Engineers Suggestion if possible : cashing rendered graphics

[etien]

Hello, first to state that i Really enjoy the new missions

I have done enough IT in my life to know that nothing is easy but i was wondering if the engine could store in a cash the graphical rendition of the last 10 planetory system map rendered as well as the last 100 faces of the quest giver and/or engineer computer. This would make doing quest runs back and forth from a mother home system more fluid and enjoyable.

Etienne

 

[who?]

They certainly could do something! Surely they could at least just bring up the System Map with wireframes straight away, and let the planetary textures/materials load when they're ready. If all you want to do is plot a route to a certain planet, you can do it straight away.

 

[Thalion Solarstorm]

Planetairy Maps are computed in Passes out of pre-computed texture maps ( Which get generated upon game startup / Shader Init ). It is already caching this Data. However, since the Textures required in differend Level of Details take HUGE Amount of Memory they are calculated on the fly using the pre-computed maps for Hills, craters and some Perlin-like functions all in overlay. Precaching would not work in this case and actually make things slower coming from Harddrive to Memory -> Bus -> GPU -> Drawcalls and also would allow us to cheat.

The fluid experience i get with an AMD card which has Async Compute - using Nvidia currently on my Mainrig ( which ill use as my background-compute card again once my new AMD card arrives ) thx to context switching needed by the nvidia Architecture leads to stuttering during Face / Surface Texture Generation. Its a hardware Design thing. With the AMD Card this simply went into the Background and the FPS drop was just like 1 or 2 FPS - sadly tho i had to lend mine to a friend whichs card died. I am doing programming and 3d Graphics hence i have two cards an AMD and an NV in my System usually ( as one Software i cant replace just runs on CUDA and CPU sadly and also to test on other Architecture / drivers).

Anyway, For the NPC Faces this would somehow work as their fairly small textures and also could be batched/clipped into a single texture - since they change with reputation towards you. But i bet FD is already improving on that - sicne this is only the first Iteration of the Character generator implementation in Background.

I totally agree on the System Map tho! This also could be implemented kind of half-transparent like the Bulletinboard in stations instead going for a entirely new Screen everytime.

Cheers!

 

[etien]

Thanks for this detailled answer. Why not store on disk? This surely Still be faster; especially with static drive?

 

[Thalion Solarstorm]

a Single Planet Texture Data with all LoD Levels takes about 180 GB Space. And that is a small one. Too much Data.
And the Lag caused by streaming even big Textures is bigger than generating it on the fly. Even caching it in System Memory is not a Solution anymore nowadays as with alot of different Configurations neitehr System Memory nor the PCI-E Bus have sufficient bandwith to transfer all that data all the time back and forth without the GPU getting seriously slow and under-fed waiting for data. Since while data transfers happen and not every card and Architecture out there supports Asynchronous DMA data streaming in Background or UMA Memory Areas its not an Option. On Systems without that support the Graphics would freeze until the Textures are finally in GPU Memory and hence they come from alot slower source....

Caching common parts in Mainmemory would work but probaly would lead to drastically increased Memory Requirements of the Game ( Star Citizen min 16 GB anyone ? ).

UMA is actually one of the keybenefits of todays consoles, which can stream Textures in background without much impact on graphics performance. Actually this is thanks to AMD's GCN Architecture inside them - ps4 and Xbox heavly rely on thoose nowadays with all the big Openworld titles.

Hope this makes things a bit clearer

Cheers!

 

[Backelaer]

Very informative post, but isn't the op talking about the system map (not the system and planet textures themselves) and npc faces which make the mission screen load slowly? Caching those wouldn't be as difficult would it?

 

[Thalion Solarstorm]

Aye, that could be partially cached or shown in a simpler view. Currently the game even generates Mini_LoDs per planet type in System map.

Id actually prefer a Bulletin Board / Station like half Transparent screen witha simplified System view that loads instantly to the pretty Graphics rightnow myself.

Cheers!