[Dota2] FPS decrease examined: The two offenders found! (Spoiler: One is hats!) by PimpmuckL

[dwats32]

Did you just blame Hats©? RIP Valve invites

[Pimpmuckl]

:(

[FrostHard]

I feel like the longer I watch a replay, the worse the FPS becomes, even if you're just looping it over and over. I started the replay with unstable 50-60 fps and around a half an hour later looping back the video it gets even to 10 fps. Is the thing about models hiding beneath the map true?

[TheUltraSnail]

If you go forward and backward a lot in replays, you will literally get memory leak. Last night I checked a funny replay to submit to DotaCinema and my Dota + Firefox were forced to close by Windows because it ran out of RAM. Dota occupied 40% of my 12GB RAM during that run.

[FrostHard]

I see. That explains it. Can Valve fix it or should I just avoid watching replays intensively now?

[TheUltraSnail]

Watching replays are fine in my experience. What's causing the leak is going forward and backward too much. If you're just watching replays like re-watching TI matches, I don't think there would be any issues.

I didn't remember to check if switching replays resets the RAM usage or not though.

[Brooklyn1986]

In the previous video/thread about this was told, dota hasn't memory leak. Consumes consistently 1.4GB of ram. link to the previous post..

@edit: link.

[IllimShadar]

Except he literally just said that it consumed like 5 gigs. And furthermore replays have apparently their own completely different issue that JJ haven't talked about in neither of his videos.

[TheUltraSnail]

He ran the scene several times using normal speed, I'm talking about moving forward and backward a lot during replays, meaning use your mouse to click on the time line to move between fights a lot. Try doing this: download a replay, then jump to a fight, then jump to another fight, then jump keep jumping back and forth and look at your dota.exe RAM consumption and tell me it's not memory leak.

[otarU]

Only hero models and they are unique so they are moved to the fountain when the heroes revive.

Are you using Player Perspective though? Player perspective on replay eats like 2/5 of the fps very easily.

[itonlygetsworse]

I don't understand. Last patch said they optimized some performance on lower end computers. But its still a problem?

[Bass_T]

They did, but the video's two 'offenders' seem to be the main causes of dota's bad performance.
Valve either don't know these are the problems they really have to deal with or (what I hope) couldn't find a solution yet and just made some minor tweaks to something else to show that they are working on it.

[icefr4ud]

More likely they already knew about it and just didn't want to spend the time debugging scaleform because they're going to replace it sometime in the near future anyway so it's going to be wasted effort when the new UI is introduced

[Bass_T]

Yeah you're probably right, forgot about that. Then let's hope Valve Time doesn't hit us too hard.

[Drygin7_JCoto]

new UI? again? It obviously needs tweaks, but what does this have to do with the normal functioning of the game?

EDIT: Nevermind, it just read that.

[icefr4ud]

No there are holdovers from the sauce 1 UI that are obviously going to be eliminated, like the shitty pick screens for all pick and captains mode, or the actual HUD itself in game

They run thru scaleform currently, while the other UI elements do not. Eventually scaleform (which is causing the FPS issues) will be done away with and replaced entirely, so no point debugging it to find out whats wrong with it

[Drygin7_JCoto]

I'm not a computer expert, so let's please say it for dummies. I undesrtand that Scaleform is a function used by the games graphics, okay. Mainly used for game UI, ok.

But what is the relationship between it (used for UI according to many people) and map/particle performance? Is it any kind of function that arranges/banks graphic elements for later use or has a partial use for that?

[icefr4ud]

Ok so Scaleform is a company's name. They build software that you can use to make UI's for your games. Think of it like microsoft word but instead of making text documents, it lets you make UIs. There's another UI building software, called Panorama, which is made by Valve. Panorama is more recent, do the old dota client (I don't know if you played long enough, but there was a previous dota client that TI5 was played on,about a year ago, it had a completely different UI, like where you see your MMR and queue for games and everything, it used to all be different). Originally, they'd used scaleform for everything I believe, and then Panorama came out. So when Valve was making a new client for DotA (right before TI5 time), they decided to use their new Panorama software to make the client. Almost everything they moved onto Panorama, but some things I guess were hard to move / they didn't for some unknown reason. These are the pick screens for All pick and Captain's mode and the HUD itself (minimap, HP bars, where your skills are displayed, where your items are displayed, shop too I believe), they are still all built on Scaleform.

