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Christopher Roberts@croberts68
Star Citizen Alpha 3.0 performance tidbitsPinned
December 25th at 4:13
Patch
In the Holiday Spirit, I thought it would be helpful to share a few insights on the performance of 3.0.
The number of players on the server has a lot less impact in client performance than one would think. During the final stages of PTU we ran tests with 50 players, 40 players and 30 players per server. While there was a slight improvement in performance it wasn't proportional to the player count at all as can be seen from the 3 samples below. The top one is a full 50 player server, the middle is a 40 player server and the bottom is a 30 player server (the X axis is FPS, Y axis is sample count).
There is a slight shift to the right as you decrease player count but it is relatively minimal.
From the data we see it is not so much about player count but more about WHAT the players are doing. In our internal testing we didn't witness the performance issues that we saw on PTU or Live once thousands of players got in and started doing all sorts of crazy things. Fill up a Caterpillar with cargo, blow it up over an Outpost on a moon and you can bring the clients and servers to their knees (as you've just added hundreds if not thousands of additional objects to simulate). One other common issue that can kill performance is interpenetration of objects as that causes an overload on physics, especially if its on a larger object. An example of this is the Asteroid Mission (which we disabled last night) that was spawning on top or near Olisar and being sucked into the local grid causing all sorts of issues and deadlocks. In addition we need to do a better job of efficiently handling the bigger ships which can bring in thousands of additional elements to update as opposed to the smaller ships that have a lot less items and geometry. Have a bunch of people fly around in Starfarers and Caterpillars and you're straining the clients and server far more than you would be with a bunch of Auroras and Hornets.
We have solutions for all these things, including moving physics to a batch updating model from an asynchronous one which will allow us to scale the physics much better (currently we are limited to only four threads for physics regardless of the cores on a client or server), level of detail updates for objects on the client from the server (don't update or update less frequently when far away, unbind an object from the network if far away from the client's view), Object Container streaming (whole areas of the game are only streamed in when needed on the client, allowing for dramatically less objects on clients) and they are in various stages of progress but they are not something we can complete in a week or two.
At Citizen Con we announced that we are moving to a quarterly release schedule that is less feature bound and more focused on regular updates. The release of 3.0 is the first step in that strategy. We could have spent a few more weeks dialing in performance and bugs before going "Live" after we returned from the Holiday break but as most of the company won't return until the second week of January (as we worked a week deeper into 2017 than we did in 2016) we would then not be going Live until the beginning of February. Considering that for us to hit the Q1 release date we need to be going to Evocati in the middle of February, it would put us in the same situation as this year where we ran late as we were focusing on features versus dates. Going live with 3.0 allows us to merge back into our main development branch, continue the performance and optimization work (which will be a big part of future releases) and deliver it with solid testing for Q1 2018. So while it may be frustrating that there are some performance issues and bugs, 3.0 is a step along the way in the Star Citizen journey that will get better and more polished as we go.
If you are getting performance in the sub 10-15 FPS range there is definitely something not right, especially if you have a quad core CPU, 4GB video card and at least 16GB. I have seen people reporting 5 FPS when other people with the same specs are getting 25-30 FPS. This is likely a result of the game paging out to disk because of low memory, although sometimes we hear about this on machines that have 16GB or even more, which needs more investigation by us. Is it other apps in memory? Bad page allocation (need 10 GB have 16GB allocated)? Or memory leaks in the game? PCs have lots of advantages but one of the downsides is the huge diversity of configurations which make it hard to pin point the cause of some performance issues. We are investing in additional telemetry both on the servers and clients so we can automatically detect when things aren't performing how they should based on the raw specs of the machine and hopefully determine some issues that are causing the abnormally low performance. Of course this will take a bit of time , so please be patient.
Finally I want to say thank you to everyone out there for supporting Star Citizen, your enthusiasm and dedication really does energize the team and myself. We are building something truly special that is only possible because of you.
Happy Holidays everyone!
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Ei ihan uusi mutta mielestäni ihan hyvä tietää tuon 3.0:n kanssa tapellessa.
