2 ms·

I’ve been playing Pillars of Eternity and I’m amazed just how poorly it runs given what it is. I’d love a no-judgment, no-blame post mortem on a game like that

I’ve been playing Pillars of Eternity and I’m amazed just how poorly it runs given what it is. I’d love a no-judgment, no-blame post mortem on a game like that, which tries to dig into the technical reasons why it’s so poorly optimized and the non-technical reasons for how they get there. I’d imagine it usually boils down to having a deadline and a budget, but I’m quite interested in understanding the in-between portion much more intimately.

TylerE 3y ago
Well, they both use the same engine. That might be a hint. Yes, to be clear, I'm talking about Unity.
- Waterluvian 3y ago
  That’s one of those convenient non-exploratory answers I’m hoping to dig past. It might be related, but we don’t really know based on this alone.
  - TylerE 3y ago
    Virtually every Unity game ever that does a non-trivial level of background simulation has considerable jank. There’s just a point where you hav wot say - look - Unity games consistently have performance issues at some point it’s legit to just call it a poorly performing platform.
    - Waterluvian 3y ago
      Cities Skylines 1 performed remarkably well on midrange computers, particularly for just how good the simulation is and how busy the viewport can get.
      - TylerE 3y ago
        The same cities skyline where traffic hasn't worked properly since day 1? It may not be as bad as some, but C:S has plenty of issues on it's own if you try to play it as an actual game and not a scenery painter, which is all its' really good for. It's always been ocean wide, pond deep.
  - scubadude 3y ago
    It's basically an emulator versus native C code, it's completely relevant
smolder 3y ago
I'm going to guess it went something like this: They kept on adding visual features that work independently, making all their own API calls, one after another, got it looking good, and moved on. That's as opposed to creating a cohesive rendering pipeline that deduplicates effort and accomplishes the same. On top of that, and most importantly, I doubt they allotted time to refactor and optimize, or... they allotted it after release. If you thrash Unity's APIs hard enough, which in turn thrashes the underlying vulkan/DX level APIs, clever drivers aren't quite enough to keep the GPU loaded with useful work. There's probably a long tail of other stuff they need to profile and tweak to get a better balance of performance to visual quality, like changing the precision of shader calculations, tuning level of detail, and so on.

TylerE 3y ago

Well, they both use the same engine. That might be a hint. Yes, to be clear, I'm talking about Unity.

Waterluvian 3y ago
That’s one of those convenient non-exploratory answers I’m hoping to dig past. It might be related, but we don’t really know based on this alone.
- TylerE 3y ago
  Virtually every Unity game ever that does a non-trivial level of background simulation has considerable jank. There’s just a point where you hav wot say - look - Unity games consistently have performance issues at some point it’s legit to just call it a poorly performing platform.
  - Waterluvian 3y ago
    Cities Skylines 1 performed remarkably well on midrange computers, particularly for just how good the simulation is and how busy the viewport can get.
    - TylerE 3y ago
      The same cities skyline where traffic hasn't worked properly since day 1? It may not be as bad as some, but C:S has plenty of issues on it's own if you try to play it as an actual game and not a scenery painter, which is all its' really good for. It's always been ocean wide, pond deep.
- scubadude 3y ago
  It's basically an emulator versus native C code, it's completely relevant

smolder 3y ago

I'm going to guess it went something like this: They kept on adding visual features that work independently, making all their own API calls, one after another, got it looking good, and moved on. That's as opposed to creating a cohesive rendering pipeline that deduplicates effort and accomplishes the same. On top of that, and most importantly, I doubt they allotted time to refactor and optimize, or... they allotted it after release. If you thrash Unity's APIs hard enough, which in turn thrashes the underlying vulkan/DX level APIs, clever drivers aren't quite enough to keep the GPU loaded with useful work. There's probably a long tail of other stuff they need to profile and tweak to get a better balance of performance to visual quality, like changing the precision of shader calculations, tuning level of detail, and so on.