Memory Usage Issue

[AlexiaKidd]

I shoot up to 150+FPS during loading screens ^^ other than that I am capped at 60fps ingame.

[charliesheen]

I must say, this is completely confusing. I got impatient and decided to test this out on the pc I'm on during daytime (very low spec but can run the game) by setting the pagefile to 256MB. The PC has 4GB of RAM so it's no worry. Despite this, Windows is still reporting the same physical RAM usage when I'm in Ul'dah and identical values under the "Commit (KB)" column in resource monitor.

I researched this the other week, and where it says "Commit charge" that would be the pagefile + physical RAM that is being used. But in resource monitor, the tooltip for this particular column that only says "Commit" says, and I quote, "Amount of virtual memory reserved by the operating system for the process in KB". Obviously that's why I've been calling the value in that column the pagefile/virtual memory usage.

So now we see that the game not only ignores the pagefile setting, if I'm to follow that tooltip OR the information I found out about commit charge, and that decreasing the pagefile size makes no difference to how much RAM the game uses.

FYI, I'm sitting in the middle of Ul'dah and the game is taking no more than 1.5GB RAM, even though it clearly needs to. I'm really not buying that this has anything to do with the natural addressing limit of 32-bit applications...

Edit: Forgot to mention, even on this old spec PC with other applications running and being in Ul'dah, CPU usage is average 80% on both cores with occasional spikes and GPU usage is... 30%. I'll say it again, there is a serious bottleneck due to how this game uses memory.

[Anty]

Um...

How are you getting above 60FPS? The game is supposed to be locked to 60FPS@1080p for PC and 60FPS@720P for PS3 to prevent PC players from having a higher frame advantage from PS3 players.

i also get much higher then 60 fps but i use vsync since i get ugly tearing and i wanna keep my gfx card as cool as possible.
In areas with lotsa alpha textures and supersampling it gets still hot ofc but without... pixel-fest

edit: did they change the 60 fps cap recently? perhaps if so i just didnt recognize it since my vsync.

[Anty]

I must say, this is completely confusing. I got impatient and decided to test this out on the pc I'm on during daytime (very low spec but can run the game) by setting the pagefile to 256MB. The PC has 4GB of RAM so it's no worry. Despite this, Windows is still reporting the same physical RAM usage when I'm in Ul'dah and identical values under the "Commit (KB)" column in resource monitor.

I researched this the other week, and where it says "Commit charge" that would be the pagefile + physical RAM that is being used. But in resource monitor, the tooltip for this particular column that only says "Commit" says, and I quote, "Amount of virtual memory reserved by the operating system for the process in KB". Obviously that's why I've been calling the value in that column the pagefile/virtual memory usage.

So now we see that the game not only ignores the pagefile setting, if I'm to follow that tooltip OR the information I found out about commit charge, and that decreasing the pagefile size makes no difference to how much RAM the game uses.

FYI, I'm sitting in the middle of Ul'dah and the game is taking no more than 1.5GB RAM, even though it clearly needs to. I'm really not buying that this has anything to do with the natural addressing limit of 32-bit applications...

Edit: Forgot to mention, even on this old spec PC with other applications running and being in Ul'dah, CPU usage is average 80% on both cores with occasional spikes and GPU usage is... 30%. I'll say it again, there is a serious bottleneck due to how this game uses memory.

the game engine is just a joke. We have these loading tunnels everywhere (mindless running)- i think thats also the reason for delayed chocobos... if we run through these loading tunnels too fast the landscape on the other side won't be loaded properly.

They just didnt make a seemless world (because obviously they just can't *sigh*) they faked a seemless world. And this is one of the few nails in the coffin. As long as they keep the engine as it is and the poor optimisation as it is... this game will go nowhere since even with good content... what good is an mmo if just the people with best hardware can enjoy it (and even then its like blasphemy throwing a 580 gfx onto this empty world just to get good fps and have the ugly foiliage smoothed out)

Don't bother testing. I tested my ass off for weeks, got my pagefile fixed on the ram via ramdisk, etc. etc. and the game just won't use it. You can optimize perhaps 15% with hardware or an SSD but the rest is up to SE, they have to do their homework and optimize this stupid engine a lot.

An mmo where you only see like 30 people max at the same time?... how massive is that lol.

[charliesheen]

For sure. Of course in this system I just used to test, there is also bottleneck from the CPU, that's why the GPU usage % is even lower on this system. But at home, there is no excuses, clearly something is wrong with the way it uses memory. Even if you do have a pimpin' GPU, it will suffer from how the game uses memory when you move to a busy city etc.

