Hi
Hi
I see that my post from last night has been seen here and there is still some comments that need addressed.
On the cpu bound issue - Yes some computers will not be cpu bound in fact it's looking like amd cpu's have more issues with the draw calls than intel machines.
What's happening is in unreal3 if you see an object, before it can go to your gpu to render the cpu tells it that you saw it in the first place. So as I stated before your cpu could be telling your gpu to render 4,000 plus objects every frame, and that was just the map. If you factor 64 players all with multiple draw calls each, add in tanks also with calls, add in arty explosions,grenade explosions,bullet shell ejects pouring out of your gun and all other guns around you..add yet even more with hit decals and the associated particle effects from your own gun and those around you, muzzle flashes... you enter a world where your cpu is telling your gpu to render closer to 7k worth of objects every frame this is where things get crazy for a lot of players. Those are just the visual things in the game on top of that your cpu is still calculating loads of game based data. So these are the things we are trying to optimize.
On the blurry textures thing - Nothing has changed with textures I've been reading that a lot from players and reviewers. So i'm going to explain it a bit, the way our texture detail slider works is if you have ultra textures set your are seeing the full res of all the textures in the game. if you set it to high it globally cut's almost all textures to half (2048x2048 to 1024x1024) and every detail step you go down it does it again until your looking at 256x256 textures everywhere. this is something I can personally tweak with time by making sure that certain textures in the game will never be able to go that low. But keep in mind that this is a memory issue and it's so medium can fit within 2gigs of ram. So if you have a great video card and a ton of ram crank up the texture slider. If your cpu bound turn world detail to low and textures to ultra that will make nice crisp textures and less overall small detail in the maps. Play with the settings, most pc's have very mixed hardware and you can play well without having to play on what it defaults you to.(shadows are still a killer
)
on the lod transitions, I'll ask around about trying to add a slider that reverses the lod distances for high end pc's, but keep in mind this is not a simple job and right now we need to make sure people aren't having major issues anymore before we risk changing something that is stable (the settings menu's). In a lot of games I've noticed the habbit of drenching the battle field with particle effects to cut the visable space into sections, most likely this is so they can cull out all objects beyond that until the player gets close enough, that's a good way to pull it off.. but I'm guessing you won't see those games with threads boasting of a 300+ meter kill becuase the visable area isn't that far to begin with. We are using an engine made for corridor shooters (gears) And we are pushing it to it's breaking point, we did the same thing to unreal2 when RO 1 came out and eventually it all leveled out.
So I hope this clears up any questions and all I ask is just be patient. we really can't work any faster, and certain things will take priority over visual issues.
Thanks
oh yeah and if your interested in your pc's bottleneck type
stat unit in the console this will show you what your computer is hanging on. if your game or draw threads are the highest that means your cpu bound and if the gpu is the highest that's your pc's bottleneck. (keep in mind all console stat commands add a slight performance hit so for regular play having multiple commands up are costing cpu cycles to update the data).So when you play turn off the stat's, that's my biggest immersion killer