Optimization Truth: It was NEVER my computer?

After the release of this game, reports came back from players that they were having issues with game performance. Lag, huge drops in frame rates, and other problems were voiced online in many forums.

Bioware went on the offensive. Stating that not only are a majority of players not experiencing any sort of issues with gameplay, those having issues have crappy "low end" computers. Essentially blaming them for the problems.

James Ohlen told Eurogamer:

Ouch.

I personally BOUGHT this computer to play this game. I made sure it was well above requirements and ready to play any game that came it's way. In spite of this, I had major lag issues on the fleet, and other places where multiple players fought or interacted.

Despite the fact that others were having the same issues, even professional reviewers who PRAISED the game, Bioware/EA stuck to the story.

That's in praise of the game itself. I know that this guy isn't using Windows 95.

The "it's you not them" sentiments were even echoed on the forums, with members stating that everything was essentially fine, and the problems were all on the part of those complaining.

The truth that most weren't aware of at the time, is that EA licensed the Hero Engine in spite of being told that it was not optimized for this game, and was essentially unfinished.

Bio/EA eventually started optimizing the engine that was perfect save for the "5% of the low-end gamers", and as stated officially by one of it's employees on these very forums.

This is a step in the right direction, I applaud the fact that it is taking place, but one that was needed many months ago.

The only MMO I've played since December of 2011 until August 2012, has been this one. I invested time, money, and even support into this game. Id left the others behind because they became stale, and as a KOTOR fan, I thought this was the MMO for me. The performance issues were such that playing the game was one of the most annoying MMO experiences I've had to date.

Now, after playing Guild Wars 2, a substantially cheaper game, the evidence of the problems being on the side of Bioware and not me is overwhelming.

Participating in World v World and having 30 or 40 people spamming abilities against each other caused ZERO noticeable dips in frame rates or obvious lag. In fact, I've had very few problems with performance at all. That's the one thing the game got right, outside of some of the more expected problems.

The lesson here for Bioware should be that if you have costumers complaining of performance issues, and you KNOW for a fact that the engine you have was not optimized for your game, don't point the finger at them. We're on YOUR side. Otherwise we wouldn't have been there in the first place.

Were there gamers playing on low end computers? I'm sure there were and are. I however doubt that they don't realize this fact and are shocked that thier out-of-date computers are slower. The complaints I've read on these forums were from people with higher end computers based on the stats of the computer itself that they posted.

I shouldn't need to buy a $5000 computer just to make this game work as intended.
I applaud the fact that optimization has been taking place, and hope it continues, but I hope a lesson was learned here in blaming those who support you and how so many walked away because of the snail paced action.

If a free-to-play and less expensive game like GW2 runs smoother than this one you want people to pay to fully experience, you've really got to step up your game.

- DH

That first quote is just priceless.
But on the other hand what would you expect them to say?

' We spend 200 million dollars developing the game and all you got was unfinished mmo from the year 2006 that features a crappy engine'

Before this post I bet Bioware was all "Meeeeeeh" about optimization... but after I bet they are all like "WE NEED OPTIMIZATION NAO!"

heh I'm still waiting for this supposed optimization...they keep claiming they are improving the engine and game but the only change I have seen is that now they only allow 1 raid per denova instance...that tells me they know their game isn't optimized to handle multiple groups/mediocre amounts of people in the same instance...yet they still haven't fixed it! We saw the problems on ilum and fleet at launch....they still exist if you goto voss during peak hours with people competing over NP. When is bioware going to actually optimize the engine and the game so we can stop experienced lag and delays in combat? I play multiple mmos and there is a noticeable difference between combat smoothness between say WOW and this game. Please bioware figure out and fix the combat delays/ghost GCD skill activations and the lag whenever a guild wants to go kill a world boss. I really want to continue playing this game.

Because yesterday's patch has decreased performance for a large number of players. It's a fine post...if you don't like it, why bother replying?

Because it is key to the post. If he has a PC that shouldn't run the game well then he is making a lot out of nothing. If his drivers are all out of date the same thing.

I was commenting as to WHY this has come up again. And...do you really think someone who shouldn't be able to run the game would still be playing it 9 months after launch?! This isn't some isolated issue, nor is it a graphics driver as it's happening on both NVIDIA and ATI cards.

If I remember rightly, this game is single-threaded, meaning all processing for this game will run through a single core on your processor. That is the bottle-neck for most people. It is also the reason why most people don't see a correlation between specs/age of their PC and their performance.

Due to single-threaded nature of the game, you will see the best performance if you have a CPU from the end of a previous generation. This is because by the end of a generation, the clock speed per core is quite high. When the next generation comes out with more cores, each core tends to have a lower clock speed.

Thats why people with CPU's with only 2 cores but a clock speed of 4 GHz are running the game better than people with 6 cores but a clock speed of only 2.5GHz.

To test this, run a CPU monitor whilst playing the game. My and my guildies have done this, and typically one core will reach 70-90% capacity whilst our other cores idle in the 5-15% range.

I love "Mr. Balls To The Wall" quotes. Priceless.

Performance is still shoddy in SWTOR.

On the funny side, Guild Wars 2 also suffers from terrible performance issues in open world PvP (sounds familiar ?).

So I posted:

"Please oh please, stop playing Bioware and don’t blame it on our rigs."

And I got an immidiate reponse from Arenanet saying:

"We are in no way blaming these performance issues on players’ systems which is exactly why we need to collect this information."

Looks like the Arenanet guys are learning from the mistakes of others.

Yeah hi, research more. My game was running terrible on my 5 year old rig.

Recently bought a new rig (i5 3.4 over clocked to 4.4ghz, 16 gig RAM, windows 7 and a GTX 660ti) game now runs fine everywhere solid 60 fps everywhere because I keep vsync on. So yeah I used to be of the opinion the engine is bad now I know it's just not very good with old hardware.