Why does this game run poorly?

[Ebolaids]

This game runs at literally 23fps average.

 

Even GrindWars 2 runs at a steady 40fps on low settings on my laptop.

Even skyrim on medium runs at 30fps.

Even runescape WHICH IS MADE IN JAVA runs fine.

 

 

Intel core i5 3317u

Intel HD 4000

4gb DDR3

120GB SSD

 

 

What happened to real programmers? When games used to be optimized?

 

It almost feels like someone paid Obsidian to make the game run like crap to force people to buy new hardware. Im not even joking.

 

Cant EDIT: Title edited.

[mvanblom]

 

Right now, I would almost sacrifice a puppy to get to a constant 30 fps... ;-)

Any luck with overclocking your GPU as suggested earlier?

 

Yep, I tried, and sadly, it did not work... Not to say that I don't appreciate the advice. But in my case, it seems not to be the graphics card. It's not memory either, since I had the opportunity to try a different pair of sticks. So that leaves the processor, which is only used for 20 percent when PoI is running...

 

Ow, and the patch didn't help either. Even setting the graphic slider to minimum I get the same 8 fps at the opening campfire...

Edited April 4, 2015 by mvanblom

[mindswayer]

 

 

I think we can all agree the game is just incredibly, incredibly unoptimised and resource inefficient.

You just summed up every Unity 4 game.

 

 

You need to learn a thing or two about Unity and development before making such ignorant statements.

 

There's 3 choices really:

- Either Unity is **** and that's why every game developed on it is either some mobile game or an unoptimized pc title;

- Or the devs just don't know what the **** they're doing but they just keep using unity because hey it's free lol

Unity IS a steaming pile of **** when it comes to using resources efficiently. it is no coincidence that almost every game released on Unity seems to have the same problems.

I understand why Obsidian chose Unity, and I'm not even mad. They said they have no experience with Unity, they're still learning, which is ok by me. I'm not gonna die because my game drops to 30 fps. It's just annoying and I'd be glad to see it fixed. I just hope they move to Unity 5 in a sequel.

[StubbinMyToe]

 

 

 

I think we can all agree the game is just incredibly, incredibly unoptimised and resource inefficient.

You just summed up every Unity 4 game.

 

 

You need to learn a thing or two about Unity and development before making such ignorant statements.

 

There's 3 choices really:

- Either Unity is **** and that's why every game developed on it is either some mobile game or an unoptimized pc title;

- Or the devs just don't know what the **** they're doing but they just keep using unity because hey it's free lol

Unity IS a steaming pile of **** when it comes to using resources efficiently. it is no coincidence that almost every game released on Unity seems to have the same problems.

I understand why Obsidian chose Unity, and I'm not even mad. They said they have no experience with Unity, they're still learning, which is ok by me. I'm not gonna die because my game drops to 30 fps. It's just annoying and I'd be glad to see it fixed. I just hope they move to Unity 5 in a sequel.

 

 

You are once again completely wrong.  The developer has full control over how resources are managed and there have been MANY successful games made with it, including games that run on limited embedded systems such as iOS and Droid.   In addition, Unity is only free if you make less than $100k.  Don't try to blame the engine until you have written code for it and released a commercial title.

 

I get a feeling your machine just sucks.  You must be one of those guys who thinks buying a bunch of parts from NewEgg (or wherever) makes you an expert at building a good machine. ROFLMAO

[mindswayer]

 

 

 

 

I think we can all agree the game is just incredibly, incredibly unoptimised and resource inefficient.

You just summed up every Unity 4 game.

 

 

You need to learn a thing or two about Unity and development before making such ignorant statements.

 

There's 3 choices really:

- Either Unity is **** and that's why every game developed on it is either some mobile game or an unoptimized pc title;

- Or the devs just don't know what the **** they're doing but they just keep using unity because hey it's free lol

Unity IS a steaming pile of **** when it comes to using resources efficiently. it is no coincidence that almost every game released on Unity seems to have the same problems.

I understand why Obsidian chose Unity, and I'm not even mad. They said they have no experience with Unity, they're still learning, which is ok by me. I'm not gonna die because my game drops to 30 fps. It's just annoying and I'd be glad to see it fixed. I just hope they move to Unity 5 in a sequel.

