Pondering SE:V performance

Slick · #1 August 27th, 2006, 08:30 PM

I'm sure that we all will be happy to see all the great shipsets that will be in SE:V as well as those to be made in the future by the talented players and modders. I'm hoping that a fleet battle of, say, 30 ships vs. 30 ships may begin to seriously degrade performance and 100 ships vs. 100 ships may be too much for older systems. I'm just piking numbers out of the air here, but I'm thinking that after the eye candy phase wears off people will be wanting extremely low-poly shipsets to speed the game up. I remember reading somewhere that SE:V will allow 2D shipsets to increase performance (?)

Anyone wanna shed some light on where performance tends to break down?

Phoenix-D · #2 August 27th, 2006, 08:39 PM

Well, you could always make a single flat square as a 'ship'.

Hmm. Actually a bunch of flying cubes with symbols on them might make a decent low-poly shipset.

Captain Kwok · #3 August 27th, 2006, 09:01 PM

A battle with 100 vs 100 (all onscreen) runs slow on my system - a P4-2.4 with 1GB RAM and 256MB GeForce 5500.

I'd imagine with that size you'd be running strategic combat anyways or if playing the battle manually you'd have it play stepped which should help things along.

Q · #4 August 28th, 2006, 12:17 PM

So you are talking about tactical combat? In strategic combat (and it's replay) I hope there will be no problems with battles involving 1000 ship and 5000 fighters on a newer computer.
If it is not too late I would suggest a low graphic mode option for tactical combat/replay.

Slick · #5 August 28th, 2006, 12:30 PM

I'd like tactical combat to be playable with ship numbers in the low hundreds since this is not unreasonable using SE:IV late game as a measuring stick.

However, Q hit it on the head since multiplayer will not use tactical, I'd really like combat replay to be reasonably fast.

PvK · #6 August 28th, 2006, 03:00 PM

Mhmm. Seems to me that the larger a battle is, the more important it is to be able to see what happens in it, even if it is just watching a replay. If at some size level a battle becomes impossible to tell what happened, that seems like a big problem. Hopefully zooming in and replaying and/or turning down detail levels can allow even a huge battle to be viewed.

PvK

Ed Kolis · #7 August 28th, 2006, 03:05 PM

You can turn down the detail level?

DarkHorse · #8 August 28th, 2006, 03:15 PM

Quote:

Speaking at the Games Convention in Leipzig, Bernd Diemer, senior game designer of Crytek, explained that next-generation consoles don't offer enough computational power to run Crysis, German publication Heise reported.

Although Crysis will support both current and the next version of DirectX, the developer claims that only DirectX 10 allows the game to run as it was intended by the developers because the next-generation DirectX API, which will ship along Windows Vista, allows more effects and more objects to be drawn on the screen with a smaller computational cost for the hardware.

Diemer explained that "next generation consoles like the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 do not offer the sufficient power" to assure the quality of gameplay Crytek demand for Crysis.

And we're worried about SE:V (using a three year old graphics engine)

Captain Kwok · #9 August 28th, 2006, 04:36 PM

Some objects are already represented like flat objects such as fighters during combat. I've never played at the lower detail levels, so I'm not sure the other models are hedged for low detail. Regarding the combat replay, I haven't use it for any large battles, but one of the other testers might be able to give some indication of replay vs. actual combat graphics performance.

Will · #10 August 28th, 2006, 04:50 PM

The engine is three years old, yes (presumably with some improvements since StarFury), but the bigger thing to see is that the engine uses DirectX 7, which was released around the end of 1999... meaning it's graphics technology from 7 years ago. Not complaining, since it's a giant leap forward from bitmap sprites, I'm just sayin'. Besides, seven year old graphics tech should be great for my current video card, so I don't need to go out and spend $1100 to go out and get dual SLI video cards, and a new mobo to support the cards, and a new processor for the mobo, and new memory...

And I call bull**** on the Crysis thing. They don't "need" the new APIs for the game, and the APIs are not going to increase "the quality of gameplay". But we already know that.