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Bethesda: making games for the PC gamers.

racofer

Thread Incliner
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Your ignore list.

Skyrim was coded in x87 code.

It does not have SSE optimization which has been standard for both AMD and Intel for nearly a decade now. Never-mind the new advanced vector extensions now available. They should have optimized for SSE 4 and AVX... not x87.

This patch will improve your frame rate by up to 40% in all CPU-dependent situations, i.e. especially in cities.It works mostly by rewriting some x87 FPU code and inlining a whole ton of useless getter functions along the critical paths because the developers at Bethesda, for some reason, compiled the game without using any of the optimization flags for release builds.

Install instructions:
1. Install SKSE, instructions are in its readme.
2. Drop TESVAL.dll from the archive above in to <skyrim root>/Data/SKSE/Plugins. Create the SKSE and Plugins folders if they don't exist.
3. Run the game by launching skse_loader.exe.

Tests show that the "Markath FPS Death Zone" went from ~20FPS without the plugin to ~30FPS with the plugin, framebuffer size 2560x1600, everything maxed except no AA. Not joking or trolling; that's just the worst CPU-bound case I could think of.

Yes you're not reading this wrong. Skyrim was not compiled for the X86 plataform, which means, no compiler optimizations are used. Skyrim doesn't benefit from your precious SSE1/2/3/4 or AMD's 3DNow! CPU extensions, meaning that it runs like that software you used to compile back in computer science school with the gnu compiler when you didn't even knew about this kind of stuff, only your little application was not a multimillion dollar game. Let alone that Bethesda refused to use DX10/11 in their game (DX:HR runs considerably faster in DX11 in my experience, so yes, games that make usage of that API can get performance benefits), now Bethesda can't be bothered to recompile their games for the PC platform.

What that little app does is the good old dll injection through SKSE (Skyrim Script Extender) to force the game executable to use those valuable CPU resources it wasn't using. Many people report increased performance in busy areas of the game (namely Markarth), and I can confirm that claim. I used to get 22fps in that place while maintaining close to 60 everywhere else, now it stays at around 30fps while facing the waterfalls. Bethesda said it was "dem waterfalz are too immershive!" but now we all know this is bullshit. I wonder if Gamebryo games don't suffer from the same issue...

Bethesda : They worry about the PC crowd.

More at: http://www.dsogaming.com/news/skyri...u-optimization-up-to-20fps-performance-boost/
 

Gerrard

Arcane
Joined
Nov 5, 2007
Messages
11,927
Could you honestly say you're surprised by this?

I'm surprised the guy didn't get banned.
 

Suchy

Arcane
Joined
Nov 16, 2007
Messages
6,031
Location
Potatoland
I guess I should be happy and download it right now, but this is how many fucks I give about Skyrim:
 

mondblut

Arcane
Joined
Aug 10, 2005
Messages
22,205
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Ingrija
racofer said:
Let alone that Bethesda refused to use DX10/11 in their game

You say it like it's something bad. I think it's nice someone is in this business not for the purpose of helping Microsoft sell their newest pile of shit OS. DX above 9 can fuck off along with Windows past XP.
 

ortucis

Prophet
Joined
Apr 22, 2009
Messages
2,015
racofer said:
Yes you're not reading this wrong. Skyrim was not compiled for the X86 plataform, which means, no compiler optimizations are used. Skyrim doesn't benefit from your precious SSE1/2/3/4 or AMD's 3DNow! CPU extensions, meaning that it runs like that software you used to compile back in computer science school with the gnu compiler when you didn't even knew about this kind of stuff, only your little application was not a multimillion dollar game. Let alone that Bethesda refused to use DX10/11 in their game (DX:HR runs considerably faster in DX11 in my experience, so yes, games that make usage of that API can get performance benefits), now Bethesda can't be bothered to recompile their games for the PC platform.


Skyrim runs at like 9000 FPS for me without any of these optimizations.

Visually game looks great and the only thing that bothered me was the character models. Game looks and performs way better than DX: HR all maxed out for me so it's HR that has the shitty engine/optimizations for PC, not Skyrim.
 

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
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Messages
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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
DX10/11 isn't the issue here.
Releasing a commercial software product on the PC compiled without compiler optimizations is majestically derp. It's not supposed to be done.
 

CappenVarra

phase-based phantasmist
Patron
Joined
Mar 14, 2011
Messages
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Ardamai
And here I thought Bethesda employed people who can into programming. Oh wait, I didn't.
 

Menckenstein

Lunacy of Caen: Todd Reaver
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Playing derpvil's advocate here: Is there some kind of legit justification for this?
 

baronjohn

Cipher
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Nov 8, 2008
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Sure, optimizations can cause stability problems and can make other problems harder to diagnose.
 

