Obduction

Obduction Stutter Showcase

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It’s been about 5 months and Obduction still has a stuttering issue. I’ve finally sent in a dxdiag report to Cyan with a link to my YouTube video showcasing stutters and lag. I have it public for anyone else who would like to see it:

Considering you spend a good amount of time exploring, wandering back and forth, and observing the environment for clues and stuff this gets annoying on the eyes after awhile, I’d hate to imagine playing it in VR. For the quality no one should be stuttering or lagging like that, especially on cards like mine 4GB and up.

I’ll also note for the record that I’m not the only one who is annoyed by the stuttering, even YouTube caught onto it right after I uploaded the video:

As flustered as I have been for wanting to play the game without the eyesores that did make me smile a bit. It’s funny considering I’ve never had this request for gaming footage before. 😛

Obduction is unfriendly to AMD GPU’s

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2016-08-27 16-48-29_1

As I’ve stated at the MOUL forums

At this point in time I can’t recommend the game to anyone running on AMD hardware. I find it absurd that I have to lower the settings on my R9 Fury to enjoy the game while my GTX 870m trots along fine with the occasional hitching. I really hope Cyan can fix this problem, at this point if they have another kickstarter and put Gameworks in their next project I won’t back it at all. I’ll buy it after the fact when I find out it’s properly optimized, or becomes extremely cheap. I had a bad feeling something like this was going to happen when Cyan mentioned NVidia, depressing… Cyan wanted people to get the word out about their game on as many avenues as possible in the latest Kickstarter update, I’m probably not doing it the right way but oh well… I gave them my money, might as well throw a in a couple more cents.

I’ll pick back up on the game eventually, with all the bugs that are being discovered I’d rather not spend several hours on a game and have to deal with corrupted saves or getting trapped in a collision. I deal with plenty of that in Skyrim, but at least Skyrim has somewhat of an excuse. Mods and an ancient game engine dating all the way back to Morrowind.

More experiments with Obduction

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I moved Obduction to my SSD and increased my swap file with some happier results. I’ll have to have a longer play session to see if I still have a memory leak. Unfortunately I still lag like hell in multiple places in the game where nothing is going on. If I want to lose most of the lag I have to play on the lowest settings which is just absurd for a system with an R9 Fury and a Xeon. When I find more time I’ll copy Obduction over to my laptop and see how well it runs. If my performance improves I’ll be severely pyst.

Late Night Open Thread

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Twas a long work day. Came home and I was too tired to play anything with puzzles so laid off of Obduction for the time being, which seems to be a fine choice since Cyan has uploaded some hotfixes to hopefully improve the game. Though at this point I don’t know what’s more entertaining, the game itself or the people who are getting pissy trying to run the game on inferior hardware? Some of the people at the Cyan forums who are complaining that they won’t fund another project after backing a game that won’t run on their old hardware are really out of touch. You had 3 years to come up with something to run the game, and you choose to run the game on your toaster mac and act all surprised when it doesn’t work. Amazing! It’s almost like Apple markets outdated hardware at ungodly prices to make people believe it’s still relevant… oh wait.

I have fine tuned my OBS Multiplatform setup, have the Elgato running through it rendering with the codec for my GPU. When I go to start Obduction with a new save I should be ready, assuming the memory leaks are dealt with by the time I pick it up again. In the meantime I tested with Skyrim of course, and the CPU barely moved. Framerate was literally the same recording or not, and I don’t have to worry about audio latency. I see OBS Multi has an option too for streaming and doing a local copy (with more advanced features than Elgato’s setup), so I’ll have to test that when I find time to livestream.

Sure I can run Crysis… but Obduction?

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Obduction

I thought it was excellent timing that I had a day off on the release of Obduction. I’ve really enjoyed the game so far, so much to explore and take in. It’s like Myst without linking books, and in space. It was really difficult to pull me away from it, thankfully the memory leak in the game ate my system RAM and my VRAM.

Yeah, the release has been a little buggy for people. I count myself among the luckier ones too. I’m really glad that I don’t game on a mac. Hopefully Cyan releases some updates though, from the performance standpoint I can only say it’s “playable” at best, and that’s on a 6 core 12 thread Xeon processor and one of the best GPU’s out there. There have been some other tips and tricks I haven’t done yet to improve performance (one being deleting your save and starting over), so I’ll try that next time I play the game.

I tried recording some clips with my the Elgato software but I’m still running into little annoyances with video/audio latency. So I’ve switched over to OBS Multiplatform earlier tonight and tested that. I still need to refine it but I can already tell it runs much better, the desync issues aren’t there and if they are they are not as apparent. And unlike old OBS I can actually use my AMD codec! Meaning I can record from the capture card, use that codec and save CPU/GPU usage. And the nice thing about OBS? It looks like that will let me stream and record at the same time much like Elgato’s Game Capture HD, which I didn’t know since up until this point I’ve been using classic OBS.

With all of this stuff I can honestly say I’m never bored. 😛

Obduction awaits

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At 7am PDT Obduction will be ready for release, apparently. That’s according to one of the playtesters (I think?) on Steam. I haven’t heard or seen anything from anyone at Cyan, so we’ll see how this goes. In the meantime I’ve been going between reading websites and playing various games. Guess I’ll get some rest, wake up to see if I got my game code, and go back to sleep while it downloads. I have the day off tomorrow so chances are I’ll play the game a bit.