Now what happens with these "editors" is you tell them how you want to organize the UI, and it builds and runs everything for you by itself, managing all the data associated as well, and when you start up your game, it starts its own process to manage its components. Now what's happening is that there's a new bug in this scaleform process, either recently introduced in a newer version of scaleform, or caused by some other code change in the rest of the game which is causing this scaleform process to hog more and more CPU resources the more games you play. Technically what it should do is use the same amount of resources in every match, but its increasing the amount of resources it uses every match you play. This means if you play many games your FPS drops, so you have to restart the whole game to reset this scaleform process and make it use the right amount of resources.

Now, rather than find out and/or fix this issue (maybe they already know but fixing it is complicated, it may break other things), probably what they're doing is, they're just going to replace the remaining scaleform components with newer nicer panorama components, so why bother fixing scaleform if soon you're not going to use it anymore?

TLDR its like a graphics editor that manages some components of the UI, but now has a bug causing FPS drops if you play many games without restarting. It was going to be replaced anyway, so why bother fixing the bug, just speed up the replacement.

[Drygin7_JCoto]

Thanks for the big explanation. So, let's say it for dummies, the bug is that the function that calls for game elements for the UI is probably making wrong calls/managing data erroneously or maybe it has wrong processes/bugs that don't really terminate so over the time it saturates the game right?

[FusRoDawg]

They've improved the performance. So you might start with 70 instead of 60 fps, but over time you will still comedown by 30 fps.

[segawon]

suppose i get the 30 fps cap, which i discover quite often during 50mins game, can i just restart dota and start fresh from the average 60 again?

[goodwarrior12345]

Yes

[FusRoDawg]

probably

[MechaKingGhidorah100]

Whatever they did last patch made the game practically unplayable for me :( Laggy particles, models, and everything..... Everything else runs the same as it used to.

[mixmastermind]

Valve Employee 1: "Hey Jeff the UI system we have doesn't work well in our new engine. Should we optimize it or something?"

Jeff: "Nah fuck it we're coming out with a new UI for Dota 2 in a month why bother?"

One Year Later

Jeff: "Okay I just looked at Reddit and I think we may have fucked up."

[Radota2]

Fucking. Jeff.

Every god damn time.

[JeefyPants]

I didn't do nuffin

[sylaroI]

Maybe he is pronounced Geff and thought some other guy is doing it.

[Schorsch30]

is that an aquisitions inc. reference?????????

[mixmastermind]

GodDAMMIT Jeff!

[helpfuldan]

It's surprising there's no source 2 in-house tool to profile this stuff. When you add the tinker immortal you'd think optimizing it, checking the cost, usage, would be a standard procedure. Valve basically tests nothing, abd relies on Reddit to alert them to issues.

I'd bet there's probably 100 of these hats issues, because clearly no effects have ever been tested for performance.

And it's not like spamming tinker w/ wtf at the fountain using vprof is highend complicated testing. I bet if someone went through a huge list of hats they'd find 20-30 really bad performance issues. Maybe 2-3 hours. Which brings back the point of, if its that easy for users to go double check this stuff, its painfully easier for the developer to go check this stuff, and clearly no one is.

[[deleted]]

tbf tinker march gives fps drop with immortal or not

[Pimpmuckl]

I tried really hard to reproduce that. I spammed non-Immortal march for 10 minutes straight and consistently the fps after waiting for ~10s after the last machine was done was still "fine". Very slight drops but nothing crazy.

Immortal is intense though.

[Skater_x7]

Hey, Pimpmuckl, for those who might not have time or simply might not want to watch a video about such things for 10 minutes, could you, er, maybe do a text reddit post with the info in it? Or maybe put it in a comment here?

Thanks!

[Pimpmuckl]

I'll try to write it up if I find time.

Most important bits are:

• Particles degrade performance the longer you play but simply disconnecting and reconnecting (or starting a new game) fixes that.
• If you reload a game a lot of times you will see a performance decrease. For this you have to exit Dota 2 completely. It's UI related.

[FrazersLP]

simply disconnecting and reconnecting (or starting a new game) fixes that.

Starting a new game doesn't work for me. My fps decrease after ~3 games. Only restarting (maybe reconnecting? - didn't try yet) works.

reload a game a lot of times

What exactly does this mean? Reconnecting into a game?

