Framerate non determinism, (stutter), fix for Radeon 7870M and Radeon R9 290.

[Shush]

Standard disclaimer: This worked for me, if it doesn't work for you, results in releasing the magic blue smoke from your GPU and or computer; causes pain, suffering, inury or even death, then it's all on your own head.

- Have all the latest drivers for your motherboard and GPU.

- Most of you should know about this one already, reduce your sound settings to CD or DVD quality, i.e. 16bit 44.1khz or 16 bit 48khz.

- Download RadeonPro and create a profile for XRebirth.exe.

- In the OverDrive tab click on the padlock so it toggles into the unlocked position.

- Select Enable Graphics OverDrive.

- Select Always use highest performance clocks while gaming.

This has been tested and works with a 7870M with an I7-3720QM@3.6Ghz and an R9 290 with an i5-4670K@4.00Ghz

*Conjecture*

So what is going on with X-Rebirth with these particular setups? If you pull out GPU-Z and watch the sensors on a 2nd monitor whilst playing X-Rebirth it quickly becomes apparent that the GPU utilisation can vary between 30% and 70%.

Now; modern day GPU's and their drivers have, (for good or bad), prioritised power consumption, heat generation and noise production sometimes at the expense of performance either due to over aggressive profiles or driver bugs. This means that if a game under utilises the GPU, the driver and associated power/temperature monitoring hardware can mistakenly lower a GPU's core and memory clocks whilst the game is still running. This is exactly what is happening with my two systems that use Radeon GPU's.

[WildAce]

didnt seem to help the issue im having with my 290's here

http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=347881

i was hopefull this would work after i saw it, once i finished posting my issue.

i get around 17-18fps

[Shush]

didnt seem to help the issue im having with my 290's here

http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=347881

i was hopefull this would work after i saw it, once i finished posting my issue.

i get around 17-18fps

:/ Before I used RadeonPro on the 290 I was getting dips below 10fps every few seconds as the GPU clocks were being lowered. After I setup a profile for Rebirth my frame rate shot up to 30-50fps with all settings maxed except anti-aliasing = 2x and View Distance = 50.

Have you tried disabling one of your 290's completely? Obviously AMD are yet to release a Crossfire profile for Rebirth and from what I have seen Rebirth has limited support for Crossfire/SLI anyway.

[WildAce]

didnt seem to help the issue im having with my 290's here

http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=347881

i was hopefull this would work after i saw it, once i finished posting my issue.

i get around 17-18fps

:/ Before I used RadeonPro on the 290 I was getting dips below 10fps every few seconds as the GPU clocks were being lowered. After I setup a profile for Rebirth my frame rate shot up to 30-50fps with all settings maxed except anti-aliasing = 2x and View Distance = 50.

Have you tried disabling one of your 290's completely? Obviously AMD are yet to release a Crossfire profile for Rebirth and from what I have seen Rebirth has limited support for Crossfire/SLI anyway.

yeah i had 1 of them pulled from the system at one point, it does the same thing.

[Lord Morpheus]

290x here. 1920x1080p. All Settings maxed out. Before your fix it was unplayable. Now it's just smooth. Thank you

[sovietax]

I have a HD7970 tried this and still got the same fps. when i first get in the ship ingame the fps is 10. After about 5 minutes of flying around it gradually bumps to about 25. Hopefully the patches will get things straightened out. At least Egosoft is great with their support.

[CBJ]

Interesting solution. Perhaps this might help others with similar problems (well, some of them at least, judging by the replies!).

[TKz]

Thanks for the radeonpro idea !
It's not the solution to what I believe is a bug, but it's definitely better, 12FPS -> 30FPS.
My GPU still goes from 0% to 100% usage while playing :

[ external image ]

[Jonezys]

Yes!
This worked for me as well.
I'm running a R9 290, i5 3470 CPU and 8 gigs of ram.
In a busy area it has jumped from 18-20 FPS to 31-35 FPS.
Still have the same usage as seen at TKz.

Much more playable now.

Thanks

[OmikronTNS]

Shush thanks for the tip, this has gotten me in a playable state.

I'm running an R9 290 and was getting around 10 FPS or so in open space.
This is keeping me around 25. While that's not great I can at least play the game!

Thanks again!

[Shush]

Thanks for the radeonpro idea !
It's not the solution to what I believe is a bug, but it's definitely better, 12FPS -> 30FPS.
My GPU still goes from 0% to 100% usage while playing :

I wouldn't have expected your GPU utilisation to change, all this fix did was stop your GPU clocks from lowering because of the wildly fluctuating GPU utilisation.

But it's cool that it's working for others.

Anyone who has been around Egosoft for more than 10 minutes knows that this launch is completely typical for an Egosoft product, (in fact it has gone very well given that it is a completely new rendering engine and the scale of what they are trying to achieve). But we also know that given time every single bug and non optimal functionality causing grief will be fixed and ironed out.

