UI's take away from the game's performance we all desperately need!
 

If you ask anyone, people want there game to run smoother, at the higher settings, hell some in the not so high settings have these problems. I for one, bought a nice rig and mainly for EQ2, and for the future in gaming all together.

I like to run things maxed out, high resolution, in widescreen w/ all the eyecandy showing.

Its been bothering me as of lately, that the game gets such a huge performance increase w/ simply hitting F10 twice, and hiding all of the UI interface.

1. Is there a UI out there that is simple, and does not take away from the performance gain we all deserately seek? (I know there are SIMPLE UI's, but I still see a huge increase w/ simply just turning the UI off, which obviously the game cant be played in that mode conveniently)

2. Is there any plans to improve the way the UI is rendering / taking away from the systems performance pool, so we can play the game even smoother, and possibly w/ higher graphics in the raiding department instead of staring at 24 smeared characters?

The game has so much potential , and its graphics are simply AMAZING. I'd love to be able to actually see all the hard work people put into this game , w/ their raiding zones for example, instead of just solo, or in a 6person group situation.


One has hope..

It might help if you stated what UI you were using.

Even the most graphically simple UI will still require more system resources than no UI. Updating numbers, progress bars, icons, etc. has an impact no mater how optimized the windows are. Still, there are a few things that can be done to reduce the processing of the UI graphics.

FetishNightfall was devloped specifically to have a small footprint and does try to avoid those UI options that might drag down game performance. Many users have commented that their game runs smoother with the Fetish UI than with the Default. EQ2Maps and Infocenter do have an impact but are considered by most users to be well worth the sacrifice.

Thanks for that!

I didnt mention a UI, because it was a generic situation I was requesting information for - any UI takes away, im looking for the best UI or someone to make one that is very easy on performance.

Incase you wanted to know for curiosity sake, I was using Profit, then tried Penta 2.0 , which I really like , it has some unique features. Definitely not good on the performance tho when you have a 4/8th of the screen covered in UI. heeh.

Ill try fetish out I guess. :)

For testing purposes, I had tried to load a UI with most xml's removed. It didn't make much of a difference, there was still a noticable performance increase when hitting F10 twice. But then my system is rather now end, so differences might be seen on high end machines.

The EQ2 engine seems to have a problem with overlaying the UI over the game graphics, and this doesn't seem to depend very much on what is actually shown in the UI. For example, putting up a black background via the widescreen overlay setting doesn't change performance at all on my system (those black bars are just another UI window).

On a side note, I was recently forced so switch a number of fonts from true type fonts to bitmap fonts. I'm still trying to figure out whether this increases or decreases performance. Since the smooth fonts is a considerable performance hit, I'd expect the use of bitmap fonts to even help performance, although they might take more memory.

That definitely is interesting. I tried out Fetish today, and havent been able to try it in the raiding situation, but it did seem to run smoother for some reason. Thanks for the tip, and great job on an awesome UI Zonx.

I did have a wierd issue when I logged in for the first time w/ fetish enabled, my gameplay screen was a dark brown, and I had to change the reso to 1280x1024, then back to 1280x900 to get my current resolution working properly w/ the game. I didnt get to camp and reload the game, so im not sure if that will happen again, but just a heads up, as Ive never seen that happen before.

The largest performance hits associated with the UI that I've found are:

1) Massive tileling - Can't be completely avoided as frames are prety much required to accomodate variable sized windows, but minimizing use of frames is helpfull.

2) Massive numbers of resource files - the default UI is horible about this. UI graphics are spread across a rediculious number of files. In theory the client only loads images slices as needed but in practice having all the slices come from a small number of DDS files helps.

3) Complex Alphas - Another thing the default UI is bad about. No transparency images are not only smaller in memory but take less processing to overlay atop the game environment. The default UI is particularly bad in that it uses the most pigish format for virtually everything. 1 bit alphas aren't much of an issue, but multi-bit alphas can have a noticable impact.

