When will POE update its graphics engine?

Hey OP here,

I never said current graphics are bad... i actually think they're pretty good!

But as time goes on they will eventually get outdated and i just hope GGG has a plan (for years down the track) to keep them up to date so as to keep the game fresh and modern :)

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 The subject of the PoE graphics engine comes up every now and then because of it's limited performance (to be polite). In older posts (mostly during PoE: The Desync Edition) it has been questioned why GGG doesn't just switch over to a commercial game engine like Unreal and it's always been the fact that any commercial game engine cost beaucoup bucks to license (or at least used to) and the 4 GGG founding devs didn't have an extra half a million to drop on a game engine license. So they rolled their own (coded it from the ground up). I'm sure that in 2006/2007 that was a major effort and coder learning curve for them. Anyway, they had to work out all the technical details on every 2D/3D graphics object and sound, every animation, etc., and come up with a data format structure. A ton of work and then some to be sure.

 Fast forward to today and just thinking of the technical nightmare that would be involved with taking each and every graphics object, every animation, etc. (how many 1000s of them are there now?) and having to convert all over to a new engine format would be a seriously daunting task (scary just thinking about it). One of the GGG devs estimated that the conversion work alone would take at least 3½ years to do. So the answer is and always will be a big NO to each and every post about asking if PoE will be converted to a high performance commercial game engine. So for better or worse we have to put up with custom game engine in PoE and GGG will always be incrementally tweaking it to slowly improve it's performance.

 Let's see now, GGG just recently said that they switched over to a newer C++ compiler. I noticed improvements right away with that. One puzzling issue for me and my venerable MSI Hawk HD6870 graphics card was the fact that when I alt-tabbed out of PoE to look something up in my browser, my GPU twin fans rpm would not go down. It has been known forever that the GPU is pushed very hard and on my AMD HD6870 the dual gpu fans (Twin Frozr III) rev up to audible levels (thankfully I have the excellent SteelHead headphones so I don't hear any fan noise) and only by going into the passive tree would the gpu load be reduced and my fans slow back down to in-audible levels. You'd think that alt-tabbing out of PoE would take the gpu load off too but that was not the case. But now with the new compiler version of PoE when I alt-tab out of PoE the gpu fans slow down indicating less gpu load.

 So GGG will always and forever be staying with their own graphics engine. Hopefully (I'm counting on it) the next gpu evolution with HBM2 memory and it's 4096 bit wide data path to the gpu will be a serious boost to graphics performance and PoE will play even better. The new graphics cards should arrive this summer and while my HD6870 does a herculean job to play PoE at 1920 x 1080 it is being pushed to the max (with only 1 GB of vram) and by the end of this year it will be time to retire it.

To the OP:

When they will have enough money / time and a good reason to do it.

I think I have read something Chris said about having hired people specifically for this. Given their track record, it's trustable.

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NeroNoah написал:

I think I have read something Chris said about having hired people specifically for this. Given their track record, it's trustable.

True, If the OP or anyone wants to invest millions to fund the conversion then I think GGG would do it.

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NeroNoah написал:

I think I have read something Chris said about having hired people specifically for this. Given their track record, it's trustable.

Chris stated their plans for 2016 is in engine improvements and optimisations:
https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/3yn9s2/at_what_point_can_we_expect_ggg_to_optimize_their/cygpxxr?context=3

Also they want to step up to DX11. I've read another post from Chris recently that they will probably work on a 64 bit client. Don't find it yet unfortunately.

So, I guess we could look forward to have some major improvements in 2016/17 with the game engine in general. The hype is real :)

Good to hear!

Would love to see PoE as optimal as possible.

The graphics is secondary to me, but the flow of the gameplay and optimization is very important.

Updating the engine would be a great thing if you ask me. Would be a chance to improve the look of the game and the backend a bit. Which would hopefully mean more stable performance.

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brunowa написал:

Hey OP here,

I never said current graphics are bad... i actually think they're pretty good!

But as time goes on they will eventually get outdated and i just hope GGG has a plan (for years down the track) to keep them up to date so as to keep the game fresh and modern :)

Most important and first prioritize should be fixing bugs, crash, client and server lags, random DC and other problem.

After that any graphic and balance changes welcomed, but other otherwise.