34 replies to this topic

[Abisha]

serious a freaking ancient mirror so you can walk backwards would be like god's gift for this game
so you can see where the freak you are stuck behind

[Nightbird]

A rear mirror or camera will cut your FPS in half because the game has to render what's in the front and in the rear instead of just the front.

That been said, a button to switch the entire view to a rear camera would have been nice. It's what another game does to get around the FPS problem.

Edited by Nightbird, 08 September 2022 - 11:33 AM.

[Abisha]

Nightbird, on 08 September 2022 - 11:32 AM, said:

A rear mirror or camera will cut your FPS in half because the game has to render what's in the front and in the rear instead of just the front.

That been said, a button to switch the entire view to a rear camera would have been nice. It's what another game does to get around the FPS problem.

even just a terrain geometry would do so long you can see you not stuck on a rock or tiny wall.

[ScrapIron Prime]

Abisha, on 08 September 2022 - 11:37 AM, said:

even just a terrain geometry would do so long you can see you not stuck on a rock or tiny wall.

Wouldn't a 3rd person camera that you could pan around be better for that? There's no way a rear view mirror could see that little ankle-height rock or tree root in Forest Colony that is somehow preventing your movement. cement pillar in Solaris City, yes. Little rock, not so much.

[MyriadDigits]

ScrapIron Prime, on 08 September 2022 - 11:42 AM, said:

Wouldn't a 3rd person camera that you could pan around be better for that? There's no way a rear view mirror could see that little ankle-height rock or tree root in Forest Colony that is somehow preventing your movement. cement pillar in Solaris City, yes. Little rock, not so much.

A butt cam angled specifically to see such things I think its the general idea of what people want.

[martian]

Abisha, on 08 September 2022 - 11:23 AM, said:

serious a freaking ancient mirror so you can walk backwards would be like god's gift for this game
so you can see where the freak you are stuck behind

Yeah!

Switchable front/rear view would suffice ...

Just like it was possible in MechWarrior 4.

[confracto]

Nightbird, on 08 September 2022 - 11:32 AM, said:

A rear mirror or camera will cut your FPS in half because the game has to render what's in the front and in the rear instead of just the front.

this ^

it was never going to, and will never happen.
I remember asking the lead programmer about it directly.

[LordNothing]

Nightbird, on 08 September 2022 - 11:32 AM, said:

A rear mirror or camera will cut your FPS in half because the game has to render what's in the front and in the rear instead of just the front.

That been said, a button to switch the entire view to a rear camera would have been nice. It's what another game does to get around the FPS problem.

this may have been true 10 years ago. even when it was true it was never half. more like 20-30%. but unless you are on 10 year old hardware its no problem. my 2070 super can run 4k at 120hz with some head room. way more fps than you need, especially if your monitor is capped at 60. the server tick is only 30 so that's still twice what you need. you are not going to be using a 4k render target, 1k or less is usually enough given the size of the in-game screens.

you can also re-use any world space buffers, like those used for shadows. world space scene construction can also be buffered and reused for the textures. you are only changing the projection matrix. you can also use frame skipping to reduce the frame rate, drop it to 30 or 20 hz my skipping 1 or 2 frames respectively. you can also time slice renderings of multiple cameras to staggered frames so that you never render more than one screen at a time. the rendered textures can persist in memory as long as you need them for no extra cost. reducing the quality can also speed up rendering, turn off things like env or particles, etc while rendering textures.

or dont use render to texture and use ray tracing/marching instead. this game is a bit too old for that, and i dont think the engine ever did have a working rtt capability. a functional implementation is dependent on a lot of low level render code, you cant do it without the required foundation. mwll looked like it was planning to go that way but never pulled it off, and none of the crysis games ive played had used it in game. quake 3 team arena did, and that game was ancient (you need a john carmack to pull that off).

i did a scripted version on the freespace engine a long time ago, this was later implemented in c by another programmer using my implementation of the template. even then, the render targets had only a minor impact on my overall framerate. on modern gpu hardware, which often has more go than the game needs (being mostly cpu constrained), its totally possible.

if only this game had a programmer that could write high performance graphics code. outside of pgi's non existent development budget.

Edited by LordNothing, 08 September 2022 - 07:28 PM.

[Nightbird]

LordNothing, on 08 September 2022 - 07:09 PM, said:

(being mostly cpu constrained)

MWO is CPU constrained, so yes, it will half the CPU FPS regardless of what your GPU can push.

[LordNothing]

Nightbird, on 08 September 2022 - 08:02 PM, said:

MWO is CPU constrained, so yes, it will half the CPU FPS regardless of what your GPU can push.

cpu is only used for setup. gpu does the heavy lifting.

Edited by LordNothing, 08 September 2022 - 08:11 PM.

[Abisha]

without a mirror or some backview screen this is how it feels like.

https://youtu.be/tCoAdQAfKJk?t=182

Rock takes the glory

Edited by Abisha, 08 September 2022 - 08:20 PM.

[Nightbird]

LordNothing, on 08 September 2022 - 08:11 PM, said:

cpu is only used for setup. gpu does the heavy lifting.

