Why is the graphics pipeline waiting for server updates?asked by BoMbY
TL;DRThe developer says the graphics pipeline does not wait for server updates and server or netcode performance does not drive client FPS, and that fixing performance is slow because the game pushes the engine beyond its design while chasing high fidelity.
Hi @BoMbY
There are a few myths that seem to get repeated quite a lot - please allow me to dispel some of them for you:
- The graphics pipeline does not wait for server updates.
- Server FPS does not affect client FPS.
- Netcode does not make clients run slowly, and never has.
- Netcode does not make servers run slowly, anymore, even though we've added more clients.
- You get better performance on newer servers because there are fewer players on them so your client has to do less work - like physics, animation, IFCS, and entity updates.
- Players hacking the game to play PU in "offline mode" get better performance than they do online because their clients don't have to deal with all the load generated by 49 other players.
What is so hard about fixing the performance problems is that the game is pushing the engine way beyond what it was designed to handle. Fixing that means fundamentally changing how systems work while simultaneously trying not to break everything in the game that uses them. Big performance gains that require making big changes take time. Sometimes we have to do a lot of restructuring before we can even start working on an optimisation. Making all these changes can introduce a lot of bugs, and fixing those takes even more time. Let's also not forget that performance is not the only goal here - we're also trying to achieve fidelity levels not seen before. Fidelity is often the enemy of performance, so we find ourselves having to optimize even further than we otherwise would have had to.