General Game Performance - Anyone Else Feel The Way I Do?

[oberonQA]

I just thought the amount of info I gave about my computer would suffice. Again, this was never intended to be a discussion on what hardware I am using.

With that being said, I am glad people have responded with such interesting information. There seems to be a lot of people who say that their system isn't stressed, but they still feel the clunky effect of the game loading in new objects. This is definitely something that I wanted to zero in on and find out more about, with regards to how other players feel. If it's true that this is just how the system is designed then I hope that it would be continuously brought to the attention of developers. Having an issue like this stick to the game for it's entirety would be quite sad.

thanks all!

So your not really interested in finding a solution to the problem... you just want people to be aware of the fact that your experiencing problems running the game.

One question for you then... why should the developers (or anyone else for that matter) give your situation any thought if your not willing to do the due diligence in isolating the cause of the problem? I don't disagree that the game has issues, but what your describing doesn't sound like a game issue. If it was truly a game issue, you would experience problems in the game that would be isolated to the game and wouldn't affect things outside the game.

I take it when you try listening to music while you play, you get a lot of audio stuttering and/or popping. Am I right? This is a classic sign of the hardware being overextended... either as a result of misconfiguration, insufficient resources, or thermal throttling. The game being choppy would have zero effect on other programs or processes running unless one of the the things I mentioned is occurring.

Yes the game has some clunkiness when it comes to loading new objects. But as myself and others have pointed out, it is only really noticeable in Ul'dah, which happens to be where most people happen to gather. Static geometry isn't causing the stutter, as if that was the case it would be occurring everywhere (oh wait, it's occurring everywhere on your machine... everyone else only experiences it in Ul'dah). The stuttering problem is most likely related to the texture buffer, which gets overloaded in highly populated areas that are full of models with different textures (as opposed to a standard "palette" of textures that would be present in an area that is full of copies of a specific set of textures). There are two causes for this problem:

1) The game's internal texture buffer sub-system isn't optimized to handle an excessive amount of unique textures being loaded all at once, requiring the game to load new textures to the buffer, display the model that uses the texture, then unload the texture to a cache in order to make room for a new texture to be loaded up... saving the textures in a cache so the texture can be recalled again when needed.

2) The game's default texture size is so large that it eats up the texture memory on a video card at a much faster rate, requiring the game to load textures to a cache on the hard drive (which is slower than loading into VRAM). There are reports of people using SLI/Crossfire setups that are not experiencing this problem, which makes sense since your standard SLI setup has access to 3GB's of VRAM (as opposed to a single card's 1.5GB's of VRAM) and your standard Crossfire setup has access to 2GB's of VRAM (as opposed to a single card's 1GB of VRAM). The more VRAM the game has access to, the bigger the game's internal texture buffer is.

It's entirely possible the problem is a combination of the two. But again, I must reiterate, this problem would affect the graphic performance of the game... not the general multitasking capabilities of your computer. The fact that your experiencing this problem everywhere in the game (regardless of where you happen to be) and your computer looses multitasking efficiency suggests your computer is overextended, which is exasperating the problem in the game.

But whatever... your not interested in finding a solution to your problem... you just want to complain and your looking for people that share the same opinion as you. Good luck getting S-E's attention... especially now that you've provided such a narrow scope for the conversation.

[Coldfire]

Just as an info: SLI or Crossfire DO NOT DOUBLE YOUR VRAM. The information has to be saved twice (once on each card). The lesser fpslag in towns for those people is due to their HDD being way faster (at least that's the case for everyone I know :P)
Also the texture size isn't that big. Even if you lower the texture detail the fps hit in towns will still be big. That is 'cause the game is split into many small files that are not accessed in order. SE just failed to implement an async loading mechanism like in UDK.

[oberonQA]

Just as an info: SLI or Crossfire DO NOT DOUBLE YOUR VRAM. The information has to be saved twice (once on each card). The lesser fpslag in towns for those people is due to their HDD being way faster (at least that's the case for everyone I know :P)

I didn't know that about SLI/Crossfire. Well that shoots my theory out the window about the cause of the stuttering problem.