayable.

[DrainHeart]

Yeah the frames are a really big thing, I keep coming back and having fun then I notice the bad FPS while doing some group events and I just can't bring myself to keep playing. The game is fun, I enjoy playing. I do not enjoy slow responsiveness due to slow frames, it really kills the game for me.

FX-8350 @ 4.3Ghz
AMD Raedon HD 7970

[WarUltima]

Yeah the frames are a really big thing, I keep coming back and having fun then I notice the bad FPS while doing some group events and I just can't bring myself to keep playing. The game is fun, I enjoy playing. I do not enjoy slow responsiveness due to slow frames, it really kills the game for me.

FX-8350 @ 4.3Ghz
AMD Raedon HD 7970

Again the 8350 is a very good chip, and a monster overclocker and a good alternative to an i7 thats 1.6x more expensive. It beats i7 in a lot of tests, dominates i7 in modern all core aware softwares, and steaming but NEVER in single thread calculations, not even close.

Too bad Rift isnt running on "modern" technology that can utilize where AMD chips excel at.

One can only hope Trion can sort it out. In the meantime only thing you can do to make ur game run better is to run the 8350 with only 4 core, 1 core per module doing this is about 15% increase for Rift flamerate (I tested it), and put more clocks on your 8350, 8350 can easily handle 4.8ghz on air cooling, little over 5ghz if you got a good chip with watercooling.

[Galibier]

Again the 8350 is a very good chip, and a monster overclocker and a good alternative to an i7 thats 1.6x more expensive. It beats i7 in a lot of tests, dominates i7 in modern all core aware softwares, and steaming but NEVER in single thread calculations, not even close.

Too bad Rift isnt running on "modern" technology that can utilize where AMD chips excel at.

One can only hope Trion can sort it out. In the meantime only thing you can do to make ur game run better is to run the 8350 with only 4 core, 1 core per module doing this is about 15% increase for Rift flamerate (I tested it), and put more clocks on your 8350, 8350 can easily handle 4.8ghz on air cooling, little over 5ghz if you got a good chip with watercooling.

Yeah kinda annoying. I am looking at getting a new system in the new year when I get my bonus. Wanted to go AMD but the only game I really play is Rift so unless they miraculously have a turn around by Feb it makes sense for me to spend the extra money on an i7 with a fair amount of cache so I can get some improvement.

I do wonder what happened to what Hartsman said when he came back. He said that there would be some performance upgrades in 2.4 and major improvements with 2.5. Dagmar already said they pushed improvements to PTS back in Sept. (I think he said 11% improvement on fps in the "new world".)

So this begs the question "what happened to the time table."

[Caitie]

I do wonder what happened to what Hartsman said when he came back. He said that there would be some performance upgrades in 2.4 and major improvements with 2.5. Dagmar already said they pushed improvements to PTS back in Sept. (I think he said 11% improvement on fps in the "new world".)

I got small improvements with the minor performance update but the main 'improvement' was a slider to turn down the quality. The main performance updates are being worked on by one person and my guess they have other stuff to do as well. The Rift team is very small now so anything out of the blue affects them greatly. We were updated recently, a month or two ago, that there are stability problems with the optimisation and it crashes. It'll be a while yet. The so-called performance updates figures were a bit of a misdirection. If you read the 'blog' post you'll find they use dungeons and really that's not where the big issue comes, it's open world and raids where you have many people.

The performance issues aren't all client sides. There can be huge issues with ability lag on the server side too. that's server code, not client code.

[wingedkitten]

I definitely would not hold your breath about this issue being remedied. I admittedly don't know very much about what needs to be done but even I know that there's a fat chance they would fix it. Tweaks? Sure. But starting from scratch, which is probably what they need to do, will never happen.

It's really too bad seeing as the most frustrating issue for me in my guild is seeing all the lag issues we have in raids while trying to progress. You can just see it sap the enthusiasm from those trying to deal with it (which is at least 4-5 people every single night). I don't even bother to CQ because I can't see anything with my FPS dropping to like 5. Pretty horrid for a computer that can run Skyrim on Ultra with a stupid amount of mods seamlessly.

[Sousui]

Yea I think rift is in an "were just here to add content and maybe balance some things for money", there is no payoff for spending money and time on a huge engine revamp. The only reason we saw planetside 2 do it was because they needed something that would run on the PS4.

[Rounded]

I definitely would not hold your breath about this issue being remedied. I admittedly don't know very much about what needs to be done but even I know that there's a fat chance they would fix it. Tweaks? Sure. But starting from scratch, which is probably what they need to do, will never happen.

It's really too bad seeing as the most frustrating issue for me in my guild is seeing all the lag issues we have in raids while trying to progress. You can just see it sap the enthusiasm from those trying to deal with it (which is at least 4-5 people every single night). I don't even bother to CQ because I can't see anything with my FPS dropping to like 5. Pretty horrid for a computer that can run Skyrim on Ultra with a stupid amount of mods seamlessly.

Lag and graphics engine have no correlation whatsoever, unless someone has screwed up badly and syncs network packet handling to screen refresh.

[Muffinmans]

Lag and graphics engine have no correlation whatsoever, unless someone has screwed up badly and syncs network packet handling to screen refresh.

I assume you mean "Lag and Servers"? If so than, yes. The quality of the server has nothing to do with how many frames your computer can process, it only affects ability lag. The frame rate lag is 100% the fault of the engine.

[Screwge]

Yea I think rift is in an "were just here to add content and maybe balance some things for money", there is no payoff for spending money and time on a huge engine revamp. The only reason we saw planetside 2 do it was because they needed something that would run on the PS4.

Yes there is. Player retention and playability increase. If retention increases and players are joining the game faster than leaving, the game experiences long term growth rather than short term growth followed by massive player loss (the trend Rift has always followed). Long term growth is how you build reliable revenue. Trying to achieve short term growth and then milking that with P2W store sales is how you kill a game.

[Archerlet]

Buy Intel for gaming, unless you exclusively want to play Battlefield 4. Scratch that, buy Intel for everything.

Jeez, what an ignorant comment. First of all , not all players have the $$ to buy Intel. That being said, AMD is a prefect processor for gaming.

I run on a FX-8350 and XFX 7970, SSD and 16gig ram. This rig eats all games existing on earth, but collapses when playing Rift (Conquest).

Love the game, Hate the engine its based on

-A

[Khelendross]

A couple things people should realize. At the time Heroes of Telara went into development there wasn't many other options for engines. Most MMO's were using either expensive custom designed engines or were using the Hero engine or Gamebryo engine. Nowadays you have the Crysis engine, the modified unreal engine and a few others. And if Trion was developing a MMO now they might actually design the engine especially given how much its gonna cost them to fix the issues with the engine they are using.

They likely used the Gamebryo engine because several of the senior designers came from Mythic EA (Gersh to name one example). So it was familiar.

I've always had decent luck with Rift, it doesn't run amazing but its more than playable on my rig even on high. Should I be able to play it on ultra with solid 40fps? Probably yes, but it is a product of its time and the engine it was made on,

Making your own engine is something new MMO developers don't often do because its very very expensive and time intensive. Blizzard can do this sort of thing cause they have the backing and money.

I'm sure if Trion was able to do it over they would do it differently, but they were a brand new company and I don't fault them to much for approaching the development the way they did. Game development is nowhere near as easy as some people think it is.

This, Trion at the highest level is to blame, they are the ones cutting corners, cutting cost, doing the things the most cheap and crappy way possible aka the outdated engine they choose for a game made in 2010

Games don't emerge fully formed. The game was released in 2010. The game was likely MADE in 2005. MMO's typically have a 4-5 year development cycle.