Wednesday 23 March 2022

Performance Boost

Hi!

Pre Super Adventure Box TacO development is ramping up, this time with a bunch of stability and performance upgrades. The Bugsplat integration in the previous build already pointed out some previously unknown issues, proving its worth. There have also been dramatic performance upgrades. Running with uncapped framerates, with some large popular marker packs loaded the uncapped framerate of TacO has jumped from 120fps to ~2k fps, for a performance boost of about 16x.

Change notes:

  • Fixed the handling of the Characters API endpoint - this should no longer crash if the API returns unexpected results
  • Added additional checks to avoid a crash related to toggling menus in rare cases
  • Added warning popup windows for when TacO is missing important data files (mostly happening when the overlay is run straight from the archive without unpacking)
  • Performance: replaced strings with string ids in the marker category system
  • Performance: trail textures are now cached more aggressively
  • Performance: the small fonts now have outlined versions as well and the outline doesn't need to be rendered separately using a 3x3 display
  • Performance: Teamspeak integration is now only ticked if the TS3 window is open
  • Performance: category visibility settings are now more aggressively cached
  • Performance: trails and markers are now bucketed for each map id, meaning a lot fewer checks per frame
  • Performance/Stability: TacO now waits for the mumble link to update more aggressively

11 comments:

  1. Downloaded this latest version and still have huge performance issues.
    When I open the markers menu the overlay stops for like 5~10 seconds on each "drop down".

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yeah the dropdown wasn’t touched yet as that’s a different part of the codebase, it’s a known issue. I went for stability and rendering performance for now.

      Delete
    2. Oh I see. Other than that it seems to work fine I did notice some improvements in performance, I thought the performance improvements were on the dropdowns.

      I also had a lot of old files from previous instalations I decided to delete everything and go with a fresh install which seems to have helped, even if very slightly.

      Thank you for your work.

      Delete
  2. This version refuses to start up.

    (Err) [GW2TacO] Failed to register gw2taco:// protocol with windows.
    (Info) [GW2TacO] build ID: GW2 TacO 054.2986r
    (Info) [core] Creating DirectComposition swap chain
    (Err) [core] DirectX11 SwapChain creation failed (The application made a call that is invalid. Either the parameters of the call or the state of some object was incorrect.

    Enable the D3D debug layer in order to see details via debug messages.)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Which OS? Did you update your gpu drivers and your OS to the latest available versions?

      Delete
    2. I got the same err above.
      GPU drivers updated to latest. OS is Win 8.1

      Delete
    3. Damn. Must be the latency reducing experiments that didn't go anywhere in the end. Will look into it, probably used a win10 only feature.

      Delete
    4. Also 8.1, guessing it's something to do with DX11 and Win8.1 :-/

      Delete
  3. Aren't unlimited framerates on TaCo a performance hit ?
    Or is there a (planned) limiter?
    Thanks a lot for your work !

    Cheers !

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Note that I said uncapped :) If you disable vsync and frame throttling in the taco config you get uncapped framerates. TacO by default waits for GW2 to render a frame before it does anything (that's the frame throttling setting)

      Delete
  4. I dont know if anyone else has had this problem but to make Taco work had to disable Nivida Gsync

    ReplyDelete