This game has a serious problem

[tizeY]

After spending some time in the game i've observed the same behavior from the game as everyone else.
The loading times are unusually long and an obscene amount of data gets processed.
For how many resources are allocated to the game it seemingly still struggles.

Now why is that?

The answer is something is quite simple -> steamapps\common\The First Descendant\M1\Content\Paks M1-Windows.ucas is a 33.3gb file which contains almost the entirety of the gamedata.

Why is this an issue and what does it have to do with the resource hog and performance issues?

Everything you do ingame requires your CPU/DISK to process 33gb of data over and over to find the requested piece of data. Every subsequent patch be it 10bytes of data will require those 33gb's of data to be completely rewritten.

This will not just wear your disk out, this will also in it's current state never be a efficient way to load data. To put it into perspective if the files were split into each and every subfile for areas and ingamefunctions the amount of data processed would be 1/10th of what it currently does.

The Shadercache also doesn't properly function due to this, it is half a gigabyte of shaders: \AppData\Local\M1\Saved ->D3DGraphics_v4318_D8578 with a 300mb Computing module attached to it D3DCompute_V4318_D8578

For a big company you have done some of the laziest possible approaches to push out a halfbake dead on arrival framework which will not be possible to optimize past it's current limitation in it's state due to your design choices.

Will this be fixed? it should, if it's not then the game will ONLY ever require more data to be processed at all times the more content gets added.

Now isn't that a pleasant thought?

[fermioff]

Several friends of mine are playing, and I have a feeling they're going to be done with the game before I figure out exactly what's going on. There is definitely a disproportionate amount of resources in use for the sort of game it is. I mean, it shouldn't be anymore gpu/cpu intensive than, idk, Elder Scrolls Online.

Anyhow, upon initializing the game, my cpu temps spike, and that is only the beginning. That's quite incredible given the game hasn't even launched. And then, as you mention, the caching takes an unusual amount of time, but I don't know all of the technical details involved. Although, anecdotally, I cannot say I've experienced this before.

Furthermore, a more interesting observation, the game seems to use an extraordinary amount of resources regardless of my display/graphics settings. My experience with this game so far has been unprecedented. I've run a number of intense benchmarks to test my system(s) over the years, yet none have attempted to initiate nuclear fusion inside of my machine as this game has. I feel sure, if it were cold outside, I could play this game without turning the heat on, since my pc would suffice. And if my machine were submerged you'd catch a glimpse of some Cherenkov radiation.

I think I may test some things out with proc mon and perhaps, if that doesn't provide any useful data, I'll test out some SANS cybersecurity and digital forensics tools. It'll be like making a game out of not playing the game! xD

I sort of want to play the game, so it would be nice if they would willingly optimize its resource management instead of my feeling the need to explore more *interesting* means of improvement.

5800x undervolted (and +200 mhz overclocked until this game) w/ ppt110 tdc80 edc104
7900xtx 24gb
win 11 pro
64gb RAM

[_Atr4Mør5]

Originally posted by tizeY:

The loading times are unusually long and an obscene amount of data gets processed.

Loading time of what?

I'm running the game now.
The EAC window popped up, I waited for it to go away and started the stopwatch.
Then Nexon's Intro appears, advertisement of engines and technologies, then connection occurs, then the main menu appears through a very long fade, already at the stage of connection I spammed the Enter button. Then the character appears, where you have to press the start button, then again a long fade, preparation of shaders, and finally appearance in the game in Albion.

All this took me 1 minute, 8 seconds.

Is it long?

[_Atr4Mør5]

Originally posted by fermioff:

I mean, it shouldn't be anymore gpu/cpu intensive than, idk, Elder Scrolls Online.

Why is that? And WoW, and TES:O, and FF XIV are server-side asynchronous games.

The First Descendant is synchronous and more client-side, which makes it consume more resources from the player's system. It also has more modern graphics than TES:O, which looks like TES:Oblivion with mods.

[tizeY]

Originally posted by _Atr4Mør5:

Originally posted by tizeY:

The loading times are unusually long and an obscene amount of data gets processed.

Loading time of what?

All this took me 1 minute, 8 seconds.

Is it long?

1 minute and 8 seconds is long yes, and the loading times in general require all the shaders to be reloaded and not just the ones for each region. This is the way it's designed and it's stupid, same with the loading of each region you're not loading the region you're loading the entire file again. Which is yet again by design.

Which brings me to cherry ontop and what really infuriated me, everything that gets added past this point with only make the core engine failure more obvious.

And yes, as a reverse engineer i can infact tell you that the current iteration of the shadercache is absolute crap.

[JohnMiller92]

doesn't path of exile do something similar? they have a .ggpk file that's around 30gb too. loads fast af and they've been doing it this way since 2012 afaik. i think they just house all the files inside there to be loaded as a virtual directory

i don't believe it's that big of an issue as you would think

[Eurodyne]

Thank you. My PC has become a nuclear fusion reactor.

[tizeY]

Originally posted by JohnMiller92:

doesn't path of exile do something similar? they have a .ggpk file that's around 30gb too. loads fast af and they've been doing it this way since 2012 afaik. i think they just house all the files inside there to be loaded as a virtual directory

i don't believe it's that big of an issue as you would think

path of exile has compatibility issues with steam, the standalone version handles things appropriately.

there is also a difference between .ggpk and .ucas

[_Atr4Mør5]

Originally posted by tizeY:

Originally posted by _Atr4Mør5:

Loading time of what?