 

 

You are once again completely wrong.  The developer has full control over how resources are managed and there have been MANY successful games made with it, including games that run on limited embedded systems such as iOS and Droid.   In addition, Unity is only free if you make less than $100k.  Don't try to blame the engine until you have written code for it and released a commercial title.

 

I get a feeling your machine just sucks.  You must be one of those guys who thinks buying a bunch of parts from NewEgg (or wherever) makes you an expert at building a good machine. ROFLMAO

 

I actually originally built this machine around the end of 2011 and have been upgrading it ever since. I also recently decided to OC my CPU to around 4.0GHz to see if it helped. But whatever floats your boat, I guess.

[Sabin Stargem]

While I don't see Unity as a problem, I do feel that Obsidian should do a GOTY edition of Eternity that uses Unity 5+.  That would improve perfromance, and be appropriate as a stepping stone to releasing an expansion or sequel to Eternity.

Edited April 4, 2015 by Sabin Stargem

[CarolAugustus]

 

 

 

 

I think we can all agree the game is just incredibly, incredibly unoptimised and resource inefficient.

You just summed up every Unity 4 game.

 

 

You need to learn a thing or two about Unity and development before making such ignorant statements.

 

There's 3 choices really:

- Either Unity is **** and that's why every game developed on it is either some mobile game or an unoptimized pc title;

- Or the devs just don't know what the **** they're doing but they just keep using unity because hey it's free lol

Unity IS a steaming pile of **** when it comes to using resources efficiently. it is no coincidence that almost every game released on Unity seems to have the same problems.

I understand why Obsidian chose Unity, and I'm not even mad. They said they have no experience with Unity, they're still learning, which is ok by me. I'm not gonna die because my game drops to 30 fps. It's just annoying and I'd be glad to see it fixed. I just hope they move to Unity 5 in a sequel.

 

 

You are once again completely wrong.  The developer has full control over how resources are managed and there have been MANY successful games made with it, including games that run on limited embedded systems such as iOS and Droid.   In addition, Unity is only free if you make less than $100k.  Don't try to blame the engine until you have written code for it and released a commercial title.

 

I get a feeling your machine just sucks.  You must be one of those guys who thinks buying a bunch of parts from NewEgg (or wherever) makes you an expert at building a good machine. ROFLMAO

 

 

lmao @ this shill. Are you a unity dev or something? Unity is a garbage engine that runs like ass and no amount of shilling on your part is going to change that. Not that Obsidian's any better, you have to try pretty hard to end up with such horrible system reqs for what should've just been a 2d game. Thank God they got those hideous nwn2 models working at least, imagine if we just had some 2d paper dolls like the IE games.

Edited April 5, 2015 by LadyCrimson
Debate the issue, not the person or their wife.

[Pawel.pc44]

It's because of the 3D characters I think (which smash the renderer), I also have some performance issues on my i7 870. Try turning off anti-aliasing in the console

 

`

 

msaa 0

 

Stop kidding. Divinity: Original Sin is in 3D and its characters have more polygons than PoE. D: OS is running wonderful on high details on my box. PoE slows down from time to time in some locations. i7 3770k 3.5GHz, Geforce 660 GTX Titanium 2GB, 16GB RAM. PoE looks worse than Temple of Elemental Evil (and ToEE had beautiful trees in 3D), but runs much worse. It's messed up Unity engine which is terribly slow. It's also the case in Wasteland 2.

[mindswayer]

 

It's because of the 3D characters I think (which smash the renderer), I also have some performance issues on my i7 870. Try turning off anti-aliasing in the console

 

`

 

msaa 0

 

Stop kidding. Divinity: Original Sin is in 3D and its characters have more polygons than PoE. D: OS is running wonderful on high details on my box. PoE slows down from time to time in some locations. i7 3770k 3.5GHz, Geforce 660 GTX Titanium 2GB, 16GB RAM. PoE looks worse than Temple of Elemental Evil (and ToEE had beautiful trees in 3D), but runs much worse. It's messed up Unity engine which is terribly slow. It's also the case in Wasteland 2.

