Occlusion Culling Perfomance Issues/Drop--Comprehensive

[ReiqMagnus]

This issue--massive performance drops while panning the camera when Occlusion Culling is enabled--has been in the game at least since ARR was released (I did not play the beta, but I assume it was in there as well) and has yet to be addressed. Worse still is the fact it seems to be either ignored or swept under the rug by random forum trolls who clearly have no idea what they are talking about.

I took the liberty of taking four comparison screenshots which literally sum up entire paragraphs of the undeniable existence of the issue and the obvious cause. To those who don't want to bother examining the screenshots, I will sum it up it lay-man's terms: occlusion culling is a common technique used in games whereas objects/characters/models are temporarily ceased to be rendered when they are occluded by some form of geometry, such as a wall; this is a fairly common feature as most games would be unplayable/lagtastic without it. FFXIV has this feature as optional and, to put it bluntly, the feature basically stops working when the player rotates/moves his or her camera even a millimeter.

Again, before anyone has some troll comment, please, look at the screenshots and pay attention to the occlusion culling option in the lower left and the framerate display in the lower right or even the integrated one in the options pane.

Occlusion culling enabled while standing still and not moving the camera--63fps, looks good... (or about 15.8ms of frame draw time & 80% GPU usage for the tech savvy)
http://i.imgur.com/4oSGCdZ.jpg

Occlusion culling enabled while moving the camera a few centimeters--dropped to 43fps, a 46.5% performance hit (about 25ms of measured frame draw time & GPU usage at 55%, whereas it should be around 23ms, so there is an immediate pipeline problem here)
http://i.imgur.com/t7VX3vx.jpg

Now, notice what happens when I turn occlusion culling off while the camera is not moving.
http://i.imgur.com/T9gxnMF.jpg
Interesting... getting the exact same framerate and frame draw time as before with occlusion culling bugging out

To put the nail in the coffin, notice how there is literally zero performance hit with occlusion culling off and moving the camera
http://i.imgur.com/RNdMFwv.jpg

As much variables as possible were accounted for and no screenshots were altered in any way.

I have tested this issue with the 331.65 drivers (latest), 331.58, 327.23, 320.49, and the 320.18 versions (cannot go back farther on a GTX 770) and the performance drop remains consistent throughout--though the latest three drivers have consistently better performance in GPU bound areas.

Finally, before someone claims it is a problem on my end, I am using the following which obtains a 12300~ performance score on maximum @ 1920x1080:
4.0GHz (locked) i7-930 (a 4.5GHZ 4770k will be about 25-30% faster in a 4-core application)
1215MHz GTX 770
6GB RAM @ 1333MHz (total RAM usage never exceeds 3GB while running FFXIV)
Windows 7 Pro 64bit
Samsung 840 Pro SSD (game drive)
screenshot or it didn't happen: http://i.imgur.com/K4xqV6b.jpg

I have also tried even single possible idea anyone can think of, so please don't recommend any run-of-the-mill ideas; these would include things such as hyper-threading on/off, vsync on/off, updating drivers, running in windowed, lowering settings (almost all settings are GPU related and have almost no effect in this situation as it is strictly CPU related), putting it on an ssd (it is), re-installing windows, turning off background applications, turning off SweetFX, turning off MSI Afterburner, stop overclocking, unparking cores, turning on/off speedstep, turning on/off C1E support... you get the idea.

[ZohnoReecho]

I would report this on geforce.com too.
After the last release they said they were going to work on ARR compatibility.

[Syx]

It depends on how they implemented the culling. Did they use IDirect3DQuery9? What do the bounding volumes look like? The game was hastily and sloppily coded with few security measures implemented. This might be fixed in future patches, but that's only for Yoshida to decide. Bringing it to their attention now might lead to better implementation with their DX11 client. Sadly, what you've discovered will most likely not be fixed for the DX9 client.

