Numbering your points, starting it with bold generally doesn't make your point any more valid, though it was flashy, very nice
Anyhow, ive messed around with all the settings, you can't presume that everyone on here doesnt. Also, I wouldn't say my system is meh, games like oblivion, and pretty much any newer games after that ive never had a problem with.
Though the game is still in beta, so we'll see, ive heard that during beta theres a string of code for easy access to change things in game that can impact the performance level.
First off, it is hard enough for some people to read implied emphasis on these forums. I don't take any chances, and it's really easy to hit some shortcuts to bold and raise font size. I find it effective, if you don't like my internet rhetoric, I'm not really all that concerned.
Have you inserted the Shader Caching line into your Vgclien.ini file? What it does is it take the Shaders that are normally stored on your memory and puts it on your HD and frees up space for other processes which are much more important. 15 or so Frames per second increase. Easy.
Additionally, Oblivion is a terrible comparison. MMOs are as a rule perform worse simply due the the uncontroled environment. Single player games have the luxury of being able to design their game with constraints. IE, when you enter this location there will only ever be these many objects here, when you enter this level there will only ever be X many modles on screen.
Also...because VG is being built so that flying mounts are available at launch and are useable everywhere, certain objects (buildings in a city, locations in the distance, things up on a mountain, etc) must be fully rendered on all sides. A complete object. Other games, like EQII and WoW excessivly use Facades, Hollywood mockups, cardbord cutouts that are propped up against a wall and only textured on one side.
And again.... They were having problems with the 6000 series. I believe you actually needed to roll your drivers back for the game to play as it should...but i don't have one so I never really paid attention to those threads.
Regarding the editing of Shader caching, actually I havent tried that, and appreciate that, I'll try that when I get home from work today, that does sound promising. Most of what ive edited had to do with ATI files and recommendations from indie people taking apart omega drivers/cat drivers. Though I found next to no performance boosts.
Its also very difficult to find a game that would be comparible by mmo nature to this game, Graphically Oblivion is probably the best comparison you could make for a single player game, as it is trying to be based off of an mmo, thus why I used it. But you are fully right about the differences in performance from single player games to one thats online, however I don't have the funds to randomly buy any MMO's to test my performance out with more recently released mmo's, and in the long run, it would be just as horrible of a comparison given the fact Vanguard is a beast of its own.
I *did* get a chance to use the performance forums quite a bit during my 4 months. That's how I managed to improve to 15 fps in a city from 4-5.
There's definitely some good stuff in there but the performance issues really needed some TLC (not trivial loot code, mind you) before going to beta 4 much less 5 or even lifting the NDA. By the time beta 3 was up, a very high (and should be significant) percentage of people were begging for Sigil to focus on that before working on anything else. But here we are with no NDA now to hide these things.
I played for the first time today for a few hours. I have 2 gigs ram, 7800 geforce, 24" monitor, at 1600 (gaming) resolution. Yes, it was choppy near other players, but forgot about the stuttering for a minute. This game, on the balanced setting, just doesn't look that great. I turned up the graphics to max and it still didn't look as good as some other games..especially the spell effects and character textures. Yeah, I'm used to the nice EQ2 textures and its smooth gameplay at max settings on my system but like I said, even if Vanguard wasn't choppy, the graphics (IMO) just aren't that great. It feels a few years old...I was expecting something ground breaking based on all the press releases and such. Now, add in the choppy performance and you get a frustrating experience with average textures at best. Hell, I expected the performance to take a huge hit when all the settings were up. I planned on upgrading my system with my federal refund in the next month or 2, but it certainly won't be for an expectation of some kick ass high-end graphics on Vanguard...it'll only be to fix the choppy gameplay and increase FPS on high settings.
I know it's beta and I've beta tested many of games. I'm sure Vanguard will improve as testing continues and the patches come out, but for those that are expecting performance to be on par with games & the textures we've been playing the past few years, think again.
I have a fairly good gaming PC. It isn't top-of-the-line, but it plays most games at maximum settings with at least 40-60 FPS. This is a 2.4 Ghz processor, 1 GB RAM, GeForce 6800 256 MB PC. It's not a race car, but it is definitely sporty.
However, I've been trying to play Vanguard and even with performance settings pushed to the ultimate low available (settings that make the game look WORSE than DAoC graphics), I am slideshowing whenever I play near other players or on occasion as I move through a zone and new graphics are streamed in.
Yes, it is a beta, and I am hearing from others that while their performance is bad compared to prettier games they can also run on their system, it is pretty much unanimous that the performance is just awful.
I've only been able to get to level 5 as I can't play on servers that have high populations (being near other people makes it unplayable - how will I ever group?), but from what I've seen so far, combat is fairly standard for MMOs. Auto-attacks and special skills. I did diplomacy missions all morning and had a really good time doing them as I enjoy stories, but they aren't rewarding - at least not so far as I have nothing to show for my efforts yet besides more skill in diplomacy which doesn't seem to have any use outside the diplomacy mini-game.
It's really surprising to me that the performance is so awful. I mean, I saw this at E3 and wondered why the graphics were so bad. Maybe they couldn't run the game with settings that normal games would use even on monster PCs back then. Unless I come into $3K and can by an uber PC with dual GPUs or they make huge fixes to this before release, there is no way that I would ever purchase this game. . .
If I can't play it even when it looks like ass (something I'm not interested in doing), then I'm pretty much SOL. I can't imagine even the high-end rigs being able to function in a raid environment. It just boggles my mind that the game is in this state during open beta.
I understand where you're coming from, although you could really use another gig of ram, one just isn't cutting it nowadays. But I can help you. I used to have terrible lag too, but I came across a tweak thread. Please try these tweaks and then get back to me. They are very easy to do, and you will gain yourself at least 8-10 fps.
Also, there is really now way of telling how computer savvy you are. Some people don't even know about windows startup and try playing games with like 8 programs running in the background.
Make sure you defrag, clear out your cookies, disable your startup items then do the tweaks. You won't believe how amazing it looks and you will be able to play on highest quality with at least 15 fps in town and like 20 or 30 in the wilderness.