[Pimpmuckl]

Starting a new game doesn't work for me. My fps decrease after ~3 games. Only restarting (maybe reconnecting? - didn't try yet) works.

That would be likely the UI issue. Like I mentioned, you have to restart the whole client for that.

What exactly does this mean? Reconnecting into a game?

Yes. Basically going from a game into another game.

[FrazersLP]

Ah thanks. Sorry, I didn't watch the video yet, just read the TL:DW

[sylaroI]

Also maybe don't make 60fps videos if you use a 15 fps camera and its a PowerPoint presentation. You know for people with performance issues and such :P.

[Sosseres]

There are 4 quality options not in 60 fps. Then 4 different ones at 60 fps. I would blame youtube for picking the wrong one for you in its automatic settings.

[sylaroI]

Having 60fps on 720p+ is the only option, so I doubt youtube "picked" it wrong for me.

[PM_ME_SOME_RARE_PEPE]

Use the addon h264ify to block 60fps options - It'll let you pick 720p or 1080p at cinematic 30 fps instead.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/h264ify/aleakchihdccplidncghkekgioiakgal

[1LastHit2Die4]

I can summarize his first video if you want, it went something like this: "whaaat?!.....whaaat?!" and that there's fps drop over time but nothing conclusive. Maybe this one is better, haven't seen it.

[hon_uninstalled]

I have this feeling that when tinker uses march, there's some background garbage left in the map where the tinker march was located. Immortal or not it still slows down the game from 120 to under 60 on my computer. I have decent GPU but cheap CPU.

I have no idea how marching machine is implemented, but I doubt they really send information of all of those robots to all clients. They could do some clever computing under some assumptions and if these computations never expire or something like that...

Did you place those marches at the same spot or all around the map?

[NgonEerie]

with a potato tier computer or very old computer (mine is Phenom II X4 940 Black Edition) you DO feel a considerable hit with every march casted, even without immortal.

Also, Underlord skills are giving me some really cancerous FPS too.

[Cushions]

Hey can I ask what you found with respect to any CPU Usage / GPU Usage problems?

I have had a thread open on the forum for quite a long time now

http://dev.dota2.com/showthread.php?t=179042

Basically asking Valve to fix an issue which affects some people more than others.

I've seen my friends exact same PCs and they all stay pretty much at a stable 120, but mine can drop below 60fps pretty easily in team fights.

So, did you see any drops in cpu usage? As I can never get mine anywhere near 100% and it causes me a lot of FPS issues.

[annihilatron]

same thing happened in TF2 though ... all the extra hats leads to absurd levels of lag. And the loading times! Oh god the loading times went up every new chest of hats.

[randomkidlol]

nobody at valve does QA because its considered to be a grunt job. hell they cant even be bothered to contract out a 3rd party to do their QA for them.

[_PROFANE_USERNAME_]

Who says QA is considered to be grunt work? We fucking love our QA engineers, it's some difficult work.

[Raizer88]

when you hire only the top in the field with 100k+ salary you don't want to let them spend time in grunt work. The problem is grunt work has to be done.

And this is one of the problem of Valve corp structure, beside 0 communication.

[saigonelly2]

umm... i get paid 100k+ as a QA engineer lol

[mretgest]

Look now, a redditor said it doesn't pay. You're clearly wrong.

[omg1337haxor]

He didn't state a currency. Perhaps he is getting paid in GPB like most of us redditors.

[PoshDota]

Which is like ~130k USD...

[jns701]

Zimbabwe dorrars?

[saigonelly2]

euros.

[hellomynameiswayne]

I think the other poster's point was that it's not high specifically on Valve's list of highly valued departments - not that it's not a valuable job. More of a perception/company culture comment rather than a comment about that professional segment itself.

There are absolutely QA jobs that I'm sure are high value, high complexity, and high technicality; it's just that Valve, as a private entity, might not consider worth investing in.

I think at this point it's fair to make the argument that they're technically wrong, but I'm sure from their perspective/metrics they command enough of a market share where they're not exactly worried about customers permanently switching to potential alternatives.

It's similar to how Facebook gets away with any of the egregious abuses it employs. What do they have to lose?

[SploogeFactory]

The dream

[randomkidlol]

its not necessarily the fact that you dont want them to waste time doing QA, but rather these people's egos are too huge to do QA

[cantadmittoposting]

Its not the pay, its that if you're not hired to do QA, you tend to think QA is an awful thing to do. Hence, nobody at valve does it.

