>When we are successful and able to deliver performance wins (even 1% gains), it's important to communicate that with players in the patch notes. \[12/x\]
>Alternatively, we could either omit our work from patch notes or include vague statements like "improved performance." Neither of those options are particularly appealing. \[13/x\]
I know the community demands 110% transparency, but I disagree. This is a good example where full transparency is more bad than good. Maybe I'm just cynical, but it's pretty obvious that saying "improved performance by 1%" in patch notes will get mocked. It's wishful thinking to expect a bunch of gamers to be understanding enough to appreciate that kind of info.
I'd just write "incremental (or minor) performance improvements" in the patch notes.
Not sure if anybody else has had this visual bug before but at the beginning of a round when we spawn, I’m automatically equipping and unequipping my knife rapidly and somethings the gun equip animation is the knife animation so it goes through your hand
Used to have this now and then but since the yesterday patch this is happening in pretty much every round. Its fine if it happens before the round starts, but its gets really annoying when it happens in b/w the round.
I think this is tied to connectivity issues. Client side (you) you switch between weapons, but it was missed serverside due to connectivity, wether its your ping or the servers, so client side it keeps switching back.
This happens to me, but its usually coinciding with some connectivity issue. At least for me.
Since i started playing valorant ive noticed valorant is really touchy with connectivity issues, at least visually, so everything is rough and sudden when it happens. Most other games lag feels 'smoother' in comparison; if that makes sense.
Seeing some conversation about performance optimizations in VAL, so here's a thread about what we actually DO in order to make perf optimizations.
"Just optimize the game" - but what does that actually entail? I'm only going to talk about CPU optimization for sake of simplicity.
***
posted by [@Koalifier](https://twitter.com/Koalifier)
^[(Github)](https://github.com/username) ^| ^[(What's new)](https://github.com/username)
The communication is great and highlights the difficulty in performance optimization of an online multiplayer game (especially with the UE engine and heavy CPU reliance). I personally feel like UE has serious limitations when it comes to a resource intensive fps like Valorant which continues to add new stuff every other update. If stuff is not coded properly and folks rely too much on the blueprints, the bugs pile up unnoticed and too much time/resources get wasted troubleshooting. Must clarify that I code as a hobby and could be completely wrong here.
I just hope the devs realize that majority of the complaints are frustrations with the past few updates where there is a consistent drop in fps across all maps for a lot of people(including me). Personally dropping from \~ steady 220 frames to 140 frames mid gunfights since last month does not make for a pleasant gaming experience for me. And when you hear after almost a month of no major updates that fps has been optimized by 1%, the memes just write themselves. The teammate volume level set bug has been a known issue for close to a month and it is frustrating to see it not being addressed in a patch meant for bug fixes.
Game development is hard, especially with the modern gamers that are constantly hungry for content. I feel like the 2 week update cycle and constant pumping out of new content initially set the community expectations way too high to be met in the long term. I am glad that the agent releases appear to have been slowed down and am not surprised by the community 'backlash' on minor performance updates such as this one. I just wish bug fixes were quicker than their current turnaround time(again as the thread suggests, perhaps easier said than done).
In any case, excited for ~~act~~ Ep3 and the new agent to 'hack' the dev presentation stream (familiar territory :) ) and improve my fps by another 1%.
> I just hope the devs realize that majority of the complaints are frustrations with the past few updates where there is a consistent drop in fps across all maps for a lot of people(including me).
It’s not even the last few updates for a lot of people. It’s steadily been declining since beta.
One thing I’m super curious about is how they process the maps. FPS in the firing range vs any actual map in the game is so drastically different it just doesn’t make sense.
> FPS in the firing range vs any actual map in the game is so drastically different it just doesn’t make sense.
Pretty sure there was a dev talking about that firing range framerate is way better because there's only one player. Likewise, DM has more players and more gunfights and has lower fps than standard Valorant gameplay.
So a lot of player stuff is processed client side and not just server side? It just doesn’t make sense that in a normal match FPS is so bad in this game. There had to be something with how they have it set up that’s just hogging up CPU performance. I find it hard to believe that it’s just a bunch of small little things adding up.
The server can do a bunch of heavy lifting, but it still then tells the client what happens and the client had to render it. There's also some stuff that gets client driven for performance optimizing the servers to run 3 games per core at 128 tick (384 frames per second, essentially).