Am building Intel core 2 quad extreme 2.66 ghz nforce 6 SLI Corsair 2Gb DDR2-800 Dual 768MB GeForce 8800 GTX's 2 150 Gb 10,000 Raptors Not sure about the case and power supply yet or the sound card ,but ive been waiting 8 months to do it gunna cost alot in Canada its time to upgrade for me . MY wife gets my old one which will run Vanguard and where both playing . See ya in there
You will love that setup. It's true Vanguard does need to optimize more for lower systems, but it runs great on my machine (2.4 Core 2, 2GB DDR2 800, 1 8800GTX.) I get 20-30 in cities (except Khal) and 50-80 in open areas (everything maxed, max clip plane)...
Numbering your points, starting it with bold generally doesn't make your point any more valid, though it was flashy, very nice
Anyhow, ive messed around with all the settings, you can't presume that everyone on here doesnt. Also, I wouldn't say my system is meh, games like oblivion, and pretty much any newer games after that ive never had a problem with.
Though the game is still in beta, so we'll see, ive heard that during beta theres a string of code for easy access to change things in game that can impact the performance level.
First off, it is hard enough for some people to read implied emphasis on these forums. I don't take any chances, and it's really easy to hit some shortcuts to bold and raise font size. I find it effective, if you don't like my internet rhetoric, I'm not really all that concerned.
Have you inserted the Shader Caching line into your Vgclien.ini file? What it does is it take the Shaders that are normally stored on your memory and puts it on your HD and frees up space for other processes which are much more important. 15 or so Frames per second increase. Easy.
Additionally, Oblivion is a terrible comparison. MMOs are as a rule perform worse simply due the the uncontroled environment. Single player games have the luxury of being able to design their game with constraints. IE, when you enter this location there will only ever be these many objects here, when you enter this level there will only ever be X many modles on screen.
Also...because VG is being built so that flying mounts are available at launch and are useable everywhere, certain objects (buildings in a city, locations in the distance, things up on a mountain, etc) must be fully rendered on all sides. A complete object. Other games, like EQII and WoW excessivly use Facades, Hollywood mockups, cardbord cutouts that are propped up against a wall and only textured on one side.
And again.... They were having problems with the 6000 series. I believe you actually needed to roll your drivers back for the game to play as it should...but i don't have one so I never really paid attention to those threads.
Regarding the editing of Shader caching, actually I havent tried that, and appreciate that, I'll try that when I get home from work today, that does sound promising. Most of what ive edited had to do with ATI files and recommendations from indie people taking apart omega drivers/cat drivers. Though I found next to no performance boosts.
Its also very difficult to find a game that would be comparible by mmo nature to this game, Graphically Oblivion is probably the best comparison you could make for a single player game, as it is trying to be based off of an mmo, thus why I used it. But you are fully right about the differences in performance from single player games to one thats online, however I don't have the funds to randomly buy any MMO's to test my performance out with more recently released mmo's, and in the long run, it would be just as horrible of a comparison given the fact Vanguard is a beast of its own.
The Shader cacheing is a must. It's relatively new to beta, and it still occasionally causes some graphical bugs. One in particular is that water textures will fail to load. But it boosts your FPS and kills most hitching (so long as you have the minimap closed, as the Minimap is still unoptimized and causes a performance dip.
Not sure if the thread is still available, I'll check it out and if it isn't I'll post the line here. I think it is something like
bUseShaderCache=1 or some buisness and needs to be inserted under the [General] line. I don't suggest using this unless you confirm it though.
For once someone made at least some sense ,however i dont think any problems in the game have to do with video cards.This game as i suspected from my post a couple weeks ago is made using a very old unreal game engine.The textures look very cheap and really shouldn't lag anyone,at least from any screens i have seen.I agree there is a big diff from single person games and MMOs because you can't really predict how many poly's will be on screen at any given time.However most games that i have ever played Do have pre settings that only allow so many objects or players to show on screen,after that the game dumbs down the rest or even blocks out background at a very short distance.
I do remember the old unreal game didn't have the greatest net code and was updated several times.I am sure these guys are having the same problems.Why moving any graphical operations into the slowest part of the processing ,wich is your HD would help is beyond me.All graphical processes should be handled by the video card.Lots of the unreal game engine code needed tweaking,i remeber hundreds of players hitting the forums looking for answers.The game engine was designed way back when directx 7 just came out,perhaps even before that directx6.,so i can truly understand when dude is saying you might be better off rolling back your drivers,on some of these older machines that have older bios and onboard drivers designed to run back in directx7 days.
Someone needs to post there actual frames per second as this game engine comes with the command to show it,i just can't remeber it offhand.You could also control your netspeed and stuff however the game may have a cap limited by the server i don't know until i try the game.Sound drivers and settings were a huge problem with this game also as the biggy [creative ]sound cards always had problems with this engine.
I really believe they started designing this game a very long time ago.They had a great vision perhaps to make something a little better than there forefather[everquest],however didn't fathom how fast and how much better game engines would develope before they actually finished there game for publication.I will be trying the open beta with no worries about lag or whatever because i realize this isnt the finished product,and will be tweaked.Sigil games i am sure have learned from the dark and light fiascal and wouldn't jeopardize there franchise by screwing up in the same fashion.
This game engine played great and looked great using the opengl drivers,maybe someone needs to look into this.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
I have a fairly good gaming PC. It isn't top-of-the-line, but it plays most games at maximum settings with at least 40-60 FPS. This is a 2.4 Ghz processor, 1 GB RAM, GeForce 6800 256 MB PC. It's not a race car, but it is definitely sporty.
However, I've been trying to play Vanguard and even with performance settings pushed to the ultimate low available (settings that make the game look WORSE than DAoC graphics), I am slideshowing whenever I play near other players or on occasion as I move through a zone and new graphics are streamed in.
Yes, it is a beta, and I am hearing from others that while their performance is bad compared to prettier games they can also run on their system, it is pretty much unanimous that the performance is just awful.
