Occlusion Culling Perfomance Issues/Drop--Comprehensive

[Syx]

Actually, your memory usage dropped by about 15-25 MB. Which seems on par with activating OC. My theory is FFXI poorly uses the IDirect3DQuery9 command for calculating meshes to cull. When you move the camera within the game, it has to recalculate all of the meshes, identify the polygons that can be discarded, and render the scene. That recalculation adds a few milliseconds to the rendering of the scene, at which point the calculations complete and the benefits kick in. So what you're seeing is this backface culling engine at work sacrificing 8-10ms to recalculate all faces of every model's mesh that are not visible on your screen. Yes, this includes characters and objects that were not visible on the screen since the last time the algorithm was used.

The problem is, IDirect3DQuery9 is not a terribly efficient method of culling on its own. Sloppy usage of this query results in lots of draw call overhead and noticeable latency while the GPU waits for the results of the queries. There are algorithms for reusing query data, but there's no way of us knowing if SE uses them without some reverse engineering or a drinking with chatty dev. Anywho, I tested your findings on my system and I see the same drop in GPU (GTX 660 SLI) usage, but I also see a shift in CPU (i5-3570k @4.2GHz) usage. All four cores seem to change their utilization. What I did was slowly pan the camera around the market area in Ul'dah while watching my G15 keyboard's LCD, I saw a 15-30% drop in GPU usage while panning and a 20% spike in CPU usage on one core, with a more moderate 10% increase in the remaining three cores. My fps would dip from 42-45 (22-24ms) down to 36-38 (26-28 ms). Not as drastic as your system, but still a variance of about 2-6 ms in draw time. With culling disabled, my fps remained a constant 36-38 fps during the same panning action as well as stationary. Take into consideration my framebuffer usage is smaller due to running the game at 1080p. Might be time to upgrade your CPU! Hope this information helps.

[ReiqMagnus]

Not as drastic as your system, but still a variance of about 2-6 ms in draw time. With culling disabled, my fps remained a constant 36-38 fps during the same panning action as well as stationary. Take into consideration my framebuffer usage is smaller due to running the game at 1080p. Might be time to upgrade your CPU! Hope this information helps.

Indeed, I am aware of my aging proc; Intel's genius decision of ceramic thermal paste in place of solder to attach the IHS to the cpu die, resulting in anywhere from 5c-10c higher temps accross the board has made me reluctant to do so, since I am not exactly a fan of the "de-lidding" concept as the modders refer to it as.

But in any case, going by the latest steam hardware survey, if this issue is a combination of CPU limitations and their admittedly insane draw distance which users cannot change--for example, I can be in the Alchemists guild and still get massive performance drops if I look in the direction of the marketboards--the performance issues related to it are overwhelmingly widespread; not even 15% of people in the survey would be using what could be considered a higher-end ivy/sandy or haswell proc, and since this game caps out at 4 cores/threads, AMD users are going to be in even dire straits.

[AeryM]

[...]and since this game caps out at 4 cores/threads, AMD users are going to be in even dire straits.

Tell me about it. I run an FX CPU @4ghz. Never had any issues with MMOs in the past - runs GW2 like a charm on max settings for example.
This bug is seriously ruining my gameplay experience, it actually forced me to take a break from the game, eventhough i love it.
In Uldah for example, while looking at the adventurers guild without moving the camera, i get 60fps stable (synched). As soon as i move around my camera it drops to 25ish fps, sometimes 30 depending on how crowded the zone is.
Here's hoping to the DX11 version. But i'd love to see it fixed before that...

[ReiqMagnus]

In Uldah for example, while looking at the adventurers guild without moving the camera, i get 60fps stable (synched). As soon as i move around my camera it drops to 25ish fps, sometimes 30 depending on how crowded the zone is.
Here's hoping to the DX11 version. But i'd love to see it fixed before that...

Same issue, same area/direction. The "hot spots" seem to be with character model heavy areas--player characters only I think, since in a lot of areas, such as instances and around The Waking Sand, both of which have a lot of relatively static NPCs a boat load of geometry, don't seem to have the problem.