 

He's talking about Unity engine in specific. It handles 3d models horribly. Divinity: Original Sin has nothing to do with it, since Larian used their own in-house engine.

[Pawel.pc44]

 

 

It's because of the 3D characters I think (which smash the renderer), I also have some performance issues on my i7 870. Try turning off anti-aliasing in the console

 

`

 

msaa 0

 

Stop kidding. Divinity: Original Sin is in 3D and its characters have more polygons than PoE. D: OS is running wonderful on high details on my box. PoE slows down from time to time in some locations. i7 3770k 3.5GHz, Geforce 660 GTX Titanium 2GB, 16GB RAM. PoE looks worse than Temple of Elemental Evil (and ToEE had beautiful trees in 3D), but runs much worse. It's messed up Unity engine which is terribly slow. It's also the case in Wasteland 2.

 

He's talking about Unity engine in specific. It handles 3d models horribly. Divinity: Original Sin has nothing to do with it, since Larian used their own in-house engine.

 

I got it. However, it shows Divinity engine is far better than Unity. They're porting it to Linux, so hopefully it will become a cRPG engine of choice in the future.

[StubbinMyToe]

 

 

It's because of the 3D characters I think (which smash the renderer), I also have some performance issues on my i7 870. Try turning off anti-aliasing in the console

 

`

 

msaa 0

 

Stop kidding. Divinity: Original Sin is in 3D and its characters have more polygons than PoE. D: OS is running wonderful on high details on my box. PoE slows down from time to time in some locations. i7 3770k 3.5GHz, Geforce 660 GTX Titanium 2GB, 16GB RAM. PoE looks worse than Temple of Elemental Evil (and ToEE had beautiful trees in 3D), but runs much worse. It's messed up Unity engine which is terribly slow. It's also the case in Wasteland 2.

 

He's talking about Unity engine in specific. It handles 3d models horribly. Divinity: Original Sin has nothing to do with it, since Larian used their own in-house engine.

 

 

So you seem to know a lot about Unity, how many times have you developed anything for it?  Do you know the exact specifics regarding the 3D rendering and limitations of models in Unity 3D?  Forget Unity for a minute, since you seem to know so much, how many commercial games have you developed with or without Unity 3D?   Have you seen the Unity code?  Have you seen the PoE code?  How about Divinity Code?

 

I thought so...

 

BTW, even on my Laptop I have zero performance issues with PoE. 

[AstralWanderer]

So you seem to know a lot about Unity, how many times have you developed anything for it?...

 

You don't need to be a developer to know what framerate you're seeing from a game, or how much system/GPU memory it is taking. And there are several examples of Unity games showing significantly higher memory utilisation and poorer performance compared to those using "native" engines, such as Legends of Aethereus or Dreamfall Chapters.

 

Based on Unity output logs I've received following a crash, Legends of Aethereus had 240MB allocated yet ended up using 2GB. Dreamfall Chapters reported 800-900MB allocated when it took up 2.8GB. Not (yet) seen Pillars use more than 1.6GB, but this is a spectacular amount of memory compared to what Temple of Elemental Evil or Divine Divinity/Beyond Divinity needed for their graphics.

BTW, even on my Laptop I have zero performance issues with PoE.

Jolly good for you. So you have no reason to post further...

[Sabin Stargem]

Engines are not just about the end-user's experience, it is also for the actual development of a game.  They are expensive to create and maintain, which is why Unreal, Cry Engine, and Unity are popular:  They take away the time and expense needed to make an engine from scratch.  Saying things like "It runs fast on the user's computer", misses important aspects like: "How long does it take to customize?",  "Can it import asset X?",  "How much skill is needed to use it?", "Is the asset store fair and diverse?" and so on.

 

Right now, the best thing for Obsidian to do is to use Unity for expanding Eternity 1, then choose the best engine for the next major project. 

[trashmyego]

While I don't see Unity as a problem, I do feel that Obsidian should do a GOTY edition of Eternity that uses Unity 5+.  That would improve perfromance, and be appropriate as a stepping stone to releasing an expansion or sequel to Eternity.

