This has almost turned into an obsession of mine, observing and trying to make sense of the performance of PoE. I'm not talking about slight slowdowns, I'm talking about outright nearly halving the framerate, on an excellent system, with no rhyme or reason to explain it.
When the beta was first released, it seemed like the game didn't suffer near the framerate issues it has, but that's mainly because the areas we were restricted to weren't the problematic ones. Almost every open wilderness area still runs very smoothly and for some reason Dyrford, despite having plenty of NPC's standing around (a leading theory in PoE's curious frame chugging being the presence of them) never showed the problem. No one suspected how bad it would get in some areas in the retail release.
So once it came out, the infamous trouble areas made many an eye roll: Copperlane in Defiance Bay and in general most areas of that city, Twin Elms (every district), and a few miscellaneous indoors areas like the marketplace in Twin Elms and certain dungeons, etc. No amount of tweaking, reinstalling, or patching the game seemed to have any effect. You just dealt with it and tried to ignore the problem. Some may ask why it even matters since this is primarily a 2D game -- and a rather boring one at that -- to which I reply that the least I should be able to expect is a 2D game running flawlessly at all times so I can properly observe all its other faults at sixty fucking instances per second.
Anyway, now patch 3.0 and the second expansion comes out. Guess what? It fixed it! Well, kind of. Now, when you load up a savegame in Twin Elms, lo and behold the framerate sticks at 60, at least for me. Walk around a little, still there. Unbelievable. Did Obsidian actually do something right for a change?
But not so fast. Enter the marketplace there, and the problem comes right back. Bam, down to 30fps. WTF? Quit and reload, same issue. Quit and reload back in Twin Elms, back to 60. Weird.
So it's still clearly a Unity issue, at least with Obsidian's implementation of Unity. And they've fixed something but I suspect there's still some bug in there having to do with lighting that continues to plague certain areas. Doubt it'll ever be truly fixed but at least it's more of an isolated problem AFAICT. And I haven't made it back to Defiance Bay yet since patch 3.0 so maybe I'm wrong.
Why do I care about this so much? Uh, should I care about the game itself that much? At least trying to figure this out gives me something interesting to do in it.
When the beta was first released, it seemed like the game didn't suffer near the framerate issues it has, but that's mainly because the areas we were restricted to weren't the problematic ones. Almost every open wilderness area still runs very smoothly and for some reason Dyrford, despite having plenty of NPC's standing around (a leading theory in PoE's curious frame chugging being the presence of them) never showed the problem. No one suspected how bad it would get in some areas in the retail release.
So once it came out, the infamous trouble areas made many an eye roll: Copperlane in Defiance Bay and in general most areas of that city, Twin Elms (every district), and a few miscellaneous indoors areas like the marketplace in Twin Elms and certain dungeons, etc. No amount of tweaking, reinstalling, or patching the game seemed to have any effect. You just dealt with it and tried to ignore the problem. Some may ask why it even matters since this is primarily a 2D game -- and a rather boring one at that -- to which I reply that the least I should be able to expect is a 2D game running flawlessly at all times so I can properly observe all its other faults at sixty fucking instances per second.
Anyway, now patch 3.0 and the second expansion comes out. Guess what? It fixed it! Well, kind of. Now, when you load up a savegame in Twin Elms, lo and behold the framerate sticks at 60, at least for me. Walk around a little, still there. Unbelievable. Did Obsidian actually do something right for a change?
But not so fast. Enter the marketplace there, and the problem comes right back. Bam, down to 30fps. WTF? Quit and reload, same issue. Quit and reload back in Twin Elms, back to 60. Weird.
So it's still clearly a Unity issue, at least with Obsidian's implementation of Unity. And they've fixed something but I suspect there's still some bug in there having to do with lighting that continues to plague certain areas. Doubt it'll ever be truly fixed but at least it's more of an isolated problem AFAICT. And I haven't made it back to Defiance Bay yet since patch 3.0 so maybe I'm wrong.
Why do I care about this so much? Uh, should I care about the game itself that much? At least trying to figure this out gives me something interesting to do in it.
