Actual Reason for CPU Bottleneck?

[Stake From JateFarm]

After hearing Capcom's response to post-release complaints about the game's performance, I've been left confused. At first I believed their response on the face of it. "Wow, the NPCs and pawns wondering around really must be every bit as detailed as they said they'd be." Sure, it sounds like a mystifying game with a weird online component could have issues we're not aware of but we've seen this before. Even following around an NPC for a little bit reveals that their moment to moment choices are not that complicated.

Having a couple handful of NPCs on screen causing frame drops and slowing down the CPU is an issue we're familiar with now affecting action/adventure/RPG games from 1-2 generations of console hardware ago. Since then, CPU and even console hardware feels like they hit lightspeed since the first Dragon's Dogma released; even now consoles have their own implementation of Ray Tracing available. So, in this day and age where poor optimization generally comes down to developers being over-zealous with particle effects/volumetrics, poorly optimized shaders, bad object culling, or implementing the UE5 engine for a simpler game than necessary (GPU-heavy tasks), how are we getting performance issues for NPC density in a modern-day title?

A comment in this Steam thread by user "Rumi" has got me thinking:

"In every game you played in the last decade, if not every game you ever played we both have techniques to reduce what is actively rendered AND simulated on screen.

First of all you have to discern the difference between GPU and CPU load. Objects being rendered, a person being actively walking around in your view, is GPU work. I'm massively simplifying here but efficiently that is what's happening. Every object you see on your screen is affected by frustum culling - which basically just describes the fact that it will simply be toggled off when not looked at by you.

A second culling method is occlusion culling, your game tries to discern which objects are completely blocked by another object such as a wall or a house and will also throw these out from being rendered on your screen. Both of these simple and industry standard technologies are next to automated in every modern engine and part of general optimization.

AI and game logic, as in path finding, physics and collision is part of your CPU load. While these are not object to traditional culling methods it's still industry standard to limit the amount of updated on the game logic that happens away from you or is outside of view. "Faking" it is the appropriate way to go about this - effortlessly wasting resources on things that don't concern the player at the moment is not a good thing. It's not smart. And has no advantage for yourself.

Furthermore NPC's in this game do not have any advanced AI or simulation going on. They are often simple AI agents same as you'd see in Skyrim or the Witcher. I'd say this game arguable has worse NPC AI as they're not even following a schedule, they simply walk from A to B and repeat it aside from very few excuses. Pawns are probably a bit more expensive due to the various factors you mentioned yourself but in no way even close to blasting your CPU away like that. So no it's not an excuse and it's certainly not the reason this game runs so bad regardless of what PR marketing ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Capcom is telling you. "


My questions going forward for Dragon's Dogma 2 now are does anyone know why NPCs are actually so CPU taxing in DD2? Will a bit of tweaking actually be able to fix performance in cities? Is this a result of lack of prioritization prior to release which should come soon now that the game is out the door?

Surely any answers we come up with will be speculation but I just can't reconcile the fact that this is why we're getting such poor performance.


tldr; Dragon's Dogma 2 experiencing CPU bottleneck issues from NPCs and pawns seems like a restriction in video games that was overcome a while ago.

[Wild]

Engine flaw.

[Kintaro]

look at this video and you see everything is fine

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvWySweguNQ

PS: this is not my video but you will see how stu pid people are here and posting misinformation with their 20 year old pentium pc

[königplatzen]

Originally posted by Kintaro:

look at this video and you see everything is fine

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvWySweguNQ

PS: this is not my video but you will see how stu pid people are here and posting misinformation with their 20 year old pentium pc

Dude has a 14900KF. Would be quite weird if it didn't sustain 60FPS

Similar to the result of this review
12700KF OC'd to 4.9Ghz can sustain 75 FPS in Vernworth
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twEERkUyAXE

...but weirdly a different conclusion

[Razorblade]

It's a crappy engine meant for Resident Evil games that needs an upgrade for a big, open world game like DD2. There's no conspiracy; Capcom used an unfit engine because they own it, and it is therefore free.

[Blitz4]

Reason why?

Because the game was underfunded and/or priority wasn't to have an enjoyable experience.

[StardomPlays]

RE Engine limits; compounding factors on top of compounding factors necessitating a 30 fps target. Limits imply tasks done within the pre launch development cycle of course.

[Kintaro]

Originally posted by königplatzen:

Originally posted by Kintaro:

look at this video and you see everything is fine

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvWySweguNQ

PS: this is not my video but you will see how stu pid people are here and posting misinformation with their 20 year old pentium pc

Dude has a 14900KF. Would be quite weird if it didn't sustain 60FPS

Similar to the result of this review
12700KF OC'd to 4.9Ghz can sustain 75 FPS in Vernworth
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twEERkUyAXE

...but weirdly a different conclusion

i got a 10850K, 4 year old cpu which was 300€ back then. easy 100+ fps now

[Where'sMySupersuit!!]

Its literally just a studio pushing an engine to do something it was never meant for. No need for a long text wall, practically just the Bioware situation but with a different company.

[Blitz4]

Originally posted by StardomPlays:

RE Engine limits; compounding factors on top of compounding factors necessitating a 30 fps target. Limits imply tasks done within the pre launch development cycle of course.

or Capcom, the $11 bil company, is cheap and rushed the game to be released before their March 31st end of year to bump their stock price

[StardomPlays]

Originally posted by Kintaro:

Originally posted by königplatzen:

Dude has a 14900KF. Would be quite weird if it didn't sustain 60FPS

Similar to the result of this review
12700KF OC'd to 4.9Ghz can sustain 75 FPS in Vernworth
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twEERkUyAXE

...but weirdly a different conclusion

i got a 10850K, 4 year old cpu which was 300€ back then. easy 100+ fps now

Sure, and my 5800H gets 200 FPS.

