I fully stand by my statement, but I think there is some clarification needed here. There are generally two types of people complaining about performance with the game:
1) Someone with older hardware that is struggling to run the game as fast as they do other FPS games released in the last couple of years.
2) Someone with very high end hardware that isn't get the performance they fell they should from the game.
Now for some reason there are a lot of number 2's (guys with high end hardware) complaining about my statement geared toward number 1's (guys with older hardware). The fact is though, when we asked for perfdumps from people having performance issues, the VAST majority of those submitted were people that either their CPU or their video card was pretty low end (far below the recommended settings) - yet they were running the game with everything on Ultra. I truly believe that this is due to the fact that most recent FPS games are console ports designed to run on 5 year old console hardware. So guys with 5 year old computers are used to cranking everything to the max and rocking and rolling. RO2 wasn't designed that way - it was created for the PC with Ultra requiring a very high end processor and a very vast video card. So in these situations people just need to set their settings to match their hardware. It isn't "blaming their hardware", its just helping people figure out the right settings for their machine.
Regarding the guys with the high end machines, I would request that you guys step up to the plate and submit your perflogs here:
http://forums.tripwireinteractive.co...ad.php?t=61789
There are a lot of guys complaining, but VERY few actually submitting their perflogs to help us dig into this issue (as a matter of fact as of a couple of days ago I don't think we got more than 1 submission from a person with a high end machine having these issues). We don't know what is causing the issue of low performance on very high end machine, and we can't reproduce it in our office, or on any of the home machines that developers working here have. So please help us help you by getting your data submitted.
Finally, to help you all understand some of the optimizations that we are making. First off I'll start by saying the game runs well on all 30+ machines we have here in our offices, as well as on everyone's home machines. Yes I know this doesn't help those of you that are having problems. But it should help answer the question "how did they release the game performing like this" - well the answer is simple, it ran well on every machine we threw at it.
Since the release however we've discovered that certain hardware is having performance issues with the game that we didn't experience. This isn't "blaming your hardware" or saying "your hardware is crap". But there are LOTS of different types of hardware out there, and they have different strengths and weaknesses. One thing that we discovered was that certain hardware really chokes when you push too many items to render at it (this is called draw calls). It doesn't have anything to do with polygons, it literally is just the number of items we're telling the video card to render. All the hardware we have can rock and roll on a high number of draw calls, but some cannot.
So this is a large part of the optimization work we are doing. We're going through map by map reducing the number of draw calls. Most of the time this is a matter of modifying the way things are set up in the level. Some times it does mean removing objects, but that is only in the most extreme cases (like Pavlovs House). It is very time consuming though, which is why it is taking so long to do. But it should have a very good benefit for people who's hardware is suffering from this (and even a reasonable increase for people without this hardware). Once again some may ask "why didn't you do this before you shipped the game". To that all I can say is, we never saw this issue on our own hardware. The best we can do now is say we're sorry we missed it, and fix the issue as fast as we can.
