Why do we accept the ENORMOUS performance drop in this game?

OP does have a point. We should not have to keep upgrading our systems to compensate for their bad coding and bad design decisions. The way things are setup it wont be long before the game just wont run well at all on most machines. Thats what got me so worried about the Ultra-Mode stuff. I have a nice rig that runs Aion excellently but chokes to death during rikti raids, zombie raids, and the ITF. It took a good bit of upgrading to compensate for the crap that is Grandville.

They have had 6 years to adress this issues. Long enough.
If they have to design an entirely new engine then do it. If they have to swap their own servers then do it.

Doe eit, doe eit noooeeew! (Arnold Swarzenegger accent)

They've already upgraded the servers.

This thread has proven that some of the blame lay on end user systems. Granted, that's because the client side systems are having to work extra hard due to questionable issues within the engine itself.

I do not think that any resolution to the various performance woes in this game will find a solution at the hardware level.

I'm now on an I7-920 2.66GHz quadcore proc OCed to 3.2GHz with an ATI 5870 vid card, Win7 and 6GB of DDR3 RAM in tri-channel config.

My test spot in Grandville STILL brought me down to 30FPS. (Granted, this was at 1920X1200 resolution and 200% world detail; 4X FSAA and 8X AF.) It can not be more plainly shown that there are many zones/areas that are poorly put together code-wise regardless of how pretty they may be.

We have been asking for these areas to be corrected for years. The fact that they haven't done so yet points to the devs being UNABLE to do so, for whatever reason.

PERHAPS, the engine changes necessary to make Ultra mode work have some underlying tweaks that will clear some of this up.

It's just as likely, however, that ultra mode is nothing more than extra junk piled on to the existing engine and those running it will do nothing but tank further in the existing problem spots.

I REALLY hope that the second item is not the case. It will not be a pleasant experience for anyone if it is.

I just wish someone on the dev team would give us some more specifics on what we might expect before Ultra mode hits test.

I have some vague recollection of someone talking about extraneous polygons in terrain or buildings or some such. It sounded like something had vertices that either didn't form polys, formed backfacing polys, or otherwise added computational load without visible benefit. These were cleaned up in GV and performance improved some. However, I have no idea where that was from, or if it was even a dev claiming it.

At this particular time, UberGuy, especially considering Ultra mode and the possible performance ramifications that might come with it...

I would consider it damn near reckless of the dev team NOT to move some priorities around and get overall performance issues dealt with ASAP.

Otherwise, when open beta for Ultra mode hits and performance is even worse off for everyone enabling it, (especially for those of us that just dropped $1250 on parts,) it might be very bad for this game.

At the least, it will be a marketing nightmare. "Introducing Ultra Mode! Be sure not to enable it even if you have Deep Thought as your PC unless you enjoy 10FPS in Grandville."

Now that's a rather doomy statement. I'm hoping for a different outcome. However, in the Army I was taught to hope for the best and expect the worst.

I'm sticking with that for now.

i think the devs are planning to improve performance in the ITF by removing the capes from the romans in i17, BABs even stated somewhere (cant find the post atm), that there is a significant performance drop when more critters or players are using capes (i think he said with 100 critters that have capes theres a 97% decrease in performance)

WoW has updated its graphics a few times over the years, always keeping the baseline the same and expanding the higher range for people who have computers that can handle it. Currently, highest settings on WoW can be taxing on some mid-range computers, with better shadows, more draw distance, more detail environment objects, etc. And beginning with their previous expansion(WotLK) and continuing in their next(Cataclysm) they're doing complete overhauls of both their environments and their models.

It will still look cartoony, because that's an intentional design choice on the part of Blizzard.

In some ways Ultra Mode is similar to what WoW has been doing, but in some ways it's different. We're getting new postprocessing effects, much better shadows, and nice-looking reflections on various surfaces like WoW has gotten. But as far as I know, we're not getting upgraded models(just some new ones later on for the new characters/factions in GR), and we're not getting redone environments(again, some new ones later on for GR).

But another similarity between the two is that the minimum requirements stay the same. If you're running these games on a 4 year old PC, turning on the extra settings may not be an option for you. But you can still play the game without them.

And if you look closely at CoH player models, you'd also notice that most of our costume parts are drawn directly onto the body, just like in WoW. (That's anything in the Tight or Tight With Skin category for chest/hips, anything in the Smooth/Bare category of gloves, and a lot of foot options.) Yeah, there's other costume bits that don't just draw on the body, but don't think for a minute that CoH doesn't do it.

Anyway, I do hope all of this work on Ultra Mode comes with some back-end fixes for basic performance, as BillZ said. Even after upgrading to a PC that will run anything I can throw at it at highest settings, I still get FPS drops in certain places in CoH(Grandville, Nerva, parts of Cap, Crey's Folly, for instance).

One of the things that people forget is that the $15 a month subscription fee gives us ONLY access to the game servers whenever they are available for play. While the money collected in game sales and subscription fees does go to operations and expenses, there is never any guarantee that anything will be perfect or even nearly so - as a matter of fact, the TOS (that we agree to every time we play the game) explicitly states that conditions of game play may change at any time without notice.

I'm not arguing that lag and dc's are not aggravating and frustrating, or that the devs should not make an effort to fix issues such as these. But to argue that you pay for hardware upgrades - well, no. You don't. You pay for access to the game servers with the game as it is.

Storm