Ever wonder why this game heats up GPU's so much?

[Fixy]

Hmmm... I think you might be wrong. The reason that you are seeing water in that particular instance is because the camera (from which your scene is rendered) is inside the wall. Usually, the water, and all the other stuff is that is not seen (like polygons hidden by opaque surfaces) is removed before rendering through the processes of > culling (occlusion, back face...) < and > clipping (view frustum) <. So in your case it should be obscured by the wall you just walked through, and thus not rendered.



Where the hell did you learn graphics rendering? I suggest you start burning your books right now, or please slap whoever told you that for me >__>

And just for information, rendering water and waves under cities has been done in other reputable commercial games. Ever heard of the > Crisis 2 tessellation fiasco <?

If you are able to prove that these polygons go down the rendering pipeline even though they are not visible, then be my guest. I'll be glad to admit that SE is in dire need of recruiting actually decent graphics programmer (and I'll be sending the my CV lol). Until then, it'll be nice if you didn't spread misinformation based on a single occurrence of a bug ^^"

I'll admit that walking through a wall is not normal though xD

its rendered because there is 0 fps drop when you go through the floor or stare through a wall. its pretty common sense. anything that exists through a mesh is rendered. when you go through the floor there isnt a brief pause or load in which the water is generated, because it already exists on the board.

theres a reason every MMO does not put anything underneath floors. explain to me, that if i put drawing detail on 1 and make my game look like its being played on a gameboy i suffer the same GPU heat problems..... hint it isnt because the game quality of 8 bit textures on drawing detail 1 are graphic intensive.

I just played BC2 on max which is way more graphic intensive and i could not even hear my gpu. Turn on ff14 in the middle of camp horizon and it goes to 90 degrees, fan at 90%. maybe it has something to do with there being nothing but endless white underneath the ground in BC2, /shrug.

Nobody knows how this engine works because for one it doesnt even look that great for how extensive it is on hardware. Not to mention in BC2 i have vision of the whole entire map and in this game i have vision of about 300 yalms.

its fine if you want to disagree and look smart, however, thats not why i am making this post.

[Lyern]

its fine if you want to disagree and look smart, however, thats not why i am making this post.

Sorry, if I came across as trying to look smart, when I was just trying to be informative and giving a documented argumentation against something that I thought (and still think) is incorrect. It was more of a case of going like : "Oh wow, looks like these people are saying something that contradicts what I have learnt in class. Or maybe they have some information I don't know? I'll send them a nicely documented message, and see if we can have a nice discussion about computer graphics :D".

I am making this post (and the previous one) so that everyone can know the reason why I think the fact that you saw water being rendered though a wall once when you glitched does not mean that all the graphic optimization issues are because of "miles of water and waves being rendered."

If giving an opinion opposed to yours on a forum, a public space where we are supposed to discuss things in a civil and intelligent way is "looking smart", then hell yeah, I am. But above everything, I am offended by your comment ;__;

its rendered because there is 0 fps drop when you go through the floor or stare through a wall.

That's not a valid argument. I don't see any FPS counters on this screen shot. Are your eyes so good that you can actually see drops that do not make the FPS go below 24 images par second?

The reason why you didn't see any FPS drops might also be just because the mesh data was already in GPU memory, as loading things in and out of GPU memory is a well known FPS drop inducing bottleneck.

Also everyone knowledgeable about properly applied polygon culling techniques (and everyone can be with the links provided in my earlier post :D) would be able to tell that with proper culling and clipping, going through the floor, a wall, or whatever should not impact the number of polygons that are actually drawn on the screen: since you are seeing (rendering) stuff that is in front of you (behind the wall in this case), you are not seeing (rendering) what is behind you (in this case, in front of the wall).

its pretty common sense. anything that exists through a mesh is rendered.

I'm not sure I get what you meant by that sentence. It is possible to render only parts of a mesh (for example, on the screen in the OP post, we can't see the hill you are inside of because of back face culling. This part of the mesh was removed since it is not facing the camera)

when you go through the floor there isnt a brief pause or load in which the water is generated, because it already exists on the board.

Yeah, but having it exist in the scene (I guess that's what you meant by board?) doesn't mean that it is actually usually rendered in a normal situation.

theres a reason every MMO does not put anything underneath floors.

