[Dawntrail Benchmark] Character bodies are the same as before

[Razraptre]

The problem is, the game engine is already heavily choking on the CPU. If you increase the polygon count then the CPU usage will go up further. So it is not an easy task for this small indie company. The first thing, they should do is the migration of the engine to DirectX 12 or Vulkan API. It will lower the CPU usage and also make it easier to support more CPU cores. The current game engine runs basically on one CPU core and does very minor tasks on other cores.

Probably showing my ignorance here, but don't higher fidelity assets usually place a greater strain on the GPU? Why would raising the polygon count in XIV stress the CPU instead?

[Larirawiel]

Probably showing my ignorance here, but don't higher fidelity assets usually place a greater strain on the GPU? Why would raising the polygon count in XIV stress the CPU instead?

It depends, how the "higher fidelity" is implemented. If you increase the polygon count then it will mostly hit the CPU. But if you increase the texture resolution or you add more unique textures then it will strain the GPU. There also effects like raytracing, which strains the CPU and the GPU etc. The devs always try to find a balance for it.



Cheers

[Somnolence]

Probably showing my ignorance here, but don't higher fidelity assets usually place a greater strain on the GPU? Why would raising the polygon count in XIV stress the CPU instead?

Polygons alone don't put much stress on modern GPUs, f.e. last gen game Horizon Zero Dawn has 500k polygon robots (while as I commented above FFXIV character has ~10k).

MMOs have higher dependency on CPU due to more diverse (and unpredictable) things happening on the screen. For example, you zone into Limsa. CPU has to handle info about all characters around you, recreate them based on appearance parameters, fetch equipment info, load equipment models and textures, handle character animations and actions etc.