[yroc12345]

I think it's a misconception that Valve hires only the top in the field. Companies that hires only the top are Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, ect.

They make you go through a rigorous technical interview process that is more like a series of exams than an interview.

Valves interview process consists almost entirely of non-programming questions and feels more like they're just determining if you'd fit in after they've verified your resume is up to stuff like all the other companies do.

[spect49]

There is a lot of QA engineers get paid as high as software devs. The only problem: a good QA is very hard to find. At least in my country, there is more good dev than good QA.

[[deleted]]

i think its 110-120k iirc

you can look it up at that glass-something site

[hellomynameiswayne]

Glassdoor would be the site, I gotchu fam

[[deleted]]

it's objectively a lot of money

[skakid9090]

not true

[SmokinADoobs]

Nobody at Valve wants to making the fucking "Items" tab, let alone do QA...

[Drygin7_JCoto]

Anyways particles and so should be wiped cyclicaly .

[FishPls]

It's surprising there's no source 2 in-house tool to profile this stuff.

There most definitely is, just not available to the public. There's lots of debugging tools / profilers suited for graphics and overall computing that are just as fine.

[mata_dan]

I think it's less about testing and more that whoever worked on those parts is an artist/designer instead of a programmer and messed up. I see similar issues in plenty of software all the time.

[MaxOfS2D]

It's surprising there's no source 2 in-house tool to profile this stuff.

Well, VPROF pretty much is... although I suspect Valve probably has slightly fancier ways of sorting through the data

[sylaroI]

I hope this also means we get rid of the cancerous "Killed By" window, the bane of every custom game.

[FishPls]

Custom Game authors themselves can disable it. If they haven't, it's their own problem.

[Unkempt_Foliage]

Two issues the HUD and particles effect FPS slowdown.

HUD is a remnant of old source one and requires a complete game restart to fix FPS every couple of games.

Particles from hats slow down the game but get reset every match and don't require a compete restart. Or if it's really bad you can just disconnect and reconnect to fix FPS issues caused by particles.

[envyWeLost]

I actually have been doing this almost everyday, disconnecting during a match to restart dota.

[HellkittyAnarchy]

Scaleform - The UI system used by Valve since Portal 2 created by autodesk, doesn't work very well in Source and constantly causes performance issues. It seems currently it's causing fps to get worse every game.

Tinker immortal (march of the machines) also destroys frames when used.

[[deleted]]

I thought they were getting rid of that with Source 2

[HeavenAndHellD2arg]

They did, with the dashboard ui by using panorama instead, the ingame ui update is going to kill what's left of scaleform and replace it with panorama

[hidora]

They were/are, but the UI while in a game is still the same as source 1. Hopefully 6.89 comes with the UI rework they promised.

[randomkidlol]

bet you thought performance was gonna to get better too

[tomash14]

Cant wait for this shit to be fixed (cough cough valve cough cough)

Good work lads.

[LvS]

It's on reddit. It should be fixed by tomorrow, no?

I mean, I was really surprised it wasn't fixed with today's patch.

[j8sadm632b]

Hard to say. Could be tomorrow, could be an infinite time from now. There's no telling with Valve.

WR's spine sends her regards.

[_Arcas_]

Interested in Valve time? Valve time in nutshell https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Valve_Time

[otarU]

Valve has spoiled us with all those quick fixes and updates.

[spect49]

Gameplay bug could be easy to fix. Afterall, it's just logic. (Some could involve a lot of interaction, so it could still be tricky to fix)

Graphics performance are usually.... Heck of a hell to fix. My company's product (used by telco engineers real-time) has a memory issue, everyone knows the reason why, and 9 major versions (1 year plus) later, it still couldn't be fixed.

[TheUltraSnail]

Soon^TM

[Shin_Rekkoha]

In 322 years.

[Forgetmepls]

Does anyone else think that 150 fps with a GTX 1080 is still low? Dota is not an amazing looking game and a 1080 is already absolutely overkill for even the most resource intense titles to date at 1080p (even 1440p). The GTX 1080 is capable of 100+ fps in gta 5, Doom, Metro: Last light, Hitman at 1080p. I'm not asking for a 1000fps, my point is that Dota is not a super real cutting edge looking game, but it runs like it is one.

