(Rothgar) Re:How in the world can a chat window be so unoptimized?

[Official Forums]

Mezza wrote:

Ok I'm not going to be ultra negative here but how come you answer the easy question and appear to completely disregard the question above it which is the more relevant? I have trialled this myself and find the Ui to be a major hit on FPS. With a permanent non moving background I had a fps of 61-62, with no Ui this went to over 110 Fps. Even by just clearing chat window it improves my FPS by over 10%? As you can see I have never entered anything on forums but I just wish that sometimes you wouldn't (appear to) ignore peoples posts and then quickly answer anothers. I am fully aware that this isn't a quick fix but whilst answering the second quoted question above it would have been nice to add that this problem is being looked into. Or indeed isn't as the case may be. This year I have made numerous major changes in hardware only to see a marginal increase in FPS. It would appear that this is due to the UI meaning I might aswell have saved my money. I am honestly not having a go but sometimes I think that a quick recognition of an obvious problem would help quell a lot of situations. I don't want instant fixes but would like to know that confirmed problems are being looked into. If fixing the problem is technically/financially impossible, fine. But I would like to know.

I answer the questions that I have the answers for.

When I read this post, the first thing I did was try to reproduce it on my dev machine and I could not. I was getting about 90 FPS with a full chat window and smooth fonts on. Disabling smooth fonts and clearing my chat window did not increase my FPS. So with that simple test, I was not able to confirm a problem specific to chat text. I'm not saying it doesn't exist, I just couldn't confirm it with a simple test.

We're aware that the UI eats up some FPS and this is one area we will look at for performance improvements.


Regarding the chat filters and why parsers still work...
Whenever damage or healing happens, this comes down via a different type of message. The text for these messages are built and displayed on the client. So shutting off combat spam will not reduce bandwidth, sorry if my original post was misleading. Any of the other messages where the chat text is actually sent form the server will reduce bandwidth if you turn them off. This includes any of the chat channels and spell flavor text.



LINK

[Illuminator]

The spell flavor text is 100% useless. Anyone obsessing over every cast will have a hard time getting past level 6.

[Snark]

Sometimes it is the only indicator of a proc going off, so it does have a purpose.

[Illuminator]

They should cut the roleplay crap then and make each text a clear-cut indicator of a successful spell cast. Then ACT can give us legit hit rates for a change, uninflated by dot's.