Quote:
Originally Posted by Lost Ranger
Its been said before but its worth mentioning again... 20 FPS is *not* good in a MMO unless its in a raid situation. If we can expect 20 FPS just grouping/solo out in the world then I think ill be saving my money for a console game or something heh.

I will NOT pay for another game that gives me medicore performance at best when I am sporting a pretty high end system. When I got the gforce 7900 card I was so excited, because it allowed me to play Oblivion fully maxed out. I log into EQ2 and crank everything to full.. as /gasp everything ran super smooth!! I was thrilled! I pull a harpy in Pillar of Flames and got to enjoy a fucking slide show. This kind of performance is un-fucking-acceptable by any games standards. Im sorry but Oblivion > EQ2 when it comes to enviroments and I can have it cranked out and have a dozen mobs beating on my ass and it never skips a beat. Same went for WoW when I still played it.. never had any video lag issues unless the server was crapping out.. which on blackhand happened alot but still

Im looking forward to Vanguard simply because I love MMOs and I am always looking for the next best thing. I can promise you though that if what awaits me in Vanguard is 20FPS all day long... You wont be taking a single cent from me.


Well, Vanguard is faster than Oblivion, and the latter is a single player game, not truly seamless, and much smaller and less taxing that Vanguard. A fantastic game, none the less, but the engine no where near as sophisticated as Vanguard's.

I had a great time with it, and, which reminds me of the 2 spots in Conan they were showing at E3, it's great when you have similar ideas as we do, but have a single player game with a much smaller and more linear world/game. You get to spend more time detailing out specific areas. That said, Telon is becoming more and more distinct, getting additional passes of hand crafted content (which has always been hand crafted) as we have time and where it's needed based on beta feedback.

Anyway, 15+ FPS is generally ok for an MMOG when traveling, shopping, chatting, etc. When you get into combat, it needs to be higher, especially with a more involved combat like we have. In raids, you also need fast combat, but the paradox is always that raids have more players and players take up a lot of FPS, so what do you do? Well, you make it either done automatically by the engine or settable by the player (up to the player) and you start LODing stuff early. Whereas LOD (level of detail) is normally used to draw a less complex art asset further away, if you have a situation in an MMOG where you suddenly have too much to draw (something that can happen in an MMOG -- raid, wedding, mass get together, etc.) you start using LODs earlier. You draw less particles, or even none if necessary. You start drawing the farther out art assets of static meshes instead of the closer ones. With characters, which usually use a dynamic LOD system, you start drawing characters up close how they would normally look farther away.

What this does is it keeps frame rate up, keeping the game playable. The downside is, though, is that visually the game suffers when a bunch of people pop onto the screen (which is relatively rare outside of people who raid a lot).

The other options are to Instance everything and don't allow very many people in, or make super low polygon characters (which can still lead to the problem, just delaying it), or to teleport storm people out of an area if too many people are around (I think AC 1 did this), or to have an MMOG that is unplayable at times. To us, none of the above are acceptable.

We can never control how many people will pop up on a screen at one time. And we also can never control how powerful people's machines are on average, individually, or in any other way, be it at launch or 2 years after launch. So while hopefully as machines grow more powerful, this system of ours will have to be used to a lesser and lesser degree, it needs to stay put for quite some time.

In EQ we started letting people turn a lot of things off, but I'd like to do a better job about it, let you do adjust more things, and go about it with a better plan. I think we'll get better performance as well as a better looking game.

Also, some people care more about FPS than Visuals, some the exact opposite, and most in-between somewhere. Having options makes the game work for everybody. I remember some people in EQ always having every option off. Heck, I remember people playing early Team Fortress to get 100fps and never ever upgrading to the newer games because they felt that their twitch abilities were so acute that they needed every FPS they could get (even if it far exceeded what the human eye can actually notice).

Movies run at about 24fps. A good action console game on the PC will run at 30 or 60. On the console, 60 is the standard. But with MMOGs, it really varies depending on the situation. Overall, though, since they are not twitch games, they are not as reliant upon FPS as some other twitch games.

On a side note, Oblivion dips into the low 20s, even lower, in some outdoor areas, even with pretty high end machines.

