Grimrock

shiny effects, etc .. have on high....very good performance (indoor) Dungeons..... 1920x1200
only bad performance....outside

carlo222 wrote:My system...
Laptop Win 7 32 bit
Intel Core (TM) Duo CPU T 6400 @ 2.00 GHz -2.00GHz
Ram 4.00
ATi Radeon HD 4650

Some FPS values would be nice too but i can tell beforehand that they can't be high.
The reason is simple: the HD 4650 is way below the minimum required GPU performance which is a HD 4850.

This is the report of an Intel HD 4000, a CPU build-in GPU that has about 15% more rendering power then your Radeon.

badhabit wrote:PC games are in general expected to scale with hardware; GPU perfomance and screen size. The LoG engine is overly limited with both aspects, which is especially surprising for many customers as: they expect a retro game, adressed at the retro audience, focussed on game mechanic and not a super-shiny AAA title focussed on graphics and visual effects, needing newest generation of GPUs.

Well people who live on expectations are in for very bad surprises which are preventable by reading.
The LoG2 requirements are phrased out pretty clear and during Beta we found them to be accurate.

badhabit wrote:Therefore I find it reasonable to expect that LoG2 has options which allow the game to run even with subpar hardware (mobile, some year olds one): deactiving shiny effects, reducing resolution etc. , like it is common for many PC games. Both options scales not enough (or are too restricted, resolution) with the LoG engine to produce enough frames.

Again you live on expectations by asking an Indie developer to add gfx options that not even some AAA titles provide.

If you want shiny effects and stuff deactivated in LoG2 select rendering mode "Low". Job done.

You know what Dr.Disaster? You really have a point. I mean...yes they stated the minimum requirements and when you are below it and have problems - well...they said what you need to get it up and running.

My Livingroom PC is powerful enough but even that system struggled in the beginning. I just don't see why.
It goes something like this:"My PC can display 2.6 million phong-shaded doughnuts + one bouncing flat shaded amiga ball + 3 gouraud-shaded x-wings in 60 frames a second but your excel pie-chart(also very nice looking) brings my computor to its limits?"

I enjoyed every minute of this game(and still do) but i still think the performance leaves something to be desired. But if they cannot fix it - it is ok, but they should try.

Dr.Disaster wrote:

badhabit wrote:Therefore I find it reasonable to expect that LoG2 has options which allow the game to run even with subpar hardware (mobile, some year olds one): deactiving shiny effects, reducing resolution etc. , like it is common for many PC games. Both options scales not enough (or are too restricted, resolution) with the LoG engine to produce enough frames.

Again you live on expectations by asking an Indie developer to add gfx options that not even some AAA titles provide.

If you want shiny effects and stuff deactivated in LoG2 select rendering mode "Low". Job done.

No, as I and other had shown, everything low and even reducing the resolution to unsupported small sizes is not providing enough fps gain, for instance in the especially demanding twigroot forest area. The dynamic provided by either the options as the influence by the resolution is just to small. I think the expectation for either a better scaling engine or at least the possibility to reduce the GFX quality or resolution to achieve a reasonable amount of frames everywhere is reasonable for a PC game.

That AH was transparent about expected requierements is nice & fine, but I can also understand people still buying this game, while having insufficient hardware with the idea, "OK. I know this approach, I will just reduce the quality & resolution significantly and can run it fine" like they did with many other PC games.

Maybe I'm now a little bit pissed, as this happens now for the second time... there was time to do something here in the two years since LOG1 where the same issues were reported time and time again... even as small indie. (Don't get me wrong, I love this game and bought it first day... but I expect better here, especially from former Demoscene guys)

badhabit wrote:

Dr.Disaster wrote: (Don't get me wrong, I love this game and bought it first day... but I expect better here, especially from former Demoscene guys)

But doing a demo and then a game are 2 different kind of shoes. I remember the group Farbrausch which did awesome demos(especially the 64k ones - fr-08: .the .product anyone?) and they also did games, but they really where bad and i don't know if this was because they did a license job for RTL or if something else was going on, maybe if they had a free hand, something like "kkrieger" would have turned out to be a great procedural generated shooter/engine.

But yeah going from a scene demo to a full fledged game is really a huge step, which almost human mastered perfectly. Iam looking forward to the interview on friday and hope that they will also say something about the performance/the engine and why they did the engine like they did.

