You clearly do not understand what a client-server architecture is. It does not mean that you cannot operate a server and client on the same machine. Have you ever played minecraft? because that uses a server-client architecture aswell, but when you play singleplayer games, minecraft is running an internal server on your computer for you to connect to locally. The servers for PA run the majority (if not all of) the simulation. On release, when they allow us to do community servers, you will be able to run a server on your computer, and yes, it will take a lot of resources to do so. But the client should not take much from CPU for simulation. All i can take from your comment is that you are trying to be sarky, but in the case you were not, i have explained the basics. PA MAY do it this way too (not sure how else they would do singleplayer in offline mode if they wanted to keep it 'simple'), but they will certainly do this for LANs.
@gunshin, have a read of Time's previous postings on the forum. You will be able to divine whether he's being snarky or not.
Then you host a LAN server that has nothing to do with Ubernet. The server has nothing to do with the graphical rendering of the game.
How much memory do you have? I wonder if you have low RAM or your seeing a memory leak whether your swapping to disk. I'm not sure but this would probably max out a single core and it could explain low performance.
Hey Bull if you were as good at gaming as you seem to be at spotting other peoples grammatical errors or trolling then I would be very scared of you.
A lot of what this thread is talking about, has been mentioned and beat to death over at this other thread. Not sure why nobody pointed to this earlier... PA Multi-threading
The reasons for low performance is likely a combination of things. But if one processor core is maxed out, thats a good sign of a bottleneck, doesn't seem to matter if you only have one core or 8, the Coherent UI processes themselves can get divided up amongst the cores, if I understand the way the game is structured out. But if one coherent UI requires more processing power than what one of your cores can provide, that is going to be a bottle neck. plain and simple. Maybe not THAT bottleneck, but certainly one of them.
I'm sure once the server is released you will see much heavier CPU usage. You need to learn just a little bit about the difference between a GPU and a CPU.
From what i know a cpu is able to do everything a gpu can but is much much slower. So i think in theory it should be possible but i dont think its worth it. Might also introduce extra overhead.
It will introduce A LOT of overhead. You have to send data back and forth between the card and cpu, and that's just painfully slow. It's a bit like sending a piece of paper to the other side of town to have it put in an envelope, and then retrieved back again so you can post it. Sure, you can collect a large batch and send back and forth periodically, but that is kinda not helpful when you're trying to put information on the screen as soon as possible.
From memory and CPU perspective certainly, but most certainly not from a GPU perspective. If you want to host a multi person LAN game while playing on the same box, you will of course need a bit more memory and a more robust CPU, but your GPU doesn't enter into it.
So basically... What does one need (from a hardware point of view) To get the best performance experience in this game. Because I don't get it - I thought that server only handled the physics and keeping everyone in sync.
No. Server do all simulation you see in game include AI, path finding, line of sight, projectiles. Game client just don't have (by design) all this information in memory. As result none of client-side cheats (like map-hack) are possible in PA because server (should) verify any command client sent. E.g it's only give client recon information about units you actually might see. Obviously it's mean server need lot of RAM and it's very CPU-intensive.
But Why dowe we even get FPS Drops then? It seems to me that if the server handles everything then the only bottleneck should be the GPU and VRAM. Why shouldn't the CPU then take the load off GPU and help it with rendering graphics?
Im not expert but i would assume that most of the time its a delay in getting the data from the server to your machine. a network bottleneck
Because some parts of game client is not too efficient yet and this what developers improve in every new version. Because CPU can't "help" GPU and even if it's were possible CPU loaded for 100% can't give even +1% to rendering performance.