Personally I am loving this game, from the spectacular graphics, immersion, vastness of the universe to even the clunky Team America World Police characters. Although having old heads on young bodies with young voices is a little creepy...

[Fnord Lightbringer]

So what is going on with X-Rebirth with these particular setups? If you pull out GPU-Z and watch the sensors on a 2nd monitor whilst playing X-Rebirth it quickly becomes apparent that the GPU utilisation can vary between 30% and 70%.

This is the smoking gun you have been looking for.

GPU utilization is below 100%, which means it's not your graphics card or driver that is holding you back.

I have a similar system and I can observe the same thing. CPU utilization is not even 50%, which means only one or two cores are being used. My educated guess is that XR uses one core and the graphics driver a second one. I have six. 2/3 of my CPU are idle, the rest can't keep up.

In other words: This is neither your CPU's nor your GPU's fault. This is purely and squarely Egosoft's fault for STILL not multithreading their engine. Astonishing, if you ask me. How long have their customers had problems with their engine not utilizing multicore systems? As long as I can remember.

But on the plus side you can attach an xbox controller now!

[larsier]

I have been having the same issues a lot of peaple have been having. Low fps in the starting area, higher in the parts after that. I have also been experiencing fps drops when turning, boosting or strafing.

I have tried what you have sugested and it has eliminated the fps drops. i still have a low framerate in some areas through.

And Fnord Lightbringer, i don't know about you but when i'm ingame i can see the game use all 4 of my cores, in loading it whent up to 90%, so your claim is unfounded.

In normal play my Cpu usage is around 50% spread evenly over the cores, and 30-40% gpu usage. This usage stays the same when i'm lagging.

[Shush]

GPU utilization is below 100%, which means it's not your graphics card or driver that is holding you back.

I have a similar system and I can observe the same thing. CPU utilization is not even 50%, which means only one or two cores are being used. My educated guess is that XR uses one core and the graphics driver a second one. I have six. 2/3 of my CPU are idle, the rest can't keep up.

In other words: This is neither your CPU's nor your GPU's fault. This is purely and squarely Egosoft's fault for STILL not multithreading their engine. Astonishing, if you ask me. How long have their customers had problems with their engine not utilizing multicore systems? As long as I can remember.

But on the plus side you can attach an xbox controller now!

Some of what you are saying is correct, Egosoft's engine does seem to have some optimisation issues with respect to GPU utilisation, but that is most likely caused by stalling the GPU with small batch sizes, too many shader swaps, shader patching, non caching of DirectX states etc etc, stuff that is all easily fixed given time and an iterative optimisation process.

But you are most definitely incorrect when it comes to XRebirth's handling of CPU multi-threading. On my system I can see with my own eyes the CPU usage in Windows Task manager varying from 50% to 80%, this means that multiple threads are running and they are using from 50% to 80% of all four of my CPU cores' available instruction time.

It's almost impossible to get 100% GPU utilisation AND 100% CPU utilisation in any complex application or real game, (artificial benchmarks or extremely specific scientific algorithms can get close). Your ideal situation is 100% GPU utilisation with a CPU that is constantly keeping the GPU fed through the graphics API and GPU driver as well as performing all the other CPU bound functionality of the game, such as position updates, physics, collisions, AI, script processing etc.

CPU multi-threading is not the modern day panacea that a lot of forum warriors claim or think it should be, (not personally attacking you here, I just see this nonsense spouted repeatedly), it is a difficult methodology to implement for complex applications such as games and does NOT provide an N speed up for an N core CPU.

There are also a multitude of ways of splitting up your complex application into a series of threads, you can go for coarse and specific granularity whereby you assign major separate functionality to threads that roughly map to the number of cores in your typical CPU, or you use a more generic fine granularity system that fires of threads as needed independently of the major tasks within your game, i.e. you could spawn a thread for each job or sector etc.

Let me try and provide an example, assume you are able to split up your game into 4 separate main asynchronous tasks, rendering, updates, physics and script processing. This allows you to separate and delegate your functionality to the most common CPU in use, the quad core, but it does not mean your game will run 4 times faster then the equivalent non threaded version of the game using only one core. Best case scenario it will run close to 4 times faster WHEN all 4 of your tasks are consecutively running, but most of the time it will be hovering between 1 and 4 times faster depending on how much work your game tries to perform.

Take the following crude example of work done split into 4 separate tasks: Rendering is active 90% of the time, Update active 50% of the time, (varies with culling), Physics is active 40% of the time and Script Processing is active %80 of the time, where time is some finite discrete window. You can clearly see on a single core non multi-threaded game engine that all 4 of these tasks would need to be sequentially processed causing it to bog down as the individual tasks percentages increased; but in a multi-threaded game engine the tasks can vary in work done from 0% to 100% without impacting performance, (theoretically), what effects performance is the task performing the most amount of work, i.e. the other three tasks get their work done whilst the most complex task is still processing.

