Falcrack wrote: ↑Fri, 10. Feb 23, 17:48
This is a difficult issue to demonstrate with a save, since loading the game resolves the issue, but sometimes the fps is fine, then all of a sudden the fps crashes to 1-4 fps for no apparent reason. Last time it happened to me, I was entering the filthy private apartment of the lady who is doing Xenon research missions. She was on a Teladi station. I'll see when I get home from work if I can reproduce the issue.
The last time I had such an
extreme fps drop it was a weird Windows paging issue. Basically, despite there being ample RAM (I have 32GB total), the X4.exe task started heavily hitting the page file once around 8GB was in use by the game. While it's normal for not recently accessed memory locations to be paged, it's not normal for stuff that's actually needed for the current scene to be paged out, requiring the game (Windows) to access the page file. For me, the issue was readily recreated from a save (unusual) and with this recreation case I was able to do some testing. Loading the save normally, I got the issue right away. However, if I
disabled my page file (just as a test you understand) the issue was gone, perfectly smooth fps upon loading the same save. Enabling the page file again, the issue was back.
As having a Page file is, these days, essential for some things to work properly (Windows 10 takes an age to shut down without a page file for example) I did two further tests. First was with a normal page file, but forcing the game's priority to "High". While this isn't magic in terms of performance usually, it
does cause the game to use more RAM = less Page file use. This solution pretty much solved the issue entirely. The second thing I did, combined with the first, was to set my Page file to the minimum value - which is 256MB IIRC - and these two tweaks combined meant I've not seen a crazy slide-show level slow-down since. I still get fps drops in large battles, but fps is still evenly paced, just lower, none of the epic lagging fps I had seen. This is not specific to the Beta, but just a general observation of when my fps was the worst it'd ever been in X4.
Not saying this is definitely your issue Falcrack, however, my example above is the only time I've seen such an extreme fps drop as 1 - 4 fps. Usually when things are busy, I'll drop from my usual (limited) 60fps, into the 30's. As mentioned,
sometimes it can clearly be seen that one thread is fully loading one core, classic CPU limitation, other times both CPU and GPU usage appear to drop, alongside the fps drop. Not sure what's going on in those situations as it's always resolved by a save / reload. I tend to blame such as this on the "long session weirdness" phenomena.
