(Autenil) Re:What bugs you the most... Results!

[Official Forums]

seamus wrote:

Rothgar, since multi-core support and improved GPU utilization are the top concerns, by far, could you elaborate on what is being looked into on these items? For one thing I've never seen a dev post that the client is using the cpu for tasks better left to the gpu. It's just a guess and assumption as far as I can tell, so is it fact or fiction? In your estimation what are the bottlenecks in the client?
What's your confidence level wrt getting better performance for the client? Do you have any notion when or if we'll see an improvement?
(I don't really expect answers to these questions, but one never knows.)

Hi seamus,

The main systems that are CPU-intensive are animation, particles and shadows. We choose to do some things on the CPU rather than the GPU for a few different reasons. Our animation system, for instance, provides data to the particle system. If we were to try and do animation on the GPU in the same way, there would be no gain due to the requirement of needing data back from the animation process.

We're looking at moving some of these CPU-intensive systems to other threads to leverage multi-core systems while trying to maintain current performance for single-core systems. Our engine was initially constructed with a single-core paradigm and multi-threaded programming is much more complicated. We're currently looking for a Graphics Programmer to add new features and consider improvements to our existing engine.

We're always interested in making EQ2's client and server perform better, so this remains a high priority for us. Thanks for your comments!


LINK

[Edwin Ahe]

The main systems that are CPU-intensive are animation, particles and shadows. We choose to do some things on the CPU rather than the GPU for a few different reasons. Our animation system, for instance, provides data to the particle system. If we were to try and do animation on the GPU in the same way, there would be no gain due to the requirement of needing data back from the animation process.

Thats why whole engine should be rebuilt imo. Yes i understand its not a 5minutes work, but isn't it something programming-ppl are paid for? Can be great marketing point for expansion too.

[Johnathon]

Originally Posted by Edwin Ahe

Thats why whole engine should be rebuilt imo. Yes i understand its not a 5minutes work, but isn't it something programming-ppl are paid for? Can be great marketing point for expansion too.

It would be 2 expansions down the road IMO