Edit: Typo.

eispfogel wrote:You know what Dr.Disaster? You really have a point. I mean...yes they stated the minimum requirements and when you are below it and have problems - well...they said what you need to get it up and running.

My Livingroom PC is powerful enough but even that system struggled in the beginning. I just don't see why.
It goes something like this:"My PC can display 2.6 million phong-shaded doughnuts + one bouncing flat shaded amiga ball + 3 gouraud-shaded x-wings in 60 frames a second but your excel pie-chart(also very nice looking) brings my computor to its limits?"

I enjoyed every minute of this game(and still do) but i still think the performance leaves something to be desired. But if they cannot fix it - it is ok, but they should try.

I agree that there are still some spots in the game that could use attention regarding gfx performance. Right now LoG2 is already faster than by the time i joined the Beta. During Beta AH managed to swat some performance sinks like inside the catacombs where a few testers (including me) were really worried about one specific room that - while being more than 60% black - managed to bring everybody's GPUs to it's knees.

The main task in optimization is to pinpoint the performance sinks and look for a way to improve them. In the above room it was pretty obvious what caused it but out in the open it's very hard to track. My best bet would be water and water reflections.

Again you live on expectations by asking an Indie developer to add gfx options that not even some AAA titles provide.

I don't know what do you mean by that but i fully expect settings like Water Reflections on/off even by an Indie developer. I don't really understand that discussion about Indie developers should not bother with settings and i find it a little disturbing.
I want my games fully customizable, i paid for them and i have high hopes for next patches.

Today's requirements are tomorrows past news, this is happens from beta to release and so on, so what's the buzz about expectations? of course we expect something that runs better. I'm sorry if i'm offending anyone.

vlzvl wrote:Today's requirements are tomorrows past news, this is happens from beta to release and so on, so what's the buzz about expectations? of course we expect something that runs better.

My point was not about "we expect something that runs better".

My point is about people who see themselfs so über in tweeking software and system settings that they don't need to care about given hardware requirements. The reason why developers specify minimum hardware needed for their product is to grant a minimum of use- or playablility and people that ignore such information on purpose are IMO flat-out stupid.

Of course it is possible to run LoG2 on any PC that runs at least Windows XP and has a GPU with at least DirectX 9 and Shader 3.0 support and it is no problem at all to find these features in a 10+ year old PC with a single-core Intel Pentium and a GeForce 6600 GT (AGP). Yet nobody would expect such a system to perform a game like LoG2 any better then a pretty looking slideshow.

vlzvl wrote:

Again you live on expectations by asking an Indie developer to add gfx options that not even some AAA titles provide.

I don't know what do you mean by that but i fully expect settings like Water Reflections on/off even by an Indie developer. I don't really understand that discussion about Indie developers should not bother with settings and i find it a little disturbing.
I want my games fully customizable, i paid for them and i have high hopes for next patches.

Today's requirements are tomorrows past news, this is happens from beta to release and so on, so what's the buzz about expectations? of course we expect something that runs better. I'm sorry if i'm offending anyone.

These problems are older then the beta, they are going back to LoG1, two years ago. If one compares the GFX options from LoG1 to LoG2 so you see no change (progress?) in the options allowing the fine-tuning of performance. So, I support the notation that additional options like Water Reflections on/off should be included...while the expectation of a optimization of the engine which seems unreasonable CPU limited for low settings (while not fully utilizing all cores) sounds not unreasonable for me. Petri could here hand out his profiler and the community would be glad to help (Also, some comment here from the devs would be helpful & show that this issue is now taken seriously ... no response up to now, also nothing in the recent patch notes ...so, please send emails everyone the AH).

Infact, I tried to further analzye the problem and bought a new CPU AMD X2 240 -> AMD X 280, the fastest one by clock for an reasonable price as final upgrade CPU wise for my system, effective +800MHz, +~28%. I got an proportional speed-up per clock increase so Grimrock is CPU clock limited for low settings and GPU limited for high settings. First on is especially unfortunate, as multicore systems are standard and Grimrock is incapable of utilizing even two cores while starving CPU ressource wise.

640x400 all low settings, no frame cap, 1 CPU core 3.6GHz, Twigroot forest: not GPU bound, CPU bound and fully utilizing 1 core (+22% FPS vs 2.8GHz)


640x400 all low settings, no frame cap, 2 CPU cores 3.6GHz, Twigroot forest: not GPU bound, CPU bound and NOT fully utilizing 2 cores(!)(+25% FPS vs 2.8GHz)