Rift to go 64-bit Client and true multi-core support

[Slipmat]

An interesting Producer's Letter was posted on the Rift Forum by Archonix last night detailing some of the upcoming plans for Rift this year, hot on the agenda was news that Rift will be getting a 64-bit Client and will allow proper multi-core support

We’re incredibly excited to reveal that the first of our planned updates is the addition of true multicore support to the RIFT client. Our engineers have been making heroic strides in transforming what was once thought of as an impossibility for the RIFT engine into a reality! For those less technically savvy, this will allow RIFT to take advantage of more of the capacity of processors released since RIFT’s launch. Our goal is to improve both the performance and stability of the RIFT client. Early stages of alpha testing are already underway, and have been going extremely well. Over time we’ll be expanding the test to include more and more of you. Faster performance and more stability for RIFT, that’s something that benefits everyone!

Because this is such a huge change, we can’t give exact estimates of when it will be ready, but we’re pushing hard to make it happen as quickly as possible. Once this is ready, we can move on to the next big technical update, which has been going on in parallel – We’re happy to share that we have been converting RIFT to a 64-bit client. It’s another massive amount of work that’s been going on for a long time now. It’ll multiply the benefits provided by true multicore support and allow RIFT to fully utilize your computer’s memory to provide even more performance and stability gains!

You can read the full article at

http://forums.riftgame.com/general-d...ears-rift.html

Also mentions new souls for all callings and stuff we already new about upcoming content, I wonder did that Korean Company who now own the Gamebryo Engine finally got off their butts and are releasing this version of the Engine described in this interview, DirectX 12 etc etc

http://gamingbolt.com/gamebryo-inter...-and-stability

[Super Kami Dende]

OH very nice. One of the few things I disliked about in RIFT was random FPS lag or game lag on my Computer which can run other games at Max.

Multithread support will definitely bring me back to try it out.

[DeltrusDisc]

An update from the Gamebryo engine would certainly help, but I wonder if this is a little too late for Rift... just how active is the game, nowadays?

[Heathy]

its about time tbh, the only thing that really annoys me about rift is how terrible it runs when your doing 20 mans. hopefully it'll be less jarring. i find it playable but it just feels like too much is going on for the game to really process frame by frame. it wouldn't be so bad if the fights were relatively easy but most of them aren't.

http://i.imgur.com/mV9bFz7.webm

[theWocky]

So, as per usual:

"We're working on it. We don't know when, but someday it will happen" - this is different how exactly to the last 4 years or so of promises?

I will, however, be suitably impressed if this happens - and works.

- - - Updated - - -

An update from the Gamebryo engine would certainly help, but I wonder if this is a little too late for Rift... just how active is the game, nowadays?

Mortally wounded would be a good description - they made some dumb and dumber community in-game decisions lately.

[Slipmat]

just how active is the game, nowadays?

Only Trion can answer that and as a private Company we'll prob never get to know. Also been F2P means the population will flucutuate from week to week, heck from day to day as people can choose when to log in with no penalties.

There's no doubt it's well down from, say, 2 years ago, how much though, 1/2? 1/3? hard to tell but you still see people in all zones, even the lowbie starter ones, Open World Instant Adventure Raids are always full even though the Hammerknell IA is more popular, World bosses still get 3-4 full raid groups every day doing them, full raids for Nightmare Rifts. Been able to hop to any shard you like of course helps a lot with these raids so overall, yes Rift has a lower population, will prob increase when the 5th Anniversary Event starts and as people get bored of which ever new shiny FoTM MMO is devoured

[DeltrusDisc]

Nightmare Rift? I can't recall if those were around in Vanilla Rift or early Storm Legion, do explain. :P

Frankly though, it just felt like nothing was sacred to Trion when they pushed Rift to F2P... the shiny Tartargon that I spent weeks farming artifacts for, buying what I could off the AH, and running around zones all day and night... the undead horse for River of Souls achievements. You could just buy these things. And then it just became stupid - it's not really buy to win, though I hear that's the direction they've started taking recently, but it's a shame. Like, at least have some rewards yet locked behind in-game achievements, ya know? I'd probably still be playing, if that were the case.