Gerrard

Arcane
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Nov 5, 2007
Messages
11,927
Menckenstein said:
Playing derpvil's advocate here: Is there some kind of legit justification for this?
It requires additional work? Same reason the UI is horrible.
 
Joined
Sep 4, 2009
Messages
3,520
Gerrard said:
Menckenstein said:
Playing derpvil's advocate here: Is there some kind of legit justification for this?
It requires additional work? Same reason the UI is horrible.

1vsoptimization.jpg


It requires literally no extra work. When you compile you flick a switch and the compiler magically makes everything faster (at the possible expense of stability and ease to debug if the compiler makes a mistake and an optimized function doesn't do quite what it should, but this is rare). Having it off while developing makes sense, but turning them on for a release is something that any non-retarded dev would do.

Its the epitome of software bloat. Now that PCs are a minimum 5x faster than console devs aren't even paying attention to PC performance unless its less than 1/5th as efficient as consoles. So much that they can't even be bothered.

I can only imagine how many other games these days have such silly issues. The only reason we are finding out about Skrim's problems is because there are thousands of modders and at least a handful of them are competent.
 

SCO

Arcane
In My Safe Space
Joined
Feb 3, 2009
Messages
16,320
Shadorwun: Hong Kong
They probably forgot to change the setting to release build.
 

sea

inXile Entertainment
Developer
Joined
May 3, 2011
Messages
5,698
Well, they integrated the Large Address Aware flag (which apparently required weeks of testing), so maybe we'll get lucky and smarten up with this one as well if people demand it enough.
 

racofer

Thread Incliner
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Apr 5, 2008
Messages
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Your ignore list.
Now on patch 1.4, Bethesda added the compiler optimizations that the likes of Tesval and Skyboost were talking about.

I've not personally tested it myself yet, but people are reporting massive performance gains with 1.4 beta, like this:

35kird0.gif


Modders fixed it once again.
 

Cowboy Moment

Arcane
Joined
Feb 8, 2011
Messages
4,407
Well, Gamebryo supposedly offloads shadow rendering to the CPU (rofl), so it makes sense that even basic optimization of the code would result in major performance gains.

But yeah, this really makes me question the basic competence of game developers in general.
 
Joined
Jan 7, 2012
Messages
14,152
95% of players and reviewers will take this as a sign that Bethesda is a really great developer that supports their games. Future Bethesda games will come with speed up loops for marketing purposes.
 

SCO

Arcane
In My Safe Space
Joined
Feb 3, 2009
Messages
16,320
Shadorwun: Hong Kong
Future Bethesda games will come with speed up loops for marketing purposes.
....


Genius. Managing i can get behind of.

Also liked this:
The Programming Antihero

I was fresh out of college, still wet behind the ears, and about to enter the beta phase of my first professional game project -- a late-90s PC title. It had been an exciting rollercoaster ride, as projects often are. All the content was in and the game was looking good. There was one problem though: We were way over our memory budget.
Since most memory was taken up by models and textures, we worked with the artists to reduce the memory footprint of the game as much as possible. We scaled down images, decimated models, and compressed textures. Sometimes we did this with the support of the artists, and sometimes over their dead bodies.
We cut megabyte after megabyte, and after a few days of frantic activity, we reached a point where we felt there was nothing else we could do. Unless we cut some major content, there was no way we could free up any more memory. Exhausted, we evaluated our current memory usage. We were still 1.5 MB over the memory limit!
At this point one of the most experienced programmers in the team, one who had survived many years of development in the "good old days," decided to take matters into his own hands. He called me into his office, and we set out upon what I imagined would be another exhausting session of freeing up memory.
Instead, he brought up a source file and pointed to this line:
static char buffer[1024*1024*2];
"See this?" he said. And then deleted it with a single keystroke. Done!
He probably saw the horror in my eyes, so he explained to me that he had put aside those two megabytes of memory early in the development cycle. He knew from experience that it was always impossible to cut content down to memory budgets, and that many projects had come close to failing because of it. So now, as a regular practice, he always put aside a nice block of memory to free up when it's really needed.
He walked out of the office and announced he had reduced the memory footprint to within budget constraints -- he was toasted as the hero of the project.
As horrified as I was back then about such a "barbaric" practice, I have to admit that I'm warming up to it. I haven't gotten into the frame of mind where I can put it to use yet, but I can see how sometimes, when you're up against the wall, having a bit of memory tucked away for a rainy day can really make a difference. Funny how time and experience changes everything.
 

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