Texture Streaming in Echoes of the Atlas

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So our compromise was to generate a pack of blurry low-resolution versions of all the textures in the game, make sure it's preloaded right when you launch the client, and then use these stand-in textures while the full ones are loaded.

It's good to know that the blurry textures are intended.

I would personally prefer a longer splash screen.

GGG, nobody would care about the temporary blur/low-res if the performance wasn't massively and noticeably worse. The widespread performance issues with this release is obvious to your playerbase, and although it has been trending for the worse with each release for the past several leagues, this one is particularly bad.

thnx !

But what about outright crashes when the game can't process everything that is happening?

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tsjnsn wrote:

GGG, nobody would care about the temporary blur/low-res if the performance wasn't massively and noticeably worse. The widespread performance issues with this release is obvious to your playerbase, and although it has been trending for the worse with each release for the past several leagues, this one is particularly bad.

Actually i care.

Sorry but its 2021 i have a computer that cost thousands of $ and there is no god damn reason at all i should be looking at that ugly shit in a supposed AAA game.

It bothers me HUGELY watching that happen each tim ei load into zones, espsecailly when things change size as i play in 4k resolution and it seems to resacle it also.

Unacceptable this will be the first core pack i havent purchased the top tier and unless they make this game smooth and look good again i wont
be buying anymore as its a joke.

Thanks for the transparency and the information! If we have to wait a while for the map to load I'm 100% cool with that.

I recently had to upgrade from an i7 7700 to an 8-core ryzen when Ritual came out because my CPU was annihilated. Things were acceptable on the new CPU, yet not as much overhead I would like. Even though I WANT to, I simply can't justify (to the wife) that I need a Threadripper to play PoE.

When today's patch came out the game was initially unplayable for me. Upon speaking with a few guildies. They mentioned they were having issues with their PoE directory growing in size, so I thought that maybe there's some cache that kept growing or simply needed to be cleared. I reinstalled the game and loaded my settings from before the reinstall and the games playable! Still more cpu than I'd like to see utilized but whatever... so I'm assuming there's a cache of something such as shader's or textures that needed to be smoked.

I'm going to set my ramdisk back up tomorrow in hopes of avoiding the blur and making this run a bit smoother yet :fingers_crossed:

Thanks for the great expansion and league, glad to know how much effort you guys are putting into the performance issues <3

Reading over this again, it is rather baffling that it's being totally glossed over that there is a huge problem affecting everyone regardless of hardware. Having assets "stream" in, which never were required to do so in such a way before, loading low-res/blurry versions instead and now not announcing a real fix or alternative (ahem, bloom? DX11 shadows? sound familiar?) is just crazy. Even loading the passive tree in town and closing it again causes the same assets I just loaded to pop back in (3900x, GTX 1080, 1TB M.2 WD Black, 64GB DDR4, small stretched window 144Hz most of the time). When first loading in, opening the Pantheon looks like a piece of parchment paper for a solid 5 seconds. Conqueror arenas load in in chunks, always, and I see streamers all have the exact same issue.

This isn't isolated. It needs to be undone.

very cool insight!

Texture streaming has been great for me - I used to lag so hard when starting a delirium my comp would freeze up long enough for me to die depending on how many Delirium Boys were hiding in the fog at map start. I can't imagine what 'reinforced harbingers' would do to my machine without it.

Usually potato textures last for .5 to 2.5 seconds upon loading in, or for a bit longer in the most hectic of rituals or beyond/harbinger/delirium and that's fine by me if my only choices are that or computer lock up.

Hey,
i think its horrible that you guys push out tech in this state to the public.
I dont know what metrics your programmers are looking at when implementing solutions for technical problems, but they are not testing them ingame and probably they are looking entirely at the wrong metrics...

For example in this case (and this is of course just guessing):
How long does the engine need to "render" a scene and does it stutter?
How long does it need to render with the new tech and does it stutter?
-> It doesnt stutter? It takes half the time?! Nice! Push it out!!

Well... the problem that you now "render" the scene twice, once for the low textures and once for the high textures is completely forgotten, the stuttering doesnt occur because the scene is a bitmap drawn with a size 50 brush when it is first loaded....

You need, need, need better technical reviews about this stuff. Its just not ready most of the time. And other times its just not fixing the problem you tried to fix with it in a manner that benefits the user.


@Jonathan: get some more peer-review going, make solutions to actual user problems and not make numbers inside the engine seem better, the engine doesnt care. The User cares!


ps: im a programmer and software architect in c++ working as Tech Lead...