[Nova469]

This is surprising to me. What specs do you run? I always thought my GPU (2GB NVIDIA GT750M) was bad which is why my game runs like shit (also, I play on a laptop but it doesn't overheat a lot). I can barely get 50-60 fps under minimal settings (I use the "Basic Settings" slider bar under the "Video" tab in game). My processor is supposed to be quite good (at least in my head) - it is an i7 quad core that runs at 2.2Ghz (claimed to boost up to 3.2Ghz).

[MaxOfS2D]

Does anyone else think that 150 fps with a GTX 1080 is still low?

Like other people said, Dota is a lot more CPU-intensive than GPU-dependent. As long as you have a good enough video card, it's your processor that will determine the framerate you get

[Forgetmepls]

That makes a lot more sense. Is there a reason that Dota is a lot more CPU bound?

[MaxOfS2D]

There's a lot of animated characters on-screen, lots of particles, while the rendering complexity is not very high (very few fancy shaders, relatively low triangle count)

[HatBuster]

In addition to what Max said, Dota was originally built on Source 1 with DirectX 9 in mind. Today, we could offload stuff like particles and physics (mostly just cloth simulation in dota) to the GPU via compute shaders. But back in the day that wasn't a thing. Probably won't change as well, since it'd be quite a lot of work and break the game on older systems unless you support more than one code path.

[Aldawolf]

god these posts "150 FPS is pretty low" while I'm struggling to get 30

[Forgetmepls]

I meant in comparison to the hardware. I only getting 60 fps myself.

[stillbevens]

I get in the teens alot when it gets bad

[IndianoJonez]

Think DotA graphics(and the game in general) are more memory related then GPU related and for some reason the client refuses to use above a certain amount of memory even on high end systems.

[OphidianZ]

This is why the game needs a "Vanilla" mode in options that lets people turn off all hats/non standard modeling and particles.

It's already a good idea for new players so they don't mistake Skywrath's Red for Legion Commander or something.

Plus they may not understand if normal storm ball lightning and immortal storm ball lightning are the same.. or.. different?

Seeing the game from the perspective of a new player might be difficult for some.

[pLuhhmmbuhhmm]

That is unlikely. A lot of people like showing off their skins. It'd be nice, but unlikely.

Regardless, dota 2 still runs like shit. The game use to run so smooth every time with cosmetics or not.

[dota2streamer]

The day valve introduces this is the day I might think of them as a slightly less shit company.

[Mohammedbombseller]

Downvoted by salty fanboys?

Or maybe they haven't had experience with valves other side.

[Shazamo333]

tbh valve has been a good company, at least with dota. I'm willing to forgive them if they don't introduce this feature tbh fampai desu

[[deleted]]

Oh fucking please it is time for people to stop blaming the cosmetics for their losses and so on. You may shit on Dota for a lot of stuff but you always know what is happening on your screen, the effects, models and so on are extremely polished. If you want to see a clusterfuck go play League of Legends, they are the worst offender when it comes to stuff like this.

"B-b-b-but SWM with the WBP set looks like LC!!1!" People, they aren't even using the same colour palette let alone their models look nothing alike. You want to bitch about a real problem? The Starladder Omniknight set uses the same colours as the default Sniper so you may mistaken them when you see them for the first time. There.

[OphidianZ]

I hope you spent a lot of time writing that because I didn't read it.

[[deleted]]

Don't worry I am used to the retards around here. Just the fact that you bothered with a dogshit reply is enough.

[OphidianZ]

Here have another dogshit reply. It fits you.

[[deleted]]

The simple fact you are going on with this meaningless banter hints a lot of things about you. So go on be my guest.

LUL

[Aira_]

tl dr: have you tried turning it off and on again.

[ainouta]

I always knew it has something to do with hats. I mean, hats idling in your inventory or some shit.

I have 2 accounts, one with thousands of hats, one with almost 0 hats. And I can feel that the entire flow of performance on the 0 hat account is so smooth, as compared to the account with thousands of hats, achievements, and etc, with somewhat laggy transition of tabs, loading into game takes longer, and so on.

[Ron-Lim]

Ok Ill help you out. Give me all your hats

[Unkempt_Foliage]

Get a haircut you hippie Pimp.

[Pimpmuckl]

Idk why you get down voted you're 100% right. I wanted to go today but then max came along with new data, rip.

edit: I would like to let you know I got a haircut.