At one point I developed a fancy version of the Knowledge window that made use of a tiled background with a complex alpha channel. Opening that one window noticebly lagged the game for about 30 seconds and performance suffered while it was open. I replaced the tiling frame with a presized opaque image and the lag vanished.

Smaller viewscreen size does improve performance, you just might not notice the difference if your lag stems from other rendering issues. Ideally, all your UI windows would be place outside the game area. Realistically that's not gonna happen, but you can place most of the "Always on" windows off the game area.

I was under impression that font-smoothing is another major performance killer (especially if there's a lot of font visible, e.g. when opening quest journal window).

But then again I didn't properly test it (aside from the fact that opening my horizontal quest journal serioulsy kills my framerate) -- it might be attributed to tileing or something else.

I tried to switch font-smoothing off and the game looked disgusting :) Perhaps I could've worked around it by changing a lot of fonts, etc., but personally I prefer to customize as little as possible of my UI (makes life easier when updates happen).

If default can be improved upon I would love to see a basic UI thats a lot like the default UI but is optimized. Personally I use default for the most part except for target, exp bar and a modified chat box.

I remember when the custome UI system in EQ1 was a couple of months old I said something about UI's possibility of hindering performance and all I got was two big interface authors jumping down my throat about "i'll be damned if I tone down my UI" seemed like a knee jerk reaction, thinking their precious UI's might be hurting game performance.

If there's a performance hit to be had, I'm probably the most guilty. I tend to take 6k pieces of the original UI and turn them into 80k or more in mods :(

I can't help it, I'm feature oriented. Of course, I don't force anyone to install anything I've written. And my fairly high performance machine runs acceptably to me with all of them installed.

I really like your mods mother, I used alot of them w/ combo uis ive used in the past. The only thing I recall was the raid window refused to update sometime, as in if someone went ld and rejoined, or something of that nature perhaps -- basically they wouldnt show up in the raid window, and I had to reorganize the way the ui displayed like 4x4 8x8 left and right, etc. then back the the setting I wanted to see the new people in the raid.

Not always was it linked to LD's sometimes it just did it when someone new joined the raid once it was set.

I also lost the control panel alot too oddly enough , which made it even harder to reset the display, which forced me to remove that mod - as I need to see everyone on a raid, naturally.


Its some great unique ideas tho, and I definitely encourage modders to continue that road!

As for fetish, in the raiding scene - its EXTEMELY laggy unfortunately ,I had better performance w/ Profit then I did Fetish, even w/ the Raid presetting from your ui cpl. I even set my own settings , the way I useally have it and w/ even less off, it still was awfully slow. I even rebooted if that was perhaps a chance of the performance loss, but that didnt help any unfortunately.

I then reloaded Penta 2.0, and it was considerably better, but not where I want it at this point for perfrormance/quality balance.

Profit reloaded thereafter the others, and its much smoother, but I am always looking for more QUALITY possibilities when raiding.

Its an interesting study indeed, and im glad im not the only one noticing such a hit w/ the UI on alone.

I don't think a few short term tests are gonna prove much. You'll get various lag results raiding regardless of the UI. Changing performance settings only invalidates the tests.

To get a reasonable idea what impact a UI is having on your lag, you'll need to use the UI with the same settings for at least a few raids then compair it to another UI with the same settings for at least a few raids. You'll also need to make sure the same windows are open and in roughly the same location for all the testing. Try to control other varialbles that will hurt performance like lots of zoning before the raid starts. If possible, get to the raid zone then reboot befor starting each test.

Also be aware EQ2Maps and Infocenter (bundled with some complete sets) are going to have an additional impact. If not included with one of the UI's you're testing, only fair to remove them from all the test cases. First determin which core UI works best for your system, then try dropping in EQ2Maps and/or Infocenter.