I've only been able to get to level 5 as I can't play on servers that have high populations (being near other people makes it unplayable - how will I ever group?), but from what I've seen so far, combat is fairly standard for MMOs. Auto-attacks and special skills. I did diplomacy missions all morning and had a really good time doing them as I enjoy stories, but they aren't rewarding - at least not so far as I have nothing to show for my efforts yet besides more skill in diplomacy which doesn't seem to have any use outside the diplomacy mini-game.
It's really surprising to me that the performance is so awful. I mean, I saw this at E3 and wondered why the graphics were so bad. Maybe they couldn't run the game with settings that normal games would use even on monster PCs back then. Unless I come into $3K and can by an uber PC with dual GPUs or they make huge fixes to this before release, there is no way that I would ever purchase this game. . .
If I can't play it even when it looks like ass (something I'm not interested in doing), then I'm pretty much SOL. I can't imagine even the high-end rigs being able to function in a raid environment. It just boggles my mind that the game is in this state during open beta.
Dink,
I didnt read what others have told you because it sounds like you have a very close configuration to what I have with one exception. I have 2 gigs of ram. the game is silky smooth - even on the highest setting it was smooth enough that I'd play (unless near water)
Go get ya another meg of ram - will help you out in more than just this game!
I have been running around in all kinds of area just fine all day. I have a 3y/o+ setup except the grafics card is half a$$ 7800GS agp and I get good framrates on high everywhere. I ran into the n00blet cities and I crashed! there must have been 400+ people in the starting city for the dark elves; I grabbed horrid framerates. trust me its the n00b chunks clean up your machines and level a little past the n00blet areas and youll have fun. Also IF you didnt happen to defrag after install and update; DO IT lol vanguard throws crap all over your drive.
Here you go.... Snagged the Shader Caching line from my own vgclient.ini file:
[General]
bUseShaderCaching=1
It helps a ton.
To Wizardry: To the contrary, this is actually a pretty updated version of the Unreal engine and heavily moded. They even have used portions of the Unreal 3 code, and have had access to it due to one of their devs having close connections to the one of the Unreal 3 project leads.
The real problems with the performance is just, simply.... bugged, sloppy coding. Which is and has been being improved upon on. VG has some bad memory leaks right now, and it always helps to flush the engine caches once an hour with a /flush.
The part about moving the shaders to the HD is because the shaders were hogging up too much attention on peoples gpus and really weren't required to be constantly adjusting. This code simply caches and uses existing shaders (if I'm not mistaken) to free up space on your Memory for other processes (like terrain and artifact rendering, etc. etc.) I'm no expert by any means, so I could be wrong.
anarchyart - I ran everything on that tweak thread and sadly didn't get much of a performance boost at all. Maybe 5 FPS, but in a dungeon I was getting 10 FPS when alone and not moving and would dip down to slideshowing if I got into a battle or other players were nearby.
anarchyart - I ran everything on that tweak thread and sadly didn't get much of a performance boost at all. Maybe 5 FPS, but in a dungeon I was getting 10 FPS when alone and not moving and would dip down to slideshowing if I got into a battle or other players were nearby.
Thanks for the suggestion Vengeful. Unfortunately, it is still not working. While I can now get up to 20 FPS with absurdly low settings out in the wilderness with no NPCs and crazy bad graphics (like 6 year old graphics), I still hitch up around other players and slide-show.
It's weird because I play with these settings a lot and I can go as high as the high quality setting and I still get 20 FPS that drops to 10 FPS in dungeons or towns and hitches to a stand-still around other players. It doesn't seem to be about the graphical settings so much as there is just some weird code going on.
It doesn't make any sense. . . even at high quality, the game doesn't look any better than other games I play at high quality (Oh, and resolution doesn't do anything either. . . 1280x1024 is the same FPS for me as 1024x768). Why should a game that looks like a high-detail EQ 2 (sort of an EQ 3 - not quite as good as Oblivion's graphics, but good) not run as well as Oblivion does? Also, why should so many high-end rigs also have troubles with hitching?
There is something odd going on with the game code that makes it give less performance than we are used to seeing on game hardware. . . by a very large margin.
Honestly, this could be a good thing as they might be able to fix it. I'm just not going to hold my breath, as I think the devs would have to be blind to know that this isn't extremely bad for the game as it means that the target audience is narrowed to people with high-end PCs (and even they complain. My brother has a large monitor and a slick system. I don't know if he is also experiencing hitching when playing on super-low settings, but he hates having to play either a super-bent game or a letter-boxed one. He isn't going to get the game unless performance improves either).
I remember coming on here after E3 and expressing my amazement at how bad the game looked. My guess is that they had to do that to get it playable back then. . . I guess I expected all of that to work itself out before launch. After a while, I really started to see how there are so many hardcore gamers that EQ created and I felt that Vanguard could be successful as a quality niche game for this type of player. But if you limit it further to only those hardcore gamers who ALSO have a killer PC. . . well, geez.
Numbering your points, starting it with bold generally doesn't make your point any more valid, though it was flashy, very nice
Anyhow, ive messed around with all the settings, you can't presume that everyone on here doesnt. Also, I wouldn't say my system is meh, games like oblivion, and pretty much any newer games after that ive never had a problem with.
Though the game is still in beta, so we'll see, ive heard that during beta theres a string of code for easy access to change things in game that can impact the performance level.
First off, it is hard enough for some people to read implied emphasis on these forums. I don't take any chances, and it's really easy to hit some shortcuts to bold and raise font size. I find it effective, if you don't like my internet rhetoric, I'm not really all that concerned.
Have you inserted the Shader Caching line into your Vgclien.ini file? What it does is it take the Shaders that are normally stored on your memory and puts it on your HD and frees up space for other processes which are much more important. 15 or so Frames per second increase. Easy.
Additionally, Oblivion is a terrible comparison. MMOs are as a rule perform worse simply due the the uncontroled environment. Single player games have the luxury of being able to design their game with constraints. IE, when you enter this location there will only ever be these many objects here, when you enter this level there will only ever be X many modles on screen.
Also...because VG is being built so that flying mounts are available at launch and are useable everywhere, certain objects (buildings in a city, locations in the distance, things up on a mountain, etc) must be fully rendered on all sides. A complete object. Other games, like EQII and WoW excessivly use Facades, Hollywood mockups, cardbord cutouts that are propped up against a wall and only textured on one side.