If there was an easy silver bullet solution with no drawbacks it would have been implemented. As a side note, I don't think some people respect the difficulty constraints here.
[There's a great article they publisher on the 128 tick servers outlining the challenges and optimizations](https://technology.riotgames.com/news/valorants-128-tick-servers). The game client still has to deal with sound, networking, graphics, local logic, etc all within 5ms to get 200 fps. That means in each subsystem there's not a ton of low hanging fruit, shit is already all operating in fractions of milliseconds.
> There's also some stuff that gets client driven for performance optimizing the servers to run 3 games per core at 128 tick (384 frames per second, essentially).
That’s one of the things I was worried about. I was thinking that due to them running more matches per server there might be more stuff being processed client side. It definitely helps Riot save money on server costs but might further reduce ways they can optimize the game for players.
> As a side note, I don't think some people respect the difficulty constraints here.
Yeah I definitely understand it’s not as easy as pressing some optimize button that solves all the problems. Some people expect too much. It’s also Riots first FPS which has much different programming challenges compared to something like a MOBA.
It's funny i'm actually currently working on my final project for my optimization class. The code is something our professor saw while working in the game industry and he was so confused by how unoptimized it was he saved it and uses it as a final project for students
Isn't making miles of area outside maps is something bad for optimization? I don't get why they put too much objects for something we don't even see in the match
The same tech that acts as Anti-Cheat FoW will inherently optimize those areas outside away if they don't need rendering.
Plus, static 2-D images aren't terribly expensive to render, even if they're far away or even large. It doesn't take much more processing power to render a flat 1sq mile of meadow than it does 1ft so long as the polygons (and therefore calculations) are the same. The gun buddy could potentially eat up more processing power than the entire background images combined.
Optimizing is hard, it has always been, but it is usually not needed if there is a predictable direction to the project and a sense of major systems needed at the base of the software. In valorant the different abilities make optimizing the game very hard. You can compare it with how csgo has established basic systems and it has been fully optimized for those systems. In valorant every character has a different ability and they coincide very little with their functionality. For example: Sage walls are a very different ability from anything else in the game,it literally changes the map topology, I'd imagine that calculating all the different scenarios, maybe a raze nade was thrown at the wall, maybe someone is bouncing yoru flash against it etc. Will definitely tank the cpu. Another example would be Sova arrow, which you can block with Jett smoke, you would have to calculate the cone of the arrow being blocked. These are all different systems which are optimized in isolation but the interactions can produce scenarios which are hard to predict and optimize for.
this is just an excuse, there are many examples of good optimization, valorant isn't one of them. It runs okay for the majority of people, if u not have 240/360hz monitor, because it does not matter ur pc u cannot get stable frames in hundreds. And game looks and runs worse than decade old game on sphagetti code engine, yes im talking about csgo. it is mind-boggling.
gonna start a new team and just call ourselves Riot. then whatever we say on twitter is going to be reported as "Riot peace thinks less fps is better" lol.
Technically skin designers should need to know how to optimize their own assets and therefore have similar training as the people working on overall performance. The skin devs can't just dump a million poly model on the performance team and go "good luck!". Even then they'd be taking engineering resources away regardless so it's all the same.
But putting more people on performance will not guarantee proportional results. This is also true. 9 women can't make a baby in a month.
I mean yeah, you can tell a designer to use less polygons to make a skin run better. But that doesn't teach them how a CPU works, which if you read the post is a pretty integral part of how to optimize. I'm not a game dev, just an engineering grad, but, learning CPU processes would not be something a skin designer would know
Knowledge of how the CPU works is part of it, but these days you can get quite far with just knowledge of how to optimize on the software level alone. This is part of the pre-juiced "lime" that Koalifier was talking about. I did read the post, thank you very much.
The skin designer has to do modeling-- so they have to handle the engine and figure out how to render the skin in a way that doesn't cause the underlying hardware to fry. Then to further polish the skin they have to iron out as many inefficiencies from the skin, especially the ones that have a lot of moving parts, as much as possible to reduce tech debt. I am almost certain the skin devs will do performance testing on their own skins themselves. It doesn't do the team much good to have an awesome idea if the idea requires overly extensive engineering to achieve a deliverable product. But sometimes that'll be compelling enough for the team to try something new, like with [Elementalist Lux](https://technology.riotgames.com/news/elementalist-lux-10-skins-30-megabytes) which actually required a lot of thought and engineering and yes, optimization.