[Anty]

For sure. Of course in this system I just used to test, there is also bottleneck from the CPU, that's why the GPU usage % is even lower on this system. But at home, there is no excuses, clearly something is wrong with the way it uses memory. Even if you do have a pimpin' GPU, it will suffer from how the game uses memory when you move to a busy city etc.

my gpu useage in town goes down to like 40% but my cpu isnt sweating at all. all cores are at like 20% max, sometimes below... the i-7 they recommend isnt even close to being used. Its a limitation they made for whatever reason.
But i think one is the heavy HD usage ALL THE TIME. This game loads every shit, every sec from HD, i think that is the reason why its so slow. IT just won'T use the memory. This might be one of the stupid ps3 limitaion issues. but ... why do WE PC USERS have to suffer for that BS? Can't they just make these limitations for the ps3 crowd, like all other ps3/pc games? Its not new that pc games look far superior by now then the ps3 twins.

[charliesheen]

my gpu useage in town goes down to like 40% but my cpu isnt sweating at all. all cores are at like 20% max, sometimes below... the i-7 they recommend isnt even close to being used. Its a limitation they made for whatever reason.
But i think one is the heavy HD usage ALL THE TIME. This game loads every shit, every sec from HD, i think that is the reason why its so slow. IT just won'T use the memory. This might be one of the stupid ps3 limitaion issues. but ... why do WE PC USERS have to suffer for that BS? Can't they just make these limitations for the ps3 crowd, like all other ps3/pc games? Its not new that pc games look far superior by now then the ps3 twins.

The reason it does that (load from drive/virtual memory) is because the things that matter in the game seem to cost a lot of memory. I really got interested in this after reading the topic about people wanting zones redesigned, someone posted a link to an interview with the devs in which they said textures cost too much memory and that's why they copy and pasted terrain.

I'm not proposing that they convert the game to 64-bit and uncap memory usage as it would spiral out of control due to how much memory some stuff takes in this game. Primarily we are talking about the amount of players within your zone, it seems to rise and rise even if there is only 100 players for instance. If they let it go uncapped, the game could be trying to use tens of GB someday.

This is a two stage problem: first of all they need to change the way the game uses memory (by this I mean there is clearly something wrong if terrain costs so much memory, or loading a player costs so much memory) or in other words optimize it. Then they need to address the fact that the game is bias towards Virtual memory rather than Physical memory, and as such isn't making full use of the hardware. Even within the 2GB addressing limit of 32-bit, if they optimize it, things could be much much smoother for everyone.

[Anty]

The reason it does that (load from drive/virtual memory) is because the things that matter in the game seem to cost a lot of memory. I really got interested in this after reading the topic about people wanting zones redesigned, someone posted a link to an interview with the devs in which they said textures cost too much memory and that's why they copy and pasted terrain.

I'm not proposing that they convert the game to 64-bit and uncap memory usage as it would spiral out of control due to how much memory some stuff takes in this game. Primarily we are talking about the amount of players within your zone, it seems to rise and rise even if there is only 100 players for instance. If they let it go uncapped, the game could be trying to use tens of GB someday.

This is a two stage problem: first of all they need to change the way the game uses memory (by this I mean there is clearly something wrong if terrain costs so much memory, or loading a player costs so much memory) or in other words optimize it. Then they need to address the fact that the game is bias towards Virtual memory rather than Physical memory, and as such isn't making full use of the hardware. Even within the 2GB addressing limit of 32-bit, if they optimize it, things could be much much smoother for everyone.

true. And i think they should use more visual "magic", realistic lighting to improve the atmosphere rather then wasting resources on too big textures. The fact that we have HD textures and bushes and foiliage not being close to HD looks makes it even more stupid. On top we have no real shadows. How HD is that? The game characters look amazing imho but the rest... doesnt look that HDish to me. But as far as i know they said that they tested it with smaller textures already and it doesnt make a visual difference. So i hope they will improve this mess asap. Just sad they didnt do it long time ago.

I also hope they implement something like fxaa for all these plants so also people with less powerful pcs can have this AA without spending 2000 § on a rig or more.

[charliesheen]

A lot of the textures in the game don't even look very high quality, especially in terrain. I've really been scratching my head about why it costs them so much memory. Same goes for loading other player models. True, they are high quality. But there are other MMOs out with thousands more players logged in at the one time that don't have these problems, and other MMOs with comparable levels of graphical quality for the player models, once again they don't cost GB of memory to load at a slow pace.

[Xquiel]

I agree with you charliesheen, this is a big big problem. This game needs more RAM specially in Ul'dah... we might wait for x64 .exe?