Something I'd like to bring up, the past couple releases I've noticed some MAJOR performance issues. For instance creating a fresh terrain, adding a couple enemies, allies and player spawn point drops the framerate down to 3-4fps. Looking in the performance tab of task manager shows that MAX is using ALL of my VRAM(4GB) and ALL of my system RAM(8GB). Admittedly, I need to add some RAM to my rig, but for an engine that's aimed at 10+ year old hardware, I feel like It should run smooth as silk. To put it in perspective, UE5 runs pretty smooth except while building shaders.

My specs
Intel Core i7 2600 3.4ghz
8GB DDR3 RAM
nVidia GTX 980 Strix 4GB VRAM
500Gb Primary HDD, 82GB Free
2TB Secondary HDD, 254GB Free
32GB Readyboost Flash Drive(x 2)

The sample games in Max Stutter and drag. Editing games slowly bogs down the system until it becomes unresponsive. I didn't have this problem a month ago. Anyone else seeing similar issues or have some insight about what the problem is?

When you say that UE5 runs pretty smooth, is that with enemies with full AI, etc.? Programming, including AI, does hit the computer pretty hard and cause significant frame drops.

As far as MAX, though, 4GB of VRAM is really, really low. Your video card is also on the edge of what MAX will take. You can't expect silky smooth when your computer specs are at the bottom end of what MAX says may run their game maker.

In any case, MAX has not been optimized yet, according to what Lee has been saying on his live broadcasts. They are planning some things to speed up rendering and increase frame rates. Some of this will come by the March early access release. But, according to Lee, they will continue to work on optimization and increasing performance (in a major way) after the initial release as well.

Having said that, you still need to consider that your computer specs are at the bottom end of what they want for developing with MAX.

You make a good point about the UE5, i'll have to load up an equivalent project later to test that out. Regarding hardware. While I'll admit that my hardware is aging, it's not really THAT close to the edge of what max is supposed to support. Lee has claimed that the target minimum is GTX 960. While still in the same series, the GTX980 is worlds above the GTX960 in terms of performance and actually can outperform or at least match many(not all) of the GTX10XX series of cards. 4GB of VRAM is basically the bare minimum by today's standards, but should still be usable. The i7 2600 is pretty old too but still respectable. I desperately need more system RAM, i know that much. Point being, my system is old, but not a complete pushover.

In regards to the optimization, yes, know that lee has been saying that optimization is coming. But things like culling are not going to effect the use of ram because all of the assets are still going to be in memory even when not being rendered. Sorry, i'm not trying to be difficult here, but what i'm arguing is that a month ago, the only performance issue i had with max was that it lagged at generating the animated thumbnails for the object browser, now, virtually the entire application is lagging because it's eating ALL resources all of a sudden, when a month ago it was not. So my question is, what has changed in the last month that has made it that much more resource hungry than it was when they have been making optimizations such as with the nav mesh generation and the quick preview, etc. I asked my original question to see if anyone else had noticed this change as well. If it was my first time running the software then i would be able to more easily accept that it's just my old hardware. But it's not, I download every week for the last several months and have just recently noticed the change in performance.

Firstly, 4GB VRAM is small. If your cards is having to swap textures, it's going to slow things down. The 980 was a great card in it's day. I had one. But it's still an aging card and on the edge of what is required to run MAX.

As far as optimization, it's not just culling on objects that needs to be done. Currently, things like shadows in the forest are killing people's frame rates, even on high end cards. This isn't about the polygons of the trees and hills, it's about shadows. And that's going to deal with your GPU. So, if a high-end GPU is currently going to struggle (i.e. get 30fps in some areas), then a lower-end GPU is most certainly going to struggle until the optimize these areas (and more).

There have also been a ton of changes to the nav mesh system and more. With many of these changes came improvements, but also other things were broken, too. So ... optimizations are coming. That's why MAX is still an ALPHA and not a BETA or even a full release. These sort of things can happen as new things are introduced into the system or other things are tweaked.

The best thing you (or anyone) can do is report what they are experiencing on GitHub. Or at least look there and see if it's already reported. If not, report it so the devs can look into your particular issue and get on it.