[Call Sign: Raven]

The reason that a Capcom rep said, is due to how every NPC dynamically interacts with the environment. It apparently takes a lot of computing power and puts a huge burden on the CPU. Whatever they did, they did NOT use a good technique to implement this feature.

[KZ]

It's RE Engine, more than likely. Frostbyte and Crytek had very similar growing pains when people modified it outside it's very slim, original, scope.

[Grr. [SG CMD] Majah Lazah]

Originally posted by Stake From JateFarm:

After hearing Capcom's response to post-release complaints about the game's performance, I've been left confused. At first I believed their response on the face of it. "Wow, the NPCs and pawns wondering around really must be every bit as detailed as they said they'd be." Sure, it sounds like a mystifying game with a weird online component could have issues we're not aware of but we've seen this before. Even following around an NPC for a little bit reveals that their moment to moment choices are not that complicated.

Having a couple handful of NPCs on screen causing frame drops and slowing down the CPU is an issue we're familiar with now affecting action/adventure/RPG games from 1-2 generations of console hardware ago. Since then, CPU and even console hardware feels like they hit lightspeed since the first Dragon's Dogma released; even now consoles have their own implementation of Ray Tracing available. So, in this day and age where poor optimization generally comes down to developers being over-zealous with particle effects/volumetrics, poorly optimized shaders, bad object culling, or implementing the UE5 engine for a simpler game than necessary (GPU-heavy tasks), how are we getting performance issues for NPC density in a modern-day title?

A comment in this Steam thread by user "Rumi" has got me thinking:

"In every game you played in the last decade, if not every game you ever played we both have techniques to reduce what is actively rendered AND simulated on screen.

First of all you have to discern the difference between GPU and CPU load. Objects being rendered, a person being actively walking around in your view, is GPU work. I'm massively simplifying here but efficiently that is what's happening. Every object you see on your screen is affected by frustum culling - which basically just describes the fact that it will simply be toggled off when not looked at by you.

A second culling method is occlusion culling, your game tries to discern which objects are completely blocked by another object such as a wall or a house and will also throw these out from being rendered on your screen. Both of these simple and industry standard technologies are next to automated in every modern engine and part of general optimization.

AI and game logic, as in path finding, physics and collision is part of your CPU load. While these are not object to traditional culling methods it's still industry standard to limit the amount of updated on the game logic that happens away from you or is outside of view. "Faking" it is the appropriate way to go about this - effortlessly wasting resources on things that don't concern the player at the moment is not a good thing. It's not smart. And has no advantage for yourself.

Furthermore NPC's in this game do not have any advanced AI or simulation going on. They are often simple AI agents same as you'd see in Skyrim or the Witcher. I'd say this game arguable has worse NPC AI as they're not even following a schedule, they simply walk from A to B and repeat it aside from very few excuses. Pawns are probably a bit more expensive due to the various factors you mentioned yourself but in no way even close to blasting your CPU away like that. So no it's not an excuse and it's certainly not the reason this game runs so bad regardless of what PR marketing ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Capcom is telling you. "


My questions going forward for Dragon's Dogma 2 now are does anyone know why NPCs are actually so CPU taxing in DD2? Will a bit of tweaking actually be able to fix performance in cities? Is this a result of lack of prioritization prior to release which should come soon now that the game is out the door?

Surely any answers we come up with will be speculation but I just can't reconcile the fact that this is why we're getting such poor performance.


tldr; Dragon's Dogma 2 experiencing CPU bottleneck issues from NPCs and pawns seems like a restriction in video games that was overcome a while ago.

The main issue is gear optimization. instead of gear pointing to a single file across multiple NPCs, each NPC has gear files and gear scripts running, even if their gear is identical.

All NPcs are also fully realized NPCs which is why all the people saying "but cyberpunk 77 has ten million npcs on screen nernerblurblurblur" are abject morons because 50% of those "NPCs" are literally just meshes running a script and another 25% of those don't even have scripts, they're just auto animating while on screen in view.

DD2 is CPU expensive, simple as.

[Blitz4]

Originally posted by Call Sign: Raven:

The reason that a Capcom rep said, is due to how every NPC dynamically interacts with the environment. It apparently takes a lot of computing power and puts a huge burden on the CPU. Whatever they did, they did NOT use a good technique to implement this feature.

nor test it
nor convince leadership the game isn't ready and up to "Capcom quality standards"
nor prevent it to ship this early before the issue is solved
nor invest more money on devs to fix the issue when they knew about it months and months ago

they're greedy in every sense of the word. it was released early. the design of the implementation of the dynamic NPC interactions wasn't completed but the game still shipped.

it doesn't matter. this isn't a flagship title, like RE, so it won't impact them as much.

remember FF14 how it had a horrible release? FF was square's flagship title, so they decided to redo the entire game from the ground up.

[NikkiQuick]

Originally posted by Where'sMySupersuit!!:

Its literally just a studio pushing an engine to do something it was never meant for. No need for a long text wall, practically just the Bioware situation but with a different company.

Dragons age inquisition and Andromeda right? Didn't EA basically say use frostbite and only frostbite for a while?