Have the developers acknowledged the FPS issues?

[The Judge1]

I am starting to wonder if the code is not optimized to use the GPU to its maximum potential. I noticed that while my CPU usage was 85% the GPU was only around 45%. This is on a older GTX 760. (new card will be ordered soon)

How is the game on the 1080?

 

[Big_Boy1]

I am starting to wonder if the code is not optimized to use the GPU to its maximum potential. I noticed that while my CPU usage was 85% the GPU was only around 45%. This is on a older GTX 760. (new card will be ordered soon)

How is the game on the 1080?

As soon mine is deliverd i will tell it . Already 1,5month in pre-order ... god damn

 

[Curlyriff]

To everyone saying that its not a bug, I understand. But they have to place a limit on the CPU usage at some level. If they don't, then no matter what CPU you have the game will begin to slow down at some point.

My Exon running 16 threads should not be used at 85%. This is a game, not a video editor, or some crazy CPU benchmark. And if they don't change it, good luck to anyone on the recommended i5. With that processor and a large detailed park, the game will be unplayable.

I am all for the game having great AI and to use the CPU, but as limit has to be set at some point. Maybe I need to upgrade to a quantum computer to build a full size park?

-1 to this comment [cry][shocked]

Why should it not run at 85%. This is a brilliant step forward to maximise the ability your CPU is currently not using? Your logic to all this seems completely backwards to what everyone in the gaming world is asking for. We expect 100% out the GPU but only 10% out the CPU? Why would you do that to yourself.

It will only use as much as is possible to give the best experience.

I have an i7 4790k and it also uses 75-85% but on my friends i3 it uses the same 75-85% so it is dynamically adjusting to what is available as it should just like having a weaker or stronger GPU.

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Further to you next comment. I have checked and currently yes my 980 is using about 60% most the time. This does increase at times but only at points. As the code is pushed and more is added to the game and things are optimised I would expect the GPU to be pushed to 100% and the CPU to still be using 85% to get the maximum performance it can from my system.

 

[xyphic]

I am starting to wonder if the code is not optimized to use the GPU to its maximum potential. I noticed that while my CPU usage was 85% the GPU was only around 45%. This is on a older GTX 760. (new card will be ordered soon)

How is the game on the 1080?

If your GPU isn't being used 100% then there's clearly more optimisation to be done. The ideal scenario for any game developer is (at least naively) to have the GPU maxed out at all times unless vsync is on. It's unclear as to whether the high CPU load is responsible for low GPU usage because the intelligent scaling algorithms mask it.

I'm sure that Frontier have plenty of profiling tools and will know pretty well what's what regarding optimisation. Expect to see improvements all over as we progress through Alpha and Beta.

 

[gregorburns]

The ideal scenario for any game developer is (at least naively) to have the GPU maxed out at all times unless vsync is on.

So why not the CPU then? Its not something we're used to seeing in games but why is it acceptable to have GPU maxed out but not the CPU?

 

[Omega1]

So why not the CPU then? Its not something we're used to seeing in games but why is it acceptable to have GPU maxed out but not the CPU?

Because the GPU is "ment" to do the work here. The CPU is a lot less powerful when it comes to computing lots of smaller calculations (which games do). So if a games uses 100% CPU and 20% GPU then the game is very badly optimized and would perform a lot better if the game was made to rely more on the GPU

 

[Curlyriff]

Because the GPU is "ment" to do the work here. The CPU is a lot less powerful when it comes to computing lots of smaller calculations (which games do). So if a games uses 100% CPU and 20% GPU then the game is very badly optimized and would perform a lot better if the game was made to rely more on the GPU

You are right but if they are pushing the GPU 100% and utilising the CPU to it's maximum as well then that would be optimum. For the light weight compute information the CPU is an ideal place so that the GPU can concentrate on rendering. I feel once we have water in the game that GPU utilisation will increase as this is pretty much guaranteed to be running form there and once more background process with AI and management are added this will change dramatically also.

