Performance bug in 2.0

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BugMeister
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Post by BugMeister » Tue, 28. Apr 09, 15:09

some info re. NVIDIA SLI settings:
http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=274810

- how is yours set @ present..
- the whole universe is running in BETA mode - we're working on it.. beep..!! :D :thumb_up:

ragamer
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Post by ragamer » Tue, 28. Apr 09, 15:21

Ah yeah... SLI anoyances :). Thanks for the pointer BugMeister... I got my good fights with it on different games to get the most of it (this included) but...

...The issue I'm experiencing after 2.0 is a bug for sure (the rest of the game performance is superb, ofc).

ATM I'm doing a more serious analysis than just a "report from memory" :).

Kapakio
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Post by Kapakio » Tue, 28. Apr 09, 15:28

Good explanation ragamer. I just wanted to confirm that this was exactly the issue I had and more or less with the same behavior and occurences.

Just to add (again) that the issue completely disappeared after deleting the 3Gb switch (in Vista x32). In Vista x64, the problem will disappear if you disable the >2Gb switch in X3TC.exe file.

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BigBANGtheory
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Post by BigBANGtheory » Tue, 28. Apr 09, 16:28

vbruzual wrote:In Vista x64, the problem will disappear if you disable the >2Gb switch in X3TC.exe file.
What application are you using to do that?

CBJ
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Post by CBJ » Tue, 28. Apr 09, 16:55

I should explain that the vast majority of people have reported that the presence of the >2GB switch in the X3TC.exe file has improved performance. The advice that vbruzual is giving out is by no means official and is based on his experiences, not that of players in general.

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Post by ragamer » Tue, 28. Apr 09, 17:04

Everything is clearer when you use the right tools to view the data :-).

Yeap... My freezes happen when the maximum memory owned goes past the 3GB limit and HD pagination kicks in (I couldn't perceive this before because the tool wasn't reporting max memory requested properly... So I had to look for a better one).

CPU load is intensive but nothing out of the ordinary on well balanced apps (X3TC puts each core on around 50% load and then they oscillate between 25% and 65% based on the rest of the tasks windows have to attend to... I repeat default scheduler behaviour).

Nonetheless there must be some other conditions... Because the time my X3TC executable can stay on the "danger region" is highly variable.


I'm going to inspect now the behaviour with the /LARGEMEMORYAWARE flag turned off.


The utility I used to "hack" the X3 executable is NTCore's CFF Explorer.

And here is a detailed link on how to use it for this particular purpose. REMEMBER TO COPY YOUR X3TC original executable first.

As CBJ highlights... This is an experiment and as such I wouldn't consider this something an average user has to do to make his game work... Wait for Egosoft reaction on hunting the bug that makes the game freeze in this particular situation.

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Post by Sogo » Wed, 29. Apr 09, 12:49

vbruzual wrote:In Vista x64, the problem will disappear if you disable the >2Gb switch in X3TC.exe file.
Confirmed - disabled 2gb switch and could not reproduce issue last night! My game is playable once again!
I have not yet begun to defile myself...

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ezra-r
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Post by ezra-r » Fri, 1. May 09, 20:31

CBJ wrote:I should explain that the vast majority of people have reported that the presence of the >2GB switch in the X3TC.exe file has improved performance. The advice that vbruzual is giving out is by no means official and is based on his experiences, not that of players in general.

Having the game be able to use more mem reliefed the "jitter" performance issue a bit, but at the end many are getting graphics corruption when the game starts using too much mem and the jitter is still there.

Increasing pci latency has really reduced the jitter drastically and then you get the same performance with or without the >2GB switch, at least in my many hours of playing, thats what i realized.

There is also the real "performance issue" of the game which I think is probably being addressed in the 2.1b4 version of the game, that is when you for example look at certain places with stations, game slows down a lot, although GPU usage is minimun (whatever it is causing it is not gpu bottleneck).


Another thread pointing to the corruption:
http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php? ... highlight=

And another:
http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php? ... highlight=

Kapakio
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Post by Kapakio » Fri, 1. May 09, 21:28

Thanks ezra-r. I also had this kind of problem before desabling the 3Gb memory usage.

Do you know how to change the PCI latancy in Vista if you don't have the option in the BIOS setup?

gandy|UKCS|
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Post by gandy|UKCS| » Fri, 1. May 09, 23:14

vista hardware latency is driver dependent for most and tends to be 64 or 32 if i remember correctly, depending on the drivers.
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ezra-r
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Post by ezra-r » Sat, 2. May 09, 16:30

vbruzual wrote:Thanks ezra-r. I also had this kind of problem before desabling the 3Gb memory usage.