Here's some data:

Oblivion Performance 1280x1024x32

Card Min FPS Max FPS
GeForce 7900 GTX 37 69
GeForce 7900 GT 26 55
GeForce 7800 GTX 256MB 27 55
GeForce 7800 GT 22 44
GeForce 6800 GT 13 29
Radeon X1900 XTX 42 68
Radeon X1900 XT 39 66
Radeon X1800 XT 512MB 37 58
All-In-Wonder X1900 29 47

You can just google on the game and FPS and benchmarks.

In the more graphically intensive areas, you see a lot of posts and reports like:

Oblivion:
1024x768: 6800gs = 16 fps; x1600xt = 17 fps.
1280x1024: 6800gs = 12 fps; x1600xt = 12 fps.

CPU and Graphics Chip fps
Intel 3.2 GHz, 6800 GT AGP 7
Intel 3.2 GHz Dual Core, 7800 GT 15
Intel 3.2 GHz Dual Core, X1900 XTX 28


Oblivion Performance - 1280x1024 (Min-Avg FPS)
Skingrad Oblivion Gate Combat
7600GST 22-53 17-20 16-23
6800GT 25-54 15-17 18-23
6800GT (SLI) 27-56 19-22 20-28

"I run Oblivion at maxed out settings and texture mods, HDR 2xAAA 2xHQAF. I've got an AMD Opty at 2.7ghz, 1gig of ram and an X1800XT 512. The game runs at 60+fps indoors, 40fps in cities and it dies in the wilderness at 25fps."

"The first test is our Oblivion Gate benchmark, which just so happens to be the most stressful out of all three. In this test we've spotted an Oblivion gate in The Great Forest and walk towards it as scamps attempt to attack our character. The benchmark takes place in a heavily wooded area with lots of grass; combined with the oblivion gate itself, even the fastest GPUs will have trouble breaking 30 fps here.

If a video card can maintain a minimum of 20 fps in our most strenuous test (the Oblivion Gate benchmark) then it will do you very well, otherwise you may want to start turning down some of the visual quality options.

What really puts things into perspective though is the performance of the GeForce 7800 GTX, a GPU that was at one point a $500 king of the hill now falls in the lower half of the graph. Unable to average more than 20 fps in this test, the settings we're running at here are too much for the GPU. Given that we haven't turned up every feature and are running at a relatively mainstream 1280 x 1024 resolution, this chart alone gives you good indication of exactly how stressful Oblivion actually is.

GeForce 6 owners should no longer consider their GPUs as high end, because Oblivion certainly doesn't. Even a pair of GeForce 6800 GSes can't break 15 fps in this test and with a minimum frame rate of 10 fps, they make the game far from playable at these settings. No, believe it or not, but the GeForce 6800 GS performs like a mid-range card at best under Oblivion."

Here are some visual examples, and while the opinions/reviews below come from various people with various machines, they were all modern machines uses the lastest couple of generations of graphics cards. These game from a

AMD Athlon 64 3500+
1GB PC3200 DDR-RAM
Radeon X1800 XT 512MB





Whereas these Vanguard images come from a similar machine, but then not exactly the same and nor are the images the same. But I adjusted the settings in Vanguard to make the game look as good as I could while choosing several views of the same area that a. somewhat look like the Oblivion Shots and b. are actually more complex, with more going on, a long clipping plane, etc. and you can see that Vanguard is averaging about 10fps higher (although there aren't characters in either of the scenes). Again, this isn't exact science or empircal evidence -- do the research yourself please -- but the bottom line is is that you can play an MMOG or an RPG (e.g. not a twitch game, or least most people can, if you can maintain 15-20fps). More fps is always good, and you definitely need to have options that allow you to maintain framerate in an MMOG given raids, etc. But all the way back to EQ 1, you could get huge raids going and the engine didn't have the speed of an FPS.













The opposite is actually true: because you don't need 30 or 60fps in an MMOG, you can create an much more 'do everything' engine than you can if you are making an FPS. Tim Sweeney has said this to Ryan Elam, that he is a bit jealous that we can do so many things -- make the 'everything engine' -- because we're not focused on twitch PvP but rather creating an online virtual world.

Lastly, since WoW is low in terms of system specs anyway, it likely doesn't have to do much to support raiding, even though they control Instancing. That doesn't change, however, that people were raiding with massive groups in EQ 1 years and years before WoW and having a blast. With our varying raid size and ideas on how to curb zerging, however, we shouldn't run into nearly the problems EQ 1 did.
<div class="smallfont"> Last edited by Aradune Mithara : Today at 07:21 AM.

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