Multi-threading really is a solution to minimum frame rates, i.e. when an application traditionally gets bogged down by trying to do too much work in one thread, it can farm off work to other threads/cores.

This is just the tip of the iceberg and I haven't rewarded the topic with even a modicum of the justice it deserves, you have two completely separate functional blocks the GPU and CPU, one is an extremely specific and deeply pipelined SIMD architecture with thousands of arithmetic units that wants to be constantly fed draw calls, vertex buffers and state changes. The other is a generic architecture with 2-8 complex cores that spends most of it's time running the Windows idle thread. Getting the two to co-habitat and produce an efficient game is a work of art that no developer gets perfectly right and that most don't even get close. Throw in all the variations of Windows Operating Systems, makes and models of CPU's and GPU's, versions of graphics, motherboard and sound drivers and you have an apocalyptic recipe for disaster.


TL;DR CPU Multi-threading is extremely complex and never gives you N speedup for an N core, (i.e. 100% work utilisation), for a real game. The best you can hope to achieve is 100% GPU utilisation with a CPU constantly feeding it and updating all of it's physics/ai/collisions/pathing/script processing etc in real time.

[zurakx]

Standard disclaimer: This worked for me, if it doesn't work for you, results in releasing the magic blue smoke from your GPU and or computer; causes pain, suffering, inury or even death, then it's all on your own head.

.

Interestingly enough i have had good FPS until starting up today in shady vault, i think is what it is called. the place with lots of roids, fog, and the shipyard.

i turned on my EVGA precisionx today too just to get some good target data.

i was suddenly at 5 FPS when loading into the game. what i noticed, like OP, is that my GPU was only being utilized to about 20-30 percent. so i thought wow maybe its my CPU?

i have an EVGA GTX 680 and core I7 2700k.

i alt tabbed out and noticed that my processor was LOLing at the load so now i was really confused.

alt tabbed back in and suddenly my FPS shot back up, my GPU loading increased to about 75 percent and i was getting around 40 fps.

what i find REALLY odd is that no matter where I go my RAM usuage is only 4 GB despite having 16gb. To me this is very concerning as I have a 1TB Samsung EVO SSD. If the game is only utilizing 4GB of RAM and then using the SSD as virtual ram that would really piss me off. I dont want to trash my $500 Drive with a ton of write operations as fake ram because the game is not utilizing ram properly. Can someone who is more of an expert provide their two cents here?


While I can't pinpoint the problem, something is clearly amiss here Im going to do more testing, this time keeping my SSD monitor open to watch read and write ops to see if something is going on. If the game is forcing systems to use HDs as ram this could be the cause of problems.

-edit- i managed to find a place that used more ram, 4.5 GB so it may not be a RAM issue after all. plus my SDD seems to not be spazing out on me with read/write ops. still though i can confirm even intel chipsets seem to suffer from failing to fully utilize a GPU at times.

[Shush]

what i find REALLY odd is that no matter where I go my RAM usuage is only 4 GB despite having 16gb. To me this is very concerning as I have a 1TB Samsung EVO SSD. If the game is only utilizing 4GB of RAM and then using the SSD as virtual ram that would really piss me off. I dont want to trash my $500 Drive with a ton of write operations as fake ram because the game is not utilizing ram properly. Can someone who is more of an expert provide their two cents here?


While I can't pinpoint the problem, something is clearly amiss here Im going to do more testing, this time keeping my SSD monitor open to watch read and write ops to see if something is going on. If the game is forcing systems to use HDs as ram this could be the cause of problems.

XRebirth.exe is a 32 bit application that has /LARGEADDRESSAWARE) flag set. This means that it is a 32 bit application that can access more than 2Gbytes worth of RAM, but that will never be able to access more than 4Gbytes worth of RAM.

I highly doubt that it is doing anything untoward to your SSD and that it is accessing the rest of the system, (i.e. virtual memory, page file and windows/system32), pretty much the same as any other standard windows application.

[LORDSATAN]

This has worked for me.
I have a decent medium gaming rig.
amd 1100t with amd 7870 and 16 gig ram. also 2 ssd in raid 0.
I have been getting 3fps in some sectors especially when I boost ot strafe.
Now I am 20-45 fps.
Well done sir

[myztkl-kev]

I find it sad that the acceptable framerate for this game right now is 30 fps.

[ryeeson]

Thank you. its working

[Frostnads]

Saw this thread, and was really hopeful. Lived on the forums waiting for release. Fresh XReunion reinstall.

But...Darn, didn't work for me. I still get severe stuttering in flight and walking around stations. FPS drops to 12.

Recurring stuttering, as bad as I'm getting, during flight pretty much ruins the immersion experience for me.

I7 2600 3.4GHz
16 GB RAM
MSI R9 290X
Win7 64 bit