Posted August 14, 2016
So while I'm pretty sure they've been strategic about hiding the way increasing detail is mapped in when you approach new areas, speeding in the air over an area isn't what croaks the engine.
And the lockups happen whether you stand still or not in very specific situations too.
....So if you want my guess, I think the problem is added shader-effects to specific objects on the ground. Like, there's a third party library of some sort, like Havok, that allocates a smaller amount of shader-units for various things like pathfinding and node-generation for various things, maybe some swaying in the wind and things like that. That run per object passes in peace normally. But once you fill all the shader-units, or the pathfinding starves processes that run in parallel (or the other way around, most likely - the particle effects on some objects seem to be designed to break the engine with shadows flaring everywhere, etc.) - then you get constant slowdowns. They also don't tend to stop after some effect stopped triggering, or when leaving the system, etc. Meaning that it's not actually the density of the scene that cause the problems, but processes that don't exit and occupy the bus/instruction queue on the graphics card. It could obviously be other functions or other libraries that cause instruction queue lockups as well. But we're likely talking about a logical error from how it affects different systems in the same way.
And you could probably guess on that this would likely be the same on any maxwell, pascal and similar gtx or lesser chip setups. Cards that have fewer "independent" smx-units (but total amount of shaders are larger, etc.), and where there's no queue-system for the instruction order or when various processes have to stop to complete something more important (to, say, get the framerate over 10 fps..). Even if the graphics cards are massively over specification in terms of performance, or just when it comes to rendering the scenes.
And on my system, and one more I got to test on, the lockups happen whether you turn the effects all the way up or all the way down. So no, it's not actually that your graphics card is too slow, it's very likely an instruction queue depth problem. That, in turn, affects a very large amount of systems.
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What also makes this so annoying is that this is classic Sony. We have effects seemingly added on for no reason in the middle of specific objects that otherwise would not "catch your eye". There are lighting effects in the game that work amazingly, there are these glare effects that seem to have been designed with a delicate brush. All the tones on the sky, how the light refracts and the shadows creeping around, and so on. Amazing stuff.
And then you have effects added on the ground that make no sense, that don't belong with the clean aesthetic, and just obscures the view. Just like the HUD icons, that also turned up late. There's also the slightly blurred palette, the less clear colours and more brown stuff. We saw nothing of that in the early demos, or in the showfloor demos earlier this year. But now that the game is out, we have these things in mass. Surface treatment is the same, in the sense of full-screen filters (they want smoother objects right in front, and pixelated/Anti-aliased lines on everything else - all Sony games end up like this).
And none of that apparently was tested properly. Just like the autopilots that obviously are designed to inhibit completely even a possibility of a crash - and have no other purpose either.
See those beacons around the planet where you can call your ship back? Have you ever used one? Probably not.
And yeah, just like the guy further up there, if I knew that Sony was involved with this game, I wouldn't have pre-ordered, and I likely wouldn't have bought it. Because I know how they work, and I would have at least waited and seen if we got to see all kinds of problems on PC thanks to effect-tweaking on the Ps4 version -- that then Sony demands should also be in the other versions. This has to do with platform parity and is partially marketing, and partially conditioned on receiving technical support from Sony (for the dev). So yeah, it's a real thing, I'm not making this up.
But.. and not to be conspiratorial about this, because there's no conspiracy here.. but I've seen this type of "three weeks before launch" panic with Sony titles before. And you really do get tweaks that for example reduce the frames from nearly always 60 to barely 30. And they think that's fine, if they can add more anti-aliasing.
I mean, sure the guys who work at Sony seem a bit crazy, and their marketing is perhaps even more crazy than the people who work there are, and so on. Their leaks and weird inverted information control certainly suggests "mental damage" more than "ingenuity", and things like that.
But trust me, the rest of the show has nothing on the guys who work with deciding "what people want" in the gaming branch. Really, you'd think this would just fizzle out by the time they've ran at least three of their own studios to the ground, and crashed several releases in succession. Or that they might have learned to shut their mouths after the entire "12 players in Battlefield multiplayer is just fine, and everyone agrees about that, including the fans and developers" thing. Same with "global pings is technically possible, and internet latency is a game-engine problem" convention they fronted. But no. They really do take brilliantly made games, that are ready for launch. And fuck them up in four weeks with bullshit under the excuse of "fixing bugs & doing support". It's all the way from features to cutting out functions and changing gameplay, and they somehow manage to do it every time without any developer protesting or putting down the foot somehow.
I've had two people from two different devs sit and say, for example, that they believed they were making the changes to either help sell the game more easily, or else to fix serious and obvious problems that would haunt them at launch. Just as a tester, we never had any say in those decisions, but they basically conflated any "early player concerns" with "serious problems that must be sorted out", and convinced the dev to go along with it.
And that obviously works out great for the dev every time, like this time. Have you ever seen a better launch for a game, right? (I have).
Another thing.. yes, this sounds crazy, and I sound crazy. But if this wasn't a... secret folder of brown junk-effects that HG wanted to get into the game, and needed to delay the game to get in there, or something. Then something other than that is going on. Several people, including me, have also seen the showfloor demos, where these things didn't exist. The same thing happened with a series of other Sony games when they went from beta to "final".
And now we have the same process on PC as well. Seriously, you'd think just not purchasing Sony products or playing on Sony products would stop them from ruining your games, but no. Clearly that's not enough. You also have to stop playing games that are not just not published by Sony, but where Sony can't be "involved" in the late "support stage" for one of the versions of the game either.