IDK- to me it seems like grass has become MUCH thicker than previously-- unless I didn't pay so much attention to it before. How much grass (not weed) have you been using? - if any But seriously you cannot even paint it down as dense as it comes originally from a procedural map... at least as far as my eyes see- so I think that is a Github issue.

They need to thin that grass out!

BTW I don't think your specs are minor in any way. I have a 1650 /w an i5 and am lucky for that. I am not one of those who clambers like a madman over everyone else to have the biggest stick in the case. Why am I seeing 20 mb zombie face textures downloads ?!? Just a single diffuse file? INSANITY!

If Lee thinks every man, woman and child who buys a $10 GG MAX Steam production game should spend another $800+ to run his procedural maps and AI characters over 36.5 fps.... woooo-weeee teeee-heeee! Yeah- right! They will run, swim or crawl to Godot!

You do realize that the MB file size has absolutely nothing to do with how a texture works on a video card, right? It's PIXEL size that matters to the video card, not megabytes. You can have two different 2k (2048 x 2048) pixel resolution images that have very different megabyte file sizes, but they will take up the same about of video memory once in the video card.

"Why am I seeing 20 mb zombie face textures downloads ?!? "
Sure, I watched it download... so looked in the folders, not sure where those went, but in fact it's 65 MB for a single characters colored textures @ 4096 is overkill. The research can verify that. Will you be walking over the top of an Amazon warehouse sized soldier? Or will they more likely be more than 10 meters away?!

Actually if you set the Draw Distance for the grass further it thins it out, Gives you a greater drawing distance and increases your fps.
Win, Win i would say.

Again, it's not the file size in MB that the video card uses. It's the pixel size (and the bits ... as in 8 bit texture, etc.). So, it's not going to matter if it's a 20MB or 65MB texture.

Secondly, you have to remember that MAX also features a Character Creator. People want to create custom characters to place in their games, not just as enemies, but as allies. So, no, you won't always be 10 meters away. You may be standing right next to them were you will see every pimple on their face.

Thirdly, MAX is not going to be just for shooter games. It will feature puzzle and RPG games. So, you will want to go up and talk to characters. In fact, even in these shooter games you can do that. So, again, you won't be 10 meters away and can go right up to that character to talk to them.

That small 65MB texture (and, yes, that's small) is well justified.

"It's justified". Oh, okay.
So you are saying that the XXL large textures and the crowded grass has nothing to do with fps rates? But whether that's the case or not- everyone should just fork out $1400-$1800 to get a 3070 + 16 ram and i9?

hmmm.... Question for you Argent_Arts;
Where do you think the fps bottlenecks originate in MAX and what do you suggest improves that? Any thoughts?
I already presented my thoughts...

Yes, I do have thoughts. If you head on over to GitHub, you can actually find out about where these slowdowns are coming from. Some of them are from shadows, especially in the wooded areas. They are causing frame rate drops by at least 50% on most cards, even the high-end ones. This has been reported and confirmed and is being worked on.

Do you know how much VRAM a single 4K texture consumes? It's not much. Not on it's own. Look it up. I'll wait ...



If you were to head over to GitHub and do a little research, you might even find a little video posted by UltraVox001. He shows a scene crammed full of grass, but no trees and no tree shadows. Guess what? no slow downs at all. So, guess what? It's NOT THE CROWDED GRASS. It's the tree shadows (a known issue).

There are also some known issues with the current nav mesh slowing things down. There are other optimization issues that are causing issues. They know about it and are working on it. At present they don't have an LOD system in there, either. It's in the works, though.

Shall I go on?

So far, you're batting zero. It's not the grass. It's not the 65MB 4K character texture. These things are not causing the current frame rate drops in MAX.