And again.... They were having problems with the 6000 series. I believe you actually needed to roll your drivers back for the game to play as it should...but i don't have one so I never really paid attention to those threads.
where is this shading caching line? I checked that mort's guide I cant find this. my performance is sucking but i only have 1gb ram. amazing now games gonna need 2gb ram this sucks what're doing with all this RAM...
edit- k found it at end of Mort's performance post
Like everyone has said, keep in mind it is a BETA, they are currently finding the correct number of players per server so that it may run at a comfortable speed. And as many people said the client is not complete and will not be untill release, as it its with most beta's... not to mention there are plenty of debuggers in the background slowing down the servers.
Thanks for the suggestion Vengeful. Unfortunately, it is still not working. While I can now get up to 20 FPS with absurdly low settings out in the wilderness with no NPCs and crazy bad graphics (like 6 year old graphics), I still hitch up around other players and slide-show.
It's weird because I play with these settings a lot and I can go as high as the high quality setting and I still get 20 FPS that drops to 10 FPS in dungeons or towns and hitches to a stand-still around other players. It doesn't seem to be about the graphical settings so much as there is just some weird code going on.
It doesn't make any sense. . . even at high quality, the game doesn't look any better than other games I play at high quality (Oh, and resolution doesn't do anything either. . . 1280x1024 is the same FPS for me as 1024x768). Why should a game that looks like a high-detail EQ 2 (sort of an EQ 3 - not quite as good as Oblivion's graphics, but good) not run as well as Oblivion does? Also, why should so many high-end rigs also have troubles with hitching?
There is something odd going on with the game code that makes it give less performance than we are used to seeing on game hardware. . . by a very large margin.
Honestly, this could be a good thing as they might be able to fix it. I'm just not going to hold my breath, as I think the devs would have to be blind to know that this isn't extremely bad for the game as it means that the target audience is narrowed to people with high-end PCs (and even they complain. My brother has a large monitor and a slick system. I don't know if he is also experiencing hitching when playing on super-low settings, but he hates having to play either a super-bent game or a letter-boxed one. He isn't going to get the game unless performance improves either).
I remember coming on here after E3 and expressing my amazement at how bad the game looked. My guess is that they had to do that to get it playable back then. . . I guess I expected all of that to work itself out before launch. After a while, I really started to see how there are so many hardcore gamers that EQ created and I felt that Vanguard could be successful as a quality niche game for this type of player. But if you limit it further to only those hardcore gamers who ALSO have a killer PC. . . well, geez.
Hrm...well, I suggest you take this feedback to the Performance forums if you haven't already. This is the crunch time and this is the sort of issues that they want to tackle no doubt.
I've gotten similar FPS on a much weaker system so it probably is some sort of capatability issue on Sigil's side. Here's to hoping they can iron it out for you.
Numbering your points, starting it with bold generally doesn't make your point any more valid, though it was flashy, very nice
Anyhow, ive messed around with all the settings, you can't presume that everyone on here doesnt. Also, I wouldn't say my system is meh, games like oblivion, and pretty much any newer games after that ive never had a problem with.
Though the game is still in beta, so we'll see, ive heard that during beta theres a string of code for easy access to change things in game that can impact the performance level.
First off, it is hard enough for some people to read implied emphasis on these forums. I don't take any chances, and it's really easy to hit some shortcuts to bold and raise font size. I find it effective, if you don't like my internet rhetoric, I'm not really all that concerned.
Have you inserted the Shader Caching line into your Vgclien.ini file? What it does is it take the Shaders that are normally stored on your memory and puts it on your HD and frees up space for other processes which are much more important. 15 or so Frames per second increase. Easy.
Additionally, Oblivion is a terrible comparison. MMOs are as a rule perform worse simply due the the uncontroled environment. Single player games have the luxury of being able to design their game with constraints. IE, when you enter this location there will only ever be these many objects here, when you enter this level there will only ever be X many modles on screen.
Also...because VG is being built so that flying mounts are available at launch and are useable everywhere, certain objects (buildings in a city, locations in the distance, things up on a mountain, etc) must be fully rendered on all sides. A complete object. Other games, like EQII and WoW excessivly use Facades, Hollywood mockups, cardbord cutouts that are propped up against a wall and only textured on one side.
And again.... They were having problems with the 6000 series. I believe you actually needed to roll your drivers back for the game to play as it should...but i don't have one so I never really paid attention to those threads.
where is this shading caching line? I checked that mort's guide I cant find this. my performance is sucking but i only have 1gb ram. amazing now games gonna need 2gb ram this sucks what're doing with all this RAM...
edit- k found it at end of Mort's performance post
It was a hidden Dev post requsting people test the Shader Cache function before they turned it on for the rest of the clients. It hasn't been rolled out yet but you can activate it by adding that line.
while the game is still in beta this is open beta which is normally used by game companies for making good impressions on the gaming community to sell the game. That is obviously not happening.
while the game is still in beta this is open beta which is normally used by game companies for making good impressions on the gaming community to sell the game. That is obviously not happening.
Right. Well, I think they are out of money and being pushed to launch.
I have a fairly good gaming PC. It isn't top-of-the-line, but it plays most games at maximum settings with at least 40-60 FPS. This is a 2.4 Ghz processor, 1 GB RAM, GeForce 6800 256 MB PC. It's not a race car, but it is definitely sporty.
However, I've been trying to play Vanguard and even with performance settings pushed to the ultimate low available (settings that make the game look WORSE than DAoC graphics), I am slideshowing whenever I play near other players or on occasion as I move through a zone and new graphics are streamed in.
Yes, it is a beta, and I am hearing from others that while their performance is bad compared to prettier games they can also run on their system, it is pretty much unanimous that the performance is just awful.