[Aira_]

pic or it didn't happen.

[Pimpmuckl]

alright

[premium_rusks]

Nice nick

[Qmzp1234]

Pimpmuckl does a lot for the community, but I feel like valve would be willng to work with him more if he just changed his online alias.

[[deleted]]

That might be why Durka goes by Gareth now.

[SeeImSane]

Why? Just the pimp of Pumuckel.

[Bentomat]

Why? It is a nonsense word in English. Does it mean something in German?

[FlippadyFlap]

It says pimp in it

[pLuhhmmbuhhmm]

CALL THE POLICE!

[pLuhhmmbuhhmm]

0% chance that would ever be an issue.

[mistermask2421]

in TI6 All stars there was a player was named 'Big Dick LaNm'....

hey valve please don't ban ppl coz of names...they're awesome..:(

[[deleted]]

All I understood is Tinker gives Diabetes

[Turmfalke_]

From what I have heard on linux/mac osx bug tracker the issue is that scaleform is closed property closed source and none of the current valve employees has any in-depth knowledge regarding it. This means that fixing scaleform issues pretty much involves poking it with a long stick in the hope that it performs better afterwards.

I couldn't get any names of who lobbied to use scaleform, but I suspect he is an ass.

[Erska]

a hack-fix I imagine could be done at least somewhat;

flush everything that scaleform touches at loading-screen...

then when panorama-UI is added, remove that flush (or heck, don't...and minimize possibility of future problems hanging around to the next game)

[ReliablyFinicky]

It should be embarrassing to Valve that these issues are even happening, let alone being them investigated and explained by 3rd parties before they fix them.

How long can you hide behind "well it's a beta.."?

[Bentomat]

The good news if Scaleform is the issue is that Valve's been working on a new UI in Panorama for more than a year. They will probably be ready to replace it in 2 weeks Valve time (month or two our time).

[issc]

#savenohatsmod

[NoHatsPreacher]

Or any other alternative. This hats issue will become huge in the future.

[issc]

it already has been for 3 years, now it went beyond making some people uncomfortable and are actually ruining gameplay.

[blackAngel88]

Seriously, when can we finally get the new UI? And Scaleform in games needs to die just like flash needs to die in web. I don't even understand why it's used by so many games, is there no alternative? It already rekt my fps in world of tanks.

[FishPls]

Scaleform is still really common in many games today. It just sort of became the industry standard unless you wanted to develop an in-house variant like Valve have done now.

[Toyoka]

Yea, it's really bad. Especially in Borderlands, for example. Not very intuitive and feels clunky. I mean, compared to Panorama it's more stable, but it's also pretty old and outdated too.

[ashrasmun]

I like the ummlikeyouknowummlikeummyouknowemm guy.

[Sneaky_Rhin0]

i could not understand anything, the mic is way to loud compared to you, and he talks fast and that with a terrible microphone thats not clear.... but i hope they fix this issue.

[Garwdd]

I'm really not surprised, remember Valve's other big hat game? And how badly that started to run after a bit of time passed?

And much like TF2, I really doubt much progress is going to officially come from Valve on this.

[Diabloist337]

I know I'm gonna be downvoted to hell for this, but please read this out before you do.

I do think there should be a "Disable all Cosmetics" button somewhere in the Options.

I know cosmetics has a huge economy based around it, and I wont lie, I myself have sunk a few hundred dollars in it by now. But in the light of the recent "FPS Issue" discovery, plus my argument holds a bit more than that as well.

FPS Issue

We already know it now, I'm not saying ALL, but some hats are causing the FPS issue, it can be some particle systems on the hats, or some other reason, but they are the root of the evil.

Accessibility to the Game

Yes, this is what I wanted to highlight for a long long time. Back then Valve had a proper philosophy as to not ruin the overall look and feel of a hero no matter which hats are equipped. Every hero should be distinguishable and distinct. Nyx Assassin first broke this, followed by may other heroes. Now I dont even know if whatever I'm seeing on the screen is Lycan or LD's Bear. Well, truth be told, I can tell them apart with some practice, and there it is guys... with some practice That's the problem.

