Will we see Performance upgrades in future updates?

The PC port is great! But there are some things that bug me. For Instance why is a game from 2014 having such high requirments, why do most generic controlers not work with the game?
Why cant we have more access to the graphical options.
I have to use a low resolution in order to be able to play competitive. Im not okay with that.
Im not saying the port is bad, im just saying that the requirments and the way that the game behaves are kinda weird for me.
Do you think that Microsoft will fix this in the near future?
Im reading more and more in the forums about people that have good specs and are still having problems with the graphical settings. Feel free to discuss below.

At least give us a config file for starters, so we can turn shadows off and pick our actual native resolution, things like that. The lava stage is pretty laggy for me too. I think a good idea would be to add a PC specific fighting background that’s like SF4 training background, nothing going on graphically. Then, if they can’t pass minimum graphics test, they can run it again with that background. If they pass, they can only play online with that background. And, even if you pass it normally you could still select it, so you don’t risk any graphics lag spikes, It might be tricky because of stage Ultras though.

The game definitely needs some pc improvements. While we’re on the subject, why no dx12 support. Is IG even considering dx12?

This is why I prefer to play on XB1, just Click and play!
I used to play on PC many years ago and was sick of poor optimised games with Driver issue’s.

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You have to remember this game is built on an engine that was created from the ground up by a very small team for a console. IG has done a lot of work to make it work on PC but a lot of the stuff PC players have come to demand from their games is probably not going to come until/unless the game ever gets ported over to another engine.

If they could upgrade the graphic engine from directx11 to directx12 that would be very good for KI. I not sure but it seems that it still running on 900p on xbox and should be 1080p now but thanks to the revamped lighiting its not a big deal.

I thought they already did that. Did they not? @developers, which is it?

nope. They just revamped the lighting system. Im quite sure the game still running on 900p and DirectX11 check out the PC specs.

No, I thought they did it before then, like halfway through S2…

I’m sure it’s 1080p now on XB1 they said in a stream before season 3 launched.

Baseline should be Xbox One specs. Within reason. You don’t need an 8 core processor, since the cores in the XB1 and PS4 are mobile targeted processors, so a 3rd gen i5 should be a match or better processor than the XB1 equivalent.

Then there is the video card. Radeon 7850 is supposedly closest equivalent, but I have an R9 270 (not the 270 x) and have NO problems running at 1080p with all settings on and textures set at high.

Then there is RAM. XB1 has 8 GB. Funny story. I’ve watched the RAM usage on KI on PC. It never seems to jump above 3 GB in use. I have 12 GB available.

So if you want better performance, and you have an i5 or AMD equivalent, I’d just bite the bullet and buy a better video card.

What are your system’s specs?

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I would also like to know your system specs.

One thing people should understant about a figting game on PC is that usually they’re HEAVILY tied to framerate. In other games you usually do time based physics, you know this animation must take 0,6s to complete and each frame you just calculate how much time has passed and pass that to the physics integration. What that means is that if your rig can’t run the game at 60fps no matter how much you lower the graphics then you can just run it at 30fps or 45fps and everything will be alright.

Not with FGs. In them everything is tied to frames, this move has X frames of animation of which Y frames are startup and such. You CAN’T skip frames in a fighting game (or at least not all the time) as it messes up the timing to do everything in it.

That means FGs are usually much less flexible about what you can do graphically. Running at a lower fps is a no-no so you must rely purely on lowering graphical fidelity to keep it running at 60fps. And with a game so heavily intense in physics and particles, things that usually are done in CPU or at least in sync with the CPU, there is just so much you can lower the graphics before you’re CPU bound.

That ties directly to what I just spoke about. Unlike CoD or BF4 where lowering the framerate is something you can do to keep playing at 1080p, in KI (and most FGs) the FPS is something you can’t change, so you must change something else. In your case it was the resolution.

