i dont see myself subscribing after 2 more weeks

erinys · February 2007

the game is fine. not good, fine

buthe performance is honestly very bad..

i run 45 fps with all the tweaks etc out in the open, and the moment i hit a group with 5+ players it is slideshot heaven

mind you, i run the game on high performance... while some of you say thats '" all my hardware can take" don forget that:

- i run EQ2 on 1600+ high qual in raid

- i run WoW any raid/BG without a hickup

- i run Daoc 100 vs 100 rvr with not a single FPS drop,

mind you,, ALL of the above examples look WAY better then vanguard does at the setting i am running it.

too bad, the game has great potential. but this is nuts.

i8theworm · February 2007

Can I have your stuff?

Any game right after launch will suffer the same. I'll wait it out for a bit and see if they get improvements in performance over the next few patches.

Consider this.. there's really no way to set up test labs and toss 30k users (scripts) at the game and see how performance goes. Post launch really is a beta for game companies. So for me, it's what they do next that's important.

If you do leave, check it back out in a couple of months.. or at least look here for folks hopefully discussing the performance improvements.

flood950 · February 2007

The other thing is maybe within those two weeks...go to a tech forum for the game...silkyvenom probably has the best...list your specs as well and see what people can recommend.

A lot of times there is just one minor tweek you can do and get the game running a lot better. Not saying that you havnt, if you have tried to work on it great...but a lot of people are complaining about performance but not really asking for advice from tech savy people either.

erinys · February 2007

well tbh, all i hear is "your hardware sucks, your pc sucks, you should upgrade etc etc etc"

when a game comes along that requires me to, i will, but so far i have not seen anything graphic wise that requires me to do so.

it runs really crap on my system:

athlon 3500

2 gig corsair ram twins

6800GT little overclocked

best drivers for 6800GT (tried the lasted 3 nvidia ones, 84.21 has way better performance)

all the ini tweaks done offcourse

i dont get it.. oblivion runs silky smooth, neverwinter nights 2 runs like a madman, EQ2 always was a "heavy" game and that runs a 50fps in raid no problem and even daoc 100vs100 rvr wich is a pain in the butt to everyone i dont seem to have a problem with.. GRR

BigMango · February 2007

Yep, the game was not designed to look good on lower end hardware. I am enjoying playing the game at max settings, but I don't think I would still be playing it on low settings.

BigMango · February 2007

Originally posted by erinys

it runs really crap on my system:
athlon 3500

FYI Dual core helps this game a lot. When I run the game on only 1 core I get 5-10 FPS less and the hitching problems many people are talking about (when it is hitching FPS can drop as low as 3 for a few seconds). This is not an issue when running on both cores.

Edit: specs core2duo, 2Gb, ati x1900xt ; runs great at maxed out settings with 16x anisotropic

erinys · February 2007

Originally posted by BigMango

Yep, the game was not designed to look good on lower end hardware. I am enjoying playing the game at max settings, but I don't think I would still be playing it on low settings.

good for you, your a minority

Arclan · February 2007

Hi Erinys, sorry to hear the framerate is sucking. You have the same video card I had prior to my upgrade last month. It was an awesome card years ago; and remains a good card today. 45fps is very impressive! And there are much more powerful cards on the market now, even for AGP. Check out Tomshardware.com

Upgrading to PCI Express was expensive. Everyone has to upgrade eventually, and I chose to do it in time for VG.

treysmooth · February 2007

To be honest neither your graphics card or your processor are new enough to run on high quality and expect to see good performance. Try a card in the 7000 series or above and a dual core chip and you won't have those problems. Otherwise run the game on balanced and I have a feeling the game should run fine. No offense but expecting a brand new game to run on a GPU thats from 2 hardware generations ago isn't realistic.

Honestly I wonder what people want, all the optimizing in the world isn't gonna change the fact the game was intended for current hardware. One of my friends is running the game with the same graphics card and is complaining about the same issue my best friend uses a similar system with a 7600gt oc and hasn't had a problem with performance what so ever.

BigMango · February 2007

Originally posted by erinys

Originally posted by BigMango

Yep, the game was not designed to look good on lower end hardware. I am enjoying playing the game at max settings, but I don't think I would still be playing it on low settings.

good for you, your a minority

I was replying to you comment : "ALL of the above examples look WAY better then vanguard does at the setting i am running it."