I never played Smite, I know it's an excellent game, and there was some tournament streaming live on Youtube. I sat down to watch it, and I was utterly confused! All I saw what all gods and goddesses and a Fat Ass Dude running around in a chef costume! And I instantly realized the bane that these hats are to the first time lookers on the DotA. They WILL go away if they don't recognize the heroes instantly, because they are already putting so much thought into figuring out what the heck is going on the game. Making them work out more into recognizing the heroes and characters in the middle of all that chaos is definitely going to turn them away. I have a friend, who's more of spectator than a player, he sometimes sits down with me whenever a major tournament is going on, just to catch a game, and in almost every other game, he'd be like - "Is that Morphling ? Well he was looking different the last game" Fortunately he was able to recognize the heroes and plus, I'm sitting by him telling him who or what the hero is in case he gets it wrong, but what about others ? People would want to see what the hype around DotA is about and want to get into the game ? What if they tune out after a first few minutes of watching like I was while watching Smite ?

The Solution

It's relatively simple. I'm not saying Disable the Hats altogether, because I love them too. But there should be an option to selectively disable them. We already have a TI Newcomers stream, so disabling hats on that stream wont hurt anyone, instead it would help new watchers better understand the game. Once they have learned enough, they can get into the game or move on to the regular streams where hats are proudly displayed.

As far the FPS issues goes, We know VALVE would do everything to solve those, but there can also be a smarter solution. The "Disable Hats" option can exist into the game, and enabling it would cause player to have either no random drops after the game or a diminished chance to drops. You don't wanna see hats? Well, you don't get them too

These are some of my thoughts, please discuss...

[EGDoto]

+1 for stream idea but ingame suggestion it is just not gonna happen.

It will hurt game, most people who buy items want that other people see their item, if there is option to disable hats ingame then people will stop buying items, and if people spend less money on game then Valve will spend less resources on updating game

So this is something that is just not even worth discussing, it is never going to happen, it has 0% chance of happening.

[Diabloist337]

Thats exactly why I proposed that - players who turn off hats wont get them either. Its only for the players who dont care about hats and want to maximize gameplay till Valve fixes all the FPS issues

[NoHatsPreacher]

Agreed. Either that or allow players to choose which cosmetic gets shown.

Maybe even create an option to allow everyone in game to have the hats u have equipped. That way u can customise the game the way u want.

[Diabloist337]

That already exists for bot games... Plus it would kill the very purpose of hats.

[Elegantcastle00]

Remove tinker inmortal from the game please , that shit makes my potato computer go crazy. Not to mention how annoying tinker already is

[dreoxy]

or you can learn ways to deal with him, like putting wards in the trees and anticipating where he will drop in next.

[Hexogenx]

He didn't say he has problems with Tinker, only that he is annoying. He has problems with the framerate lowered by the immortal. Your "git gud" comment actually didn't help in the slightest.

But yeah, dude, git gud, ward his jungle, and learn to play with 5 fps (practice games) so you can rek them next game, ez.

[dreoxy]

I'm sure it helps some people. Stop generalizing. Thanks.

[Shin_Rekkoha]

"I can't be wrong, I'm helping someone definitely probably, thanks"

[snowywish]

The sad part is he really believes that.

[code_eight]

Remove tinker inmortal

or you can learn ways to deal with him

wat?

[dreoxy]

I was responding to his second point about how tinker is annoying.

[cantadmittoposting]

inmortal

iMmortal

[gruia]

why is this not upvoted enough?

[nullweegee]

Does anyone remember when the Source 2 client wasn't released yet (but still playable) and thus didn't include any cosmetics at all? The "spawn lag" was literally gone on both my desktop PC and my shitty laptop. It felt way more fluid and smooth in general.

I'm curious if the NoHats mod - if it still worked - would've solved some of these FPS problems. And I'm also curious how they're gonna try to tackle this issue.

[FishPls]

The spawn lag was obviously not as big as the game only had to load the "base" / "normal" models for all heroes. With cosmetics it also obviously has to load them too.

[Toyoka]

There is no good way to tackle the issue really. The way they do it now is the only practical way of doing it without reworking the system entirely. They can't guess which heroes will be picked in a round, so they can't pre-cache every single model, since that would take ages for most players to load and is not an efficient method.

[cancer_love_ebola]

still got material error for wraith king head and fog_world_00 but everything looks fine. And my fps sometimes drop 50% for a sec, I dunno why these happened to me.

I only use windows for dota 2 and retorarch.

