Let's talk about client optimization

[zak.preston@gmail.com 8]

Hello, fellow-survivors!

 

I've bought my ARMA2 key and joined DayZ community when there were around 20 servers in total (only 2 Russian servers for example), guess I was in first 3-5k subscribers =)) I've encountered a lot of frustrating and disappointing situations, bugs, glitches, cheaters, sudden and silly deaths (bridges, rocks, doors, trees), but nothing of that compares to the enjoyment I got from this game. Thanks to DayZ I've made friends with a lot of nice and adequate guys and girls all over the world (Poland, Ukraine, Russia, Lithuania, France, Great Britain), with some of them I communicate even now. I had around 3-4 accounts in ARMA2 just to store some expensive gear and be able to loot my alt's dead bodies. When DayZ SA launched I instabought it within an hour, and don't regret it. Guess I proved enough evidence to show that  I'm quite a loyal member of DayZ community.

 

Recently I tried to play DayZ SA after a half-year break, but got disappointed by extremely low FPS I got on my gaming laptop. I do understand that laptop's specs are far inferior to PC's ones, that DayZ is in alpha stage and it's quite unfinished. I've even read that DayZ will receive a new engine, and it might (and should, btw) improve performance. 

The only thing I would like to ask devs is to take in consideration medium-priced laptops as a minimal configuration that could run DayZ on lowest settings with relibale 30 FPS in town when they release game.

 

One sad example from my experience:

Currently I'm working as a devops in a gamedev studio and sometimes I take part in developer's meetings. The company I'm working in is developing yet another TPS-MOBA game (like Smite) for browsers on Unity Engine. Every single programmer, artist or QA has a high-end HP workstation with a Quad-Octacore Intel CPU and a professional NVidia Quaro GPU with tons of RAM, SSD Raids and so on. Testers have a quad-core Intel CPU and an acceptable gaming GPU (GF660 - GF770, depending on how the rigs are). Development of the game and internal tests went quite smoothly, until we released a closed "friends and family test", where most of responces were absolutely negative in terms of client's performance. The game was extremely poorly optimized for any dual-core CPU and low-ended GPU. This has set back the project for a half a year at least, since casual players, students, pupils or people from poor countries couldn't afford themselves an expensive upgrade to play our game and we potentially could lose around 70% of subscribers. The problem was that none wanted to test the game on low-specced PCs, laptops and different fersions of drivers before the game got a pre-alpha status.

 

Another example is Planetside 2 game that lost a lot of potential clients due to low optimization on start. They had to optimize heavily the game later, but it could not repel the damage taken to their subs base.

 

UPD:

Current mediocre gaming-capable laptop's config is:

CPU: i5 dualcore Intel or A8\A10 quad-core AMD, which are comparable to cheapest desktop CPUs

GPU: AMD Radeon 8750M-8870M or NVidia 650M-760M

RAM: 4-8GB

Edited November 6, 2014 by Zak Preston

[Evil Minion 943]

Recently I tried to play DayZ SA after a half-year break, but got disappointed by extremely low FPS I got on my gaming laptop. I do understand that laptop's specs are far inferior to PC's ones, that DayZ is in alpha stage and it's quite unfinished. I've even read that DayZ will receive a new engine, and it might (and should, btw) improve performance. 

The only thing I would like to ask devs is to take in consideration medium-priced laptops as a minimal configuration that could run DayZ on lowest settings with relibale 30 FPS in town when they release game.

Two things to consider: The game is currently in alpha and explicitily stated not to be optimized. And at the time the game will be released your "mediocre gaming-laptop" (which was already mediocre when I bought mine a few years ago) will be closer to a "low-end gaming-laptop". Now that doesn't mean they should squander resources but even with an optimized game you might not be able to get the best performance here (heavily depends on how the mechanics are handled).

[FrostyKush 44]

Yea we most likely won't see any real major optimizations until beta since that's when that type of stuff usually occurs however when the new renderer comes I'm sure we will see the beginning of some optimizations client side and should help performance quite a bit itself. We still need to wait and see how it plays out but I'm hoping for some large gains and I believe 64bit clients and multithreading both client and server have been discussed by the devs at some point which would lead to massive performance increases all around if done properly. Hopefully we'll get some more information on this since I haven't seen the 64bit clients or multithreading mentioned in quite a few months.

[zak.preston@gmail.com 8]

My laptop is not quite mediocre, since I have a Radeon 8970m GPU and an overclocked to 3.5GHz AMD CPU, but still I have a very shaky FPS in towns without zombies. Actually I'm going to buy a clevo based barebone laptop with i7 CPU (no more AMD CPUs for gaming) and a more decent AMG GPU. I'm concerned about DayZ to be available to as much people as possible =)

Edited November 6, 2014 by Zak Preston

[Death By Crowbar 1213]

I think it's premature to worry about client side performance given where it is in the alpha stage, the engine updates still being worked on, etc. The client hardware requirements and performance now are no indicator of what the beta or even final release will look like. It's like trying to gauge how many miles to the gallon a car will get when it doesn't even have a gas tank, frame/body, nor even an engine finished yet... or perhaps better put it's got something that looks like those so it at least runs but they're all going to be different (some parts greatly different) by the time it's done.

