PA Server and performance failure

This image sum it up for me:


My comp : i7 2600K @ 4.5Ghz + 770 GTX, 10FPS with only 1500units, CPU usage ... 13%, GPU usage 42%.

Not to mention the 433kB/s bandwidth used for only 4players and 1500 units. We will never player 20players games.

I am sorry to say that but your server system is a complete failure, and optimization will never fix all those problems. You need to switch to a deterministic simulation. Computing everything on the server was a bad idea from the beginning. 433kB per player/spectator ? No one will ever be able to host big games, even if you devide the bandwidth usage by 10.

And by the way, we do not care about chronocam, it's nice, but it does not bring anything gameplay wise.

Edit: even a 4player game is barely playable with my high end pc.

Why do you think so?
Client only need to get data about units/projectiles you see so it's doesn't mater how many players/units is in game.

And what are spectators and defeated players supposed to do? Cover their eyes?

You're playing an unfinished game. Performance optimizations are one of the last things done. The game is far far from optimized.

Hang in there.

Edit: I VERY much care about the chrono am. It is an amazing feature that is going to majorly improve the game once it becomes fully improved.

I guess spectators and defeated players not actually need to get all data in real-time so there is lot of things that can improve their experience and decrease bandwidth usage of host.

What is your internet connection? What country are you in?

He has to have a internet problem.
I have the same cpu clocked at the same speed with HT enabled and cores unparked.
I get way more than 10fps with 1500 units....For me i get a major fps dip in large games when i have been annihiliated and have full view of all players/planets.

That's because fog of war is really expensive.

They're working on some performance updates, something to do with the lighting, that will drastically reduce the expense of rendering fog of war – meaning gameplay, especially spectating, will be a lot smoother. :-D

Connection issues and bandwidth throttling do not affect client FPS at all. E.g if there is limited bandwidth then units will movements will be choppy, but you might have solid 30-60FPS.

It's main advantage of client-server architecture: client can't affect simulation performance and server can't affect client rendering FPS. I suppose some bugs theoretically possible, but I never seen any in PA.

In my books the chrono cam is a feature that almost surely will be underutilised and underdeveloped. The main point is that the immidiet ideas of using it are all rare edge exceptions. And even then it's a nicety. Also in order to be agile with it it requires a whole new kind of coordination / conceptualization from the player. It also has not been designed around and it resonates somewhat poorly with the other components of the game. Even when it would work how now intended it gives a slight usability boost althought in a very base category of engaging with the game. In order for it to really matter it would need to be greatly expanded upon.

Having played intensively with the smaller scale technological big brother of it in Achron's timeline that actually has gameplay implications I don't expect to see much what I haven't seen. Sure apples are sweet but not like candy. I have seen what was promised as part of a different bigger package and what PA will do will be very much the same that game did with strategic zoom compared how it's done in the SupCom lineage: a shadow of a good idea taken as a tack on, not taken far enough and slightly misunderstood. The concept of chrono cam will be much greater than PA will live up to.

Those are some bold words criticizing a feature that is not fully implemented and optimized.

I understand your concerns.

But wait until the game is finished and features are fully implemented. There's still a bunch more features yet to be added to it. Also the performance optimizations are gonna make it a lot more useful. I'd use it a lot more if my computer handled it better.

When the systems gets much larger, we can't be everywhere at once. The ChronoCam will be important for keeping track of what's going on.

Saying it then could not impact whether or not it happens. As time grows short whatever can be accomplished dimishes and the product should mature to be able to stand as a work and not a work-in-progress.

I think some of you are missing the point here. A system like the OP has should NOT be struggling to run this game at all. Even next gen console games are running very well on modest systems below the one by the OP, PA is perhaps the most demanding game ever created at the moment.

