Will this game ever be optimized?

ThaPro2012 · February 2017

I started playing Tera around 2013. Back then I had an HD 7750 and an i3. I had trouble running Tera at 60fps. People told me it was my processor. So I upgraded to an i5 3570k and pretty much got the same performance. Then I upgraded to an HD 7850 and performance was better; but I still struggled to get a constant 60fps.

Recently I upgraded to a GTX 1050. But I still struggle to get a constant 60fps on max in this game.

My current specs are:
CPU: i5 3570k
GPU: GTX 1050
RAM: 8GB

This is a DX9 game; but I can play several DX11 games on medium to ultra settings at 60fps.

DX11 games such as:
-Battlefield 3 on ultra at 1080p with 2xMSAA.
-Civilization V on ultra at 1080p.
-Black Ops II on ultra at 1080p.
-Star Wars: Battlefront on medium at 1080p.

It's not that my GPU simply can't handle this game. My GPU can handle way more advanced games with a constant 60fps.

It's not the CPU; an i5 3570k works well enough in most other games.

Every time I upgrade my PC, I see a drastic performance increase in most games; but not Tera.

So my question is; will this game ever be optimized?

BlackMagesKool · February 2017

Probs not (10/10 constructive post)

Zoknahal · February 2017

Most likely it will, only when BHS finally remembers the NA and EU regions do not play like the Japan and Korean versions. They think that since it plays good in Ktera, it should play good in the other regions apparently.

Roly · February 2017

Several threads pointed at this topic just try to find out in the forum but my answer to it will be always the same, Compatibility, your Station spec tell me everything, there is no driver from Nvidia PASCAL technology that allow their Video Cards make compatibles with TERA engine, is drivers issue trust me...also the possessor that you have is 4 cores so you have to specified that in the engine. ini there are plenty of guide on how to fix that problem, google it!!, Tera only recognize 1 core, might be help, good luck.

ThaPro2012 · February 2017

Roly wrote: »

Several threads pointed at this topic just try to find out in the forum but my answer to it will be always the same, Compatibility, your Station spec tell me everything, there is no driver from Nvidia PASCAL technology that allow their Video Cards make compatibles with TERA engine, is drivers issue trust me...also the possessor that you have is 4 cores so you have to specified that in the engine. ini there are plenty of guide on how to fix that problem, google it!!, Tera only recognize 1 core, might be help, good luck.

I would like to believe it's a driver issue. However, I've had the same problem with my older AMD cards.

On preset 6, even with no others players around, the game will run at around 30-60fps. In crowded towns; I've seen as low as 20-30fps.

Yamazuki · February 2017

They don't do much in terms of optimization, the game runs worse than it used to for many hardware configurations. I used to play Tera on an AMD Phenom II and a GT545 and could run it on max settings with at least ~30 fps but then shortly before Gunner came out I could not play tera not even on a slightly better setup, AMD FX 6100 and GTX650. Would constantly freeze when people died, in AI certain 1 shot attacks (due to my defense) would make my game freeze, etc. Even things that would freeze my game before like ui sounds and such were causing freezes. BHS has acknowledged multiple times that they have made optimization worse, but over the last couple years they have only done very minor tweeks, one of which actually made it worse for certain configurations.

I have a liquid cooled Intel 6700k overclocked to 4.7ghz, a reference GTX1070, DDR4 16GB 2,500 RAM, and I can still run into problems, I don't as much, but that's mostly because my hardware is brute forcing its way through things. There are specific scenarios where I can still freeze, like Brawler Growing Fury since it seems no amount of power can handle that problem, certain spots in Sky Garden, Highwatch for some reason can crash and freeze my game in the crowded spot even though all the mongos (had my game on max setting too..) never caused crashes even though there was much more people along with all the abilities being used.

Catatonic · February 2017

A lot of the problem is they keep piling more [filtered] into the game without removing old elements. The UI is the biggest problem with the game; everything about the UI. When the game first came out it was flashy but it wasn't over the top. WIth the introduction of reaper you had these intense combat skill animations and effects that clogged up the pipeline, and with each and ever class added and revamp it hasnt gotten any better. You add that with all the other on screen elements added, well you it will only get worse is what I'm saying. I dont even know if BHS can effectively optimization the UI without

The most efficient thing that a player can do to create an offset is throw as much CPU power at it as possible. Overclock as much as you safely can, you will notice a difference.

Pixelator · February 2017

With your setup and i5 overclocked to 4GHz+, you shouldn't have any problems maintaining a constant 60fps, especially outside towns and dungeons.

If you haven't already, refer to this guide as a starter to tweaking your ini file: https://web.archive.org/web/20160414212908/http://teratoday.com/content/tera-guide/tera-general-guide/tera-optimization-guide-bernkastel

Also, turning off Shadows is a must if you want to maintain decent fps in crowded areas.

As an aside: TERA runs with 3 major threads:

This means with a quad-core processor (such as an i5), the absolute maximum cpu usage you can hope for TERA is 75%. This threading setup is also not affected by any ini tweaks you make. Especially the infamous CPUNumLogicalProcessors setting.