[BiggestNoob]

They've been making this same claim for at least 2 full years.

[Slipmat]

One of the Lead Engineers, Snedhepl, has done a post outlining a bit more about the multi-core support coming soon:

Now, for the most exciting upcoming feature: true multicore support! This is really huge news, and it’s been kept under wraps for more than a year! This is about the biggest change we can make to RIFT. It is, essentially, changing the way the entire game engine renders. Any bigger and we’d basically be re-writing the game from scratch.

Why is it important? RIFT runs in a graphics API called DirectX 9 (DX9). This allows the RIFT client to talk to your computer’s graphics card. The problem is that DX9 is showing its age and was designed with single-core computers in mind, and DX9 places a fairly large burden on the CPU. Technology has since advanced and now multiple core computers are the norm. RIFT will soon have true multicore support, which allows us to use every core on your computer to provide better frame rate and improved response time while ensuring that your CPU speed doesn’t throttle your graphics card.

You can read the full post at:

http://forums.riftgame.com/general-d...tech-rift.html

Nightmare Rift? I can't recall if those were around in Vanilla Rift or early Storm Legion, do explain.

Nightmare Rifts came with Plane of Water Expansion and basically are like normal Rifts but on steroids

Everyone will get automatically mentored down to the level of the NMR so if i opened a level 10 NMR in Silverwood, everyone that joins the raid will get mentored down to level 10, it follows the same basics as a normal Rift, packs of mobs followed by a boss and on it goes, it will last as long as the raid doesn't fail the timer, you're talking about 300+ stages for them.

There are various Tiers, a Tier One NMR is easy enough, it's possible to get into the 100's in the Open World but to guarantee success you can also buy an Instance Lure so you and your raid can enter your own Instance and do NMRs without any "baddies" coming along leeching or standing in bad

Tier 5 Nightmare Rifts are almost like proper raids, bosses get more complex mechanics, as you get into stages 150+ of a NMR 5 healing, using the powerups becomes essential, in fact they had to be nerfed as people couldn't do a lot of the mechanics, like at the start of the Expansion the bosses would do an ability where you'd have to face away from the boss or it would get a shield, despite big letters appearing on screen to "look away now!!" the amount of baddies that didn't turn away meant the boss got an unbreakable shield and timer ran out

**Edit*8 found a few videos on YouYube showing some gameplay, this is inside the instance Shores of Terror.

[BiggestNoob]

One of the Lead Engineers, Snedhepl, has done a post outlining a bit more about the multi-core support coming soon:

And he's full of shit. Trion has no good engineers left. They've been "working on this" for as long as I can remember, and it's been asked for since early beta.

There's nothing that makes this a fundamentally difficult problem, and it's not particularly difficult if you know what you're doing. The rendering doesn't need to happen on multiple cores to be efficient -- plenty of games that look better than Rift use single core rendering and run at substantially higher framerates. And DX9 isn't the problem, nor is the major improvement in DX11 or DX12 parallel rendering. The game doesn't even come close to saturating a modern GPU while rendering a single fucking square. And let's not forget that DX and OpenGL can't actually parallelize GPU calls, so the things getting moved into other threads are very unlikely to improve performance of the game much. Only if extreme CPU processing is being done for each frame before generating GPU calls is there a huge benefit. And we don't see any technology like that in Rift. Much of it is static and can be heavily cached -- this isn't real time physics, destructible environments, or highly dynamic scenes.

Here's what DX12 really brings you:

This has in turn driven the need for an API that scales similarly with core count. GPU performance can be exploited three ways: drawing better pixels, more pixels and more objects. We have reaped much of what can be gained from pixels. DX12’s focus is on enabling a dramatic increase in visual richness through a significant decrease in API-related CPU overhead. Historically, drivers and OS software have managed memory, state, and synchronization on behalf of developers. However, inefficiencies result from the imperfect understanding of an application’s needs. DX12 gives the application the ability to directly manage resources and state, and perform necessary synchronization. As a result, developers of advanced applications can efficiently control the GPU, taking advantage of their intimate knowledge of the game’s behavior.

