DOff UI - Roster- Kills Frame Rate?!?!?!

phantomeight

So I have an MSI Geforce 560 Ti Twin Frozer 2GB card.... I play with everything set to max and DX11 with excellent frame rate, but the doff UI brings be down to 7FPS....

1. Standing in SFA at the bar - 39 to 36 FPS <= Baseline
2. Open DOff Window with overview tab open - 39 to 36 FPS <= No change
3. Click Duty Officers tab and click sickbay (no one in there) 29 to 25 FPS <= ok whatever
4. Click Roster tab (381 peeps) 7.7 to 7.6 FPS <= WTF?!?!?!?!

Meanwhile, MSI Afterburner shows 11 percent GPU usage. If I close the doff window and run laps in the bar my GPU Usage jumps to 35 to 50 and the frame rate stabilizes at 33FPS.

So what gives Cryptic? Is there anything I can do to fix this? When I have the doff window open, everything else drops to 7.5FPS, simple animations of other players just standing look awful.

EDIT: Er... maybe this should be in the PC and technical section... not really sure, I think its UI/Game Engine related. The machine is a Quad Core Phenom II machine with 8GB of RAM.

warriorxsgr

I confirm I have the same

th3xr34p3r

The UI overall needs optimisation, its not till i recently upgraded to a i7-3930k from a i5-920 that fps has been fluid regarding that, any window with lists kills fps in sto.

futurepastnow

Same here. Been that way for a long time. Reducing the number of doffs visible in the roster (by setting the status filter to "recent," for example) brings the frame rate back up, so it seems it's rendering each and every doff card as its own little UI element.

darkjeff

Graphics card doesn't come into it, the bottleneck is CPU in this case. When we open the interfaces a bunch of scripts fire off in the background. I have a weaker GPU (GTX 460) and I get better fps than the OP.

rodentmaster

This wasn't a problem before Season 6. Before Season 6 I could open the full doff roster with no FPS drop, Now It's taking my rather high-end system down to 10 FPS. It's atrociously mis-managed programming code to go from "works perfectly" to "doesn't work, period" all in exchange for a few minor graphics changes.

Also, if it were just scripts kicking in, the scripts would finish and the FPS would resume. This is NOT the case. The FPS stays in the toilet until you close this screen. FURTHER, if you filter the doffs by checking "common" or "rare" or whatever the FPS instantly gets much better. It isn't a script issue on loading the menu/list/whatever. It's a massive FPS drain trying to render each item on the list. It shouldn't be. It's a freaking standard background with text on it.

Massively bad decisions on Cryptic's part to implement the code changes on the doff UI.

P.S. It also kicks in when searching user content for the daily foundry missions.

darkjeff

rodentmaster wrote: »

Also, if it were just scripts kicking in, the scripts would finish and the FPS would resume.

This was the explanation given before, about why any UI window will cause slowdowns - because each one causes scripts to run. My assumption is that it does not "finish", it keeps running so long as the window is open.

My graphics card is weaker than OP's, and I have less RAM. I have no issues, and as far as I can tell the only thing better on my rig is the CPU - I have an Intel Q9450. It would appear th3xr34p3r's experience supports this as well - it's not a graphics issue, it's the things firing in the background while UI windows are open.

rodentmaster

If it's CPU limited it's a gross mis-coding of the entire game system. It's killing FPS on high-end systems that can process a heckuva lot more than that.

I run an Intel i7 with 8 cores, 24 GB RAM, and a 2GB AMD 6970 video card. The game isn't bottlenecking my CPU. It surely isn't my video card. I have more than enough RAM.

It's faulty code somewhere. I don't know if it's running a recursive loop or what. I'll definitely have to check memory usage, CPU usage, and video RAM usage next time I load up STO. I'll compare both on "assignments" tab and "roster" tab.

th3xr34p3r

rodentmaster wrote: »

If it's CPU limited it's a gross mis-coding of the entire game system. It's killing FPS on high-end systems that can process a heckuva lot more than that.

I run an Intel i7 with 8 cores, 24 GB RAM, and a 2GB AMD 6970 video card. The game isn't bottlenecking my CPU. It surely isn't my video card. I have more than enough RAM.

It's faulty code somewhere. I don't know if it's running a recursive loop or what. I'll definitely have to check memory usage, CPU usage, and video RAM usage next time I load up STO. I'll compare both on "assignments" tab and "roster" tab.

