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

[AndrewN]

OK, there is a lot of speculation in this thread, but do we know for sure that the 'sea' and 'rivers' are displayed when you are walking on the ground normally? My understanding of graphics programming in limited but normally things like this wouldn't get displayed at all once the engine has worked out you can't see it (the ground is in the way).

As for the airships, I agree they are not very high at all. If you go to the large pond near Emerald Moss and look north over the water you can sometimes see an airship pass by in front of the trees. It looks really odd.

[Fixy]

OK, there is a lot of speculation in this thread, but do we know for sure that the 'sea' and 'rivers' are displayed when you are walking on the ground normally? My understanding of graphics programming in limited but normally things like this wouldn't get displayed at all once the engine has worked out you can't see it (the ground is in the way).

As for the airships, I agree they are not very high at all. If you go to the large pond near Emerald Moss and look north over the water you can sometimes see an airship pass by in front of the trees. It looks really odd.

Everything is rendered upon loading into the game, or a zone. All of its contents.

[Lyern]

Look through the ground sometime, you'll see miles of water and waves being rendered.

http://imageshack.us/f/689/watervl.jpg/

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.

Everything is rendered upon loading into the game, or a zone. All of its contents.

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

[Misha]

Unfortunately OP this is true, just hoping that Yoshi is smart enough to direct his team on the new map redesigns appropriately and we'll see not only a fix for this but also a HUGE spike in fps/performance!

[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.

[Zenaku]

They redoing the maps and fixing the core system so why even make this topic it going to be fixed if it really a issue.

[Jinko]

As far as I know the GPU only renders what is on screen, so this would have no effect until you fall through the floor.

Of course you are right that it is taking up valuable game resources mostly memory.

They did say a while back they do realise the game is pushing graphics cards harder than they should be and that they are looking into it.

[Eekiki]

Look through the ground sometime, you'll see miles of water and waves being rendered.

http://imageshack.us/f/689/watervl.jpg/

WoW had this problem in beta, and made the underground nothing but white. Solved a lot of FPS issues.

And don't bother asking how i got under there, i just finished mining and walked right through a wall. It's perfectly logical why places like the Hall's of Flames have zero fps lag, it's because they're new and do not have this awful design flaw.

Furthermore, I really can't believe they would do something like this in their own game.... its quite amateur design.

Good call. I think the game renders a lot of unseen stuff, and slowly but surely they're correcting this (they gotta if they ever want this game to run decently on the PS3). Hopefully they take this thread under advisement.

[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

[syntaxlies]

The more you know!

/rainbow

knowing is half the battle