Test Track: Unecessary Background Rendering?

General Chat Developer Questions
1

I remember reading in the old Open Beta 1362 release that graphics rendering is briefly stopped to speed up Testing result processes.

Well, when we Test cars going around the Track in the Test Track, we’re just staring at 2D images moving about. The background render of the current vehicle continues to be pointlessly rendered during this time.

Now, because most GPUs that support DX9 (and thus, Shader Model 2.0) are fast enough to render Automation at 60 fps all the time anyway, nobody is bothered by this.

However, there are some Shader Model 2.0 compliant GPUs that are complete dogs that struggle to render Automation above 10 fps average when rendering a full car, like my Toast of all Toasts Intel GMA 4500MHD. There are even much slower than this, going all the way back to the grand old GMA 900 circa 2004. Before you ask me what resolution i’m running Automation at, I’ll answer with as low as possible without causing errors and crashes and still looks okay, which happens to be 1024x600.

Thus, when running the Test Track sim, the sim is actually not running at 100% speed and annoying audio stuttering is present. The only way I can mitigate this is by stripping the vehicle down as far as I can and zooming right in for culling to kick in so I can render the least amount of the car as possible to try and squeeze my frametimes as low as they can go. The result is the sim is almost full speed and Audio doesn’t stutter as much.

Now, I can understand the most likely response I’m going to get from this is: JUST UPGRADE YOU BUFFOON, and I’ll take that for an answer just fine, because I have a faster Laptop available whose HDD decided it wanted to quit a few months ago. I just want to start a meaningful discussion on Software optimization.

2

Automation in its current state is very poorly optimized. The calculations were sped up a lot by going multithreaded, but that of course doesn’t impact overall performance much if someone is running it on a potato or when the graphics card is struggling to render the scene at obscene framerates.

As you probably know we are currently working on switching our out old home-brew engine to replace it with the Unreal Engine 4. This will mean a few things:

  • It is not feasible for us to spend any significant amount of time on optimizing the current game engine.
  • Once running on UE4 the game will be much better adaptable to varying degrees of system performance.
  • The UE4 version will run faster at higher fidelity.

The game will then become DX11 based, getting rid of many of the inefficiencies of DX9, too.
The timeframe for us switching over to the UE4 version is ~6 months, i.e. two big updates down the road.

Cheers!

2 Likes
3

Thanks for the thoughtful reply Killrob, but now that you mention the UE4 port is DX11 based, does that mean that GPUs that are not Shader Model 5.0 compliant will be unable to run the new, shiny UE4 engine Automation?

4

Yes, that means you will need a graphics card that supports DX10 or higher to run Automation. UE4 is DX10 compatible. This also means you need Windows Vista or newer.

1 Like
5

Okay perfect, my GMA 4500MHD actually supports DX10 (Shader model 4.0).

Thanks Killrob!

6

Well, fuck.

7

woop dx12 all the way