In my rig the game performance varies GREATLY when you lower the resolution and the effects so the game is very scaleable in regards to graphical fidelity, it’s just that FPS isn’t one of the settings so you must use what you must use. It’s not fair to complain about the game not being very configurable but then not using one of the settings the game gives you that allow you to play it at 60fps.

Also remember the game doesn’t run at 1080p on Xbox, it runs at 900p. So in essence a machine with comparable power to the Xbox One should be able to play the game with some effects off (to match the console version) and at 900p.

It needs PC improvements in other areas like crashes and such, but in regards to performance I think the game is very on point. It has some restrictions due to being a FG so it’s tied to FPS but having said that you can actually tune most of the things that matter. You’re ASSUMING things like shadows will improve much if you just turn them off but in reality doing hard shadows is very fast and would show basically no improvement at all. It’s soft shadows that are a big performance hog and you can turn them off (just lower shadow details).

The empty stage idea would kind of work but then what happens with the other player? I don’t know if all stages are the same size but at least they are different in regards to some having stage ultras and others not, so I don’t know if it’s possible to have one player see the full stage and the other see just an empty white box. It would be very unfair to allow a player that can only play on this stage at 60fps play ranked matches and force everyone who plays with them to always play on a boring empty stage even if they can play on any stage just fine.

DX12 isn’t a magic bullet, you need to create the game’s engine with it in mind, you can’t just replace the DLLs and have it working faster all of a sudden. Redo a game engine to work with DX12 involves a lot of work and most of the things have to be done again because the fundamental nature of the problem changes with the new API. The DX11 engine solved a lot of problems using the DX11 way of thinking and this way simply doesn’t work with DX12 (it works but wields the same result with no improvements).

Think like this, DX12 is like building an engine for a car with a different method that can wield better performance, but you can’t just grab a car, replace it’s engine by one made with DX12 and it will suddenly work faster, the other components are still made to work with the old engine. You COULD just replace all components but then at what point you just didn’t build a complete new car? It will certainly cost as much and take as much time so most probably it’s better to just sell this car as is and in the future your next car will be made with DX12.

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I`d love devs to implement option to reduce particle effects. It would be beneficial both for my framerate and eyes.

The thing is that without knowledge of the engine there is no way to know if that would help.

With todays technology we’re able to calculate particles both in CPU and GPU. It’s even possible to have the engine being flexible enough to calculate them where you’re not bound, so if you’re CPU bound you can do them in GPU and vice versa.

So it’s entirely possible the way particles are calculated affect performance very little. Maybe they are calculated in CPU and heavily optimized to require very few draw calls (maybe even just one), meaning reducing graphics fidelity on them will in no way affect performance. I have no way to know but if I had to guess I would say particles are generated and calculated on CPU - because of the way they work with the physics engine (they bounce when hitting characters and the floor) - and just rendered on GPU.

The thing I know is that we can’t just remove them (have a “Particle Effects: Off” toggle) because many moves in the game use particles to hint the player about where the hitbox is. Take Tusk’s back HP for example (holding the sword and hiting it on the flor after you release HP), the area where the move destroys fireballs and does damage is dictated by particles, remove them and fireballs will just pop out of existence for no reason. Same thing for basically all Kan-Ra’s moves, even his simple st. HK is a shower of particles rendered as sand and you need the particles to know where the move will hit.

My specs are
Intel® Core™ i7-4510U CPU @ 2.00GHz
NVIDIA GeForce 840M
8 gigs of ram
I think there needs to be an option to completely disable shadows idk

Sorry, you don’t understand how dx12 works. Rendering engine does not equal game engine. And, a rendering engine can be ported to PC, Xbox One Direct3D 11.X to to use Direct3D 12. It’s not some super complicated task you’re making it out to be. Devs already know the low-level APIs they’ve used. The main thing they will have to do is specify how resources are to be used on PC, that’s it really. Multi GPU support, better cpu utilization, Async Shaders support, etc… No, they do not have to build an entire new game engine around dx 12. Please don’t speak on subjects you have no knowledge of, k, thanks.