 

They're working on the expansion already and will be releasing the first 'half' by the end of the year according to their own expectations. I doubt if an overhauled GOTY release is a priority for them.

[StubbinMyToe]

 

So you seem to know a lot about Unity, how many times have you developed anything for it?...

You don't need to be a developer to know what framerate you're seeing from a game, or how much system/GPU memory it is taking. And there are several examples of Unity games showing significantly higher memory utilisation and poorer performance compared to those using "native" engines, such as Legends of Aethereus or Dreamfall Chapters.

 

Based on Unity output logs I've received following a crash, Legends of Aethereus had 240MB allocated yet ended up using 2GB. Dreamfall Chapters reported 800-900MB allocated when it took up 2.8GB. Not (yet) seen Pillars use more than 1.6GB, but this is a spectacular amount of memory compared to what Temple of Elemental Evil or Divine Divinity/Beyond Divinity needed for their graphics.

 

Nice try but wrong, looking at frame rates does not tell you anything about the engine because you do not see the code in a profiler to see where the bottle necks are.  There are ways to control your memory footprint and other things if you know what you are doing, people do it all the time on mobile devices. 

 

Have you developed any native engines?  I have, many times over the past 30 years as a developer.

[StubbinMyToe]

Engines are not just about the end-user's experience, it is also for the actual development of a game.  They are expensive to create and maintain, which is why Unreal, Cry Engine, and Unity are popular:  They take away the time and expense needed to make an engine from scratch.  Saying things like "It runs fast on the user's computer", misses important aspects like: "How long does it take to customize?",  "Can it import asset X?",  "How much skill is needed to use it?", "Is the asset store fair and diverse?" and so on.

 

 

Exactly right, and with deadlines being what they are today, developers do not write as much custom engine code as they used to.  Hell, back when I started developing (8 bit computers) we packed a big punch into games by using assembly language, people do not use asm today, they rely on high level languages like C/C++/Java/C# and high level SDK's such as DirectX to access the hardware for them.  Now today cross platform is a huge thing, and maintaining your own cross platform engine is a huge undertaking.  We did this at Adobe, had our own framework to develop for mac and pc at the same time,  but fortunately this was not for games but applications like Photoshop and Illustrator,  a game framework is much more difficult, especially when it comes to consoles, pc clones, mac, linux, etc.

 

If you are not a developer, you have zero understanding of this.  Looking at a task manager or memory dump is meaningless without knowing the context within the code.  For example, one bone head can write sloppy code that uses DirectX, if they have piss poor texture management, poor 3D object optimization, poor culling, etc, someone who is not a developer would claim DirectX is slow.  ROFLMAO

Edited April 6, 2015 by StubbinMyToe

[Pawel.pc44]

 

 

So you seem to know a lot about Unity, how many times have you developed anything for it?...

You don't need to be a developer to know what framerate you're seeing from a game, or how much system/GPU memory it is taking. And there are several examples of Unity games showing significantly higher memory utilisation and poorer performance compared to those using "native" engines, such as Legends of Aethereus or Dreamfall Chapters.

 

Based on Unity output logs I've received following a crash, Legends of Aethereus had 240MB allocated yet ended up using 2GB. Dreamfall Chapters reported 800-900MB allocated when it took up 2.8GB. Not (yet) seen Pillars use more than 1.6GB, but this is a spectacular amount of memory compared to what Temple of Elemental Evil or Divine Divinity/Beyond Divinity needed for their graphics.

 

Nice try but wrong, looking at frame rates does not tell you anything about the engine because you do not see the code in a profiler to see where the bottle necks are.  There are ways to control your memory footprint and other things if you know what you are doing, people do it all the time on mobile devices. 

 

Have you developed any native engines?  I have, many times over the past 30 years as a developer.

 

 

Could you point us to a PC game which is using the Unity engine and works well? PoE sucks, Wasteland 2 sucks. It seems there are no problems with Unreal, Quake, Crytek or Serious Engine. Do you really think developers can mess Unity so much it works like that? I'm not saying you're mistaken, but maybe there's something wrong with this engine? Maybe it's harder to make optimized game with it?