And as for "your a minority", well... I see so many people leaving the game and posting in frustration on these forums about performance problems or poor graphics on their lower end systems. That almost looks like 1/4 of this forum's population, so I don't think I'm a minority.

But anyway, if you like it or not, even the VG devs have said countless times that this game was not designed to look good on lower end hardware.

Salvatoris · February 2007

You guys completely miss the point. He says he doesn't want to upgrade because every other game runs fine. At low settings, vanguard looks bad and still doesn't run very good. That is the issue. Most of the responses here are either telling him to upgrade, or tweak the ini to make the game look even worse. The whole "let them eat cake" attitude is just asinine.... the code is bad, that is all there is to it. There are games that look far better than vanguard on low / medium settings and still run silky smooth. The system requirements aren't just too high, they are unjustified.

Arclan · February 2007

Salvatoris, I think the posts here are telling Erinys not to try to run a brand-new, graphic-intensive game on High considering his hardware is two years old. The game looks fantastic on "Balanced" setting.

mx500torid · February 2007

I have the same 6800 gt not overclocked because i found that if i did oc i would get artifacts in the game so set it back. I run balanced in the sticks and high performance in towns. Towns get laggy but no worse than EQ2 does. I get 30-35 with a peak of 40, woowoo, on balaned in the sticks. Town drops it to single digits sometimes. Still doesnt bother me. Went thru a lot worse at WOW and EQ2 startups. I did notice that playing around with the settings that on my rig it plays smoother if I set the clipping plane to max. One thing for sure you have to update Comps after awhile would be nice to use a three year old comp and play the game at high settings but its not gonna happen, Technologys are changing so fast and if you want nice FPS and eye candy you gotta ante up. Ive been saving and buying parts for awhile now saving the video card MB and cpu for last. Its getting close tho.

wmbyrne · February 2007

You know, I can’t tell you how many time I seen someone say there are going to quit a game, and someone always asked for their stuff. I have to tell that I’m also thinking about letting my subscription to Vanguard laps. I will keep my stuff though, because I hope to come back. I’m on a first rate server, have great names, and have good bankroll, but the lack of quests, bugs and yea lack computer power makes the game less that enjoyable.

My biggest gripe about Vanguard is there is no central web site forum, maintained and policed by Sigil or SOE. Instead I have to hunt around for information on about 6 websites and the information I have to gleam is dubious at best. I have heard people defend the current policy, but really your telling me Sigil can’t afford to add game forums to there existing central site, and hire the talent need to do it right, if that is the case I worry a bout the longevity of this game. That’s some of Vanguard problem in a nutshell the information is out there but just hard to dig up and MMO research is not why I play a game, playing is, the game is so huge that finding things and quests can be a problem. This way you can avoid the constant shouts and questions in game chat.

You know I read a lot, and often times posters are barraged with various inane comments designed to start a flame war, so if that is you passion go ahead, but criticism is from the Greek root word “to make better”, and that’s all I’m trying to do. I want Vanguard to get better, so I will come back.

mx500torid · February 2007

http://vgplayers.station.sony.com/ . Try this looks like Forums to me.

BigMango · February 2007

Originally posted by Salvatoris

You guys completely miss the point. He says he doesn't want to upgrade because every other game runs fine. At low settings, vanguard looks bad and still doesn't run very good. That is the issue. Most of the responses here are either telling him to upgrade, or tweak the ini to make the game look even worse. The whole "let them eat cake" attitude is just asinine.... the code is bad, that is all there is to it. There are games that look far better than vanguard on low / medium settings and still run silky smooth. The system requirements aren't just too high, they are unjustified.

Which part didn't you understand in " this game was not designed to look good on lower end hardware." ?

You have no clue what you are talking about when you say "the code is bad, that is all there is to it"

; or are you one of those "I know it all but I have no idea" dudes ? (no pun intended, its just a question, I don't make any assumptions)

This game's engine was made to run on current hardware, so the game was designed for this. One of the first technologies that come to mind is speedtree; apart from the trees and the grass drawing, speedtree also gives you this great viewing distance, so the engine has to take care of all this. There are many other components in this game that are made and/or tweaked for current hardware.

