Lag is a pretty general term. There's a difference between network lag and visual lag, yes. Most people use them pretty interchangeably. I definitely think the bigger issue is frame rate loss. Considering it's a console game and you can't do anything in terms of "upgrading" to reduce performance loss it becomes pretty frustrating to deal with.

I played a PC match earlier, and the frame rate was downright terrible. I may have actually killed someone if it wasn't so bad (please do not take this to mean that I am blaming my lack of kills on the frame rate, I still would've sucked) but I was just completely useless.

Someone in this thread before said, "It may be because people spam uplinks and nanohives in aPC, and 50 pulses per second is a lot for it to handle." (I apologize, as I know that most of this is incorrect, but cannot recall the statement right now, and I am too lazy to find it again lol) But this match there were not as many "spammed uplinks and nano hives."

The frame rate for PC is just downright terrible. It is worse in the complexes on the certain maps that have them, but it can still be terrible on the outside as well.

This needs to be fixed.

Even on public servers running solo, some things are obvious:

1) Large outposts lag*, even when nothing much is going on. It just appears to be too much geometry for the game to handle at 30 FPS.

2) Whenever I see a good squad on each team, I know that the game is going to lag. I'm not part of any of those squads, so it's not the voice coms that lag me, it must be the blobs and uplink spam as mentioned before.

3) Being near the blob is always causing lag as well.

I have never played PC yet, but the few times I've squadded up have predictably all made the situation worse. I can only imagine that the situation is even more exaggerated in PC, and frankly that kills all my interest to squad up, let alone play competitively in any form.

30 FPS is very difficult to bare to begin with, and it really isn't a sky high bar you set yourself there. The fact that the game consistently drops below this mark, often MUCH below it, is just too much for me to tolerate.

What annoys me the most is that this issue doesn't seem to be acknowledged very much. There won't be a magic bullet to suddenly make all framerate issues disappear. Unless you completely overhaul the engine, which is unlikely to happen, it will never be able to handle the geometry from the large outposts and it will always be overwhelmed by the amount of objects being rendered when two blobs battle it out.

Unless there is an obscure bug which reduces performance for many/most of us, you might never be able to fix the performance problems on the PS3 unless you take some drastic measures to reduce the amount of visible objects on screen. And the large outposts are really not acceptable either, you can't just add as much detail as you like and then say "oh well" when it doesn't meet the target framerates. If you really want to make a visuals vs. performance tradeoff, then at least give us the option to switch to low detail geometry.

Ultimately this is just really frustrating, because I play console games partly so I don't have to put up with stupid framerate issues. I'd like to see some clear acknowledgement of the problem, and at least some indication that there are plans to rectify the issue. Right now the only thing that gives me hope is the potential switch to the PS4. Please do take this seriously CCP... I don't think there is anything that would do more to improve the feel of the core mechanics than if the game would consistently run at 30 FPS.



* Whenever I say "lag" in this post, I am referring to framerate issues (visual lag), not network latency.

Can you give us any specific reproduction steps? We had a hell of a time tracking down the lag last time and it was mostly related to voice chat. Having lots of people on voice was the biggest issue last time.

It took us a long time to figure that out, and it wasn't something we hit with our internal play tests as you guys do it differently than we do.

So yea, if you can give us any details that would be AWESOME! :D

Yeah I agree that the new outpost really destroys performance, especially when people start throwing equipment and explosions everywhere.

I seriously think the Unreal engine just isn't optimized well enough for the PS3 because I've played online games with waaaay better graphics that don't nearly have as much frame rate lag as DUST. CCP made a bad decision (in my opinion) choosing the Unreal engine for this game. Alas...

To give proper feedback:

Performance loss persists regardless of in or out of squad. Voice chat does not affect it. Lag persists in full squad, no squad , 16v16 or anything below. Lag is exacerbated tremendously by equipment and explosions (MDs, Grenades, etc.). My input is KB/M so quick movements really feel stutter. I have an SSD installed so load time isnt the issue either. All effects set to Low in game.

Close combat is bearable but nowhere near optimal. It's definitely frame rate and not network latency because hit detection is not an issue, though actually hitting becomes difficult because of visual lag. Lag becomes worst inside Gallente Research and Orbital Artillery, less so on Biomass and Communications. Vehicles are almost always present but don't really present a difference with or without.

There are a multitude of old issues associated with PC battles that have begun to crop up again:

- Very low frame rates, sometimes as low as ~1FPS; Some maps are worse than others

- Players getting kicked from game while experiencing the other listed effects

- Lower frame rates in general, even when not absurd

- Higher latency even on "home" servers



If this affects you, please keep the post bumped. These issues were the reason that many players quit playing Dust with Uprising 1.0, and they really drain a lot of the fun out of PC.

o7

We have people looking into it, but please do keep giving feedback. Anything can be useful in tracking these type of things down.

Do you experience it more with lots of uplinks/nanohives?
When you say the city which one? There are a few of them.
Was it a full server?
Were you in a squad?
Were you on voice? If so which channels and with how many people?

The PC matches I've played in the past few months (not a lot) has had tolerable framerate for me. I've seen some hefty lag in pubs a couple of times, though.

Some of the times, it happened when a lot of grenade and mass driver spam was going on in a concentrated area.

The worst framerate has always been coupled to a proliferation of equipment and players in a small area. The equipment seems to be the worst sinner. On a couple of these occasions, I've seen 30 to 40 pieces of enemy equipment within a 40 meter diameter or so. Once I've cleared out about 75% of that equipment with my fluxes and stuff, the framerate has bounced right up again.

I think the best place to start while trying to fix this would be to have some sort of limitations on equipment. The equipment spam is really lame strategy-wise anyway, and increases the chances of stomping and redlining. So placing restrictions on active equipment based on general type (rather than specific model) and/or requiring them to have, say, at least 20 meters between each piece would improve gameplay in any case - and might help the framerate issues.

Also, I'd take a look at optimizing the deployed equipment itself. A nanohive, for example, has to do at least three things that might affect performance:

• Render the bubble effect
• Check if anyone is inside the bubble and have them restocked and/or repaired
• Play the sound effect

Multiply that by 30-40-50-60 within the player's immedate vicinity, and the potential for performance issues skyrockets. Maybe make nanohives not play the sound effect if there are more than 5 within a radius of x meters? Make the bubble effect slightly less demanding to render? And so on.

Can you give us any specific reproduction steps? We had a hell of a time tracking down the lag last time and it was mostly related to voice chat. Having lots of people on voice was the biggest issue last time.

It took us a long time to figure that out, and it wasn't something we hit with our internal play tests as you guys do it differently than we do.

So yea, if you can give us any details that would be AWESOME! :D