[Pawel.pc44]

 

Engines are not just about the end-user's experience, it is also for the actual development of a game.  They are expensive to create and maintain, which is why Unreal, Cry Engine, and Unity are popular:  They take away the time and expense needed to make an engine from scratch.  Saying things like "It runs fast on the user's computer", misses important aspects like: "How long does it take to customize?",  "Can it import asset X?",  "How much skill is needed to use it?", "Is the asset store fair and diverse?" and so on.

 

 

Exactly right, and with deadlines being what they are today, developers do not write as much custom engine code as they used to.  Hell, back when I started developing (8 bit computers) we packed a big punch into games by using assembly language, people do not use asm today, they rely on high level languages like C/C++/Java/C# and high level SDK's such as DirectX to access the hardware for them.

 

C and C++ are middle level languages, so comparing them to bloat like c# and java is a huge mistake. The 'fastest' game engines were made in C++. When comes to directx I wouldn't call it fast. It's just popular.

[StubbinMyToe]

 

Could you point us to a PC game which is using the Unity engine and works well? PoE sucks, Wasteland 2 sucks. It seems there are no problems with Unreal, Quake, Crytek or Serious Engine. Do you really think developers can mess Unity so much it works like that? I'm not saying you're mistaken, but maybe there's something wrong with this engine? Maybe it's harder to make optimized game with it?

 

 

PoE works fine, even maxed out on my gaming laptop, perhaps your computer is the issue?   Until you are able to see the code, you are just blowing smoke.  Unity has MANY successful games, it has for many years,  how about you post some reliable counter?

[StubbinMyToe]

 

 

C and C++ are middle level languages, so comparing them to bloat like c# and java is a huge mistake. The 'fastest' game engines were made in C++. When comes to directx I wouldn't call it fast. It's just popular.

 

 

Wrong, the fastest games were writtten in Assembly language and eventually C, then C++.  C# and Java are higher level languages, but they are perfectly capable of producing very fast games, it all depends on the skill and knowledge of the developer!   And regarding DirectX, it is as fast as possible to write to a graphics card without creating your own device drivers!  Do you know how DirectX functions under the hood?  I do!

[AstralWanderer]

Nice try but wrong, looking at frame rates does not tell you anything about the engine because you do not see the code in a profiler to see where the bottle necks are...

When games A and B do a similar thing but B has half the framerate while consuming double the memory and CPU/GPU processing power, then it is a simple judgement to say that B is less efficient than A. You don't need to run a profiler, debugger or other monitor to see the results.

 

With PoE's fixed perspective view, valid comparisons can be drawn with earlier games like Temple of Elemental Evil (min spec 700MHz CPU, 128MB RAM, 32MB GPU) or Beyond Divinity (800MHz PIII, 256MB RAM, 64MB GPU). PoE's min spec (2.5GHz Core i3, 4GB RAM, 512MB GPU) is completely out of line.

Have you developed any native engines? I have, many times over the past 30 years as a developer.

Just none you'd care to name publicly, eh?

For example, one bone head can write sloppy code that uses DirectX, if they have piss poor texture management, poor 3D object optimization, poor culling, etc, someone who is not a developer would claim DirectX is slow.

If it was one game only, you'd have a point but several other Unity-based games have been mentioned in this thread as showing poor performance also. That does fairly put the spotlight on Unity, since it either proves it to be a bottleneck, or so difficult to get good performance out of that nobody bothers.

 

This isn't to say that people should expect good performance of Pillars from the start - as I and others have said, bug-fixing should take priority over speed improvements. However performance tuning can have a huge impact and any experienced developer should know that.

[StubbinMyToe]

 

Nice try but wrong, looking at frame rates does not tell you anything about the engine because you do not see the code in a profiler to see where the bottle necks are...

When games A and B do a similar thing but B has half the framerate while consuming double the memory and CPU/GPU processing power, then it is a simple judgement to say that B is less efficient than A. You don't need to run a profiler, debugger or other monitor to see the results.

 

With PoE's fixed perspective view, valid comparisons can be drawn with earlier games like Temple of Elemental Evil (min spec 700MHz CPU, 128MB RAM, 32MB GPU) or Beyond Divinity (800MHz PIII, 256MB RAM, 64MB GPU). PoE's min spec (2.5GHz Core i3, 4GB RAM, 512MB GPU) is completely out of line.

