Occlusion Culling Perfomance Issues/Drop--Comprehensive

[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.

[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.