You can turn a lot of the gfx output down on low quality settings, but the engine still has to run with its components and as it is it is still far from optimized to bypass everything it doesn't need, to draw the minimum on the screen. And so, the design (as opposed to the WOW design for example, which was designed to look good on hardware 3 years ago), was not made to look good on older hardware.

Salvatoris · February 2007

Originally posted by Arclan

Salvatoris, I think the posts here are telling Erinys not to try to run a brand-new, graphic-intensive game on High considering his hardware is two years old. The game looks fantastic on "Balanced" setting.

He said he is running the game on high performance, which is the lowest graphics quality setting. It's a bit cunfusing, because they changed all the setting names in the last storage of beta. I agree, the game looks pretty good at balanced, but look at the difference between the bottom two settings. The lowest setting is just plain ugly, using extremely low detail textures. there really isn't any excuse for it to run as poorly as it does at that setting, where it looks like a 5 year old game. The real issue isnt the system requirements of the hihest quality setting, it is the performance of the lowest quality setting.

@ the guy with the sony forum link.... There are no official gameplay discussion forums for vanguard. Sigil shut them down about three weeks ago.

graill · February 2007

people with low end machines actually exist?!

i think thats like talking m&m's

BigMango · February 2007

Originally posted by Salvatoris

The lowest setting is just plain ugly, using extremely low detail textures. there really isn't any excuse for it to run as poorly as it does at that setting, where it looks like a 5 year old game.

That's what you think when you have no understanding of how the game engine works. To look good at those settings it should be made so. This can be done, although it is a lot of work. There are many priorities in this game, the devs have said several times that this part is an ongoing work, so it will be better as the time goes by.

Salvatoris · February 2007

Originally posted by BigMango

Originally posted by Salvatoris

You guys completely miss the point. He says he doesn't want to upgrade because every other game runs fine. At low settings, vanguard looks bad and still doesn't run very good. That is the issue. Most of the responses here are either telling him to upgrade, or tweak the ini to make the game look even worse. The whole "let them eat cake" attitude is just asinine.... the code is bad, that is all there is to it. There are games that look far better than vanguard on low / medium settings and still run silky smooth. The system requirements aren't just too high, they are unjustified.

Which part didn't you understand in " this game was not designed to look good on lower end hardware." ?

You have no clue what you are talking about when you say "the code is bad, that is all there is to it"

; or are you one of those "I know it all but I have no idea" dudes ? (no pun intended, its just a question, I don't make any assumptions)

This game's engine was made to run on current hardware, so the game was designed for this. One of the first technologies that come to mind is speedtree; apart from the trees and the grass drawing, speedtree also gives you this great viewing distance, so the engine has to take care all all this. There are many other components it this game that are made and/or tweaked for current hardware.

You can turn a lot of the gfx output down on low quality settings, but the engine still has to run with its components and as it is it is still far from optimized to bypass everything it doesn't need, to draw the minimum on the screen. And so, the design (as opposed to the WOW design for example, which was designed to look good on hardware 3 years ago), was not made to look good on older hardware.

For the record, I have my MCSE, CCNE and BWACNE, I manage a wireless ISP and offer full PC hardware and software service and support. Prior to my career focusing on this path I did Video Game support. I am not a game developer, and I admit that I am not intimately familiar with the code of the game. I do have a decent grasp of the concepts in layman's terms, and pretty good idea of what the average gaming machine is made up of. I run a moderate sized gaming team that I founded 7 years ago. I had 3 beta accounts in my house, all on different machines, and had opportunity to see it run on my little brothers machine, which is pretty top of the line. I generally try not to get in to arguments where I am speaking from a position of ignorance.

That said, your post only reinforces my original point that this games problems are in it's code. It is not properly optimized to run on medium to low end gaming machines. The problem, by your own admission is one of optimization...therefor, a problem with their code. The problem isn't that the game doesn't run at high quality settings on medium range machines, it is that the only setting it will run at looks like crap. They have not made a sufficient efforts to optimize the settings and allow the game to run and look good on the machines most people currently have.

There are at least 10 other MMOs I can think of that look better than vanguard at "high performance", but still run silky smooth.

BigMango · February 2007

Originally posted by Salvatoris

They have not made a sufficient efforts to optimize the settings and allow the game to run and look good on the machines most people currently have.