Speaking of tests I just did one to check, with 213 doffs listed out in sector space game maxed out, sitting out in eta eridani just at the fed fleet base entrance and 3 other ships in view. (cept bloom ofc thats always at 100%).

FPS:

• Closed: 100
• Open: 23

CPU usage

• Closed: 20%
• Open: 10%

GPU usage

• Closed: 61%
• Open: 16%

Vram idles 642 MB either/or and Ram (32GB slotted) stays the same a 19%

So with that, something is definitely going on. my full system specs are listed in my sig.

rodentmaster

By that logic, it can't be overtasking the CPU. It's using LESS!

Definitely some coding problem. I really am suspecting an endless loop or recursive loop at this point. I mean, what else would act like that? Only thing is if it were endless or recursive i think it might increase CPU utilization and might not go away when you closed the screen. So that doesn't really fit perfectly either (as far as theories go).

th3xr34p3r

rodentmaster wrote: »

By that logic, it can't be overtasking the CPU. It's using LESS!

Definitely some coding problem. I really am suspecting an endless loop or recursive loop at this point. I mean, what else would act like that? Only thing is if it were endless or recursive i think it might increase CPU utilization and might not go away when you closed the screen. So that doesn't really fit perfectly either (as far as theories go).

My guess is might have to do with how the UI handle's the threads between the CPU and the engine, GPU wise that would simply be due to it having to render less when the window is open and in-focus.

rodentmaster

I checked mine out.

Overview tab: 77% GPU usage, 54% usage in core 1 (typically STO), used 2862 MB
Doffs with close to 300 doffs: 18% GPU, 18% core 1, used 2906 MB

Assume RAM stays the same. I toggled back and forth between tabs and noticed the massive drop in CPU and GPU utilization every time. It went up and down as soon as I went to or from that page.

Near as I can figure that means the game isn't sending anything to be computed. Some kind of internal code slow-down. Otherwise the CPU/GPU would just crunch through it. No input = no output, hence the low fps. I was getting about 12. Otherwise I'm pretty well capped at 60 (monitor max).

darkjeff

Huh. Then I wonder if it's a slowdown on their end, kind of like the Fleet Bank slowdown.

notapwefan

yep, same thing.
Seems like some parts of coding were outsourced to somewhere else

th3xr34p3r

I was right to check the CPU/GPU usage then since the same is happening on your machines aswell. Should help the UI Code team narrow it down, since as I said before it does need a performance update (granted a few things have been moved around/added/removed but its still essentially the same UI since beta).

somebob

Coming from CO, the answer is more or less simple:

The UI elements as a whole in CO/STO absolutely suck system resources out of PCs. It's a severe engine design fault.

Example: During our giant open world boss fights in CO (so 50-75 people in the same zone all right next to each other), FPS drops to the teens or less unless you do two things.

1) Disable all player names over everyone's head (normally on by default).

2) Disable all damage number floaters (normally on by default).

According to someone who ripped open the main hogg files, all UI text is forced anti-aliased and is transparent. In large numbers, this utterly kills FPS on any and all rigs.


Also in CO, anything that the system has to check on (say, with costume unlocks), apparently checks so every single frame. If you search for costume unlocks on the auction house, expect your FPS to drop into the teens. I'm guessing this applies to the DOFFs as well, as they're always being 'checked up on' in the background.


TLDR: The guys who designed the UI in the Cryptic engine did a terrible, terrible job. The above issues have been around in CO since Day 1.

rodentmaster

In S6 they hosed it. Before that it was fine. In S6 the following began:

For a MINOR change in the actual graphics (some of the backgrounds behind items, some color changes) the FPS tanks in both doff roster list AND the foundry missions list.

On top of this, the UI stopped reading preferences. It defaulted back to default settings. This means that among other things, names stopped displaying over other players' heads on the ground, mines, small ships, shuttles, etc, stopped getting outline reticles, names, and health bars. Looking in your HUD options there are all still checked properly, but the game refuses to read them properly or follow their settings. If you UN-check the properties and RECHECK them right afterwards, then apply your settings, it would follow them.

.... for a while. It would quite frequently snap back to a default setting again, making you go BACK into the stupid HUD setting and uncheck/recheck it all, over again. I've had to do that a couple dozen times since S6 launched.

In S5 there were none of these glitches and slow-downs. The few minor graphics changes they did in S6 screwed the entire interface over.


So it's not a problem that's been here since beta. It's a recent S6 garbage code problem.

mewi

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