Vinley-KT Posted November 11, 2018 Share Posted November 11, 2018 Hi guys! So, I've been scratching my head a bit since trying AION again, puzzled by the iffy performance. It's an old engine; the original Cry engine heavily modified and doesn't play nice with multi-core systems, but in no way do I expect to get stutters on some of the highest end equipment available, right? I wanted to share this in the case that anyone was experiencing the same issues I was with iffy performance! Since i'm going into a bit of detail here i'll throw some general optimization guide tips for people who want to get the most performance. Basic In-game settings Tweak your shadows. Aion doesn't like new graphics cards. If your card is even semi-modern, chances are this engine doesn't really care. Getting 100% usage out of any card in this game is going to be nearly impossible for most systems. But, there's some things you can do to trim back graphic fidelity for huge gains. One of them is shadows. I like to keep this in the middle. If you're running the "HQ engine" (I'm not a fan) there will be three toggle settings, the middle will disable the rendering from objects based on light sources. This can give great gains to slower cards and in heated situations like pvp (looking at you zerging animals...) it can make a solid FPS difference. If you're on default engine, based on my testing, the highest setting and the second highest are almost no difference in performance on higher equipment. If you can't stand objects without the rendered shadows, don't bother dropping it at all. If you have limited VRAM on your card, taking shadows down is one of the biggest gains. TURN OFF VSYNC! I shouldn't have to say this but this is a PVP game. Turn off VSYNC, no ifs ands or buts about it. The latency introduced isn't worth it. Do you have a 120hz, 144hz, or 240hz monitor? Well here's a great tip! DO NOT USE FULL SCREEN MODE! I don't know why, but I've tested with numerous systems and for some reason full screen mode locks the game, likely through a registry or code, to 60hz, no matter what I tried, I could not unlock it. This will present a lot of tearing in high end systems with VSYNC off. There is situations where Windowed-Full Screen will introduce some latency in low-end systems, in which case you might want to instead deal with the tearing. HQ Vs. Default Engine :: If you have an old card (6yrs+?) It might not play nice with the lighting changes introduced in the HQ engine, I'd recommend default. I personally use default when I pvp, I find it to perform slightly better. The other benefit is, in the HQ engine, there is no option to use typical AA techniques. The HQ engine will use a technique that blurs and messes with the edges pixels to give it a smoother "look" but I find it just looks like nyerk. The default engine uses traditional AA techniques and on 8x looks beautiful with no jagged edges. Best of all, it costs nearly no performance to use it on modern equipment. Terrain Range is generally useless and in cases of draw distance causing stutters, this can remove a lot of them. Try tweaking with it, if you dont notice the distance terrain changes, turn that baby down. The texture quality on distance objects in this game is such nyerk that you may even prefer the cleaner look of the background images that actually look good! Before we move on, i'm sure this has been hammered hundreds of times, but you might be wondering... What are the best PC upgrades to get performance gains in AION? Hard Drive, Hard Drive, Hard Drive. Aion uses some odd texture techniques that introduce amazing stutters when loading distant character objects. The SINGLE BEST PC UPGRADE YOU CAN MAKE FOR AION IS A SOLID STATE HARD DRIVE. Have you ever been running through the world map and know that an elyos is going to be right around the corner because of the lag? Yes, that's AION pulling the needed textures from your hard drive in real time. It's a disgusting effect and causes the game to feel as if playing from my grandfathers 8-tracks. RECOMMENDATION: Samsung 860 EVO It's a cheap, modern, reliable piece of gaming equipment that will make AION run beautifully. You can go for the other style SSDs if you have the board to support it, but the differences don't carry much weight for just AION. CPU... If you have anything modern, i5+ or equivalent AMD equipment, don't go crazy upgrading this just for AION. You will see minimal gains in-game alone. The engine simply doesn't take advantage of newer technology enough and all you will see happen on a newer card is your usage go down while your FPS stays the same. If you MUST upgrade, go with something that can overclock well and increase your core clock. Aion does really well on single/dual core equipment and you'll get the most gains from a strong core clock. GPU... Same as above, very little performance differences in higher end tech. You'll see good gains in faster cards, VRAM is not a necessity in AION. But if you're already attaining 50+ FPS, you'll see minimal gains in upgrades. Now on to the good stuff... Ryzen user tweaks... If you are an intel user you can still try this but I can not guarantee the same benefits. So, unlike Intel, AMD's implementation of multithreading and the latency overhead caused by the Infinity Fabric can reduce performance in response time sensitive applications, specifically, gaming. While AION doesn't get absolutely hammered in performance by Ryzen's tech, it does take some serious performance drops in certain situations, from my experience. One way to fix a lot of the performance issues I faced was to disable SMT and cores on the CPU. I'm not a big fan, and feel it's better to optimize the individual programs and still allowing other programs to automatically take advantage of all the other cores available on Ryzen. Download Prio - Process Priority Saver, this will allow you to change affinity in between computer restarts. Find AION in Task Manager and "Set Affinity" in my testing, I found the even cores performed much better in Aion. Do your own testing but it should be the case for anyone in most situations. For additional performance, you can enable only cores on the same side CCX. On a Ryzen 7 1700X for example, it uses a 4+4 CCX which is two 4 core dies meshed, using Infinity Fabric. Also to note, Infinity Fabric runs at the same speed as your DDR4 memory, so if your memory clock is lower than your CPU core clock, it can bottleneck between the cores. I recommend 3200+ DDR4. As an example, enabling only cores 0, 2, 4 and 6 on the Ryze 1700X uses ONLY the PHYSICAL cores on the same CCX and eliminates the infinity fabric bottleneck. If you're confused by any of this and just want to keep it simple, just disable all of the odd OR even numbers, and enable the opposite. You'll see an immediate performance boost. So that I too can attain greatness, what is your PC build? Ryzen 1800X AsRock X370 Taichi Samsung 960 EVO 1 TB PCIe 16GB G.Skill Flare X Series DDR4 3200 XFX Vega 56 8GB Also... Check out my Twitch for AION pvp and League of Legends feeding! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DevilNest-KT Posted November 12, 2018 Share Posted November 12, 2018 Great post! Thanks for the contribution Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kromede-KT Posted November 12, 2018 Share Posted November 12, 2018 On 11/11/2018 at 7:08 AM, Vinley-KT said: TURN OFF VSYNC! I shouldn't have to say this but this is a PVP game. Turn off VSYNC, no ifs ands or buts about it. The latency introduced isn't worth it. Do you have a 120hz, 144hz, or 240hz monitor? Well here's a great tip! DO NOT USE FULL SCREEN MODE! I don't know why, but I've tested with numerous systems and for some reason full screen mode locks the game, likely through a registry or code, to 60hz, no matter what I tried, I could not unlock it. This will present a lot of tearing in high end systems with VSYNC off. There is situations where Windowed-Full Screen will introduce some latency in low-end systems, in which case you might want to instead deal with the tearing. You can set the FPS in Aion by adding g_maxfps = "144" or whatever value you desire. 0 for no cap. In the System.cfg file. You will need a cfg editor. I use Aion rainmeter. You will also need to change the file attribute of System.cfg to Read-only by right clicking on the file > properties > check read-only. Doing this the game won't auto save to the file when you close the game. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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