On performance

[raevol]

Was just goofing around in the game, and noted that disabling shadows and the water shader changed my FPS from unplayable to playable, at 1080p in full screen.

Is there a less-complex water shader we could use? It certainly is beautiful, but it chugs super hard. Something better than the no-shader plastic wrap look, but not as fancy as the almost photo-realistic shader from max settings, that could still support reflections...

And regarding shadows, they appear to be a huge performance hit, and even on top settings, they're pretty hideous. Is there a better shadow method we could use? I don't know much about it.

[Deonsion]

You know it is strange. I'm using Mint KDE 17 I believe, and I'm getting 10 FPS just about no matter what.
I have tried changin all the settings I can think of without any difference to the FPS. If I enable all graphics options it will drop to 7 interior and 5 exterior

Using Radeon R9 280x
AMD FX6300 OC'd somewhat.
8GB 1866 ram.

[andrano]

I can confirm Raevol's observation on my laptop (i7-4700MQ, GTX770M, Windows 8.1). Disabling shadows increases my FPS from 22 to 45 indoor (in front of Jiub), and the water shaders are also very demanding.

[Lagahan]

I run the game with Shadows, Water off. Even on D3D they are hogs. I think that the shadows are causing a lot more calculations on the CPU and slowing down the whole game as a result. Maybe they could be threaded to another core? I never really see any more than 20% on other cores while one core is 80-90%. Even on my system its a 20fps drop with shadows on.

[andrano]

I am not sure about that, but I think games in general can't really make a big use of multithreading, there will always be one core doing most of the work. From what I understand, this is because most of the game process is inside one big "while" loop which receives the input from the controls. I'd actually like to know if I understand this idea correctly (it makes sense to me).

[Lagahan]

I am not sure about that, but I think games in general can't really make a big use of multithreading, there will always be one core doing most of the work. From what I understand, this is because most of the game process is inside one big "while" loop which receives the input from the controls. I'd actually like to know if I understand this idea correctly (it makes sense to me).

A thread creates another loop running concurrently to the main one so you could pretty much thread everything but it only makes sense for really intensive stuff, like:
Audio file decompression thread (Titanfall's minimum spec didnt allow for one hence 40¬ gig install: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014- ... gb-install)
Rendering thread,
Ai thread,
Sound processing thread,etc etc.

All of them call home to the main "Update" loop at set intervals but they operate mostly independently

[Tarius]

I am not sure about that, but I think games in general can't really make a big use of multithreading, there will always be one core doing most of the work. From what I understand, this is because most of the game process is inside one big "while" loop which receives the input from the controls. I'd actually like to know if I understand this idea correctly (it makes sense to me).

This is the kinda statement made like in this example:
So quite a while back, a writer for PC magazine was at a computer show and one company was showing off their massive 9gb cluster of drives. When something was asked along the lines of "So, why dont you have more drives connected" or "why arnt the drives larger" to which the answer was "Are you crazy?! It would be way too unstable." That company wasnt in business much longer after that.