 

[Bergenia Tanoak]

Because the GPU is "ment" to do the work here. The CPU is a lot less powerful when it comes to computing lots of smaller calculations (which games do). So if a games uses 100% CPU and 20% GPU then the game is very badly optimized and would perform a lot better if the game was made to rely more on the GPU

Planet Coaster is a different type of game than the normal First Person Shooter, or Puzzle game. There will be more CPU usage because Planet Coaster is simulating thousands of guests, riding 25+ rides, walking on paths, buying things from shops, and many more aspects. All these that I just listed aren't in a normal game, and these aspects aren't something that is normally handled by the GPU. Displaying people and rides are done on the GPU, but calculating where the thousand people need to be and how they feel and move and interact with the rides are all done by the CPU.

GPUs are getting more general purpose, but the ability of them to be general purpose varies widely, and if Frontier programmed the game to run all the simulations (people, rides, money) off the GPU, people would be even more upset because likely the visual prettiness of the game would have to be reduced because half the GPU is calculating simulations (for instance). In reality the programming language support is all over the map for General Purpose GPU programming, so Frontier would have to have an even higher minimum hardware requirements, so they could target a smaller subset of graphics cards resulting in them being able to complete the game in a reasonable time and budget. Going even further they'd have to limit themselves to routines that are supported across all the graphics cards in that subset. Likely the language library that would be used is OpenCL 1.2. No using Cuda because that is only Nvidia. Nvidia is behind on their support of Open CL, only supporting version 1.2. Intel and AMD support one release further at OpenCL 2.0. The CPU still has to coordinate the GPU, so there will always be some useage there. There is even further a knowledge roadblock because General Purpose GPU programming is an emerging field, so there are less people that can do this special purpose programming compared to the number that can write code for the CPU.

 

[AndyC1]

We already run many tasks in DirectX 11 Compute Shaders - and as we optimise further we will no doubt push even more work onto the GPU. However, some tasks simply aren't well suited to run on the GPU. Also it's important to remember that this kind of simulation game is particularly taxing on the CPU. Not even just simulating the peeps, or animating all the rides - the piece-by-piece nature of construction makes it difficult to use many of the normal optimisation techniques that we would have at our fingertips if authoring a more traditional game. I wouldn't expect the CPU usage to decrease - we'll always want to be using all the CPU we can and scale based on what you have available, but as we optimise both the CPU and GPU side of the game I'd expect framerates to increase along with GPU utilisation figures.

Cheers

Andy

 

[Bergenia Tanoak]

Thank you for replying Andy.[yesnod] The Frontier development team has produced a wonderful product already, and I'm sure the game will continue to get better in the next alpha, beta and final releases.[up]

Also thanks for the insight into a little of the programming bits. I have a Computer Science degree, and currently pursuing high performance computing applications for GPUs. I really admire that this game can push current computer systems to the max while giving creative individuals tons of freedom.

Best regards.

 

[Weegee]

I am starting to wonder if the code is not optimized to use the GPU to its maximum potential. I noticed that while my CPU usage was 85% the GPU was only around 45%. This is on a older GTX 760. (new card will be ordered soon)

How is the game on the 1080?

very nice [up]

 

[Omega1]

Could you explain the reason why the team went with DX11 when you could use a more future friendly API like Vulkan (also for the multiplatform support) or DX12?

 

[AndyC1]

Yeah sure - our engine supports DirectX 11 under Windows as this is a good compromise between efficiency and platform choice. We couldn't use Vulkan - at the time we started the project it was still a pipe dream, it's only in the past month or so have drivers come out actually supporting it. DirectX 12 was considered, but we felt that restricting the game to Windows 10 only wasn't a good idea at this stage (although API and driver support was stable enough). Vulkan's multi-platform support isn't really a major pull - had it gained OSX adoption rather than Metal then it might have been more interesting to us.

We still feel we've got plenty of performance improvements to make with the functionality offered by DirectX 11.

