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Let's beat a dead horse: Optimization.
I know this is a topic that's been beaten to death. Regardless, I feel I want to bring it up simply because I'd like a bit of an official response as to what's going on. First a bit of backstory. I am an old player back from when Tera first went free to play. Back when Conjunct weapons were the best, 60 was the level cap, awakening didn't even exist and people farmed gear from doing Nexus.
That being said, it's been a few years now I believe, please correct me if I"m wrong on the time frame, since that era has come to pass. Even back then Tera was optimized poorly but there is something funny. When I go back and run dungeons from that era, I actually don't have much of an issue. In Grenarkus and Zhulfkar I actually keep a fairly consistent 50-60 FPS, even on the preset 5. Now before i delve into numbers, I'm on Win 10 with an AMD FX 4100 3.6ghz quadcore black processor, an nvidia GTX 970 DDR5 4gb Vram and 8 gigs of Corsair 1866mhz ram. My PC, while not beastly, is enough to run most games fairly well. Even DKS3 runs as a decent frame rate of 40-60 FPS consistently. That's Dark Souls 3 for the non souls players out there.
So even back then the game was pretty much reverse engineered, a lot of the issues were "solved" as to what was causing the massive CPU bottleneck, which I assure you I am very aware of the MMO using CPU and not GPU argument. It's largely due to the flash UI as, even in most situations, simply turning off the UI leads to a dramatic increase in performance. I, however, play a warrior and thus limiting the UI makes it incredibly difficult to keep track of edge and scythe unless I mentally count it, which detracts from my ability to respond and iframe correctly when need be.
The point that I"m bringing up, is that it is not exactly the UI that causes it. I've noticed that if I'm not in a party with a gunner, ninja or reaper, I actually get a much better frame rate than normal. For example, I ran Kalivan's dreadnaught. The majority of the time I get around 17 fps. There is almost always a gunner, ninja or reaper present. However, I done a guild run without any of those classes and I actually averaged 25-35 fps which actually made running the dungeon quite pleasant. This was much better than when Akeron's inferno used to run at 7 fps no matter what i done and made it entirely unplayable. I left and went on hiatus after that.
Another thing I've noticed outside of the UI is certain textures seem to cause rampant slowdown. Kumas for example, runs very well but fraywind, or any area with sand for that matter, has a dip i framerate. Grenarkus, Fyrmount and most other places with rocky terrain run fine, but it's sandy areas that seem to dip the most. I have done many a fixes to make the game playable, and honestly, after this game being alive for many a years now, it's absolutely appalling that some sort of framerate fix has not been put in place or at least attempted. The rampant particle creep from the newer classes also does not make it any better either. I apologize for the long post, but with all this being said, my question is simply this...
Are there any QoL (Quality of Life) improvements in the pipeline to actually make the game playable? I know it's doable. It was playable back in the nexus days and over the years, it's actually gotten worse, not better. In my opinion, on a game this old, it's simply inexcusable that it's still in this sorry half-assed state, pardon my language.
I love Tera. It's combat is by far some of the best of any game I have played and after playing it, I simply cannot play a tab target game anymore. On the same token, I want to be able to play Tera as well but these recent patches and updates have made it harder to really enjoy the game. While it's bearable to do forsaken island or Kalivan's at 15 FPS or lower, it is not optimal and honestly rapidly destroys my enjoyment of the game. I honestly wish Bluehole would take some time, stop with the updates for a bit and add some QoL patches to the game in the form of better optimization. However, that's just me. Thanks for reading.
-Kinohki
That being said, it's been a few years now I believe, please correct me if I"m wrong on the time frame, since that era has come to pass. Even back then Tera was optimized poorly but there is something funny. When I go back and run dungeons from that era, I actually don't have much of an issue. In Grenarkus and Zhulfkar I actually keep a fairly consistent 50-60 FPS, even on the preset 5. Now before i delve into numbers, I'm on Win 10 with an AMD FX 4100 3.6ghz quadcore black processor, an nvidia GTX 970 DDR5 4gb Vram and 8 gigs of Corsair 1866mhz ram. My PC, while not beastly, is enough to run most games fairly well. Even DKS3 runs as a decent frame rate of 40-60 FPS consistently. That's Dark Souls 3 for the non souls players out there.