Set your CPU to half speed. If yours is 4Ghz, set it to 2Ghz in BIOS run MWO (real match, not testing ground) then comeback to tell us what happened to your FPS.

[LordNothing]

Nightbird, on 09 September 2022 - 05:35 AM, said:

Set your CPU to half speed. If yours is 4Ghz, set it to 2Ghz in BIOS run MWO (real match, not testing ground) then comeback to tell us what happened to your FPS.

that will certainly break things. but thats not how render to texture works. render times are proportional to the number of pixels that need to be filled. so filling the 2.07 million pixels on a 1080 display, compared to 1.05 million pixels for a 1024^2 render target. thats not filling 2 screens, thats filling a screen and a half.

my screen is about 8.29 million pixels, and so a 1024^2 render target would only require less than an eighth the work. and thats just from my modest sff build and last gen gpu. and that might knock 15 fps of my 120ish fps ive been getting. this is an acceptable sacrifice for a rear view camera. realistically you will let users pick their render target size so they can render panels that look good on their screen resolution or reduce the impact. say pick a 512^2 texture at lower performance tiers or a 2048^2 texture if you are running some kind of render monster, or 256^2 or disable completely if on some kind of potato, and this may also come with a slider to reduce render quality on render targets.

and thats just messing with the resolution of the render target and render settings. frame skip stands to save 50% for one frame and 66% for two frames. skipping two frames at 120hz still gives you a 40hz refresh of your cockpit monitors which is far beyond the performance of cctv systems. and if you can drive a full 144 (probibly not at 4k), you can skip 3 frames and get 36fps. this can be set from 0-3 and give players some wiggle room in their settings.

so lets say you are using a 1024^2 render target on a 2560x1440 display. you only end up filling 28.44% more pixels per frame. throw in a frame skip of one and your render work load only goes down to 14.22% more pixels per unit of time (per frame no longer makes sense in this situation). if thats still too much of a sacrifice, cut your target size down to 512^2 and quarter it further or skip two frames, still enough to see the squirrel in your back side or to see if your team mates are following or just sitting there.

using render targets is not cutting your performance in half, it never was. and with properly configured settings it can work. i also figure a lot of players are wasting gpu resources on rendering frames they will never see. if you are hitting 90fps with a screen that can only display 60, you have enough surplus gpu time to render your monitors.

Edited by LordNothing, 09 September 2022 - 04:37 PM.

[martian]

confracto, on 08 September 2022 - 06:20 PM, said:

this ^

it was never going to, and will never happen.
I remember asking the lead programmer about it directly.

If you are thinking about it, it's pretty ironic.

What was possible in 1995 (MechWarrior 2) or 2000 (MechWarrior 4), it is impossible in 2022 (MechWarrior Online), even with the today's advantage of having vastly more advanced and more powerful hardware and software available.

[confracto]

martian, on 10 September 2022 - 05:29 AM, said:

If you are thinking about it, it's pretty ironic.

What was possible in 1995 (MechWarrior 2) or 2000 (MechWarrior 4), it is impossible in 2022 (MechWarrior Online), even with the today's advantage of having vastly more advanced and more powerful hardware and software available.

rendering everything twice? yeah, it is ironic, but no less completely impossible.
also, by impossible I mean "prohibitively expensive enough in dev time that it'll never happen in this game", and I think this was true even from the beginning of development, let alone the state things are in now.

[martian]

confracto, on 10 September 2022 - 09:43 AM, said:

rendering everything twice? yeah, it is ironic, but no less completely impossible.
also, by impossible I mean "prohibitively expensive enough in dev time that it'll never happen in this game", and I think this was true even from the beginning of development, let alone the state things are in now.

Even if you are switching between the front view and the rear view, so you never see them simultaneously, as in MechWarrior 4?

[PocketYoda]

Man the PGI devs are terrible..

[Nightbird]

LordNothing, on 09 September 2022 - 04:35 PM, said:

Looks like you don't understand the role of the CPU in rendering. Hint, no pixels involved.

[LordNothing]

Nightbird, on 12 September 2022 - 07:25 AM, said:

Looks like you don't understand the role of the CPU in rendering. Hint, no pixels involved.

how many rtt implementations are you responsible for?

because your post reads like you once used a really old version of opengl. gpu memory is practically free, so you can cache things, and use the data for multiple jobs now. we have come a long way since the time when the only thing you could get into vram was the frame buffer.

Edited by LordNothing, 12 September 2022 - 09:39 AM.

[Nightbird]

LordNothing, on 12 September 2022 - 09:29 AM, said:

how many rtt implementations are you responsible for?

because your post reads like you once used a really old version of opengl. gpu memory is practically free, so you can cache things, and use the data for multiple jobs now. we have come a long way since the time when the only thing you could get into vram was the frame buffer.

The internet is full of free information. Look up the role of CPU and GPU in video games.

The CPU processes what is in a scene, where all the players and objects are. The GPU turns that scene into pixels.

If a scene has 95% of pixels on your monitor from one camera pointing forwards and 5% of pixels from a rear camera, it still processes 100% of all pixels. However the CPU has to process 100% of all objects that belong to the front, and 100% of objects that belongs to the back.

Edited by Nightbird, 12 September 2022 - 10:35 AM.