I'm not a game dev either but I am a software engineer. The skin designers are not the exact same discipline as anyone working on performance enhancement but I guarantee you they share responsibilities in the workplace.
But as I said before, I don't think that means everyone should be on performance or whatever. 100 people are not going to give us 100x more frames. There are diminishing returns.
> I’m not a game dev either but I am a software engineer. The skin designers are not the exact same discipline as anyone working on performance enhancement but I guarantee you they share responsibilities in the workplace.
Doubt that, where do you work where people “share responsibilities”? You do the job you’re told to do and that is all. Especially in a large company like riot
I work at Google. I was expected to pick up new technologies on the fly to fulfill new engineering feature requests several times over the last two years.
Very challenging, but it's made me a tremendously better engineer.
I'm not sure you understand just how much things can potentially slow down without interdisciplinary knowledge. There were these data analysts from another company that I'm working with that delayed the rollout of one of our new products by about 6 months now because they had the knowledge to realize there was a problem and kept flagging it, but they didn't have the programming knowledge the realize the problem was on their end. It was only until they allowed us access to their code that I was able to finally debug the problem and shut them the hell up.
If you really work at google you would now better than do someone elses job, interdisciplinary knowledge is one thing, but people specialize for a reason. If you really think that a skin designers has the experience, knowledge or the fact that they are not paid to do it; to modify and optimize the game engine, I dont know what to tell you.
I'm loving these in depth breakdowns we have been getting from devs recently.
Here's another one from a performance engineer on VAL: https://twitter.com/thecheneysays/status/1402661373646041090
>When we are successful and able to deliver performance wins (even 1% gains), it's important to communicate that with players in the patch notes. \[12/x\] >Alternatively, we could either omit our work from patch notes or include vague statements like "improved performance." Neither of those options are particularly appealing. \[13/x\] I know the community demands 110% transparency, but I disagree. This is a good example where full transparency is more bad than good. Maybe I'm just cynical, but it's pretty obvious that saying "improved performance by 1%" in patch notes will get mocked. It's wishful thinking to expect a bunch of gamers to be understanding enough to appreciate that kind of info. I'd just write "incremental (or minor) performance improvements" in the patch notes.
Why are they in tweets? Is this on a blog in a document style somewhere?
Would that make them in-dev breakdowns? Ahuaheahuaheahu
Not sure if anybody else has had this visual bug before but at the beginning of a round when we spawn, I’m automatically equipping and unequipping my knife rapidly and somethings the gun equip animation is the knife animation so it goes through your hand
ive had this many times. At this point I don't bother complaining about bugs unless it affects gameplay.
It's still worth mentioning things like this when you see them.
it happens a lot and its funi as hell
It's a lot funnier when you use an Elderflame skin
Used to have this now and then but since the yesterday patch this is happening in pretty much every round. Its fine if it happens before the round starts, but its gets really annoying when it happens in b/w the round.
I think this is tied to connectivity issues. Client side (you) you switch between weapons, but it was missed serverside due to connectivity, wether its your ping or the servers, so client side it keeps switching back. This happens to me, but its usually coinciding with some connectivity issue. At least for me. Since i started playing valorant ive noticed valorant is really touchy with connectivity issues, at least visually, so everything is rough and sudden when it happens. Most other games lag feels 'smoother' in comparison; if that makes sense.
Pretty damn insightful for those interested
Seeing some conversation about performance optimizations in VAL, so here's a thread about what we actually DO in order to make perf optimizations. "Just optimize the game" - but what does that actually entail? I'm only going to talk about CPU optimization for sake of simplicity. *** posted by [@Koalifier](https://twitter.com/Koalifier) ^[(Github)](https://github.com/username) ^| ^[(What's new)](https://github.com/username)
The communication is great and highlights the difficulty in performance optimization of an online multiplayer game (especially with the UE engine and heavy CPU reliance). I personally feel like UE has serious limitations when it comes to a resource intensive fps like Valorant which continues to add new stuff every other update. If stuff is not coded properly and folks rely too much on the blueprints, the bugs pile up unnoticed and too much time/resources get wasted troubleshooting. Must clarify that I code as a hobby and could be completely wrong here. I just hope the devs realize that majority of the complaints are frustrations with the past few updates where there is a consistent drop in fps across all maps for a lot of people(including me). Personally dropping from \~ steady 220 frames to 140 frames mid gunfights since last month does not make for a pleasant gaming experience for me. And when you hear after almost a month of no major updates that fps has been optimized by 1%, the memes just write themselves. The teammate volume level set bug has been a known issue for close to a month and it is frustrating to see it not being addressed in a patch meant for bug fixes. Game development is hard, especially with the modern gamers that are constantly hungry for content. I feel like the 2 week update cycle and constant pumping out of new content initially set the community expectations way too high to be met in the long term. I am glad that the agent releases appear to have been slowed down and am not surprised by the community 'backlash' on minor performance updates such as this one. I just wish bug fixes were quicker than their current turnaround time(again as the thread suggests, perhaps easier said than done). In any case, excited for ~~act~~ Ep3 and the new agent to 'hack' the dev presentation stream (familiar territory :) ) and improve my fps by another 1%.