Catatonic · February 2017

Pixelator wrote: »

With your setup and i5 overclocked to 4GHz+, you shouldn't have any problems maintaining a constant 60fps, especially outside towns and dungeons.

If you haven't already, refer to this guide as a starter to tweaking your ini file: https://web.archive.org/web/20160414212908/http://teratoday.com/content/tera-guide/tera-general-guide/tera-optimization-guide-bernkastel

Also, turning off Shadows is a must if you want to maintain decent fps in crowded areas.

As an aside: TERA runs with 3 major threads:

This means with a quad-core processor (such as an i5), the absolute maximum cpu usage you can hope for TERA is 75%. This threading setup is also not affected by any ini tweaks you make. Especially the infamous CPUNumLogicalProcessors setting.

Having spent a lot of time mucking around with the ini file the single biggest change you can get to increase overall performance is turning off smoothedframes. A lot of the ini settings are simply ignored by the engine and are hard coded into the graphics presets we can choose in the options menu.

narkfestmojo · February 2017

I tested by going to various locations and checking FPS.
no difference between an old 560ti and a 1080 lol

Catatonic · February 2017

narkfestmojo wrote: »

I tested by going to various locations and checking FPS.
no difference between an old 560ti and a 1080 lol

Pretty much. The game is VERY cpu bound.

Yamazuki · February 2017

narkfestmojo wrote: »

I tested by going to various locations and checking FPS.
no difference between an old 560ti and a 1080 lol

Any gpu related issues occur in instances for majority of cases, and specific bosses and attacks. Your gpu won't do much in terms of idling in various situations since there's not much for it to be doing.

nawrot · February 2017

It is quite simple: TERA is made on very old Unreal engine build (now obsolete). It uses version of engine from around 2007 (ie similar to UT3). It also abuses that old poor engine, because it is mmorpg and such games cannot be optimized as good as FPS games (for which was old unreal engine designed). You also compare it to non MMO games, i just say there is very good reason for all multiplayer games to have about 64 players limit. Another factor is that unreal always had good optimization, it tries to dynamically load more when your hardware can hamdle it. TERA as game is overestimating what can be handled so engine delivers a bit too much. Probably somebody 10 years ago decided to overestimate a bit so screens look better, and unreal engine just sticks to that old decision.

And to answer you: TERA will be not optimized, nobody is going to rewrite old engine for old game that does not give much profit anymore. We can only hope that they make new TERA game on newest unreal (which is awesome compared to this old used here).

5H96Y49G6D · February 2017

its called tweaking

F4ngDragon · February 2017

I´ve heard that the korean version has a good optimization patch, but it has never come to us, so we are in the dark when it comes to knowing when this MMO will run smoothly on our PCs. I personally run it normally at 80 FPS in open world areas, and that is my maximum, but it dips hard to even getting as low as 14 FPS on huge crowded areas like the Corsairs Stronghold Defense round preparation starting point, and this is, of course, at preset 6.

Considering that this game existing on unreal engine 3 is already a miracle, it doesn´t surprise me that the optimization is low, I just wish it had better of it so the dips in FPS wouldn´t be so bad. I run this game with a I5-6600 @ 3.3 GHZ speed and a Zotac Mini GTX 1070.

Deleted User · February 2017

Its all true that these BHS guys are extremely cheap and won't put extra money into optimizing the game in a meaningful way.

Just won't happen... because if it was ever going to, it would have years ago. This games over 5 years old now, actually bit older if you look at the original korean release which dates it over a year or two before the NA release. Its likely the majority of this game code was written and finished over 8 years ago. Thats a long time and those original programmers are likely long gone, and revisiting old game code is a confusing mess, even if looked at by the original coders.

There was a bit of hope when there was some rumor that TERA may come out on consoles, and if this was actually going to happen, they would have had to rebuild the game to use more than 3 threads... and then they could have applied the rebuilt code and applied it to the PC version quite easily since the ps4/xone are similar to a pc in architecture. I think they quickly gave up on the idea of porting this game to a console since their cpus are so weak that using only 3 threads of their already low frequency cores would make the game unplayable.

I've seen other games put a bit of money into adding some optimization and improvements to their engine. World of warcraft did it to use more cpu cores on top of adding more graphic and environmental visual upgrades.

AION also did this, the game originally only ran on Directx9 on a 32bit client. Slightly after the release, they released a new 64 bit client that also let you run the game using Directx10. Mind you the performance improvements were nothing to brag about, but it was at least an attempt to improve their client the best they could.

Would making a 64 bit TERA client help? Who knows, it may. The main problem i always observe is crowds and game shadows. The game chugs it can't handle it when theres too many people, effects all in one area. And this stress all bogs into the cpu first, as you likely notice when you see your gpu usage not even getting over 30% usage obviously showing a cpu bottleneck due to bad optimization of the game not being able to process everything it needs to fast enough to keep up decent framerates when there are a good number of people in an area.

Blade and Soul uses the same or similar version of the Unreal Engine. Yet it runs so much better and doesn't have these cpu bottlenecks as much. So this engine could perform better, but would take some work beyond just some .ini tweaks. Need a few skilled programmers but it would take months for them to figure out how to read the old code and to optimize it enough to make it worth while.

Will this game ever be optimized?

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