I've only been able to get to level 5 as I can't play on servers that have high populations (being near other people makes it unplayable - how will I ever group?), but from what I've seen so far, combat is fairly standard for MMOs. Auto-attacks and special skills. I did diplomacy missions all morning and had a really good time doing them as I enjoy stories, but they aren't rewarding - at least not so far as I have nothing to show for my efforts yet besides more skill in diplomacy which doesn't seem to have any use outside the diplomacy mini-game.
It's really surprising to me that the performance is so awful. I mean, I saw this at E3 and wondered why the graphics were so bad. Maybe they couldn't run the game with settings that normal games would use even on monster PCs back then. Unless I come into $3K and can by an uber PC with dual GPUs or they make huge fixes to this before release, there is no way that I would ever purchase this game. . .
If I can't play it even when it looks like ass (something I'm not interested in doing), then I'm pretty much SOL. I can't imagine even the high-end rigs being able to function in a raid environment. It just boggles my mind that the game is in this state during open beta.
After a 14 hour download, finally gave this turd a shot and man, what a let down. I would invest in a new PC if there was an inkling of enjoyment with this over hyped monstrosity, but alas, I'll save my money and wait for something decent to come around. Oh yeah. and any game Anarchyart thinks is great, run, don't walk, away from it as fast as possible. This is the same clown that thought the SWG NGE was a blast.
Trust me when i say that literally thousands of players had issues and problems getting the unreal engine to work properly so it will take time.When they use the word heavy modded engine i kinda laugh because i am sure its nothing more than the original engine revamped to make use of the modern directx9 libraries,wich BTW are suppose to help smooth graphics and increase framerates so either its all BS by microburp or sigil better contact infogrames/legend or epic games and learn how to tweeak this engine properly.
Why the caching line wasn't implemented as true/on is another one that puzzles me,it only makes sense to have as much as you can cached for quicker access,unless there is so much in the game already overloading the cache.There is settings on your computer than you can change to make your computer reserve more of its resources for programs.I might add way back in the old days i went through all that defrag junk and it NEVER did anything EVER.The only way i can see it happening is if your HD is near full and very old when this was an issue because seek times were real slow like 3600.Nowadays there in over 7200+ and with first hand trial and error MANY times over i have never seen one iota of performance increase after a defrag.The other reason this was an old school issue was because hard drives were so small people were loading and unloading hundreds of prgrams to make room for new ones,and junk was left all over your HD because programs did not remove everything cleanly back in the day.
I still can't try this game out because fileplanet is doing something weird by limiting the download bandwidth on me,its hitting 200kb/s then dropping off to zero every 5-7 seconds.Maybe they are swamped with downloads right now especially since this is a large download..grrrr.
Another one that people had to change in there sound section was LATENCY for some reason people solved alot of problems by changing this from 80 to say 40.There is also shiny surfaces /umm the one that creates bright lights[coronas]could be turned off,triple buffering,use agp textures,sound chanells perhaps default is 16 turn it down to 4 or 8.There is just tons of tweaks to turn off or mess with that can add frames here and there.There is the one that leaves effects showing on surfaces that can be turned down,the word slips me right now im sure someone knows.Vsync i believe was just the one that keeps the framerates steady to match your monitor settings,turning that off allows max framerates but can jump all over.
This engine also has the abilty/settings to allow it to try and maintain a certain framerate,wich in hand forces the engine to dumb down other things in order to keep that framerate steady or at a minumum.I believe anti aliasing was proven to help framerates when used at a certain setting i just cant remeber if it was 2x or full out,and this was only on geforce cards.
If there is just too many players in one visual area then there isn't a video card on the market that can handle that kinda video bandwidth,that you can't blame sigil for as overloaded zones won't be constant forever only in the early noob zones.Still waiting grrrr..fileplanet.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
Wizardry - Well, I can play UT2K4 on this machine at max settings while getting about 60 FPS. . .
Anyway, I'm hearing from lots of people with killer-machines that are also getting terrible FPS even when the game is set to look ugly (like 5 y/o games).
Game runs great for me as good as any game ive played and my system is what would be considered bottom of the mid range systems You guys do relize that the humun eye cant tell the difference in any way once you get above 35 FPS thats why movies are made at 35 FPS and no more unless its for stop motion to catch a bullet in mid flight type of thing
No...Open beta is not to give people a good impression. It is to stress test and optimize. There are breaking points in the code of any MMO that you can't tell are there with only a thousand or so online. The goals of an open beta are as follows...
1) Stress test
2) Fix breaking points to ensure stability
3) Determine a "Critical Mass" of a server (The number of people required to create a moving economy and make sure it is easy to find groups)
4) Finish up the polish job
Vanguard Beta, is not like the LotR Online beta, where they have to offer a sweepstakes prize in order to get people to play in beta.
And again...
Wizardry: The Shader Caching is a NEW OPTIMIZATION that is only available right now for knowledgable people to test. Once they fix the bugs it WILL be turned on or available in the settings menu.
And also... They DID have to heavily mod the Unreal engine, and if you can't tell that just by looking at the game then I'm not so sure you know what engines do. And again... a sizeable portion of the VG engine are pieces of the Unreal 3 engine. Chances are they are still having compatibility issues with the 6000 nvidia line....something they have to fix, but definately nothing to throw your arms up in disgust over. Compatibility issues occur in every game. My girlfriends old gpu had huge graphical anomalies when playing WoW when it launched. It got fixed.
Comments
First off, it is hard enough for some people to read implied emphasis on these forums. I don't take any chances, and it's really easy to hit some shortcuts to bold and raise font size. I find it effective, if you don't like my internet rhetoric, I'm not really all that concerned.
Have you inserted the Shader Caching line into your Vgclien.ini file? What it does is it take the Shaders that are normally stored on your memory and puts it on your HD and frees up space for other processes which are much more important. 15 or so Frames per second increase. Easy.
Additionally, Oblivion is a terrible comparison. MMOs are as a rule perform worse simply due the the uncontroled environment. Single player games have the luxury of being able to design their game with constraints. IE, when you enter this location there will only ever be these many objects here, when you enter this level there will only ever be X many modles on screen.
Also...because VG is being built so that flying mounts are available at launch and are useable everywhere, certain objects (buildings in a city, locations in the distance, things up on a mountain, etc) must be fully rendered on all sides. A complete object. Other games, like EQII and WoW excessivly use Facades, Hollywood mockups, cardbord cutouts that are propped up against a wall and only textured on one side.