Obduction gets delayed… again

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Obduction

In case someone out there hasn’t heard Obduction has been delayed yet again for further polishing and bug stomping. Not that it bothers me, as I’ve mentioned before and as self evident as it is I’m not exactly bored. If anything I feel almost sorry for people who took vacation time specifically to play this game, only to find out that it won’t be released. Which in all honesty is a pretty silly thing to do in the first place. Or for that matter people who only play games released by Cyan. Talk about a limited selection.

On a brighter note when the game DOES finally get released I’ll be able to capture it in all its glory with my new capture card coming in the mail. Might have to do a livestream, when I get around to it of course. 😀

Cyan at E3

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If anyone wants some Rand talk and Obduction eye candy, here it is:

I find it funny how at the end of the PC Gamer interview Rand had to say that The Stanley Parable was one of his favorite games. If only the rest of the Myst/Uru Community knew that him (and others) had a sense of humor… and learned how to develop one.

One can dream. 😉

The Obduction Updating Frenzy

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Ever since the specs for Obduction have been declared things have been rather interesting at both the MOUL and Cyan forums.

Seems there are more people in the community than I expected that will actually be able to run Obduction. It is funny though watching people on ridiculously ancient hardware have sads about not being able to have a system that can run the game.

Well, I’m guessing it was enough for someone at Cyan to step forward and say something. I recommend reading the whole post in the link. Here are some of the bits I found interesting:

Between in-house testing, and a 3rd party hardware lab taking a look at the title, we really tried to find that minimum spot where the game was perfectly playable without the performance taking enough of a dive to be an issue. In reality, the game will start on anything that supports DirectX 11, but on the early DX11 cards they’re just too old to be able to push what we’re doing. The one gig of video memory limitation is honestly aiming a bit low as well. The game at it’s lowest settings can stay within this, but you’re looking at a pretty poor visual quality. Turning the graphics up past the lowest point, you’re going to start seeing a large amount of stuttering and hitching as the game has to swap between video memory and system memory. A 2 or 3 gig card helps, but the 4 gig of the recommended specs is highly recommended. If you’re picking up a new card for the game, try to aim for at least 4 gig of video ram.

Funny, even they admit that 1GB is kind of a stretch when it comes to minimal requirements.

I am afraid that there is a can of worms to open however: the AMD vs Nvidia battle. To be upfront and honest, the game runs about 15% faster on nvidia cards than the equivalent AMD card. The nvidia cards also seem to deliver a bit smoother experience as well. There’s nothing wrong at all on the AMD side however and both companies really do offer the same visual quality. You won’t lose or gain any pretty effects with either manufacturers card. But if you’re picking out a new card for the title, be aware you’re going to need a slightly faster Radeon than you will a GeForce if you’re looking for that super-fluid 60 fps experience.

I am going to reserve my judgement until I play the game on my hardware, but I’m not exactly happy to see another game that may possibly fall to GameWorks.

Hard drives and storage:

The one area that makes a huge difference with the game, and isn’t necessarily reflected in the system specs is hard drive/ system storage speed. We do a *lot* of streaming from the drive during gameplay, and slower drives have a terrible time keeping up. A generic traditional mechanical hard drive is going to see a lot of hitching and pausing during the game while it loads in. Outside of a video card, upgrading your drive to a solid-state drive if you haven’t yet will make a huge impact in how smooth of an experience you’ll have with the game, along with being a very nice and very noticeable upgrade for your machine in general.

This has me a bit concerned. If you need to run your game on an SSD to stop hitching and stuttering then something is really really wrong. I didn’t get this with any UE4 game I’ve played so far, and that’s on a 2TB 7200 RPM Hitachi Ultrastar with 32mb cache.

I know I’ll be able to play this… But between the NVidia favoritism and info regarding drive performance I’m not sure what to think. Guess I’ll figure that out on release.

Oh, and psssst, Cyan! Stop Uncategorizing your posts! Only n00bs have the excuse to use Uncategorized as a category. That’s a big no no with for a blog/website as it’s hard to find uncatagorized posts. Search engines have a better time finding your posts when they’re tagged and categorized properly! Unless… Finding your blog is supposed to be a difficult puzzle in of itself. Never mind.

System specs for Obduction

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Here are the system specs that you’ll need to be able to run Obduction, as per the Obduction Steam Page:

Minimum:

    • OS: Windows 7 SP1 64 bit or newer
    • Processor: CPU Intel i5-2500 equivalent or better
    • Memory: 8 GB RAM
    • Graphics: GeForce 660 GTX w/1GB / AMD 7700 series w/1GB equivalent or better
    • Storage: 20 GB available space
Recommended:

    • OS: Windows 10 64 bit
    • Processor: CPU Intel i5-4590 equivalent or better
    • Memory: 16 GB RAM
    • Graphics: NVIDIA GTX 970 w/4 GB / AMD R9 290 w/4 GB equivalent or better
    • Storage: 20 GB available space

It looks like I’ll be able to run Obduction decently. I’m upgrading my GPU from an R9 290 to a R9 Fury, and I have 12 GB instead of 16 on my desktop. So I’ll be in good condition for the release. 😀