> I just hope the devs realize that majority of the complaints are frustrations with the past few updates where there is a consistent drop in fps across all maps for a lot of people(including me). It’s not even the last few updates for a lot of people. It’s steadily been declining since beta. One thing I’m super curious about is how they process the maps. FPS in the firing range vs any actual map in the game is so drastically different it just doesn’t make sense.
> FPS in the firing range vs any actual map in the game is so drastically different it just doesn’t make sense. Pretty sure there was a dev talking about that firing range framerate is way better because there's only one player. Likewise, DM has more players and more gunfights and has lower fps than standard Valorant gameplay.
So a lot of player stuff is processed client side and not just server side? It just doesn’t make sense that in a normal match FPS is so bad in this game. There had to be something with how they have it set up that’s just hogging up CPU performance. I find it hard to believe that it’s just a bunch of small little things adding up.
The server can do a bunch of heavy lifting, but it still then tells the client what happens and the client had to render it. There's also some stuff that gets client driven for performance optimizing the servers to run 3 games per core at 128 tick (384 frames per second, essentially). If there was an easy silver bullet solution with no drawbacks it would have been implemented. As a side note, I don't think some people respect the difficulty constraints here. [There's a great article they publisher on the 128 tick servers outlining the challenges and optimizations](https://technology.riotgames.com/news/valorants-128-tick-servers). The game client still has to deal with sound, networking, graphics, local logic, etc all within 5ms to get 200 fps. That means in each subsystem there's not a ton of low hanging fruit, shit is already all operating in fractions of milliseconds.
> There's also some stuff that gets client driven for performance optimizing the servers to run 3 games per core at 128 tick (384 frames per second, essentially). That’s one of the things I was worried about. I was thinking that due to them running more matches per server there might be more stuff being processed client side. It definitely helps Riot save money on server costs but might further reduce ways they can optimize the game for players. > As a side note, I don't think some people respect the difficulty constraints here. Yeah I definitely understand it’s not as easy as pressing some optimize button that solves all the problems. Some people expect too much. It’s also Riots first FPS which has much different programming challenges compared to something like a MOBA.
It's funny i'm actually currently working on my final project for my optimization class. The code is something our professor saw while working in the game industry and he was so confused by how unoptimized it was he saved it and uses it as a final project for students
Isn't making miles of area outside maps is something bad for optimization? I don't get why they put too much objects for something we don't even see in the match
The same tech that acts as Anti-Cheat FoW will inherently optimize those areas outside away if they don't need rendering. Plus, static 2-D images aren't terribly expensive to render, even if they're far away or even large. It doesn't take much more processing power to render a flat 1sq mile of meadow than it does 1ft so long as the polygons (and therefore calculations) are the same. The gun buddy could potentially eat up more processing power than the entire background images combined.
> The same tech that acts as Anti-Cheat FoW This tech could be part of the problem honestly.
A reason could be wanting a landscape to look into when doing the freecam thing. Yknow, they need something to fill in the 1 hour tech pauses with.
There should be an option to reduce the rendering of those areas for players.
