Performance issues, even on amazing hardware

[wframe]

I just wanted to start this thread to gather feedback. I have been enjoying Fantasy Grounds quite a bit since coming back to Unity. Moon Wizard has done a lot of great work and the LOS and Lighting features are well implemented.

In the past, I have seen recommendations from the staff to keep the size of maps, the LOS points, and animations down to increase performance. That's all fine, in theory. But I thought that one of the benefits of Unity was a 64 bit platform that allowed for a little more wiggle room there. I have been running the game on an M1 Mac mini and most of the time it's fine. Last night, I ran a fairly large map with one animation layer (water) and a mixture of lighting and LOS points. All movement lagged, even for me. It was a little frustrating.

So in the interest of testing, I copied my entire environment over to my gaming machine. I was getting pretty much the same results. Here are the specs of my gaming machine:

Ryzen 5900
64GB RAM
6800XT GPU

This is a brand new machine. It's pretty clean with nothing else running. I could understand some performance issues on the Mac on a big map, but with that much RAM, processing power, and GPU overhead, I'd expect to be able to crush pretty much anything Fantasy Grounds could throw at me. Unless there's some kind of hard limit I'm not aware of.

I do have several extensions running. I had 5 players connected to me last night, but none when I tested on the PC this morning. The movement was still laggy and the combat tracker, to an extent. If I turn off lighting and LOS on the map, things obviously get a LOT smoother.

I guess what I'm asking is: Is using small maps and very few LOS points really the only way to have good performance, even on high-end hardware? I like the details on the bigger maps. And sometimes there are a lot of curved walls.

Thanks.

Edit: The game I have been running is a 5e game with about 5 or 6 extensions. Map image is 2.3 mb. I also uploaded a screenshot showing LOS points. Screen Shot 2021-11-12 at 8.30.31 AM.jpg

[Trenloe]

But I thought that one of the benefits of Unity was a 64 bit platform that allowed for a little more wiggle room there.

64-bit purely allows more memory to be used. It doesn't make things faster or improve performance for most applications. In fact, if you're opening a larger map (because you can with 64-bit) then performance will probably go down - as there's more pixels to be displayed, more light to be calculated, etc., etc..

Some things to try are listed in this Wiki article: https://fantasygroundsunity.atlassia...cing+GPU+Usage

If the steps listed in the GPU usage article don't help, in order to investigate your issue, please provide a copy of your campaign where the issue occurred - information on how to do that here: https://fantasygroundsunity.atlassia...ort+Developers

When you provide the zipped campaign, please give some steps to reproduce the issue.

[ddavison]

The LOS definitions on that map look to be good. Carl has been working on some performance issues and occasionally we see things get better, then worse, then better again, as we play around with some different things. I would be curious to hear if you have the same issues with that campaign in the current TEST channel build that we have available. Longer term, we are looking into some other changes that we hope will significantly improve performance.

[Zarestia]

It is mostly software capped and not hardware capped as pure performance goes (like many many other programs).
The display/monitor resolution is more important than image size when speaking about performance, size is important when sharing with other people as you need to upload that to your players.

Some things I would check from my own experience:
- Does it start to lag at the beginning of the map or only later on?
- If later on, does it help if you delete FoW data via right-click from each token?
- Is there a difference if token lock or free movement is used?

Of course it's also good to disable all extensions, especially if they manage anything image-related.

[jaharmi]

I had performance problems on my Core i9 Intel-based Mac with a Radeon 580 last week. My system has a 5K display and 64 GB of RAM. This was probably the only time I’ve had FGU performance issues on this computer.

I chalked this up to running two instances of FGU at the same time. I wanted a second instance on an external 4K monitor to share the player view on Discord. (The players were not connecting via Fantasy Grounds.)

It is also possible that the particular map contributed to the issue. I was using a map I found on Reddit or Google. I have been adding my own LOS and lighting to it. The LOS I added doesn’t seem extravagant. I did have some colored candle lights in one room the PCs can’t see from their current location. Other than that, some players had light affects applied.

[*Neuro*]

I think 2.3mb is too big image. I struggle with those sizes, I try to keep maps under 1mb, otherwise unless all players/DM have very fast DSL you will struggle loading.

And yes, with old hardware FGU struggles.

I have one of my players with old hardware and while FGC ran smoothly he cannot run smoothly FGU. Always delays, lag, stuttering.

I think developers should work on optimization.

I still think is a good software, but it required a lot of optimization for sure.

[Mephisto]

I don't think map size has really much to do with it. I would assume it is mainly the amount of LOS points and tokens on the map. The software needs to run a LOS check for every token x times per seconds so the amount of work likely rises exponentially. I would assume it is currently mainly CPU limited.

[damned]

For columns, trees etc I use a X for the line of sight points. Eg two short lines crossing each other, or 4 LoS points.

[YAKO SOMEDAKY]

I'm going to take advantage of this topic and ask you a few questions... It is true that the FGU is 64-Bit i.e. supports higher memory usage, but it is multi-threaded? Would his performance change with Multi-Thread? Now regarding the connection and performance of machines... Does it help that I have a powerful and constant connection and one of the players has a bad connection? (Taking into account that everyone has "good" machines), I'm wondering the same situation, but now let's imagine "bad" machines and good connections...
So the doubt is machines and connections untouchable and the lack of multi-threaded support (if it is not active) is what affects fgu performance?

[Zarestia]

- Image size (size on your drive) has nearly nothing to do with performance, it's just the transmission time from your machine to your player's machines.

... It is true that the FGU is 64-Bit i.e. supports higher memory usage, but it is multi-threaded? Would his performance change with Multi-Thread?

- FGU is partly multi-threaded as outlined by many posts from Moon Wizard in the past

Now regarding the connection and performance of machines... Does it help that I have a powerful and constant connection and one of the players has a bad connection? (Taking into account that everyone has "good" machines), I'm wondering the same situation, but now let's imagine "bad" machines and good connections...

- The player with bad internet might have problems, but the main point in sharing is the GM's upload speed

what affects fgu performance?

- We're speaking in most cases about performance on maps.
> Display resolution of the image on that user's computer correlates to GPU use. The same image on a 5k display in background mode will be using more power than on a Full HD display in background mode.
> LoS points
> Lightning
> FX
> Tokens on map
Simply said, anything that adds calculation needs more performance. Lagging and performance issues can also come from extensions and/or bugs. That's why it's important to try recreate issues and share them so the devs can take a look at specific examples.