I mean seriously, I can play MKX on 60 FPS with max textures, fxaa and bloom and get green on benchmark, and it`s two years younger game than KI and looks better hands down.

Please stop talking, you don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re spreading misinformation. He said reduce not eliminate particles. That’s completely possible and worth doing. You can also reduce the amount of particles rendered. And, yes, this will drastically improve performance. Post processing effects are resource intensive and so are particle emitter tasks. That’s why if you turn AA off you get fps improvements. Same thing with particles reduce them, performance will improve, eliminate certain ones performance will improve even more.

Particle effects are not all linked together either. You can remove gun muzzle flash in a game and still have a campfire, they’re not tied together in that way. Game specific particle effects are usually just textures rendered in a different way via a particle emitter to a billboard. So that gun muzzle flash effect starts off as just a picture of a spark, then the rendering engine processes the picture to display the way it does when given certain parameters(number values usually), fed to the emitter.

You can change the particle effect emitter values at will pretty much. That will control the amount of particles/spawn rate, particle lifetime/how long you see it on screen, initial velocity vector/the direction they move when spawned, etc… If you want to you can literally put a slider in a game menu to control those things. lol

Yes it is. If you think it is not then I’m sorry but it seems it’s you that don’t know what you’re talking about.

When rendering a scene usually the CPU will collect data, organize it and send it to the GPU, after that the GPU will run shaders that will transform this data into an image. The way you collect this data on CPU to send to the GPU is HEAVILY dictated by how the architecture and graphics API work.

Each new advancement in computer graphics and 3D rendering gives us new ways to solve the fundamental problem we have that the CPU memory is separated of the GPU memory (in some cases only logically) and we have to lose time sending work to the GPU. If the new API has a completely new way to talk with the GPU then you have to rewrite the code used to do that task, no way around that. Also you can’t simply replace commands and still think the same way you did with the old API, new optimizations are needed since the fundamental data you’re sending to the GPU has changed.

Thinking that just updating a rendering engine to support DX12 and have it magically work faster with no extra optimization work involved is just naive, specially when you don’t know how the rendering engine works. And for your information, Killer Instinct was made in an engine developed by Double Helix called HEX engine, so either IG would have to update the engine themselves or ask Double Helix to do it, and DH is working for Amazon now so no, they aren’t available.

What exactly that I said is wrong? And please, limit yourself to things I actually said, for example:

I never claimed he did, that’s an example of you reading something I didn’t say. If I thought he had said “eliminate” I would not waste time explaining why “reducing” them might not improve performance all that much.

I just mentioned “removing them” to say “the only thing I knew was that”, because as I said earlier, everything else is conjecture of my part. I only know that removing them wouldn’t help because of gameplay reasons (you need “something” there to see where the hitbox should be)

You on the other hand is saying that reducing the particles in KI will SURELY improve DRASTICALLY the performance of the game, without any evidence of that since you don’t know how the engine works.

So it’s not me trying to spread misinformation here.

Humm, particles aren’t a post process effect, they are rendered on their own pass. I believe they are affected by post process effects (specially bloom) but since you can turn them off separately I don’t see why you chose to compare particles to post processing effects.

If you know this then you also must know that you can do the actual generating, updating and removing of the particles both in CPU or in GPU, it’s the developer’s choice. We don’t know how the HEX engine works but it’s very possible the particle system works in CPU and the GPU just receives the current state of the system and renders the particles, maybe it’s even a very performatic shader that renders the particles as a texture inside a single quad per effect.

I don’t know if that’s the case, maybe KI’s particle system runs on GPU, but the reason I believe they do it in CPU is because the Xbox One has 6 cores available to be used by the game. When you have that many cores available it’s more than expected that you dedicate at least one of them to emit particles.

Maybe that’s not how it works, without knowing the engine we can’t really know, but it’s entirely possible IG chose to not enable us to reduce the number of particles because they tested it and concluded it didn’t gave enough extra performance to be worth it compared to, for example, disabling AA and reflections.