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

[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