And again.... They were having problems with the 6000 series. I believe you actually needed to roll your drivers back for the game to play as it should...but i don't have one so I never really paid attention to those threads.
Regarding the editing of Shader caching, actually I havent tried that, and appreciate that, I'll try that when I get home from work today, that does sound promising. Most of what ive edited had to do with ATI files and recommendations from indie people taking apart omega drivers/cat drivers. Though I found next to no performance boosts.
Its also very difficult to find a game that would be comparible by mmo nature to this game, Graphically Oblivion is probably the best comparison you could make for a single player game, as it is trying to be based off of an mmo, thus why I used it. But you are fully right about the differences in performance from single player games to one thats online, however I don't have the funds to randomly buy any MMO's to test my performance out with more recently released mmo's, and in the long run, it would be just as horrible of a comparison given the fact Vanguard is a beast of its own.
There's definitely some good stuff in there but the performance issues really needed some TLC (not trivial loot code, mind you) before going to beta 4 much less 5 or even lifting the NDA. By the time beta 3 was up, a very high (and should be significant) percentage of people were begging for Sigil to focus on that before working on anything else. But here we are with no NDA now to hide these things.
I played for the first time today for a few hours. I have 2 gigs ram, 7800 geforce, 24" monitor, at 1600 (gaming) resolution. Yes, it was choppy near other players, but forgot about the stuttering for a minute. This game, on the balanced setting, just doesn't look that great. I turned up the graphics to max and it still didn't look as good as some other games..especially the spell effects and character textures. Yeah, I'm used to the nice EQ2 textures and its smooth gameplay at max settings on my system but like I said, even if Vanguard wasn't choppy, the graphics (IMO) just aren't that great. It feels a few years old...I was expecting something ground breaking based on all the press releases and such. Now, add in the choppy performance and you get a frustrating experience with average textures at best. Hell, I expected the performance to take a huge hit when all the settings were up. I planned on upgrading my system with my federal refund in the next month or 2, but it certainly won't be for an expectation of some kick ass high-end graphics on Vanguard...it'll only be to fix the choppy gameplay and increase FPS on high settings.
I know it's beta and I've beta tested many of games. I'm sure Vanguard will improve as testing continues and the patches come out, but for those that are expecting performance to be on par with games & the textures we've been playing the past few years, think again.
I understand where you're coming from, although you could really use another gig of ram, one just isn't cutting it nowadays. But I can help you. I used to have terrible lag too, but I came across a tweak thread. Please try these tweaks and then get back to me. They are very easy to do, and you will gain yourself at least 8-10 fps.
Here is the tweak thread.
Also, there is really now way of telling how computer savvy you are. Some people don't even know about windows startup and try playing games with like 8 programs running in the background.
Make sure you defrag, clear out your cookies, disable your startup items then do the tweaks. You won't believe how amazing it looks and you will be able to play on highest quality with at least 15 fps in town and like 20 or 30 in the wilderness.
First off, it is hard enough for some people to read implied emphasis on these forums. I don't take any chances, and it's really easy to hit some shortcuts to bold and raise font size. I find it effective, if you don't like my internet rhetoric, I'm not really all that concerned.
Have you inserted the Shader Caching line into your Vgclien.ini file? What it does is it take the Shaders that are normally stored on your memory and puts it on your HD and frees up space for other processes which are much more important. 15 or so Frames per second increase. Easy.
Additionally, Oblivion is a terrible comparison. MMOs are as a rule perform worse simply due the the uncontroled environment. Single player games have the luxury of being able to design their game with constraints. IE, when you enter this location there will only ever be these many objects here, when you enter this level there will only ever be X many modles on screen.
Also...because VG is being built so that flying mounts are available at launch and are useable everywhere, certain objects (buildings in a city, locations in the distance, things up on a mountain, etc) must be fully rendered on all sides. A complete object. Other games, like EQII and WoW excessivly use Facades, Hollywood mockups, cardbord cutouts that are propped up against a wall and only textured on one side.
And again.... They were having problems with the 6000 series. I believe you actually needed to roll your drivers back for the game to play as it should...but i don't have one so I never really paid attention to those threads.
Regarding the editing of Shader caching, actually I havent tried that, and appreciate that, I'll try that when I get home from work today, that does sound promising. Most of what ive edited had to do with ATI files and recommendations from indie people taking apart omega drivers/cat drivers. Though I found next to no performance boosts.
Its also very difficult to find a game that would be comparible by mmo nature to this game, Graphically Oblivion is probably the best comparison you could make for a single player game, as it is trying to be based off of an mmo, thus why I used it. But you are fully right about the differences in performance from single player games to one thats online, however I don't have the funds to randomly buy any MMO's to test my performance out with more recently released mmo's, and in the long run, it would be just as horrible of a comparison given the fact Vanguard is a beast of its own.
The Shader cacheing is a must. It's relatively new to beta, and it still occasionally causes some graphical bugs. One in particular is that water textures will fail to load. But it boosts your FPS and kills most hitching (so long as you have the minimap closed, as the Minimap is still unoptimized and causes a performance dip.
Not sure if the thread is still available, I'll check it out and if it isn't I'll post the line here. I think it is something like
bUseShaderCache=1 or some buisness and needs to be inserted under the [General] line. I don't suggest using this unless you confirm it though.
For once someone made at least some sense ,however i dont think any problems in the game have to do with video cards.This game as i suspected from my post a couple weeks ago is made using a very old unreal game engine.The textures look very cheap and really shouldn't lag anyone,at least from any screens i have seen.I agree there is a big diff from single person games and MMOs because you can't really predict how many poly's will be on screen at any given time.However most games that i have ever played Do have pre settings that only allow so many objects or players to show on screen,after that the game dumbs down the rest or even blocks out background at a very short distance.