Do you know how to change the PCI latancy in Vista if you don't have the option in the BIOS setup?
If you dont have the chance in the bios all you can too is try the pci latency software and have the luck that it supports your bios/motherboard and your sound card appears as one of the configurable slots, in that case setting the latency to 192 will save you lots of hitter and pauses during combat, which is something to apreciate.

Good luck.

Note: The pci latency software does not affect or work ever with Pci-E sound cards, its just for the usual pci.

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Post by paulms1980 » Mon, 4. May 09, 11:32

ok and what about the AI just stopping in space (mainly big ships) and appear tht only 1 set of turrets or none are working
even the fighters stop dead!

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ezra-r
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Post by ezra-r » Mon, 4. May 09, 22:41

paulms1980 wrote:ok and what about the AI just stopping in space (mainly big ships) and appear tht only 1 set of turrets or none are working
even the fighters stop dead!
Ive seen that only with scripts installed. One of the times it was MARS incorrectly packaged by me or something like that, havent been able to reproduce the exact scenario because I now use MARS and dont have that kind of trouble, so it as well could be something else.

Do you have any scripts installed?

paulms1980
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Post by paulms1980 » Tue, 5. May 09, 08:39

not MARS or any other CPU crunching script
improved boarding
less missiles
pandora
dock TS
cheat package
ATF shipyard
nooone of these use alot/extra cpu power all the time
they all more or less manual scripts

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Post by softweir » Tue, 5. May 09, 09:23

I doubt that some, but not all ships freezing is a symptom of CPU overload. If the whole game froze, then I would agree it sounds like a script crunching cpu cycles.

To me, it more sounds like either the game losing track of a ship's AI, or a script which isn't supposed to interfere with combat intercepting a signal and instead of passing the signal along going into a Wait state, freezing the ship's AI but not all AI.

Therefore, it might be worth asking on the S&M forum if anybody using any of these scripts has noticed an AI freeze.
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paulms1980
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Post by paulms1980 » Wed, 6. May 09, 11:23

it does this with no scripts aswel
particularly the big ships
K's n akuma's ect
saw a boreas get wiped out as its turrets jammed up
hav seen a couple of old posts talking about this

Eztrelle
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Post by Eztrelle » Wed, 6. May 09, 12:30

Can someone tell me what CFF Explorer is??

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Eztrelle
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Post by Eztrelle » Wed, 6. May 09, 12:43

Ok.. I have found out what CFF Explorer is..

Now.. could someone tell me how i use this to turn off/on the "use more than 2gb" switch for x3tc.exe. I open the .exe in CFF but have no clue where to look :p.

Out of interest.. does anyone know if you could use this to turn ON use more than 2gb memory for games that are not 64 bit aware.. I am thinking of Empire Total War.
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softweir
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Post by softweir » Wed, 6. May 09, 16:11

Eztrelle wrote:Out of interest.. does anyone know if you could use this to turn ON use more than 2gb memory for games that are not 64 bit aware.. I am thinking of Empire Total War.
DON'T!

To use more than 2gb of ram, a game must have the high memory aware flag set, AND the game must be written in such a way that it won't crash if it attempts to access high memory.

A game with the high memory flag set will run fine if it is given a small amount of ram - after all, it has to cope with machines with just 2gb of ram. It doesn't matter whether the small amount of ram is given because the system only has 2gb ram or because you forced windows to hand over less ram than was available.

But... force a game to take 3gb when its code is expecting to be given only 2gb, and all sorts of weird and wonderful crashes will occur. For instance, if the devs have used the high bits of memory addresses to store other data (expecting those bits to be clear) and these bits are overwritten with real address data, then the game will get very, very confused.

An example is that of a list of pointers to blocks of data, with the end of the list marked by an address which is too large to be a real address. If the game is given 3gb of ram, then addresses in the top gb of ram will be too large, so if the game puts game data in that space and tries to store the address of that data in a list, then it will create a false end-of-list marker. When it comes to process the data linked to by the list it will stop processing data too soon. The results of that would be strange, and probably crash the game, if not the whole system.
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Post by chrisnic6 » Sun, 10. May 09, 06:28

Eztrelle wrote:Ok.. I have found out what CFF Explorer is..

Now.. could someone tell me how i use this to turn off/on the "use more than 2gb" switch for x3tc.exe. I open the .exe in CFF but have no clue where to look :p.
I think this answer would also serve to correct my problem if anyone could get around to sharing it.

appreciated.

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