Hmm, because there usually isn't anything to see? In this present case, I'm pretty sure that the water is there because it was computationally cheaper to leave it there rather to take it in and out of memory every time the sea comes in and out of view in La Noscea (this would case significant FPS drops). And no, animating those waves is not that expensive (see how the water is atrociously tiled?). And like I said earlier, it has already been done in high profile commercial games that have been praised for their graphics engine (Crysis 2...).

explain to me, that if i put drawing detail on 1 and make my game look like its being played on a gameboy i suffer the same GPU heat problems..... hint it isnt because the game quality of 8 bit textures on drawing detail 1 are graphic intensive.

I do not know how SE coded this game, and neither do you. I know however that even though in the lowest graphics options, all we can see is a blurred and pixelated mess, the game still seems to process high quality meshes and textures. This is a part that was actually badly optimised by SE.

And having GPU heat problems =/= The game is not optimised, or too computationally expensive.

I just played BC2 on max which is way more graphic intensive and i could not even hear my gpu. Turn on ff14 in the middle of camp horizon and it goes to 90 degrees, fan at 90%. maybe it has something to do with there being nothing but endless white underneath the ground in BC2, /shrug.

Way more graphics intensive, but doesn't heat your GPU? There's a contradiction in there.

Also, way to compare apples and oranges here. A MMO and a FPS usually have a different level (world) structure, because a MMO tends to be an "Open world" when you usually don't have long lines of sight in a FPS (unless they like to make it easier for snipers lol). So more things are clipped/culled, hence more FPS for the apparent same more level of detail.

Nobody knows how this engine works

Except SE and I'm not even sure about that lol. So please tell me how you can affirm what was said in the OP post if you don't know how their engine works? That's my main gripe in this whole discussion.

because for one it doesnt even look that great for how extensive it is on hardware.

The difference between this game and let's say, BF3 (yeah, I haven't seen BC2, but I assume they should be fairly similar) is that SE bet mostly on pretty models and textures, at the expense of pretty effects (shadows, physics, particles...). Whether it was a good choice (and whether it "doesn't even look that great") is a matter of opinion (I would have liked more advanced texture mapping personally, c'mon SE that's easy and cheap ;__;)

Not to mention in BC2 i have vision of the whole entire map and in this game i have vision of about 300 yalms.

See above. (and yeah, their drawing distance is kinda weird).


PS: There, I was just trying to be informative and exhaustive. And yeah, I'm still pissed, and I feel trolled. Hopefully this was helpful to someone though. And at least it was enough to procrastinate until play time and patch notes, hell yeah :D

[Krin]

PS: There, I was just trying to be informative and exhaustive. And yeah, I'm still pissed, and I feel trolled. Hopefully this was helpful to someone though. And at least it was enough to procrastinate until play time and patch notes, hell yeah

No, this whole thread is a troll by someone who knows nothing about graphics programming. I do a lot of C and OpenGL programming and I agree with you. You're graphics card does some extremely simple and straightforward math to determine what polygons need to be drawn and what polygons do not need to be drawn. This is such a fractional portion of the full work required to draw a single frame you literally would have to load all three zones of Eorza, and all character models into the GC to do what you're claiming. It's ridiculously easy for a graphics card to take your camera position, fulcrum, side-culling instructions and tear through billions of 3D* vertices in a time measured in hundreds of nanoseconds marking them as "draw/no-draw". The hard work is figuring out what pixel on your screen is what color when you consider light sources, textures, multisampling, anti-aliasing, etc. That's what takes several milliseconds and produces the heat that you attribute to the "water".

All the work subsecting and determine whether to draw an object before making calls into DirectX/OpenGL is a relic from the days of AGP and conserving bus bandwidth. PCIe and current front-side bus speeds make this a non-issue.
* Actually, the space described inside your graphics card is a 4D normalized space. That means the origin, (0,0,0) is, in fact (0,0,0,1). This is because graphics support translation, such as moving everything 10 positive unites along the X axis. Since this sort of transformation results in (0,0,0)X != (0,0,0) where X is a 3x3 transformation matrix, it breaks the rules of linear algebra and linear transformations of vector spaces. Hence, we describe the entire 3D space as existing at 1 on the 4D access. Translations in 4D result in (0,0,0,0)X = (0,0,0,0), so it all works out. You're Graphics card actually considers a small sliver of the 4 dimension (at least, mathematically) when it draws FF for you. Er go, your graphics card is a time machine. (*trounces off having had his fun messing with the trolls*)

[Bahn]

@Krin: Then what do you theorize is causing the huge amounts of GPU overhead in this game? Obviously something doesn't seem to have been programmed right for a game like this. Games like Crysis blows this game out of water in terms of graphical fidelity, so I'd like to know from a programmer's perspective why this game causes so much stress on a top end GPU for such inefficient performance.