I do remember the old unreal game didn't have the greatest net code and was updated several times.I am sure these guys are having the same problems.Why moving any graphical operations into the slowest part of the processing ,wich is your HD would help is beyond me.All graphical processes should be handled by the video card.Lots of the unreal game engine code needed tweaking,i remeber hundreds of players hitting the forums looking for answers.The game engine was designed way back when directx 7 just came out,perhaps even before that directx6.,so i can truly understand when dude is saying you might be better off rolling back your drivers,on some of these older machines that have older bios and onboard drivers designed to run back in directx7 days.
Someone needs to post there actual frames per second as this game engine comes with the command to show it,i just can't remeber it offhand.You could also control your netspeed and stuff however the game may have a cap limited by the server i don't know until i try the game.Sound drivers and settings were a huge problem with this game also as the biggy [creative ]sound cards always had problems with this engine.
I really believe they started designing this game a very long time ago.They had a great vision perhaps to make something a little better than there forefather[everquest],however didn't fathom how fast and how much better game engines would develope before they actually finished there game for publication.I will be trying the open beta with no worries about lag or whatever because i realize this isnt the finished product,and will be tweaked.Sigil games i am sure have learned from the dark and light fiascal and wouldn't jeopardize there franchise by screwing up in the same fashion.
This game engine played great and looked great using the opengl drivers,maybe someone needs to look into this.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
Dink,
I didnt read what others have told you because it sounds like you have a very close configuration to what I have with one exception. I have 2 gigs of ram. the game is silky smooth - even on the highest setting it was smooth enough that I'd play (unless near water)
Go get ya another meg of ram - will help you out in more than just this game!
I have been running around in all kinds of area just fine all day. I have a 3y/o+ setup except the grafics card is half a$$ 7800GS agp and I get good framrates on high everywhere. I ran into the n00blet cities and I crashed! there must have been 400+ people in the starting city for the dark elves; I grabbed horrid framerates. trust me its the n00b chunks clean up your machines and level a little past the n00blet areas and youll have fun. Also IF you didnt happen to defrag after install and update; DO IT lol vanguard throws crap all over your drive.
[General]
bUseShaderCaching=1
It helps a ton.
To Wizardry: To the contrary, this is actually a pretty updated version of the Unreal engine and heavily moded. They even have used portions of the Unreal 3 code, and have had access to it due to one of their devs having close connections to the one of the Unreal 3 project leads.
The real problems with the performance is just, simply.... bugged, sloppy coding. Which is and has been being improved upon on. VG has some bad memory leaks right now, and it always helps to flush the engine caches once an hour with a /flush.
The part about moving the shaders to the HD is because the shaders were hogging up too much attention on peoples gpus and really weren't required to be constantly adjusting. This code simply caches and uses existing shaders (if I'm not mistaken) to free up space on your Memory for other processes (like terrain and artifact rendering, etc. etc.) I'm no expert by any means, so I could be wrong.
anarchyart - I ran everything on that tweak thread and sadly didn't get much of a performance boost at all. Maybe 5 FPS, but in a dungeon I was getting 10 FPS when alone and not moving and would dip down to slideshowing if I got into a battle or other players were nearby.
[General]
bUseShaderCaching=1
Thanks for the suggestion Vengeful. Unfortunately, it is still not working. While I can now get up to 20 FPS with absurdly low settings out in the wilderness with no NPCs and crazy bad graphics (like 6 year old graphics), I still hitch up around other players and slide-show.
It's weird because I play with these settings a lot and I can go as high as the high quality setting and I still get 20 FPS that drops to 10 FPS in dungeons or towns and hitches to a stand-still around other players. It doesn't seem to be about the graphical settings so much as there is just some weird code going on.
It doesn't make any sense. . . even at high quality, the game doesn't look any better than other games I play at high quality (Oh, and resolution doesn't do anything either. . . 1280x1024 is the same FPS for me as 1024x768). Why should a game that looks like a high-detail EQ 2 (sort of an EQ 3 - not quite as good as Oblivion's graphics, but good) not run as well as Oblivion does? Also, why should so many high-end rigs also have troubles with hitching?
There is something odd going on with the game code that makes it give less performance than we are used to seeing on game hardware. . . by a very large margin.
Honestly, this could be a good thing as they might be able to fix it. I'm just not going to hold my breath, as I think the devs would have to be blind to know that this isn't extremely bad for the game as it means that the target audience is narrowed to people with high-end PCs (and even they complain. My brother has a large monitor and a slick system. I don't know if he is also experiencing hitching when playing on super-low settings, but he hates having to play either a super-bent game or a letter-boxed one. He isn't going to get the game unless performance improves either).
I remember coming on here after E3 and expressing my amazement at how bad the game looked. My guess is that they had to do that to get it playable back then. . . I guess I expected all of that to work itself out before launch. After a while, I really started to see how there are so many hardcore gamers that EQ created and I felt that Vanguard could be successful as a quality niche game for this type of player. But if you limit it further to only those hardcore gamers who ALSO have a killer PC. . . well, geez.
First off, it is hard enough for some people to read implied emphasis on these forums. I don't take any chances, and it's really easy to hit some shortcuts to bold and raise font size. I find it effective, if you don't like my internet rhetoric, I'm not really all that concerned.
Have you inserted the Shader Caching line into your Vgclien.ini file? What it does is it take the Shaders that are normally stored on your memory and puts it on your HD and frees up space for other processes which are much more important. 15 or so Frames per second increase. Easy.
Additionally, Oblivion is a terrible comparison. MMOs are as a rule perform worse simply due the the uncontroled environment. Single player games have the luxury of being able to design their game with constraints. IE, when you enter this location there will only ever be these many objects here, when you enter this level there will only ever be X many modles on screen.
Also...because VG is being built so that flying mounts are available at launch and are useable everywhere, certain objects (buildings in a city, locations in the distance, things up on a mountain, etc) must be fully rendered on all sides. A complete object. Other games, like EQII and WoW excessivly use Facades, Hollywood mockups, cardbord cutouts that are propped up against a wall and only textured on one side.