Now let me show you some stats to back stuff up.
http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/ (can't post links as new user apparently, replace the (dot) with .)
Firstly, let us go over video cards. The OP has a GTX770, which about 1.31% of steam users are using. According to http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html this card is arguably the 7th best video card in the world at the moment. All the cards above the GTX770 do not show up in the steam hardware survey because they are too uncommon (the lowest card on the list has a 0.5% usage) so for now lets assume best case scenario that all the cards above GTX770 have a 0.5% usage (which we all know statistically this is probably not the case and will be far lower) This means 4.31% of steam users or less have a GTX770 or better.
Therefore, the top 4.31% of rigs in the world, graphics card wise, will be able to run PA at 10FPS minimum. The rest of the 93.69% will get LOWER performance than this.
Next, to go over CPU. The OP has a i7 2600K @ 4.5Ghz. This one is a bit tougher, since the normal clock speed for this CPU is actually 3.5Ghz, so I have to wonder whether OP has overclocked his CPU heavily or whether this was a typo. This is a 4 core CPU and is probably where the OP is getting a performance reduction. However, steam hardware survey shows that the OP is in the top end of CPU cores, where only 2.29% have more cores than the OP. The OP is also in the top 0.42% of actual clock speeds, making his CPU one of the better ones in the market.
This means that somewhere between 2-5% of rigs will get around 10fps minimum in PA. The other 95-98% will get LOWER performance than this.

This poses serious problems to the game if only 1 in 20 people using computers to game can actually play PA at 10FPS late game. There are probably a VERY SMALL percentage of players who are getting acceptable framerates. My friend has one of the better rigs you can get at the moment (I forget but it is two high end cards SLI with a CPU probably around the OP level) and he was getting around 30FPS late game and he was so shocked that this game performed so badly that he deluded himself into thinking the client was lying about his performance and said it felt better than that. Whether this is true or not I don't know, but I doubt he would lie about the FPS counter anyway.

There are a few problems with my analysis for sure, like not going into RAM in detail and using some assumptions, but the results seem to be clear: PA is arguably the worst performing game in the world at the moment. Can it be improved? Most likely yes. It is a very ambitious game, but I fear it may be too ambitious for its time. The world is perhaps not ready for PA....

Just understand that this particular functionality is far from being complete.

He does have a point, though. The popcorny combat of PA both provides a need for the Chronocam (i.e. 'retro-scouting' causes of death for units) and makes its use highly dangerous because time spent on observing past events is time not spent on the present - which might lead to you missing even more crucial engagements.
Regarding the original poster's concern for the game's performance I think we can safely say that processing power and memory requirements will be cut down massively by optimisation - just look at the last thread by @varrak for what is possible once time can be dedicated to it.
Bandwidth I am not sure on, though. Look at the envisioned technical goal of 1 million units at some point. Neglecting anything that is not a unit - e.g. projectiles, planets - assume each update from server to client to take up 1bit per unit and an update rate of 10Hz. That gives us an upload bandwidth of 1MByte per second per player.
Now look at the values the original poster provides: 433 kBps for 1500 units. That amounts to ~2300 times my estimate per unit. Divide freely by 25 (assuming 24x times as many projectiles as there are units) and you still end up with ~100 times my estimate of a best case. Sounds like a lot of work to me.
Plus client-server scales nicely with differing client specs but poorly with the number of clients so I am not too keen on 40 players plus observers in the future. We will see.

Do you know how much you can screw up a game for the other players by spectating it and shifting between viewpoints?

It's ridiculous.

I know what's going on here- you're CPU limited! I know that sounds daft at first, however the PA.exe client is *single core* only. The UI runs separately however uses very little (It's just like running Chrome so hardly any overhead there). Now you have an i7- with HT enabled no doubt. This basically treats your CPU like an octacore. If the thread can only run on a single logical core, then your 'maxed out' cpu usage in this scenario is 100/8 or 12.5% which happens to be what your running at.

Varrak has posted an interesting thread about the fact that Lights and Fog of War are using far too much CPU time:

https://forums.uberent.com/threads/graphics-update-v1-2.57899/

Hopefully once the light instancing and FOW changes come into effect it will relieve the bottleneck and speed your system back up. Other things you could try is looking at the instructions to unpark your cores, and possibly disable hyper-threading as in some circumstances it can actually be a hindrance when your working with limited threads.

My computer is worse and I never have any problems in game . Barely ever lag.

I have a FTTH 300/50 Mbps connection. I am not worried about the FPS, I am worried about the bandwidth usage and the simulation speed of this client/server system. While deterministic system only use few kB/s per player, and any computer can host multiple servers, this system requires a powerfull server with a very good connection. It means it will be either expansive for them or for us. And it does not bring much to the client, everything the server is doing, could be done on one of my bored i7 core, and I am sure it would be done faster and better. It's not too late, they can still change their mind, I know they won't but still, it had to be said.

And no the chronocam is a marketing argument not a player one, it does bring some interresting things, but it's clearly not something important, and it would still need a lot of work to be useful in a real game.

Ehmm the Full release of the game will have offline play. And the game is still incomplete...