EVE General Discussion

I tweeted this exact message at #tweetfleet yesterday, but I'm reposting here in hopes that someone from CCP can comment.




Alright I need your help. During yesterday's 2000+ man brawl in 0P9Z-I I encountered 10% TiDi which was kinda hilarious, but I still encountered client lag because of the massive amounts of objects onscreen. When FCing you almost ALWAYS have two or more clients open and I was no exception. bit.ly/z5AN9C My question is... What the hell HW specs do Ito run JUST ONE CLIENT without experiencing lag, both brackets off and brackets on? I currently have an Intel i7-2600k, 8GB ram, an ATI Radeon 5670 w/1GB. I -need- to have one client with brackets on -all the time- or my spatial awareness is ****.

SO... Someone, please, help me figure out what the **** I need to not experience client lag , so you know, rotate my camera around the battlefield without it going 3fps? I can't do any better than an i7-2600k processor at the moment, and I am willing to upgrade my video card but not if it doesn't make a difference.

Eve online is the ONLY GAME I HAVE that requires better "something" than I currently have.

There was a huge FPS drop as the fight progressed. My FPS was fine at the beginning with ~1600 dudes in system and 6 or 7 different fleets on grid and fighting. All effects off, everything turned to lowest in graphics settings, brackets on for ships only.

Then after a few hours of real time (~20 minutes of tidi, local was down to around 1300 I guess) my FPS dropped to 4-7 and stayed there. Enabling all brackets or disabling them didn't have any noticeable effect. When fleets started warping out my FPS started going up as well. I was ~250 km of the fight most of the time, zoomed out. Zooming in didn't have any effect on FPS either.

I was in your fleet. My 2 year old pooter is able to run max graphics but by habbit I turn off drone modals and remove brakets in large fights. Try zooming out a bit too

it wasn't exactly opsec.


Also FREE NOFARTHER

I'll bet EVE is the only online game you have where you get 2,000 others in the same area shooting at each other. I also bet you don't try and run 2 clients with 2,000 others in the same area shooting at each other. That's just 2000 others - not drones, missiles, etc. - in 2 clients at the same time.

I'm not trying to poke fun at your situation but griping about FPS running 2 clients, in battles with 2000 people -AND- all the other "junk" such battles have floating in space -- then comparing that to any other MMO I know of...

I might understand why some CCP folks don't reply - CCP's management probably takes a dim view on smart-assed responses. My first reaction wasn't all that polite and I didn't work on any of this stuff like they did.

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That out of the way...

I doubt your CPU is the bottleneck. GPU renders the graphics to show. Some of that can come from your hard-disk but mostly GPU.

Gurus can tell you a bit about some of this but the basics are fairly simple.

Games "load" info - random stuff to and from files and not just when you are loading into different areas. Background process on your machine can cause some stuttering - very noticeable if something like a virus scan is going and you're watching youtube videos or the like but this also becomes more noticeable when you are in a big battle in a game. As such, the ancient rule of optimized IO is generally where to look - video card FIRST - disk second - CPU generally 3rd on the list. Most CPU's spend a hell of a lot of time snoozing vs other components so it's not too common for that to be a major throttling point these days.

Video cards are where your biggest FPS gains come from. Understand that the bigger your monitor, or more monitors, the more work a GPU must do so bigger isn't always better with respect to how quickly things will be drawn. It's just "cool" to talk about triple displays but if you try that with your method of operating - expect to spend a mint on video cards to push the rates.

As for costs - for roughly 450ish you can drop a decent twin SLI or Crossfire setup into your machine. Keeping it to a "reasonably sized" monitor, you can pull very nice, through exceptional performance. If it's single monitor, you could step up to a 7970 class single-card solution. That's the new card that came out and it performs on par with many dual card solutions - for a lot less power consumption, heat, etc... They are costly (about $550 on up range) but work well as a single card solution.

That would be the first area I'd look at for improved FPS.

If that isn't pulling enough performance, then look at an SSD and the SSD I'd look towards is the new Intel 520 series - 120gb or 240gb model but this would be AFTER I checked out just the video card solution.

It's a high-reliability SSD with good performance. It shines decently with respect to random IO performance and when very "dirty" with data. It also packs a 5 year warranty which isn't too common for SSD's and I tend to like support - intel is pretty decent at that.

Anyhow - that's a bit of suggestion if you need to load up heavy for graphics. Just try not to buy into all the talk you hear about "triple" and "5 monitor" configs. It may be nice to see HUGE amounts of space but the rending of that... "with 2000 ships!!!" - don't expect good performance and performance sounds like what you're after.

Relevant: http://community.eveonline.com/en/crucible/features



About time if you ask me.

No expert though I've played with various things to optimize multiple clients on an old rig, my advice would be

Turn down your res as much as your comfortable with - rendering less pixels is a good thing

Run your 2 clients in full screen mode and 'windows key' between them - my old rig could run 4 clients fullscreen but struggled with 2 windowed

Hope this helps some

You have more than enough stuff to run several clients on top.

The problem you have, as me by the way and many others, is the internets my space friend.

Yes we all pay a dam service that is supposed to give you a certan number of fixed advantages/services but in fact you just don't.
Unless you have cable or live in US, where by the way I saw the best internet ever (not the providers but it's another thread) seems that everywhere else in the planet is just populated by scaming internet providers that have no clue what they're doing and who cares provided $$$$$$/€€€€€€€ rush in.

So, the best you can do is try to get cable internet or suffer (yes in europe cable is not a stardart and US is not the only place on earth)

Which is why I would really welcome an option to turn all in-game models off (maybe except for supercaps and structures), and just keep the brackets. It must surely be much easier to just render a colored square sprite than to do a ship model - even at the lowest LOD.

FFS, Why would you use one computer for that?

I have 3, and my alts run on a 46 inch monitor to my right, much better for intel work...