Wednesday 2 April 2014

Internal Testing Heat

Work

Another quick blog from me. Another day of developer graft as we continue ticking off little fixes between us, and the biggest decision was to postpone some Store integration work in favor of more performance tuning of the engine. We have some early results back and although half our test systems report super smooth and silky 60 fps on low-end hardware, we are getting reports of dreadful fps on what looks like mid-range systems. Very odd. Thursday will be about running multiple performance tests in parallel as we drill down to the root cause of performance drains from system to system. The good is that the core team are starting to see some nice smooth zero-stutter performances, we just need to convey those results to the other test systems now which means understanding them inside and out.

I had suspected the CPU power was the crucial factor, but this seems not to be the case at this early stage. My favorite gremlin is the 'shaders on low-end cards' as the major cause of all performance drains, but we will soon see if this is so as we augment the engine with some aggressive debugging options and extra logging features to really get to the bottom of where the gremlins are hiding!

5 comments:

  1. "and the biggest decision was to postpone some Store integration work in favor of more performance tuning of the engine."

    Great to see you and the other two see sense.

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  2. I still wonder if it's going to be as smooth as unreal engine 2. Though it might be outdated but heck the game looks beautiful for a 2002-2004 game engine. I run Unreal tournament 2002 and 2004 and they both run at 60 fps on my pc. I love it, should do the same as this engine and should work well using directx 7 and 9, plus 11.

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  3. I think this is a good improvement overall

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  4. Lee, you mentioned your virtual town square a couple months back, and imagining it with day to day activity and life. This is a brief preview to a non-FPS game that's coming out this fall, from a new company, and I must say its graphics and life look most impressive in this preview!

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xx5CwBUBXpo

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