SOLVED! Getting 1FPS (new player) on a good PC - Resolved by unplugging a keypad.

[badwhippet]

UPDATE: Razer Orbweaver keypad was at fault. Once unplugged , the game ran normally!
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Hello
I'm a brand new player, so I have no saved games, no mods and no DLC, and I'm trying to play version 5.10 of the game on Steam for the first time. I tried restarting my PC but it's still no-go.

It's totally unplayable. It's running at less than 1 FPS and it takes an age even to display the menu. Even the initial Egosoft logo loads extremely slowly frame by frame. Takes the longest time to even reach the game menu. Hoping it was just the menus, I tried loading up the first tutorial, but that's exactly the same (unplayable). The only thing I've noticed is that it seems to be using a lot of RAM before it even starts (over 2.2Gb). Nothing else seems to be amiss (CPU at 37%, GPU only 6% - music is playing fine enough).

Can anyone advise on what might be wrong please?

My specs:

Windows 11 64-bit
Display 3440 x 1440
Intel I9 11900k (overclocked to 5GHz)
RTX 3090 (the only GPU - there is no integrated GPU) - driver version 527.37 (latest)
32Gb DDR
Installed on an SSD drive

[CBJ]

Please provide a full DXDiag and vulkaninfo, as requested at the top of the forum.

The only thing I can think of without this info is to check whether you have a development version of the Vulkan SDK installed, set to run in debug mode.

[badwhippet]

My apologies. I can't see how to attach the files here, and the contents are too long for the post, so I've added to dropbox:

DXDIAG: https://www.dropbox.com/s/g89p4niykimuo ... g.txt?dl=0
VULKAN INFO: https://www.dropbox.com/s/5s2urbyniqtsh ... o.txt?dl=0

I know absolutely nothing about Vulkan (ie I made no explicit install of that) so maybe the fault lies there?

[CBJ]

Putting the files in DropBox is absolutely fine; indeed it's one of the suggested options in the sticky thread at the top of the forum.

The only thing that immediately jumps out from your DXDiag is the sheer number of sound devices you have. Try disabling most of them, especially the NVIDIA, Oculus and What U Hear ones, and just enabling your on-board sound. Also make sure the drivers for that are up to date, using the manufacturer's website rather than Windows Update. If doing this solves the problem then you can re-enable the other devices one by one to see which one it is that's causing the problem.

[badwhippet]

Thanks

Well, my Soundblaster drivers were embarrassingly out of date (now up to date)!

However, I disabled everything except "What U Hear" (no device to disable for this - seems to be just a setting in the Soundblaster software that can have volume increased or decreased, but it can't be switched off). However, mic is not set to this so it's not in use.

Started up the game, still the same unfortunately.

[badwhippet]

UPDATE! A reddit user suggested unplugging controllers and such (I hadn't thought to do that). The culprit has been found. It's the Razer Orbweaver keypad. As soon as that's unplugged, the game works.

[CBJ]

Excellent! And thanks for reporting back, so that others can benefit from what you've found.