[Krin]

@Krin: Then what do you theorize is causing the huge amounts of GPU overhead in this game? Obviously something doesn't seem to have been programmed right for a game like this. Games like Crysis blows this game out of water in terms of graphical fidelity, so I'd like to know from a programmer's perspective why this game causes so much stress on a top end GPU for such inefficient performance.

It's likely the way the backgrounds are done. The backgrounds are actually rendered in real time. They're not a sky box. However, if you turn your background settings down, they look like 8-bit mode only with the close up stuff and your character in HD. It's likely the background is drawn as a separate buffer with down-graded settings. It's a good technique for wide open landscapes, but it still requires a pretty high level card to begin with.

Also, we've noted that FF will still work you to death if you put it in 8-bit crap mode. I agree with the guy who got trolled, something is definitely wrong with the texturing work. In my work, I have to provide several qualities of texture and set up "mip-maps". The farther away something is, the less intensive and lower-quality texture it gets. When you adjust graphics settings, the game should also have a separate set of textures for each setting. Even with background and even regular qualities set to 1, they are still jamming that hardcore, high-quality texture into the graphics card. All the issues I've seen mirror the fact that the game does not change out the textures for low quality ones. They seem to have mistakenly believed that the graphics card would down sample the textures in real-time. It's a fairly common mistake and probably explains why it melted the PS3 when they started testing it.

[ispano]

That's not a valid argument. I don't see any FPS counters on this screen shot. Are your eyes so good that you can actually see drops that do not make the FPS go below 24 images par second?

I know this post is on the 3rd page, but i've been away from my computer for a few days. Do you really think a person can't see the difference between 24 fps and say 40 fps? And the change between that? Because they can. The human eye doesn't "see" in FPS, it sees changes, and 24 fps looks different than 40 fps.

[Kowen]

its rendered because there is 0 fps drop when you go through the floor or stare through a wall. its pretty common sense. anything that exists through a mesh is rendered. when you go through the floor there isnt a brief pause or load in which the water is generated, because it already exists on the board.

Huh...? That's not true at all, it's very simple for the game to just not render surfaces that aren't visible.

Try keeping your camera aimed at the floor or at a wall in a laggy area, and I can guarantee it'll make your framerate go up. I do it all the time when I go AFK because it makes my GPU temperature drop a bit as well.

[Fixy]

Huh...? That's not true at all, it's very simple for the game to just not render surfaces that aren't visible.

Try keeping your camera aimed at the floor or at a wall in a laggy area, and I can guarantee it'll make your framerate go up. I do it all the time when I go AFK because it makes my GPU temperature drop a bit as well.

obviously, and not relevant at all.

[Keith_Dragoon]

its rendered because there is 0 fps drop when you go through the floor or stare through a wall. its pretty common sense. anything that exists through a mesh is rendered. when you go through the floor there isnt a brief pause or load in which the water is generated, because it already exists on the board.

theres a reason every MMO does not put anything underneath floors. explain to me, that if i put drawing detail on 1 and make my game look like its being played on a gameboy i suffer the same GPU heat problems..... hint it isnt because the game quality of 8 bit textures on drawing detail 1 are graphic intensive.

I just played BC2 on max which is way more graphic intensive and i could not even hear my gpu. Turn on ff14 in the middle of camp horizon and it goes to 90 degrees, fan at 90%. maybe it has something to do with there being nothing but endless white underneath the ground in BC2, /shrug.

Nobody knows how this engine works because for one it doesnt even look that great for how extensive it is on hardware. Not to mention in BC2 i have vision of the whole entire map and in this game i have vision of about 300 yalms.

its fine if you want to disagree and look smart, however, thats not why i am making this post.

Now that you mention it I can vouch for this, I was recently playing BF3 Open beta on max and my GPU was as stealthy as a mouse, when i get on FFXIV it starts raging and gets loud. The temp doesn't spike as much as your because of the dinner plate sized fans on all side of my case but it is definately getting hotter in a less graphics intensive game.