![[TW]Ramm-Jaeger](/data/avatars/s/0/2.jpg?1568638684){kind=avatar}
Regarding performance
We're working diligently on performance, but improvements/fixes for performance are going to take a bit longer. The fact of the matter is, as a PC game we really pushed the boundaries on the game's content. I know a lot of people have said things like "well I can run game X at 100 FPS on the highest settings." Well that may be true, but game X is most likely a console port and designed to run on a much lower spec machine than RO2. Honestly gamers have gotten a little too used to console ports designed to run on 4-5 year old kit. Everyone talks about the golden age of PC games in the 90's. Well back in that golden age it was very common for a new game to come out that pushed the hardware curve, and people would just update to keep ahead.
Others have said "but I think game X looks much better than RO2, I don't understand why RO2 runs worse." Beauty is in the eye of the beholder of course, and whether someone thinks game X looks better than RO2 is usually down to whether people like our visual style. We don't go over the top with most effects, while other game studios make EVERYTHING from dirt to concrete shine like it's covered in vasoline or go crazy with their post processing. But at the end of the day, when you boil it down to cold hard data, RO2 is pushing more polygons, models, and shaders than most (if not all) other shooters currently on the market. To put it another way, there may be other games that are pushing more details on smaller levels, but we're pushing lots of detail in much larger levels than other games are doing.
With that said, there are improvements that can still be made, and there are things we could have done better before launch. In all of our testing internally the the game was running great on a wide range of hardware (for example, I have a five year old AMD FX-60 dual core with an 8800 sitting next to me that runs the game at a solid 50 frames per second). But as we have learned during the beta and launch there are certain types of PC configurations (even very powerful ones) that are struggling to run the game at a good framerate. So here is what we are working on to address these issues:
Level art optimization: for our levels we tuned our visual detail based on the test hardware we had in our offices. And for these machines the game ran great. But it turns out there are certain CPU's/video cards that frankly just choke on the number of objects we're throwing at them to render (even high end ones). It isn't that this hardware is bad, it just has different strengths/weaknesses than the hardware we developed the game for. So over the coming weeks we're going to be optimizing the levels to have less visible objects in view at one time, which should greatly increase the performance on these levels. Since this is a pretty extensive operation, it will take some time, and what you will likely see is us roll through 1 map at a time releasing an optimized version of each map.
General optimizations: we'll also continue to work on general optimizations to the engine/codebase itself. Some improvements will happen right away, others will be ongoing. This will be ongoing until we get to the point where we feel the majority of users are reasonably happy with the performance they are getting.
So how can you help? By getting us perflog dumps which will help us get the information we need to improve the performance. Please check out this link here for information on how to do this:
http://forums.tripwireinteractive.com/showthread.php?t=61789
The more information we have, the easier it will be to track down these issues. So thank you for your patience while we get these issues sorted. And rest assured we're hard at work to make that happen.
We're working diligently on performance, but improvements/fixes for performance are going to take a bit longer. The fact of the matter is, as a PC game we really pushed the boundaries on the game's content. I know a lot of people have said things like "well I can run game X at 100 FPS on the highest settings." Well that may be true, but game X is most likely a console port and designed to run on a much lower spec machine than RO2. Honestly gamers have gotten a little too used to console ports designed to run on 4-5 year old kit. Everyone talks about the golden age of PC games in the 90's. Well back in that golden age it was very common for a new game to come out that pushed the hardware curve, and people would just update to keep ahead.
Others have said "but I think game X looks much better than RO2, I don't understand why RO2 runs worse." Beauty is in the eye of the beholder of course, and whether someone thinks game X looks better than RO2 is usually down to whether people like our visual style. We don't go over the top with most effects, while other game studios make EVERYTHING from dirt to concrete shine like it's covered in vasoline or go crazy with their post processing. But at the end of the day, when you boil it down to cold hard data, RO2 is pushing more polygons, models, and shaders than most (if not all) other shooters currently on the market. To put it another way, there may be other games that are pushing more details on smaller levels, but we're pushing lots of detail in much larger levels than other games are doing.
With that said, there are improvements that can still be made, and there are things we could have done better before launch. In all of our testing internally the the game was running great on a wide range of hardware (for example, I have a five year old AMD FX-60 dual core with an 8800 sitting next to me that runs the game at a solid 50 frames per second). But as we have learned during the beta and launch there are certain types of PC configurations (even very powerful ones) that are struggling to run the game at a good framerate. So here is what we are working on to address these issues:
Level art optimization: for our levels we tuned our visual detail based on the test hardware we had in our offices. And for these machines the game ran great. But it turns out there are certain CPU's/video cards that frankly just choke on the number of objects we're throwing at them to render (even high end ones). It isn't that this hardware is bad, it just has different strengths/weaknesses than the hardware we developed the game for. So over the coming weeks we're going to be optimizing the levels to have less visible objects in view at one time, which should greatly increase the performance on these levels. Since this is a pretty extensive operation, it will take some time, and what you will likely see is us roll through 1 map at a time releasing an optimized version of each map.
General optimizations: we'll also continue to work on general optimizations to the engine/codebase itself. Some improvements will happen right away, others will be ongoing. This will be ongoing until we get to the point where we feel the majority of users are reasonably happy with the performance they are getting.
So how can you help? By getting us perflog dumps which will help us get the information we need to improve the performance. Please check out this link here for information on how to do this:
http://forums.tripwireinteractive.com/showthread.php?t=61789
The more information we have, the easier it will be to track down these issues. So thank you for your patience while we get these issues sorted. And rest assured we're hard at work to make that happen.