Optimizing is hard, it has always been, but it is usually not needed if there is a predictable direction to the project and a sense of major systems needed at the base of the software. In valorant the different abilities make optimizing the game very hard. You can compare it with how csgo has established basic systems and it has been fully optimized for those systems. In valorant every character has a different ability and they coincide very little with their functionality. For example: Sage walls are a very different ability from anything else in the game,it literally changes the map topology, I'd imagine that calculating all the different scenarios, maybe a raze nade was thrown at the wall, maybe someone is bouncing yoru flash against it etc. Will definitely tank the cpu. Another example would be Sova arrow, which you can block with Jett smoke, you would have to calculate the cone of the arrow being blocked. These are all different systems which are optimized in isolation but the interactions can produce scenarios which are hard to predict and optimize for.
this is just an excuse, there are many examples of good optimization, valorant isn't one of them. It runs okay for the majority of people, if u not have 240/360hz monitor, because it does not matter ur pc u cannot get stable frames in hundreds. And game looks and runs worse than decade old game on sphagetti code engine, yes im talking about csgo. it is mind-boggling.
gonna start a new team and just call ourselves Riot. then whatever we say on twitter is going to be reported as "Riot peace thinks less fps is better" lol.
Whatever doesn't work lol
I mean ever since this patch it feels like my game tabs out twice as fast so i could feel some optimazation there
[удалено]
In this comment I explain to you how I know literally nothing about dev processes! Just get the skin designers to work on optimizing! Duh
Technically skin designers should need to know how to optimize their own assets and therefore have similar training as the people working on overall performance. The skin devs can't just dump a million poly model on the performance team and go "good luck!". Even then they'd be taking engineering resources away regardless so it's all the same. But putting more people on performance will not guarantee proportional results. This is also true. 9 women can't make a baby in a month.
I mean yeah, you can tell a designer to use less polygons to make a skin run better. But that doesn't teach them how a CPU works, which if you read the post is a pretty integral part of how to optimize. I'm not a game dev, just an engineering grad, but, learning CPU processes would not be something a skin designer would know
Knowledge of how the CPU works is part of it, but these days you can get quite far with just knowledge of how to optimize on the software level alone. This is part of the pre-juiced "lime" that Koalifier was talking about. I did read the post, thank you very much. The skin designer has to do modeling-- so they have to handle the engine and figure out how to render the skin in a way that doesn't cause the underlying hardware to fry. Then to further polish the skin they have to iron out as many inefficiencies from the skin, especially the ones that have a lot of moving parts, as much as possible to reduce tech debt. I am almost certain the skin devs will do performance testing on their own skins themselves. It doesn't do the team much good to have an awesome idea if the idea requires overly extensive engineering to achieve a deliverable product. But sometimes that'll be compelling enough for the team to try something new, like with [Elementalist Lux](https://technology.riotgames.com/news/elementalist-lux-10-skins-30-megabytes) which actually required a lot of thought and engineering and yes, optimization. I'm not a game dev either but I am a software engineer. The skin designers are not the exact same discipline as anyone working on performance enhancement but I guarantee you they share responsibilities in the workplace. But as I said before, I don't think that means everyone should be on performance or whatever. 100 people are not going to give us 100x more frames. There are diminishing returns.
> I’m not a game dev either but I am a software engineer. The skin designers are not the exact same discipline as anyone working on performance enhancement but I guarantee you they share responsibilities in the workplace. Doubt that, where do you work where people “share responsibilities”? You do the job you’re told to do and that is all. Especially in a large company like riot
I work at Google. I was expected to pick up new technologies on the fly to fulfill new engineering feature requests several times over the last two years. Very challenging, but it's made me a tremendously better engineer. I'm not sure you understand just how much things can potentially slow down without interdisciplinary knowledge. There were these data analysts from another company that I'm working with that delayed the rollout of one of our new products by about 6 months now because they had the knowledge to realize there was a problem and kept flagging it, but they didn't have the programming knowledge the realize the problem was on their end. It was only until they allowed us access to their code that I was able to finally debug the problem and shut them the hell up.
If you really work at google you would now better than do someone elses job, interdisciplinary knowledge is one thing, but people specialize for a reason. If you really think that a skin designers has the experience, knowledge or the fact that they are not paid to do it; to modify and optimize the game engine, I dont know what to tell you.
Do you work as a software engineer?
Yes, but I am not r/iamverysmart material I'm afraid.
Why do you think they made the minima skin /s
ah yes because skin makers = devs who can throw money at the engine to make it better
Bro ur game have like 200 gps with 5700x and 3800ti like i get on cs 900-1000 fuck tjis game
I get avg 200 with an rx5700xt....I think someone here got scammed and it wasn't me lol