DX12 is not Mantle, nor is it widely supported in consumer hardware. DX11 support is just now reaching market saturation. Multithreaded command buffers do not allow the GPU to perform render calls sent by multiple threads in parallel. It simply reduces the CPU overhead involved in performing the same work. When this overhead is a substantial part of the budget of each frame, the result is a huge performance increase. This is currently not the problem with Rift, nor with most DX9 applications. This is a class of issues with cutting edge engines saw on DX11 which generated enormous amounts of traffic to the GPU, causing significant CPU overhead in the driver and OS. When a game like Rift spends almost all its time performing inefficient calculations then spends very little time actually sending calls to the GPU, it will see virtually no benefit from the improvements made in DX11 and DX12.

A game as old as Rift should be running at 200+ FPS on minimum settings and easily well over 60 FPS on max settings in a crowded area. It can barely do 40 on minimum settings in a crowded area, and moving everything unimportant to other threads like UI and lua processing will at most give something like a 10-20% improvement which is nowhere close to good. I'm talking about rendering with all of the CPU-intensive processing DISABLED, which means the core rendering code is the thing that's inefficient here. This should've been the primary focus this entire time. I've done significant performance analysis and improvements. It's very common in obviously inefficient code to find an easy solution to improve performance by 10-100x. We have never once seen any such optimization improvement in Rift. Never.

If they were going to really "rewrite the entire game", they'd have just ported it to a new engine. That takes far less time than doing anything so drastic, which tells us that this claim is a lie.

[Slipmat]

Hmm, who to believe, an Engineer employed by Trion and actively working on the game engine or random Internet poster on random game Forum, tough call to make, also you could count how many games out there are even DirectX 12 on one hand and still have fingers left over, let alone any MMO running DirectX 12 or even getting converted to DirectX 12 anytime soon.

[justinhalfout]

I doubt any of this will take place since at the rate they're going nobody will be left to actually enjoy all these supposed new bells and whistles

[BiggestNoob]

Hmm, who to believe, an Engineer employed by Trion and actively working on the game engine or random Internet poster on random game Forum, tough call to make, also you could count how many games out there are even DirectX 12 on one hand and still have fingers left over, let alone any MMO running DirectX 12 or even getting converted to DirectX 12 anytime soon.

You mean the guy Trion tried to hire to solve this exact problem because I was trying to debug the issue on my end without access to the source and was talking to Trion employees about it? Yeah, I'm a senior engineer working in SV, and I very well could make a modern game engine on DX12 as well as an MMO.

Try to employ common sense here. Would Trion Worlds, a company with scant engineering resources and a budget minuscule by comparison to major studios that build their own engines, somehow come up with the resources to rewrite a game engine from scratch or would they just port their game to a new engine?

What is most likely the case is that things that aren't essential to the engine's render loop are being moved off the main thread, which probably involved ugly immutability hacks for the engine because the game previously just used a bunch of global mutable state. That means whatever the overhead from those tasks was on the main thread will now be available for rendering, which might give a 10-15% performance increase. They also use processing on their executable that adds a significant overhead which this won't fix. It's unlikely that anyone would notice a difference. Going from 20 FPS to 23 FPS would not be noticeable for the vast majority of people.

[Slipmat]

Going from 20 FPS to 23 FPS would not be noticeable for the vast majority of people.

Except Snedhepl published some screenshots of an 11 FPS increase in a large scale zone Event which would normally have anywhere up to 100+ players, it's the Ocean boss that appears above Draumheim, Ojingeodon.

No Multi-core:



With Multi-core:



Since the testing going on Live right now with the chosen few is under NDA there's no way to get more info on different PC builds, does having an 8 Core CPU work better than a Quad core, stuff like that but from what they said, anyone using the multi-core addon has no effect on anybody else's game play so can't even tell who's using it to pick their brains

[BiggestNoob]

-Dumb, dumber, dumbest things ever said-

You do realize that instantaneous framerates are not useful for comparisons like this, right? There's a huge variance in framerate Rift dependent on many factors. Even standing in the same area with no variables changing, you can restart the client several times and get different framerates. In addition, you could be looking at a beta build that includes none of that shit that they add into production builds that makes it run like shit on our machines. It has always run significantly better in beta builds on Trion machines than in production.