Have you developed any native engines? I have, many times over the past 30 years as a developer.

Just none you'd care to name publicly, eh?

For example, one bone head can write sloppy code that uses DirectX, if they have piss poor texture management, poor 3D object optimization, poor culling, etc, someone who is not a developer would claim DirectX is slow.

If it was one game only, you'd have a point but several other Unity-based games have been mentioned in this thread as showing poor performance also. That does fairly put the spotlight on Unity, since it either proves it to be a bottleneck, or so difficult to get good performance out of that nobody bothers.

 

This isn't to say that people should expect good performance of Pillars from the start - as I and others have said, bug-fixing should take priority over speed improvements. However performance tuning can have a huge impact and any experienced developer should know that.

 

 

As I said before nobody in this thread can see the code, therefore you cannot comment on if the code was written efficiently or not.  For example, in some cases managing memory/garbage collection in Unity can be eased by using Object pooling.  Given game A & B both being visually identical, one has pooling the other doesn't, the one with pooling will perform better!  So no, you cannot use the task manger to profile a game.

 

One example of a game Engine I worked on was Nightmare Ned (3D) for Disney.  I also created various other games in the 80's, but I eventually moved away from games to make better money at Adobe.  I have also worked on device drivers for non-linear video editing hardware for Sanyo Electronics.  This is not really a discussion about my career though (I am retired now, been so since I was 50), it is a discussion where we are trying to determine what factual basis you have when claiming it is Unity causing the game to be slow (which it isn't on all machines).   You need to backup your arguments with real knowledge, not armchair development and speculation. 

 

If we had the code in front of us, we could see where any bottlenecks might be, but without it we have pure speculation.  I can use the Unreal SDK and write a ****ty poor performing game with it, that is easy to do, using it to the best of its capabilities requires knowledge of it and how it manages resources for example.  Unity is the same way,  one guy can write **** and another can create something amazing, the engine is not the problem here.

 

Also, in many of the performance posts I see people (not saying YOU) are using Intel graphic chips and expecting high performance! LOL... try lowering your settings, especially when running on  a machine that does NOT MEET THE MINIMUMS. 

[Underking]

There's something wrong with the game performance. I can't run most maps at 60 FPS, especially in Defiance Bay and underground areas like sewers and dungeons. These places runs between 30 and 45 FPS and in combat I get some 1s drops below 30 FPS. Changing resolution doesn't do anything: the framerate is the same at 720p, 1080p and 4K! Also, loading times are terrible: the first one takes 1 minute and when changing maps 15-20 seconds.

 

The temps are low and the CPU usage doesn't go above 35% (this is probably the issue here).

 

This is my computer:

 

AMD FX-8320 3,5ghz

8 GB DDR3 1600mhz

Nvidia GTX 760 2GB GDDR5

Windows 8.1 x64

[Justinian]

Yea it seems like the game is artificially limiting it's CPU/GPU performance in crowded areas and when spell effects go off.

[tet666]

The performance is absolutely terrible in crowded areas/combat especially on older Hardware there is no denying that if it is Unitys fault (probably, Unity 4 is notorious for it's poor performance) i don't know im not a dev, i just can comment on what i see and compare it to similiar games with other engines. I play other Unity Engine games too atm like Ori and the Blind Forest and Oddworld - New 'n' Tasty and those do run fine.

As mentionend above way older games like TOEE and Beyond Divinity which use the same 3d models on 2 d background art not only run way better they run even on a Toaster.

  I preordered the game cause the min specs where very low and i assumed the game would run fine on my aging Hardware (C2D 3,5 ghz,4gb ram HD5770) this is obviously not the case and they changed the min specs a short time before release to something way higher, tbh i feel a bit cheated.

Now i have to live with the fps issues or buy new hardware for a retro style crpg.

Edited April 7, 2015 by tet666

[Maquabra]

I have no issues with performance but my rig is by far more powerful than what most people report here. 

All the same, game and in general software optimization is a serious issue. It's really a shame that this game needs so much resources in comparison with games that have much more to show.