[zak.preston@gmail.com 8]

I think it's premature to worry about client side performance given where it is in the alpha stage, the engine updates still being worked on, etc. The client hardware requirements and performance now are no indicator of what the beta or even final release will look like. It's like trying to gauge how many miles to the gallon a car will get when it doesn't even have a gas tank, frame/body, nor even an engine finished yet... or perhaps better put it's got something that looks like those so it at least runs but they're all going to be different (some parts greatly different) by the time it's done.

 

But there is one simple "but": writing a resource-efficient code saves much more time and money than writing a monster and then fixing it with patches and hotfixes, which shows my companie's example. So if Dayz will be supposed to run sufficiently on a low-end PC with 25 FPS at least, it would be really great.

Edited November 6, 2014 by Zak Preston

[Death By Crowbar 1213]

But there is one simple "but": writing a resource-efficient code saves much more time and money than writing a monster and then fixing it with patches and hotfixes, which shows my companie's example. So if Dayz will be supposed to run sufficiently on a low-end PC with 25 FPS at least, it would be really great.

There's several approaches - two big ones are "make it run, then make it run fast", another is "engineer it optimally from the bottom up". It's the prior that's at work here, because if it were the latter the concept of an early access alpha would be impossible and we wouldn't be here discussing it in the first place. There also arguably might not be capital to do the project in the first place. Also, seeing as how DayZ SA started as a port that's being re-worked in pieces, the entire project was never a candidate for starting from scratch with resource efficient code.

 

The concept of an early access alpha is entirely new and very very difficult for most people to grasp, because it's unusual and confusing. It's both a business model as well as a development model - traditional acadamia or "ideal best practice" doesn't apply in most cases. In some ways early access alpha is it's own worst enemy from a development model, but from a business model it's very clever.

[byrgesen 1341]

This is exactly why they are working on a new renderer and disconnecting the simulation from the current one.

So they can get directx 11 running in the game and render exactly what they want, meaning if you set the settings to the lowest, it should be able to run in a laptop like you speak of and if you put it to the highest, it will be very pretty and runn well, on a high end PC  :)

 

At least thats how im interpreting the information about the new renderer.

Edited November 6, 2014 by Byrgesen

[instynct 99]

The major performance issues will most likely never be solved judging by Bohemia's track record. For example: Arma3 has a new renderer. Arma 3 has the same performance issues and everyone said it would be resolved in Beta yet to this day it's still not resolved.

 

Hell most of the new features in the standalone were ripped directly from Arma 3. Proof is in the source code SQF files that still contain copy pasted code with references to Arma 3.

Edited November 6, 2014 by Andromeda

[zak.preston@gmail.com 8]

 

This is exactly why they are working on a new renderer and disconnecting the simulation from the current one.

So they can get directx 11 running in the game and render exactly what they want, meaning if you set the settings to the lowest, it should be able to run in a laptop like you speak of and if you put it to the highest, it will be very pretty and runn well, on a high end PC   :)

 

At least thats how im interpreting the information about the new renderer.

 

I didn't realize that DayZ SA works with DX9 0nly o.O
I'm not sure if DX11 will decrease system requirements, but I do know that their engine lacks native multithreading and efficient memory usage.

 

 

The major performance issues will most likely never be solved judging by Bohemia's track record. For example: Arma3 has a new renderer. Arma 3 has the same performance issues and everyone said it would be resolved in Beta yet to this day it's still not resolved.

 

Hell most of the new features in the standalone were ripped directly from Arma 3. Proof is in the source code SQF files that still contain copy pasted code with references to Arma 3.

 

The real promsing thing is that they are going to port the game to PS4, which is comparable to the lowest-tier gaming PC. We have a good example of SoE that optimized Planetside 2 for PC heavily while working on PS4 release.

[byrgesen 1341]

I didn't realize that DayZ SA works with DX9 0nly o.O

I'm not sure if DX11 will decrease system requirements, but I do know that their engine lacks native multithreading and efficient memory usage.

 

Yes right now it only supports DirectX 9 :)

DX11 will brings tons of goodies with it, it has so many improvements and enhancements.

But its gonna take some time and a huge amount of work to put it into the game.

[St. Jimmy 1631]

Hopefully stencil shadows will be taken out and replaced with more GPU friendly like Shadow Maps. Stencil shadow is so old, not that good and CPU hungry solution and you really don't want to have anything CPU hungry in this game if you can move them in GPU.

http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?154493-Stencil-shadows-vs-Shadow-Maps&p=2388851#post2388851

[zak.preston@gmail.com 8]

So, i tuned down most setting on minimum, added startup params, edited configs and I really got a nice but unsufficient 5-10 FPS boost.

But the best thing I've noted is that there are no fps issues shortly after server restart. I mean that FPS holds on fair 35 rate, no shutters and microlags.

 

On a sad note: I do understand that people want new weapons, new features and more "shiny dingies" (c - Risen 2/3), and I doubt game designers can be seriously involved in game engine coding process... But some or (even most) features may stop working as intended after a serious core update. 

[TheFarm 158]

People say that the standalone doesnt have a culling method in place yet, you can bet that when they do add in some sort of culling you will see a huge performance boost on every system, especially in towns.

Culling is useless in a forest as you may know OP, thats why the performance is usually good there for most players. But in a city, where each one of those tall apartments is holding >20 items, culling is going to be a huge help.