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[Matthew Craig]

Performance Update

We know that performance slowly declined for a number of users to the point of becoming unplayable in recent patches, obviously we’ve been progressively adding content and features to the game and we’ve also been trying to keep performance in a playable state but clearly we haven’t done enough and need to do better. We’ve been going over all the games systems in detail and building a complete picture of where the key costs for MWO lie and how we can work to improve them and I wanted to share our findings so far with you.

HUD

As I’ve mentioned in other posts MWO does not have a cheap HUD it contains a lot of detail and we always planned to have Scaleform 4.0 as part of the CryEngine 3.4 update which is much more optimal than the version currently in MWO. Sadly this integration did not come as part of the 3.4 update, so we are now taking the time to make the HUD more optimal until such time as we can upgrade MWO to the latest version. A minor improvement goes out today which was a bug fix for an issue that was causing the cockpit monitors to use more draw calls than necessary.

Levels

The levels were created with performance in mind but not as the primary goal and visual quality was more important to us initially. Each level is now getting a cleanup pass and the changes will roll out in upcoming patches all of them should be done by early in the New Year. This work has already been making its way to production Forest Colony and Frozen City are already done and other maps are coming down the pipe, part of the reason the full impact hasn’t been felt yet is the costs in the HUD and in the Terrain.

Terrain

We’ve been looking more closely at the Terrain code in 3.4 and noticing that it is generally responsible for much of the streaming/hitching happening in game. We are working to tune it for min spec machines; this work should help all platforms feel generally ‘smoother’ in terms of performance. There were also a few regressions caused by a cleanup pass that happened a few weeks ago which have been caught and re-exported correctly that go out on production today.

Ray Traces

Mechs sure can fire a lot of lasers and also use ray traces for range finding, tagging etc. These can add up fast especially on a Swayback, we’ve recently done some work to reduce the amount used where possible and to optimize the underlying system to make it faster which should be making its way to production in the next couple of weeks.

Audio

We’ve also recently done some audio cleanup passes that should help performance that go out in today’s patch.

Engine

CryEngine 3.4 was a great update for us and lays the groundwork for many good things to come, but it also set back some earlier optimization work. There are no more planned updates in the foreseeable future so the community should feel reassured that stability and performance will both continue to improve from here forwards and remain a high priority for us here at PGI.


We’ve also significantly tightened up on our process for internal performance testing of upcoming builds to ensure builds don’t go out with any significant performance regressions. We appreciate that there are some outstanding performance issues awaiting fixes on production 4fps bug and degradation over time, we continue to actively track these and work with the community to help resolve them.

Starting today we hope you will experience some improvement in today’s build with a much more significant improvement in the following build that we hope will bring us much more in line with where performance was earlier in closed beta and then only ever the same or better from there.


As always we thank you for your support and patience and hope to see you on the Battlefield.

[Matthew Craig]

Just a quick update to say that the next build (18th) is showing a marked reduction in CTD (crash to desktop) issues and another up tick in performance we're looking forward to seeing how it performs for the community as a whole when it's released next week (hang in there low fps players).

As mentioned prior there is additional performance work coming down the pipe beyond that also, including an optimization pass for particles as well as further work to the maps so the improvements don't stop there.