[ReiqMagnus]

Perhaps, but I would not be surprised if this is the root cause for a lot of players performance issues whether they know it or not. You can find volumes of performance complaints which go something like "I AM LAGGING PLZ HLP" with no real information or research done on the problem; the only results I was able to find on this specific problem were either ignored or computer illiterates brushed the issue off as a problem with the plaintiff's system. Frustrating to say the least... especially since this game, sans the OC issue, is one of the most technically proficient MMOs I have come across, an MMO of which I genuinely enjoy playing.

A very specific problem with a specific feature in a specific game is not a problem on my end, it is most likely a problem with the game or with current nVidia drivers (I don't own any AMD cards to test the problem, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was there as well).

[AeryM]

I've never posted in here before - always lurked around.
But for this I'm making an exception, because I really want SE to see and address the issue.

[Syx]

Technically proficient is not how I would describe this game. You should not be able to send SQL inputs over the internet to edit your character's DB entries server side with zero sanitizing, yet you can. BELIEVE ME when I tell you, things are going to get really fucking awful now that it's known how to perform such an action on a player other than yourself. Fraudulent purchasing was just the beginning.

[ReiqMagnus]

You are indeed correct on that front, there are issues the game has which are mind blowing, such as the servers apparently not keeping track of player positions which allows botters to literally teleport around to different nodes and the recent market board hijacking. I probably should have specified it is very technically proficient (in my experience, I have played a lot of MMOs) from a graphics/performance standpoint; most MMOs which look any better than WoW usually have a host of performance problems which are never addressed and people just have to stick with or get used to the idea where 30fps is "normal" on a high end system

[Squa11_Leonhart]

The occlusion culling option reduces the impact of CPU limited scenario's by no longer drawing objects that are masked and offscreen. Generally this reduces cpu usage (or just improves the rate in which visible data reaches the gpu) which increases the GPU usage and the framerate as a result.

What you are seeing is a result of the culled data no longer being in video memory, and having to be streamed back in from system memory - which you have little of on that 930 so its actually fishing the data from the GPU Commit (Paged out) memory.


Windows Memory Management is actually fairly complicated, so you cannot rely on the memory used column in task manager.

[ErikGreaves]

I would also like to see this fixed!

[ReiqMagnus]

The occlusion culling option reduces the impact of CPU limited scenario's by no longer drawing objects that are masked and offscreen. Generally this reduces cpu usage (or just improves the rate in which visible data reaches the gpu) which increases the GPU usage and the framerate as a result.

What you are seeing is a result of the culled data no longer being in video memory, and having to be streamed back in from system memory - which you have little of on that 930 so its actually fishing the data from the GPU Commit (Paged out) memory.


Windows Memory Management is actually fairly complicated, so you cannot rely on the memory used column in task manager.

Not exactly sure what you are talking about, I have more than enough memory for this game; FFXIV is a 32bit app meaning it cannot use more than 4096MB theoretically or around 3.4-3.6GB in a Windows environment (taking into account large address awareness, which I assume FFXIV is, but I have not checked). Additionally, the amount of L1, L2, and L3 cache in the i7-930 is identical to the 4770k--256k, 1MB, and 8MB, respectively.

There are very little performance gains in any real-world scenarios, even gaming benchmarks, between the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th (Nehalem, Westmere, Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge, and Haswell) generation Intel procs. Any performance gains are quite minimal clock-for-clock--the actual performance has completely stagnated as they have been too preoccupied with energy efficiency and worthless integrated graphics.

Also, keep in mind this game has clearly been optimized for the PS3 (ultra low res textures indicate this) so there is simply no way memory could be the issue in any way, since the PS3 has a nonexistent amount of any kind of memory, whether it be system or cache. I have not played the PS3 version, but it obviously needs to use occlusion culling, same with the soon to be released PS4 version, as the former is based on 6-year old tech and the latter is based on mid-range laptop components.

In any case, as I mentioned in the original post and as you kind of mention, the culled data should not be being retrieved in the first place, since the visual data the user receives is not changing--I am not walking around corners, you can look at a flat wall and the performance drop will happened because, for some reason, the game is trying to render things behind the wall, be they character models or other geometry on the map, while it is still occluded.