Performance tuning

[Wurmhole 3,650]

This is a slightly different thread than my request for performance tuning the client.  Here, I would like to ask for advice on what things people notice as causing the most FPS drop and CPU/GPU/RAM use increase on their deeds.

 

Is planting lighting worse than planting lots of trees?  Are animals worse than lights or trees?  How about fences - gates worse than non-gates (yes, swinging animation would do something, but how about at a distance)?  How about items?  Pile of rafts, next to a cart, worse than pile of rafts in a cart?  Should I build a bunch of ships to keep all my crates stored?  How about building a big building in the far corner of my deed, for storage of less used things, where I can stock pile junk?  Supposedly, if more than 4 tiles away, the client doesn't try drawing any items inside buildings.

 

Any clever thoughts on low-lag deed design?  I've always built a central workshop, that contains all bulk storage, cookers/forges, chests, armor/tool/weapon racks, etc.  But now I'm starting to think having so much in one place is hurting me more than helping.  Running one alt generally is fine, but I fire up 2 or 3 and the hair dryer mode kicks in.  7+ and I worry my laptop will detonate, causing Trump to blame NK and start WW3.

[Nomadikhan 2,196]

Through months of fine tuning and hardware changes to get something that works... I've found, for myself at least...

 

Anti-Aliasing > Water Reflections/Shadows > Lights > Structures (houses) > Fences/Trees > everything else.

 

Not sure why wurm doesn't handle these so well, but turning off anti-aliasing completely allows me to gain 40+fps on a radeon rx 480 8gb and 8-core 4.0ghz cpu with 16gb ram.  This lets me actually use shadows and reflections and hell pretty much other stuff.

Edited June 1, 2017 by Nomadikhan

[Etherdrifter 2,518]

Oddly enough, in very dense areas of forest, I get a sharp FPS drop when looking up.

 

I don't get any noticeable drop from lights or water though.

[Wurmhole 3,650]

11 minutes ago, Nomadikhan said:

Through months of fine tuning and hardware changes to get something that works... I've found, for myself at least...

 

Anti-Aliasing > Water Reflections/Shadows > Lights > Structures (houses) > Fences/Trees > everything else.

 

Not sure why wurm doesn't handle these so well, but turning off anti-aliasing completely allows me to gain 40+fps on a radeon rx 480 8gb and 8-core 4.0ghz cpu with 16gb ram.  This lets me actually use shadows and reflections and hell pretty much other stuff.

I have literally all of the above disabled or minimal.  But that is a good priority on performance.  One thing I really notice helps is entering caves.  I don't know if the caves will still perform so well, once i build in them.  Maybe putting all my buildings, storage and general misc items below ground will make the surface of my deed easy on the resources?

[Nomadikhan 2,196]

1 minute ago, Wurmhole said:

I have literally all of the above disabled or minimal.  But that is a good priority on performance.  One thing I really notice helps is entering caves.  I don't know if the caves will still perform so well, once i build in them.  Maybe putting all my buildings, storage and general misc items below ground will make the surface of my deed easy on the resources?

It can help, we resorted to storing all old furniture, objects, statues, etc underground... and when new citizens joined they didn't need to build much, they selected for the vault first lol.  I remember going through my deed the first time and cleaning it out, gained 3-4fps by the time I was done clenaing out containers, beds, carts, etc.

[Fraeya 341]

I've noticed that setting the max dynamic lights limit on and the slider to 1 nets me about 20-30 fps increase compared to halfway along the slider at 8

[Wurmhole 3,650]

It does, but sadly I can't make use of the unstable client.  It takes a lot more resources overall, when everything is set to minimum.  It really chews up the RAM.  About 50% more than the stable client.  Stable uses slightly more CPU though.  If I only ran one alt, I'd go unstable for sure though and take advantage of the better looking settings.

Edited June 2, 2017 by Wurmhole

[Niki 2,278]

I wish Wurm would optimize more. There is some serious fps issues for larger deeds, even on a high end system with max graphics.

 

I still encounter lag at my deed as well, I shouldn't have to disable everything either or make a separate profile when I'm at my deed. (I do have a lot of shinys but still.)  

 

It's hard to narrow it down but turning off AA or even GLSL helps a ton at least for me.

[Wurmhole 3,650]

GLSL is the rare glow, right?  That is a thought.  I remember doing that for running Intel graphics.  Will try that out.  Thanks!

[Nomadikhan 2,196]

15 hours ago, Wurmhole said:

GLSL is the rare glow, right?  That is a thought.  I remember doing that for running Intel graphics.  Will try that out.  Thanks!

 

It's for shaders, which from my understanding are what the glow uses.. you'll gain some good fps iirc from disabling it.  If you start noticing the terrain tiles shifting or being glitchy, it's probably due to disabling that (happens sometimes during the ninja patches).

[Wurmhole 3,650]

ah yes, it got very slidey and shifty.  Had to turn it back on.

 

So, I discovered something that really helped.  Not sure exactly which setting, as I still need to run more tests, but ultimately it was tweaking my Nvidia graphics settings that made it run better.  Right now I'm running higher graphics and getting higher FPS, with a quiet laptop fan.  I'll make a post soon with my exact findings.