I can see where your points and I apologize if I seemed terribly offended about you pointing out my aging hardware, I'm a bit touchy about the fact that I don't have newer hardware, my card was actually an upgrade I got this year when my HD6870 1GB took a crap, got the GTX 980 used for $200 because it was the best performing card I could afford thanks to the high demand for GPUs at the time. The funny thing is, my wife has a newer gaming laptop that she doesn't even game on, think it's got a 1660 or 1060 with 6 or 8GB VRAM. I swore when she got it I would leave it alone but I might have to see if she will let me try MAX on it. Probably not, she thinks game are stupid and making games is stupider(not sure how we ended up married to each other, lol)

Anyway, being alpha I can see how system requirements would fluctuate before finally settling back around where Lee said they should be. You're right, I should use github despite the fact that I hate github. Just wanted to see if anyone else noticed the change in performance too, I can have 60fps in a fresh biome but as soon as I add a single AI or a spawn point, the frames drop to nothing, static models seem ok, maybe it's just anything with a script attached to it that's causing the problem. Guess maybe I should have specified that earlier, and maybe tested the theory before posting. Anyway, guess I have some testing to do. Thanks.

@Toxicclowd
I think, actually I'm sure Argent_Arts was talking to me!
No need to apologize to him, we need to discuss these things without the fear of "stepping on people's toes" at least if we are trying to better things around here and not being plain trolls. I'm never a troll, but maybe my language has the flair of "creativity" at least I'll call it that. So it's me that is batting zero, my friend, not you.

@ Argent_Arts / Toxicclowd
I'm looking at putting various objects on maps and seeing how that effects performance. I'm using the "paint" tool and there's some weirdness going on with that. Is the paint objects circle supposed to follow the mouse? I thought it was supposed to. Mine isn't. Also is there just one simple setting for the paint tool; "radius" setting? When you select "paint objects" and then scale and rotation controls are on there at the same time without a division between the "radius" then it looks like you are supposed to get controls for all painted objects in scale and rotation. They could use those controls if not, but presently they seem broken.

Anyhow, this might be going off on a tangent that this thread is not directed toward... over and out.

@Toxicclowd - I totally get you! I am on an older card, too. But I am fortunate because I had snagged a 1080 ti just before all card prices hit the fan! I simply can't afford the prices on one of the 3x series cards at this time, no matter how much I want one. Sorry to hear about the other part, too. It's hard when people can't understand how important gaming is to us (and game creation is).

So, I did a few tests. First, i tried a test that i did on the last build that ended up freezing up Max. the test was that i created a new biome, added a squad of enemies and a squad of allies, plus a spawn point, it worked fine on this build. Plus a bug seems to have been fixed where the allies would begin shooting at me after they went into attack state. So in that regard, my performance complaint for editing seems to be resolved. Now regarding the performance while playing the sample games. I hate to admit when i'm wrong, but i'm wrong. I tried the demos on my wife's laptop. and while according to online benchmarks i've researched, the performance of my desktop SHOULD be slightly above her desktop based solely on specifications. The truth is there's apparently something to be said about newer hardware despite what specifications say. My wife's laptop not only ran max, much much faster, but it looked A LOT better. On my desktop, everything has a very slight cartoon look for some reasonand just doesnt look right. While on the laptop textures look crisper, less cartoony, much better contrast, just generally better in every way.


As a comparison, hardware specs for desktop and laptop

Desktop:
Intel Core i7 2600 3.4ghz
8GB DDR3 RAM
nVidia GTX 980 Strix 4GB VRAM
500Gb Primary HDD, 82GB Free
2TB Secondary HDD, 254GB Free
32GB Readyboost Flash Drive(x 2)

Laptop:
AMD Ryzen 5 4600H 3.0Ghz
8GB System RAM
nVidia GTX 1650 4GB VRAM 8GB Shared
500GB HDD

So anyway, all issues are resolved, whatever was causing my editing problems last week has been fixed and as far is my performance issues while playing the demos, i apparently just have old hardware.

Now for the hard part.

Wife and laptop!
How to seperate??

Straight swap wont work
She loves the laptop

So whats your cunning plan?

sell your pc and buy the same laptop. (plus gift her a flower )

Buy parts and build your own gaming (MAX) PC. Laptops are ok but not easy, if not impossible to upgrade.

Divorce worked for me.

Lmao