So even back then the game was pretty much reverse engineered, a lot of the issues were "solved" as to what was causing the massive CPU bottleneck, which I assure you I am very aware of the MMO using CPU and not GPU argument. It's largely due to the flash UI as, even in most situations, simply turning off the UI leads to a dramatic increase in performance. I, however, play a warrior and thus limiting the UI makes it incredibly difficult to keep track of edge and scythe unless I mentally count it, which detracts from my ability to respond and iframe correctly when need be.
The point that I"m bringing up, is that it is not exactly the UI that causes it. I've noticed that if I'm not in a party with a gunner, ninja or reaper, I actually get a much better frame rate than normal. For example, I ran Kalivan's dreadnaught. The majority of the time I get around 17 fps. There is almost always a gunner, ninja or reaper present. However, I done a guild run without any of those classes and I actually averaged 25-35 fps which actually made running the dungeon quite pleasant. This was much better than when Akeron's inferno used to run at 7 fps no matter what i done and made it entirely unplayable. I left and went on hiatus after that.
Another thing I've noticed outside of the UI is certain textures seem to cause rampant slowdown. Kumas for example, runs very well but fraywind, or any area with sand for that matter, has a dip i framerate. Grenarkus, Fyrmount and most other places with rocky terrain run fine, but it's sandy areas that seem to dip the most. I have done many a fixes to make the game playable, and honestly, after this game being alive for many a years now, it's absolutely appalling that some sort of framerate fix has not been put in place or at least attempted. The rampant particle creep from the newer classes also does not make it any better either. I apologize for the long post, but with all this being said, my question is simply this...
Are there any QoL (Quality of Life) improvements in the pipeline to actually make the game playable? I know it's doable. It was playable back in the nexus days and over the years, it's actually gotten worse, not better. In my opinion, on a game this old, it's simply inexcusable that it's still in this sorry half-assed state, pardon my language.
I love Tera. It's combat is by far some of the best of any game I have played and after playing it, I simply cannot play a tab target game anymore. On the same token, I want to be able to play Tera as well but these recent patches and updates have made it harder to really enjoy the game. While it's bearable to do forsaken island or Kalivan's at 15 FPS or lower, it is not optimal and honestly rapidly destroys my enjoyment of the game. I honestly wish Bluehole would take some time, stop with the updates for a bit and add some QoL patches to the game in the form of better optimization. However, that's just me. Thanks for reading.
-Kinohki
3
Comments
There are optimizations coming on the 30 man raid patch. Just be a bit more patient.
Unfortunately, that is how TERA is.
All I can say is, play in full screen mode. There's a noticeable difference.
Saying anything else would get me banned or this thread deleted.
Not sure what you define as "perfect" and "stable", but the issues are in combat. I can get 100+ fps in towns, even 60 when crowded. People mostly have issues in combat, and even for people that stay around 30 fps often, like I do, with some dips that's not "fine" considering any other optimized game with that same computer would get 120 to 400 fps depending on the game.
Tera... I'm lucky to hit 30 FPS in dungeons or big raids like CU at medium setting. The game is incredibly nice to play if you venture out in the middle of nowhere to obtain 60 fps tho.
To be honest, they're better off scrapping Tera and restart from scratch. Make a Tera 2.
- new broken UI (This [filtered] drawing one picture on another, instead replace it. Also often create transparency what also kills performance.)
- flashy effects: weapons flashes, skills effects flashes etc.
That said, given the performance problems, there is more they could do as they implement new content to try to avoid these issues... but I just feel like it isn't really a priority for them. They seem to focus primarily on the art and effects they want to put in, performance secondary.
Another problem is that the game runs even worse on an AMD system, due to their generally lower per-core clock speed.
Doesn't help things when BHS keeps going for flashier effects in game, either. Perhaps they could at least rewrite the damned UI? It'd help, and be FAR less work than redoing the engine.