All this took me 1 minute, 8 seconds.

Is it long?

1 minute and 8 seconds is long yes, and the loading times in general require all the shaders to be reloaded and not just the ones for each region. This is the way it's designed and it's stupid, same with the loading of each region you're not loading the region you're loading the entire file again. Which is yet again by design.

Which brings me to cherry ontop and what really infuriated me, everything that gets added past this point with only make the core engine failure more obvious.

And yes, as a reverse engineer i can infact tell you that the current iteration of the shadercache is absolute crap.

Well... mr. Revers-Engineer, who said

Originally posted by tizeY:

The answer is something is quite simple -> steamapps\common\The First Descendant\M1\Content\Paks M1-Windows.ucas is a 33.3gb file which contains almost the entirety of the gamedata.

What can you tell us about Linear Operations and Operations with random access and how they are perform on HDD/SSD?

[tizeY]

Originally posted by _Atr4Mør5:

Originally posted by tizeY:

1 minute and 8 seconds is long yes, and the loading times in general require all the shaders to be reloaded and not just the ones for each region. This is the way it's designed and it's stupid, same with the loading of each region you're not loading the region you're loading the entire file again. Which is yet again by design.

Which brings me to cherry ontop and what really infuriated me, everything that gets added past this point with only make the core engine failure more obvious.

And yes, as a reverse engineer i can infact tell you that the current iteration of the shadercache is absolute crap.

Well... mr. Revers-Engineer, who said

Originally posted by tizeY:

The answer is something is quite simple -> steamapps\common\The First Descendant\M1\Content\Paks M1-Windows.ucas is a 33.3gb file which contains almost the entirety of the gamedata.

What can you tell us about Linear Operations and Operations with random access and how they are perform on HDD/SSD?

nothing without getting game or forum banned

[_Atr4Mør5]

Originally posted by tizeY:

Originally posted by _Atr4Mør5:

Well... mr. Revers-Engineer, who said

What can you tell us about Linear Operations and Operations with random access and how they are perform on HDD/SSD?

nothing without getting game or forum banned

BTW, mr. Revers-Engineer

The last patch was 264MB, which also changed the M1-Windows.ucas file, which is 33GB in size. Do you know why your speculations are just speculations? As correctly pointed out above, Path of Exile is packaged on the same principle, except that the Path of Exile installer is able to repackage files, replace old data inside the archive with new data, and then pack it back again, without having to download the entire archive.

Steam, by the way, also can do this.
For this reason, the latest patch and has a size of 264MB, not 33GB.

[tizeY]

Originally posted by _Atr4Mør5:

Originally posted by tizeY:

nothing without getting game or forum banned

BTW, mr. Revers-Engineer

Steam, by the way, also can do this.
For this reason, the latest patch and has a size of 264MB, not 33GB.

which is also precisely why it rewrites the 33gb's everytime the gamefile is changed, absolutely.

[_Atr4Mør5]

Originally posted by tizeY:

Originally posted by _Atr4Mør5:

BTW, mr. Revers-Engineer

Steam, by the way, also can do this.
For this reason, the latest patch and has a size of 264MB, not 33GB.

which is also precisely why it rewrites the 33gb's everytime the gamefile is changed, absolutely.

It's the same as opening 7Z or RAR and adding a file there.

And if the archive was divided into a hundred small ones, you would wait for the game to load not 1 minute, of which half of the time is video clips and menu fades, but 3-5 minutes.

Because random access operations - sucks.

[JohnMiller92]

Originally posted by tizeY:

Originally posted by JohnMiller92:

doesn't path of exile do something similar? they have a .ggpk file that's around 30gb too. loads fast af and they've been doing it this way since 2012 afaik. i think they just house all the files inside there to be loaded as a virtual directory

i don't believe it's that big of an issue as you would think

path of exile has compatibility issues with steam, the standalone version handles things appropriately.

there is also a difference between .ggpk and .ucas

Originally posted by tizeY:

Everything you do ingame requires your CPU/DISK to process 33gb of data over and over to find the requested piece of data.

30gb of data doesn't need to be read and loaded into memory for data inside that file to be accessed though. your entire premise in the original post isn't correct mate.

[tizeY]

Originally posted by JohnMiller92:

Originally posted by tizeY:

path of exile has compatibility issues with steam, the standalone version handles things appropriately.

there is also a difference between .ggpk and .ucas

Originally posted by tizeY:

Everything you do ingame requires your CPU/DISK to process 33gb of data over and over to find the requested piece of data.

30gb of data doesn't need to be read and loaded into memory for data inside that file to be accessed though. your entire premise in the original post isn't correct mate.

i'll genuinely just stop arguing and encourage you all to monitor what the game does by yourselfs the next time it gets patched. Ya'll know better than me and i'm full of myself fr fr ong.

[_Atr4Mør5]

Originally posted by tizeY:

Ya'll know better than me and i'm full of myself fr fr ong.

You said it.

But I'm used to trusting only myself.

Oh, by the way, I'm an engineer too. A technical engineer. And I'm sick and tired of dealing with low-quality software, with Windows that doing what it likes and so on and so forth.

Yeah, man, you're not the only one. As the proverb says For every big fish, there is always a bigger fish.