Cheers

Andy

 

[Omega1]

Alright that makes a lot of sense. But there is also OpenGL left which is in a very late stage now so it should be stable. Did you guys consider this too?
Also is it possible to add other API's later on? This way we can have some hope for a potential Linux and/or Mac port in the future.

Thanks for your elaboration Andy!

 

[AndyC1]

We're not considering OpenGL for Planet Coaster as it lacks compute shader support (well, things like OpenCL are supported, but the interchange cost between running OpenGL shaders and OpenCL shaders is prohibitively expensive).

While our focus right now is DirectX 11 / Windows, our Cobra Engine does support other platforms, and porting to different APIs in the future is certainly an option.

Cheers

Andy

 

[Nolfy]

For all alpha's i played this is definitely one of the better optimized games in this stage of development.

My only concern is that the graphics will be downgraded at some point. The game looks really great now so i hope the team find ways to optimize. Hopefully future things like dark ride techniques can also mean a lot to cut off objects from the inside of buildings when the camera isn't inside of it and things like that.
Maybe a way to lock down a building which renders it as one piece instead of several hundred pieces like i do with music tracks (freeze/unfreeze a track to save memory and cpu).
Of course when we get more pieces we don't need to use 200 signs for a roof [big grin].

 

[Omega1]

Hmm it all seems more complicated than I originally thought. Thank you for explaining the things

I hope Linux will get a version one day

 

[xyphic]

So why not the CPU then? Its not something we're used to seeing in games but why is it acceptable to have GPU maxed out but not the CPU?

Most games don't have a lot of computation to do, and often a large part of the CPU load is down to draw calls into the graphics drivers or audio APIs. So developers would often try to keep CPU load low to avoid bottlenecks that lead to frame rate drops.

There are a few games like Planet Coaster that *are* computationally expensive, and I really don't envy the developers. They have to balance the CPU requirements for park and guest simulation, and for the graphics and audio. And they've really not made life easy for themselves by creating systems that allow the user to create arbitrarily large structures (and thus arbitrary numbers of polygons), and thousands of guests all of which are potentially unique and all of which are governed by an underlying simulation, and all of which might potentially have to be drawn to the screen at one time. That they're farming work off into compute shaders (i.e. letting the GPU do some of the computation work) shows how advanced this engine is. [As a software engineer, these are the sort of problem I'd love to be able to tackle. Unfortunately taking the sideways step into game development at this point would require an effective step down, so not really doable.]

 

[hightechartist]

I get that the game tries to "make the most" out of whatever CPU it is working on, but it looks to me (judging from watching various LPers whose systems really struggle with it despite being high end) that sometimes it thinks a CPU can handle more than it can and it bogs down the whole game.

I really hope in the future that there is an option in setting to tell the game to treat the CPU like it is less powerful than it thinks it is, as an option to improve performance.

 

[Curlyriff]

I get that the game tries to "make the most" out of whatever CPU it is working on, but it looks to me (judging from watching various LPers whose systems really struggle with it despite being high end) that sometimes it thinks a CPU can handle more than it can and it bogs down the whole game.

I really hope in the future that there is an option in setting to tell the game to treat the CPU like it is less powerful than it thinks it is, as an option to improve performance.

I believe it has a lot more to do with what is optimised and what the Devs are still working on to get the pipeline in DX11 to run from the GPU at this time. It may well be that at the moment engine pipelines are mapping through the CPU rather than GPU as they are working on optimising.

I certainly don't believe there will be an in game setting to adjust what goes on with your CPU because otherwise you will just slow the game down further which won't help anything.

That is really what game settings are for. Don't forget that Frontier are pushing the game as far as it will go so to expect 60fps at 4k is asking a heck of a lot out of current cards when the game doesn't officially release till end of year.

I am getting a steady 25-30fps with game maxed at 4K with one 980 so I am not expecting more in terms of FPS and I have no hitching issue in honesty.

Also remember at the moment people are using thousands of pieces to create something that might only take hundreds later once more parts/themes are released so even on that front it will help significantly as the game won't be rendering 10x the pieces to get the same building complete.