I'd be surprised if other UIs run better than FetishNightfall without EQ2Maps and Infocenter ;)

I have run Fetish from day 1. I logged into EQ2 on a trial account, said wow this UI looks like crap... bad enough that I wasn't going to continue playing. Then a friend pointed me towards Fetish and I haven't looked back since. I have added a few of Mother's pieces as well, especially the new Timer window which I use only when raiding.

Anyhow all that said, in order to get the most out of my toon on a raid and in order to best be able to lead raids I have to raid on Extreme Quality, even though when I play outside of raiding I run High Quality with 30+ FPS which is good enough for me. But there are SO many others factors that affect the lag and frame rate in raid zones that I don't think it would be possible to "test" ui against ui. I don't know this for fact but I am pretty sure that the servers the raid zones run on arn't the same as the servers the "overland" zones run on. When you get 3-4 guilds all zoning into a raid zone at the roughly the same time I can tell a HUGE difference in lag etc. What more I think some of the raid zones share servers with instanced zones... lke PPR that zone lagged regardless of what settings I used or didn't use.

Well, the point being... use the UI thats going to make the game p[ay the best for you. The performance difference in the different UI's in reality, when one considers ALL of the variables that come into play, is so small it doesn't matter. I do realize that not everyone can go buy a super gaming rig (I know I can't) and play on Extreme Quality all the time, but seriously... the UI is how we as players are able to interact with the game. In the long run thats a lot more important to me then being able to raid on high graphic settings :) And if you don't believe me, next time your raiding hit f10 twice so you have no UI and see how that game play experience goes... jk :)

I can now say with more certainity that Smooth fonts option is an absolute performance killer. Too bad that default UI looks like crap with this option off.

I'm talking about 37->30 fps drop on latest hardware (a64@2500, 7900gtx) when two open chat windows are fully loaded with text. If smooth fonts option is off, the performance hit is maybe 2 fps or so (instead of 7).

I should start by noting that I use the default UI.

I found that the windows themselves individually decrease your FPS. But setting their opacity at 0 doesnt give a hit. Each window takes about 1-2 fps away from what I'v seen.

So I have a question. Is it possible to set parameters for when a window will show? Like the way the target window only apears when you have something targeted, or the way the chat window fades in only when theres something going on. I would like to set it so my hotkey bars and spell effects windows only show when I am in attack mode. Otherwise the screen will be blank. This should give about 5-10 more FPS from just doing the little tests I'v done clearing them out myself.

I believe something like that could be written in a mod. However the problem with this is that you need FPS the most when you're fighting (IMO) -- with your approach your FPS in a fight will take an additional hit.

I agree. I have made the same experience with performance loss with the user interface.

I suspect a bad implementation for the rendered scene merged with the ui bits. Maybe it is getting rendered with the scene together all the time?

Hitting F10 twice increases FPS a LOT (2 - 3 times more than with UI)

To investigate the matter I switched back to the default UI disabling all windows (not by pressing F10 twice). There is no real difference. Pressing F10 twice with default UI will have the same effect.

Another point: It depends on size of the AREA that the UI element covers.
So having very small UI elements can run as game a little bit faster.
Try it yourself: (use uibuilder to allow the quest journal to resize up to 1 x 1 pixel) (use FRAPS to show FPS)
- open journal with full size --> FPS drops a lot
- resize journal to 1 x 1 pixel --> FPS rises back to original value
-> so the content of the window is not the point if it is not shown

Yet another point: Making UI elements 100% invisible (by window options) prevents FPS to fall a lot. it just falls very few frames per second. You have to make sure it is 100% invisible. 99% is not fully invisible.

I would like to have an API which I can use to write my own 'UI' to show it on a second monitor for example. Wouldn't this be great?
I know everything is possible but it wouldnt be legal.



Maybe there is a way to influence DirectX directly ? Maybe to disallow thr game to use a specific feature that results in the fps problems?
I do not know a program which can do this.