Here I agree with you. You could even almost go as far as to say that they have barely worked on that part. But this does not necessarily mean bad code as you said previously. It's obvious that the game was not finished in many other more important aspects and they didn't have the time to work on this. It's all about setting priorities.

Salvatoris · February 2007

Originally posted by BigMango

Originally posted by Salvatoris

They have not made a sufficient efforts to optimize the settings and allow the game to run and look good on the machines most people currently have.

Here I agree with you. You could even almost go as far as to say that they have barely worked on that part. But this does not necessarily mean bad code as you said previously. It's obvious that the game was not finished in many other more important aspects and they didn't have the time to work on this. It's all about setting priorities.

I just think that optimization should have been higher on the priority list. The reason it really bugs me is that they knew it was a problem for at least the entire time I was in beta. They kept saying that it was a top priority, but there weren't any significant improvements in the last few months before launch. I don't expect everyone to agree with me, and i can understand that for people with very high systems specs it might seem like the problem doesn't exist at all. I guess it's all about perspective. I foresee a lot of people buying the game based on the specs on the box and then being pretty upset to see how it runs on their machine.

I have a p4 3.2, 1 gig of ram and a geforce 6800 gs. Despite being well above minimum requirements, performance at the lowest setting is still unacceptable. I shouldn/t have to spend 2 days tweaking files to make ti run right... that is their job. I was really thinking this would be the next game my team would play, but not a single one of the guys in my guild that tried it were willing to buy it at launch.... they would honestly rather play AO. By the time they get it sufficiently optimized, we'll probably playing AOC or WAR. It's a shame, because if it ran better, it would certainly be my game of choice right now. I'm just glad I only lost 5 bucks on my preorder and not the 60 bucks that a lot of people are wasting to find out it won't run for them.

DDM_redeye · February 2007

I'm not buying a new comp just to play a game that is only O K

BigMango · February 2007

Originally posted by Salvatoris

I just think that optimization should have been higher on the priority list. The reason it really bugs me is that they knew it was a problem for at least the entire time I was in beta. They kept saying that it was a top priority, but there weren't any significant improvements in the last few months before launch. I don't expect everyone to agree with me, and i can understand that for people with very high systems specs it might seem like the problem doesn't exist at all. I guess it's all about perspective. I foresee a lot of people buying the game based on the specs on the box and then being pretty upset to see how it runs on their machine.
I have a p4 3.2, 1 gig of ram and a geforce 6800 gs. Despite being well above minimum requirements, performance at the lowest setting is still unacceptable. I shouldn/t have to spend 2 days tweaking files to make ti run right... that is their job. I was really thinking this would be the next game my team would play, but not a single one of the guys in my guild that tried it were willing to buy it at launch.... they would honestly rather play AO. By the time they get it sufficiently optimized, we'll probably playing AOC or WAR. It's a shame, because if it ran better, it would certainly be my game of choice right now. I'm just glad I only lost 5 bucks on my preorder and not the 60 bucks that a lot of people are wasting to find out it won't run for them.

/agree.

Although priorities can be a hell of a pain in the ***. I am not sure it would have been better to put optimizations for lower end systems higher on the list, as this would certainly have meant that other essential parts of the game would be in an even worse state than they are today.

As it is now we have a game that is, content wise, good for 30% (?) of the player base and constantly improving; I think this is still better than a bad game (content wise) that 100% of the player base can play with good graphics.

The bottom line is that this game should not have been released now, but we all already know this.

ozomatli · February 2007

I dont get it why this game is such a resource hog. Its based on the Unreal Engine 2 which was released in 2003. Admittedly its been upgraded quite a bit but I dont understand why it performs so poorly.

BigMango · February 2007

Originally posted by ozomatli

I dont get it why this game is such a resource hog. Its based on the Unreal Engine 2 which was released in 2003. Admittedly its been upgraded quite a bit but I dont understand why it performs so poorly.

The game is based on unreal engine 2,5 (2005) + heavily patched with parts of unreal engine 3 + many "in house" improvements + speedtree (trees, grass & viewing distance).

The reason why it is a resource hog is that it draws more on the screen & very large textures (high end systems) (it takes 17Gb HD space) , and is not optimized for low end systems yet.

Howdy, Stranger!

i dont see myself subscribing after 2 more weeks

Comments

Howdy, Stranger!

Quick Links

i dont see myself subscribing after 2 more weeks

Comments