You would need a deterministic and repeatable test an to collect framerate data for many data points to draw conclusions about framerate increases. This is just basic shit man.

Not to mention they didn't specify in that stream what is actually being distributed. That means this improvement may only be visible if you're using certain graphical settings. For many people who are running Rift with as much disabled as possible because it runs at sub 20 FPS in raids, they may see absolutely nothing if only expensive CPU processing is being distributed.

If it wasn't clear to everyone here already, I think blatant stupidity like this proves you're a fanboy or a shill.

[Slipmat]

Ah yes, the old reliable Ad Hominem comeback, insult the poster, call him dumb when i was just quoting and reposting what the Thread was discussing, it wasn't me doing the test, it wasn't me that took the screen shots, i have no idea what rig it was all done on, like i said all i'm doing is reposting the results the Engineer got, you know the guy actually working on the engine and not the armchair engineer posting on MMO Champion.

[Frozenbeef]

Would be nice if it actually was added and did icnreae fps, Soemthing currently is really off with performance in game can set everything to max and get like 30fps then set everything to low and get like only a 10fps increase, then turning around or moving just reduces it again :S

[justinhalfout]

Ah yes, the old reliable Ad Hominem comeback, insult the poster, call him dumb when i was just quoting and reposting what the Thread was discussing, it wasn't me doing the test, it wasn't me that took the screen shots, i have no idea what rig it was all done on, like i said all i'm doing is reposting the results the Engineer got, you know the guy actually working on the engine and not the armchair engineer posting on MMO Champion.

Keep drinking that Trion branded Koolaid Slip and take everything they say as gospel,I'd sooner trust the word of an armchair enginneer frankly over that of the bunch of comedians in charge of the game nowdays.

[theWocky]

Ah yes, the old reliable Ad Hominem comeback, insult the poster, call him dumb when i was just quoting and reposting what the Thread was discussing, it wasn't me doing the test, it wasn't me that took the screen shots, i have no idea what rig it was all done on, like i said all i'm doing is reposting the results the Engineer got, you know the guy actually working on the engine and not the armchair engineer posting on MMO Champion.

I hate to break it to you, but you bring it upon yourself.

You are like some person sucking on some cult Trion Kool-aid and come across as some sort of Trion Evangelist.
You appear incapable of being critical of anything negative about the game.

Those screenshots are completely irrelevant.

1. How many players were there in the original test? 10, 20, 30? You said that there "can" be 100+ players.
2. The players were doing, standing in exactly the same spot at the second screenshot?

We don't know the test environment. For all we know, there were 20 people on screen and the graphic fidelity was turned right down and it is highly likely the scenario was changed between screenshots.

Far too many variables, so these screenshots prove nothing.

We've all seen previous Trion "performance boosts" and this discussion is nothing new. With Trions track record, this 64 bit, multi-core client may remain in alpha forever and then discarded. Not like it hasn't happened before. Heck, they couldn't even keep the mobile app working after promises to "have an engineer working on it"?

Based on their track record and recent behaviour, gestapo attitude on Forums, I really don't assign any credibility to their actions any more.

They also appear to break more with each content patch than is normal - especially when bugs affect / or appear to drive players towards the cash shop to rectify - eg. damaged currency rewards and/or drops in the beginning of events. How many times has this happened and apologies were made?

Then we have stealth patches that take REX away from referrals and NO RESPONSE weeks later except a weak response of "Oh, I forgot to hit post to tell you guys about the patch. My bad" - but absolutely nothing further happens to make up for their mistake.

I don't think Rift will be around in 2 years. I uninstalled it as well as their other games earlier in the year. They should choose a F2P model and stick to it, instead, they launch with one model and then introduce and remove features that penalize / punish F2P players.

Trion are the FineBros of the MMORPG world.

[thewallofsleep]

While I don't play Rift anymore, it's good to see they are doing this. Now that the game is essentially true P2W, it's too little too late, in my opinion. Still cool though. I was always blown away by how terribly the game ran on my system with an i7 processor, 2GB GPU and 16GB of RAM. My system has since been upgraded significantly and I bet it still runs like garbage.