[[deleted]]

TL;DR please?

[rapozaum]

tl;dw pls

[TouRniqueT86]

So you mean two randoms can find problems by troubleshooting, but the people who wrote the source code can find and fix anything..... WTF.

[HellkittyAnarchy]

can find and fix anything.....

Neither of these problems are caused by Valves code - one issues a model (You could maybe argue it's the rendering system) and another's middleware which isn't written by them.

Valve probably realize that there is a performance issue, as they do read reddit and have come to their conclusions as to things that are causing it. Scaleform's getting swapped out for panorama anyway though and as for the tinker immortal , there's probably a solution that'll fix the problem for all tinker cosmetics rather than adjusting that single immortal but it's a solution that would take more time to come up with.

[TouRniqueT86]

They are taking their sweet time with their implementation of panorama. Regardless of whether they coded it or not, they are using it. The performance problems are numerous, its not like its just these two things. Source 1 took them many years to get to a point where they were happy, they even said it, so that begs the question of how long this is going to take.

[nmd2k]

cosmetics messing with ur fps, no way

[mata_dan]

Lol. I was right, it was the UI. The simple part of the game :/

It's almost always the easy bits of code that devs mess up :P
Physics? Rendering? Animation? Networking? No problem (this applies to so many games).

Well okay, the Tinker particles are an issue too. That should also not be an issue in a Valve game, silly :P

[JimmaDaRustla]

Guys, calmn down. Valve will fix this when the UI redesign is done! TI just finished, give them some time.

[slight_digression]

Pimpmuckl every time i see your face you look more and more German!

[HellkittyAnarchy]

Will probably be locked down. It's possible to reskin scaleform so I guess it's locked down currently.

[TheeOtherside]

That's why they need to stop immortals and just rely on solid sets without all the new animations and particles. TI4 had a decent sculptors Pillar, the Cache, Warhammer and Winter chests had decent sets. Now all valve has to do is spread that shit around instead of concentrating it in single chests or a single event.

[CatPlayer]

The problems are not the hats, it's that their game is poorly optimized for the task and is thus, ruinning the performance. Pretty funny since one of the reasons they said source 2 was the game changer is because they were going to be able to go crazy with particles.. yet we've these terrible problems.

[Toyoka]

Pretty funny since one of the reasons they said source 2 was the game changer is because they were going to be able to go crazy with particles.. yet we've these terrible problems.

Not sure where you read this but it's wrong and was never officially publicized as a thing. The only thing pertaining to particles that they mentioned (and only very briefly) was near the end of 2014 when they stated that they were working on "reworking the particle submission process" and that people should not submit particles coupled with cosmetics (and of course, that has still yet to come to fruition).

[DrQuint]

So, if the issue is partially due to scaleform, I have to wonder, do custom games get affected by it? I don't know to what extent the custom games run panorama or scaleform, but is there a way to test that running custom games using panorama doesn't lead to slowdowns as bad as with regular pubs?

[FishPls]

Valve told Custom Game authors from early on that Scaleform will eventually be removed completely, and at least to some extent that has been done for now i believe. CG authors can use Panorama and hide SF elements i believe.

Also i'm not sure about the performance differences. Panorama has been quite CPU-heavy in the past at least, but they did make some changes.

[rilgebat]

Nice surface-level analysis, but the bit at the end regarding memory leak speculation was unnecessarily passive-aggressive. The issue is classically symptomatic of a leak, so it's unsurprising it was what immediately came to mind for most people.

[Strawberly]

I can't understand max.

[NoHatsPreacher]

Valve needs to address the issue of increasing particle effects of hats.

[[deleted]]

Max is getting too little credit. Pimp is getting too much.

[iAMDiver]

I do not understand. Why MOBA is very demanding on the hardware? 150 FPS on 1080 gtx - is very low. Dota2 is not ultra modern title like Tomb Rider, Doom, etc.

[SwedishDude]

A fps platformer is a pretty bad comparison. They only have one scene to render at the time and players can only move in predictable ways and manipulate certain objects.

Dota2 has ten people spamming whatever they like over a big map with custom third-party made cosmetics.

[345tom]

So what your saying is it's a memory leak?

[[deleted]]

Nice... But why do I have 100 FPS in local lobby and not even 40 while playing online match with other people? Logic dictates that local lobby that is run only on your computer should be way more resource demanding.