And again.... They were having problems with the 6000 series. I believe you actually needed to roll your drivers back for the game to play as it should...but i don't have one so I never really paid attention to those threads.
where is this shading caching line? I checked that mort's guide I cant find this. my performance is sucking but i only have 1gb ram. amazing now games gonna need 2gb ram this sucks what're doing with all this RAM...
edit- k found it at end of Mort's performance post
Like everyone has said, keep in mind it is a BETA, they are currently finding the correct number of players per server so that it may run at a comfortable speed. And as many people said the client is not complete and will not be untill release, as it its with most beta's... not to mention there are plenty of debuggers in the background slowing down the servers.
try morts tweaks, and just to shed some light, I get very nice graphics and im running on a 1.83 core2 geforce go 7600 and a gig of ram on a laptop!
I've gotten similar FPS on a much weaker system so it probably is some sort of capatability issue on Sigil's side. Here's to hoping they can iron it out for you.
First off, it is hard enough for some people to read implied emphasis on these forums. I don't take any chances, and it's really easy to hit some shortcuts to bold and raise font size. I find it effective, if you don't like my internet rhetoric, I'm not really all that concerned.
Have you inserted the Shader Caching line into your Vgclien.ini file? What it does is it take the Shaders that are normally stored on your memory and puts it on your HD and frees up space for other processes which are much more important. 15 or so Frames per second increase. Easy.
Additionally, Oblivion is a terrible comparison. MMOs are as a rule perform worse simply due the the uncontroled environment. Single player games have the luxury of being able to design their game with constraints. IE, when you enter this location there will only ever be these many objects here, when you enter this level there will only ever be X many modles on screen.
Also...because VG is being built so that flying mounts are available at launch and are useable everywhere, certain objects (buildings in a city, locations in the distance, things up on a mountain, etc) must be fully rendered on all sides. A complete object. Other games, like EQII and WoW excessivly use Facades, Hollywood mockups, cardbord cutouts that are propped up against a wall and only textured on one side.
And again.... They were having problems with the 6000 series. I believe you actually needed to roll your drivers back for the game to play as it should...but i don't have one so I never really paid attention to those threads.
where is this shading caching line? I checked that mort's guide I cant find this. my performance is sucking but i only have 1gb ram. amazing now games gonna need 2gb ram this sucks what're doing with all this RAM...
edit- k found it at end of Mort's performance post
It was a hidden Dev post requsting people test the Shader Cache function before they turned it on for the rest of the clients. It hasn't been rolled out yet but you can activate it by adding that line.
while the game is still in beta this is open beta which is normally used by game companies for making good impressions on the gaming community to sell the game. That is obviously not happening.
I miss DAoC
Trust me when i say that literally thousands of players had issues and problems getting the unreal engine to work properly so it will take time.When they use the word heavy modded engine i kinda laugh because i am sure its nothing more than the original engine revamped to make use of the modern directx9 libraries,wich BTW are suppose to help smooth graphics and increase framerates so either its all BS by microburp or sigil better contact infogrames/legend or epic games and learn how to tweeak this engine properly.
Why the caching line wasn't implemented as true/on is another one that puzzles me,it only makes sense to have as much as you can cached for quicker access,unless there is so much in the game already overloading the cache.There is settings on your computer than you can change to make your computer reserve more of its resources for programs.I might add way back in the old days i went through all that defrag junk and it NEVER did anything EVER.The only way i can see it happening is if your HD is near full and very old when this was an issue because seek times were real slow like 3600.Nowadays there in over 7200+ and with first hand trial and error MANY times over i have never seen one iota of performance increase after a defrag.The other reason this was an old school issue was because hard drives were so small people were loading and unloading hundreds of prgrams to make room for new ones,and junk was left all over your HD because programs did not remove everything cleanly back in the day.
I still can't try this game out because fileplanet is doing something weird by limiting the download bandwidth on me,its hitting 200kb/s then dropping off to zero every 5-7 seconds.Maybe they are swamped with downloads right now especially since this is a large download..grrrr.
Another one that people had to change in there sound section was LATENCY for some reason people solved alot of problems by changing this from 80 to say 40.There is also shiny surfaces /umm the one that creates bright lights[coronas]could be turned off,triple buffering,use agp textures,sound chanells perhaps default is 16 turn it down to 4 or 8.There is just tons of tweaks to turn off or mess with that can add frames here and there.There is the one that leaves effects showing on surfaces that can be turned down,the word slips me right now im sure someone knows.Vsync i believe was just the one that keeps the framerates steady to match your monitor settings,turning that off allows max framerates but can jump all over.
This engine also has the abilty/settings to allow it to try and maintain a certain framerate,wich in hand forces the engine to dumb down other things in order to keep that framerate steady or at a minumum.I believe anti aliasing was proven to help framerates when used at a certain setting i just cant remeber if it was 2x or full out,and this was only on geforce cards.
If there is just too many players in one visual area then there isn't a video card on the market that can handle that kinda video bandwidth,that you can't blame sigil for as overloaded zones won't be constant forever only in the early noob zones.Still waiting grrrr..fileplanet.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
Wizardry - Well, I can play UT2K4 on this machine at max settings while getting about 60 FPS. . .
Anyway, I'm hearing from lots of people with killer-machines that are also getting terrible FPS even when the game is set to look ugly (like 5 y/o games).
1) Stress test
2) Fix breaking points to ensure stability
3) Determine a "Critical Mass" of a server (The number of people required to create a moving economy and make sure it is easy to find groups)
4) Finish up the polish job
Vanguard Beta, is not like the LotR Online beta, where they have to offer a sweepstakes prize in order to get people to play in beta.
And again...
Wizardry: The Shader Caching is a NEW OPTIMIZATION that is only available right now for knowledgable people to test. Once they fix the bugs it WILL be turned on or available in the settings menu.
And also... They DID have to heavily mod the Unreal engine, and if you can't tell that just by looking at the game then I'm not so sure you know what engines do. And again... a sizeable portion of the VG engine are pieces of the Unreal 3 engine. Chances are they are still having compatibility issues with the 6000 nvidia line....something they have to fix, but definately nothing to throw your arms up in disgust over. Compatibility issues occur in every game. My girlfriends old gpu had huge graphical anomalies when playing WoW when it launched. It got fixed.